Liberal activist, author
TOM HAYDEN, 1939 - 2016
Tom Hayden, a 1960s radical who was in the vanguard of the movement to stop the Vietnam War and became one of the nation’s best-known champions of liberal causes, has died in Santa Monica after a lengthy illness. He was 76.
Hayden vaulted into national politics in 1962 as lead author of a student manifesto that became the ideological foundation for demonstrations against the war.
President Nixon’s Justice
Department prosecuted Hayden in the raucous “Chicago 7” trial following the violent clashes with police at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Hayden later married actress Jane Fonda, and the celebrity couple traveled the nation denouncing the war before forming a California political organization that backed scores of liberal candidates and ballot measures in the 1970s and ’80s, most notably Proposition 65, the anti-toxics measure that requires signs in gas stations, bars and grocery stores that warn of cancer-causing chemicals.
Hayden lost campaigns for U.S. Senate, governor of California and mayor of Los Angeles. But he was elected to the California Assembly in 1982. He served a total of 18 years in the Assembly and state Senate.
During his tenure in the Legislature, representing the liberal Westside, Hayden relished being a thorn in the side of the powerful, including fellow Democrats he saw as too pliant to donors.
“He was the radical inside the system,” said Duane Peterson, a top Hayden advisor in Sacramento.
A longtime target of government surveillance, Hayden took pride in his history of dissent. A photo from the late 1970s shows him pondering, with apparent satisfaction, his 22,000-page FBI file, stacked about 5 feet high.
Hayden, who enjoyed media attention and was skilled at attracting it, worked closely with militant radicals but was equally at ease with the likes of governors and presidents. “He’s always been someone who would much prefer to work and get things done than stand on the sidelines and protest,” Fonda once said.
Born Dec. 11, 1939, Hayden grew up in middle-class Royal Oak, Mich., a Detroit suburb. His father, John Hayden, was an accountant at Chrysler; his mother, Genevieve Garity, was a film librarian at local schools.
At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Hayden was editor in chief of the campus newspaper and was captivated by the burgeoning civil rights movement in the South. In 1960, he hitchhiked to California to cover the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where John F. Kennedy was nominated for president.
In 1962, Hayden joined dozens of other students at a Students for a Democratic Society convention in Port Huron, Mich. As primary author of the group’s Port Huron Statement, he gave voice to a youth disaffection that foreshadowed the explosive power of the antiwar and civil rights protests of the years ahead.
“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,” the manifesto began.
Hayden and his fellow students bemoaned poverty, racial bigotry, the Democratic Party’s tolerance of Southern segregationists, the threat of nuclear war and an apathetic citizenry.
Gradually, Hayden’s activism became focused primarily against the war. In 1965 he traveled with an antiwar group to Hanoi, the capital of communist North Vietnam. The 10-day trip offended many in the U.S., and the State Department temporarily withdrew Hayden’s passport.
He returned to Hanoi in 1967 with another antiwar delegation during a period of heavy U.S. bombing.
The climax of Hayden’s antiwar work came in 1968, when he and fellow radical Rennie Davis served as codirectors of protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The nation was torn by social upheaval as the August convention approached. The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April had sparked urban riots. Two months later, a gunman killed New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles on the night he won California’s Democratic presidential primary.
At the convention, thousands of Chicago police and National Guard troops overwhelmed crowds in the street, blasting them with tear gas. Police in blue helmets clubbed front-line protesters, Hayden among them.
“The whole world is watching,” demonstrators chanted as police charged forward. The violence, televised live, contributed to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s loss to Nixon in November. A government report later called it “a police riot.”
In March 1969, the Justice Department had Hayden and seven others indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot at the convention. The group included Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale and counterculture icons Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, leaders of the Youth International Party, best known as the Yippies.
Seale’s case ended in a mistrial, leaving the “Chicago 7” as the remaining defendants.
Hayden was convicted of traveling across state lines to incite a riot and sentenced to five years in prison. The conviction was overturned on appeal, largely because the judge had sided openly with prosecutors. The government declined to retry Hayden.
Hayden’s first marriage, to fellow student activist Sandra Cason, ended in divorce. He crossed paths with Fonda in 1971, when both were speaking at an antiwar event in Michigan. The following year, Hayden saw Fonda again at an antiwar event in Los Angeles. He had just written a book on Vietnam and was traveling the country doing a multimedia “teach-in” on Indochina.
Fonda invited him to her Laurel Canyon house to share his slide show. “I wanted a man in my life I could love, but it had to be someone who could inspire me, teach me, lead me, not be afraid of me. Who better than Tom Hayden?” she wrote in her 2005 autobiography, “My Life So Far.” The couple married in 1973.
By then, Fonda’s 1972 trip to Hanoi had made her a political lightning rod. She’d been photographed sitting in a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun battery, an incident her detractors considered traitorous and for which she later apologized.
Hayden and Fonda joined forces on an antiwar project, the Indochina Peace Campaign, which lobbied against military funding. Often hounded by protesters, they also went on a national speaking tour with singer Holly Near and former POW George Smith.
Looking back on the war in his memoir, Hayden voiced a few regrets. Time proved him “overly romantic about the Vietnamese revolution,” he wrote. Hayden also admitted “a numbed sensitivity to any anguish or confusion I was causing to U.S. soldiers or to their families — the very people I was trying to save from death and deception.”
As the war came to an end, Hayden embraced mainstream politics in California with a campaign to unseat U.S. Sen. John Tunney. He lost the June 1976 Democratic primary to Tunney, who was ousted in November by Republican S.I. Hayakawa. Some Democrats blamed the defeat on Hayden.
But the campaign laid ground for Hayden and Fonda to start the Campaign for Economic Democracy, later known as Campaign California. The group fought for such causes as Santa Monica rent control, public spending on solar power and divestment from apartheid South Africa.
Much of the group’s money came from Fonda, whose movie career was booming and whose workout video business would spawn a fortune in the ’80s.
It helped elect scores of liberals to local offices statewide and campaigned for Proposition 65, the anti-toxics measure that requires signs in gas stations, bars and grocery stores that warn of cancer-causing chemicals.
Hayden represented Santa Monica, Malibu and part of the Westside in Sacramento. His legislative achievements were modest — research into the effects of the herbicide Agent Orange on U.S. servicemen in Vietnam; repair money for the Santa Monica and Malibu piers; tighter rules to prevent the collapse of construction cranes, to name a few.
Hayden paid a personal price for his work as a radical.
His father, a Republican, refused to speak with him for 13 years. They reconciled before his father’s death, a few days before Hayden won election to the Assembly in 1982.
In Sacramento, Hayden was isolated even among Democrats, who were put off by his disdain for the capital’s favor-trading culture. He feuded with Willie Brown, then Assembly speaker, who ultimately stripped Hayden of a committee chairmanship and moved his Capitol office to smaller quarters.
A prolific author, Hayden wrote books on Cuba, Ireland, Vietnam, street gangs, spirituality and environmental protection, the Iraq war and the Newark riots.
Hayden is survived by his wife, Barbara Williams, an actress and singer; their adopted son, Liam; Troy Garity, his son with Fonda; and his sister, Mary Hayden Frey. He is also survived by stepdaughter Vanessa Vadim and her two children.
michael.finnegan @latimes.com Times staff writer Matt Hamilton contributed to this report.