Radical turned statesman, Tom Hayden, dies at 76
Refusing a newspaper job, Hayden said, ‘I didn’t want to report on the world; I wanted to change the world’
LOS ANGELES — In one of the most dramatic personal transformations in American political history, Tom Hayden went from being a famed 1960s and 1970s student radical to a mainstream elected official and elder statesman of the country’s left. He died Sunday at age 76 following a lengthy illness.
Hayden will be forever linked to riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Vietnam War protests of the 1970s and his onetime marriage to actress Jane Fonda.
Those events, however, ultimately represented just a small slice of a life dedicated to, as he put it, trying to change the world.
Elected to the California Assembly in 1982, Hayden served 10 years, followed by eight more in the state Senate.
During that time, he put his name on some 100 pieces of legislation — including laws aimed at holding down college tuition costs, preventing discrimination in hiring and modest safety controls on guns.
Former President Bill Clinton praised Hayden, saying “his eventful life in pursuit of peace and justice ran the gamut from protesting to legislating, with lots of writing and teaching along the way.”
Clinton added: “Attacked first by the right as a dangerous radical, then by the left for his willingness to compromise, Tom always marched to the beat of his own drummer, doing what he thought at any given time would advance his lifelong goals.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown said Hayden “took up causes that others avoided. He had a real sense of the underdog and was willing to do battle no matter what the odds.”
It was a battle that began at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in the early 1960s where Hayden, then barely out of his teens, co-founded the Students For a Democratic Society and wrote its “manifesto,” the often-quoted Port Huron Statement.
“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,” the lengthy screed railing against racial discrimination, war and wage disparity proclaimed in its introduction.
While critics of the time dismissed it as nonsense and Hayden’s group as a band of rag-tag malcontents threatening the American way of life with their left-wing ideas, its author would be invited to colleges for decades to come to lecture about its significance.
Youth International Party co-founder Paul Krassner, who also participated in the Chicago demonstration, told The Associated Press on Monday that the manifesto was a cornerstone of the 1960s radical movement because it spelled out precisely what protesters hoped to accomplish.
“People were always saying, ‘Oh, what do they really stand for?’ And this laid it out,” Krassner said.
Born in Royal Oak, Mich., on Dec. 11, 1939, to middle-class parents, Thomas Emmet Hayden once considered a career in journalism and would eventually publish 20 books on a myriad of subjects.
But after graduation he turned down a newspaper job. He said in his memoir: “I didn’t want to report on the world; I wanted to change the world.”
Hayden had a stroke last year but continued to make public appearances until last summer.
He is survived by his wife, sons and stepdaughter Vanessa Vadim.