Tom Hayden: The Winter Soldier

Tom Hayden: The Winter Soldier
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“I’m not the same angry young man I used to be.” Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda with Troy and Vanessa. Famed anti-Vietnam War leader Hayden entered electoral politics as a surprisingly strong U.S. Senate candidate in the 1976 California primary, then won a seat in the California Assembly in a 1982 race on the West Side of Los Angeles which was then the most expensive legislative race in American history.

“I’m not the same angry young man I used to be.” Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda with Troy and Vanessa. Famed anti-Vietnam War leader Hayden entered electoral politics as a surprisingly strong U.S. Senate candidate in the 1976 California primary, then won a seat in the California Assembly in a 1982 race on the West Side of Los Angeles which was then the most expensive legislative race in American history.

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One thing's for sure. Tom Hayden would have enjoyed Tuesday night tremendously.

A lifelong fanatic of America's Pastime -- to the extent that he played organized baseball until late in life and had a special relationship with the Los Angeles Dodgers that extended to stints at spring training -- Hayden would have thrilled to the first World Series game in his adopted home city in 29 years. That the Dodgers won handily would have been all the better. That the game was played in the hottest temperature in World Series history (103 degrees, nine degrees higher than the previous record) would have been grimly satisfying to Hayden, who crafted the first, sadly unsuccessful, California climate change program nearly three decades ago in the Big Green initiative.

The famed anti-Vietnam War/New Left leader who spent several productive decades in California and national politics as a legislator, organizer, and advisor to Governor Jerry Brown passed away just over a year to the day before the game.

Hayden, one of the crucial figures of the only generation in American history not to produce a President, left us just a couple weeks before the election of President Donald Trump. As I worried throughout the election cycle about Trump's alarmingly possible perhaps probable election, I couldn't write about the passing of Hayden -- whom I'd known well since the late 1970s -- until the election's aftermath.

Of course, that aftermath goes on and on and on and on, with the endlessly alarming distractions of Trumpism. And I was loathe to delete Tom from my mailing list, let alone seek to do him justice in remembrance.

But I've been thinking for awhile now about a speech he gave on several occasions in the year after Ronald Reagan's election, when many shocked liberals and progressives thought the world might come to an end. He called it "the winter soldier" speech, after a line from his hero Tom Paine, who wrote during some very dark days in the American Revolution about the need not for "sunshine patriots" and "summertime soldiers" but "winter soldiers."

And Tom's beloved Dodgers returning the World Series to LA for the hottest game in the Fall Classic's long history crystallized the moment.

I came to know Tom Hayden essentially on a dare. Several of my naval reservist associates believed he was a traitor. I didn't. I thought he was an angry patriot. I'd met him briefly, doing a little volunteering in his 1976 primary campaign against a U.S. senator I’d interned with, but was more involved as a student advance man in Jerry Brown's late-breaking presidential campaign. "Write in Jerry Brown for President" in the Oregon primary and all that.

It was a very slender connection, but I learned that Hayden was lecturing at USC. I forget the formal subject of his class, but it was really about the sociology of power in national security and world politics, a not unfamiliar field. So I started attending and engaging him in conversation.

He was as brilliant as advertised. A very fine writer and an especially cogent lecturer with a knack for summing things up and engaging in a sort of charismatic Q and A, often ending up out in the parking lot.

Indeed, it seemed to me he might have been President. But for one big thing.

We hit it off and, while not infrequently disagreeing, ended up working together on quite a few projects over the years. I was with him the night of his first electoral victory -- and shortly after that primary got his Republican opponent on tape giving the lie to his professed moderate positions to ensure Hayden would not drown in a wave of national spending against him -- and was with him again on the night of his last electoral defeat.

In between I was with him at the California State Capitol as right-wing protesters howled for his removal from office.

It was the overhang of anger from the Sixties that haunted always and held him back from what might otherwise have been. It stemmed in part from principle confronting entrenched power, in part from wrong thinking.

Privately, Hayden had long since acknowledged that he and Jane Fonda, in their increasingly desperate zeal to end one of the stupidest and most monstrous wars in history, had evidenced such anger that it was all too easy to paint them as anti-American.

And so when he gave his "winter soldier" speech to shell-shocked liberals and progressives in 1981 as the Reagan Era unfolded, he cautioned that a sense of perspective was called for.

Apocalypticism was not the path to the future.

Hayden called for a participatory society rather than an escapist culture, a society in which inevitable external limits are countered by the development of inner potentials, with wastefulness replaced by conservation, the insecure opulence of Gatsby supplanted by the sustainable self-assurance of Thoreau.

Tom Hayden and Barbara Williams, speaking at an accompanying activist event, took part in the April 2016 Vietnam War Summit at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

Tom Hayden and Barbara Williams, speaking at an accompanying activist event, took part in the April 2016 Vietnam War Summit at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio Austin

That Hayden's Reagan Era message of 1981 is every bit as relevant in the unfolding Trump Era of 2017 is either a measure of his prescient timelessness or our devolution. Or, perhaps, both.

With the difference being that Trump is far more dangerous than Reagan.

Looking at my notes, I see I've barely scratched the surface, my plan to winnow down 20 telling vignettes to three simply not happening.

If you know him it is impossible to seriously explain Tom Hayden in less than 10,000 to 20,000 words. I certainly can't do any justice to Jane Fonda, one of the greatest troupers of all time, or to Barbara Williams, who helped Tom steer a measured yet passionate course. And there are of course a great many others who figure in all this, from the Students for a Democratic Society to the Campaign for Economic Democracy and beyond.

Like, for example, Jerry Garcia, who spearheaded the music-based counter-culture, and Warren Beatty, who spearheaded the New Hollywood movement, Tom Hayden, as principal leader of the New Left, was extremely influential in shaping his generation and its impact on America.

That that impact has been less than it should be is a matter not just of successes and failures but also of the underlying state of the nation.

America was already suffering from the lack of resolution of the Civil War. Is it any wonder that we stumbled into the Vietnam War? Or that the fissures of that misbegotten conflict, not to mention all the cultural contradictions which began erupting around the same time, have still only been papered over?

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