Tom Hayden's Reunion

...Thanks, Dad...

...I'm sorry it's been so long...

...When Zooey appeared to have difficulty in remembering something, his hesitation invariably interested all his brothers and sisters, and even held some entertainment value for them...

...The least affected and most powerful chapter of Reunion describes Hayden's involvement with the civil rights movement in 1960-1962...

...The amount of shrewd calculation that went into the creation of Reunion is evident from the first, starting with the cover photo of Hayden offering up his famous lop-sided boyish grin...

...This one unstaged reconciliation spurred Hayden on to a frenzy of calculated fence-mending, a triumph of contrivance over substance...

...Right...

...The activist core of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was tested in those early days through acts of courage and decisionmaking made (figuratively and sometimes literally) under fire, and the process produced some extraordinary leaders...

...Partisan labels and stereotypes didn't seem to matter," he writes of his high school reunion, "as much as caring about the quality of each other's lives...

...In the end I was fortunate to reach a point of return, of personal and political reintegration...

...that of transforming the entire student movement, through this particular student revolt, into a successful effort to bring down the system...

...Again, drawing on Jim Miller's account, there was one famous SDS meeting in the mid-1960s where "Hayden refused to sit on stage and debate in front of an audience, instead taking a seat among the rank and file...

...He describes a belated reconciliation with his father, a conservative Marine veteran who had broken all contact with his son in the mid-1960s: One morning, when we were standing alone on a sidewalk, my father said, out of nowhere, "Son, I'm proud of you...

...Hayden was personally victimized by this bias on several occasions, most traumatically in 1970 when he was expelled from the "Red Family" collective in Berkeley after a bruising criticism/selfcriticism session...

...And if that's the current state of regard in which Hayden's held among those who might be expected to have the greatest respect for him, what does it say about his prospects for winning acceptance from a broader public...

...Reagan's constant harping on the "Vietnam syndrome," his criticism of "naysayers" reminds Hayden "of the most rigid view of my parents' generation when they wanted to impose the lessons of their experience on their children and grandchildren...

...Much the same could be said of Tom Hayden's new book, Reunion: A Memoir...

...the desire surged back when my son, Troy, who is now fourteen, entered the Little League...

...You're such a grass root, Tom,' snapped his opponent, 'that I don't know whether to debate you or water you.' " Hayden is striving to produce a balanced treatment of the New Left in Reunion, which is all to the good, but does so in a way that allows him to take credit for its virtues while exculpating himself from responsibility for its worst excesses...

...But there were moments in the 1960s when Hayden came across as if he were the unmentioned youngest sibling of Seymour, Buddy and the rest...

...Taken simply as narrative chronology, Reunion does succeed in reminding us that Hayden helped shape some of the most significant moments in recent American history...

...People were accorded respect as leaders to the extent that they embodied the values the movement stood for...

...There is something about Tom Hayden that doesn't inspire trust...

...As with Zooey, Hayden's mannerisms — written, spoken, and performed—have always been part of his message, often the most important part...

...Here all the ingratiating images of the book, Hayden-as-child, Hayden-asseer, Hayden-as-healer come together in a final all-out drive for acceptance from the reader/voter...

...q CONDIS IN DISSENT Michael Harrington on Socialism and the Market Paul Berman on The Last Intellectuals Cynthia Fuchs Epstein on Labor and Technology Eric Foner on Colonial Slavery FALL • 1988 • 503...

...The issues being considered by seventeen-year-old freshmen at Columbia University would not have been within the imagination of most `veteran' student activists five years ago," Hayden wrote with apparent enthusiasm in Ramparts in the summer of 1968...

...You can do it...

...He played an essential role in the rebirth of campus activism in the early 1960s, as a founder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and author of its 1962 manifesto, the Port Huron Statement...

...could only forgive and love Tom Hayden the way his family and friends have come to forgive and love him, America's troubles would be over...

...He notes, correctly, that as SDS tottered towards the apocalypse in its last few years, he had lost much of the influence within the organization that he had earlier enjoyed...

...he visited the site of SDS's Port Huron convention, found it much changed since 1962, and was sadly reflective on the passing of time...

...He was absolutely committed to an impossible yet galvanizing dream...

...Hayden, a decade younger than Salinger's characters, had a larger agenda when he engaged in what Miller describes as "histrionic displays of Socratic ignorance and moral humility...

...I sensed in Mark an embryo of 502 • DISSENT fanaticism that made me feel slightly irrelevant in his presence...

...That, and help clear the way for his return to the national political arena (Hayden's plan, according to some California insiders, is to succeed incumbent Mel Levine as Congressman from California's 27th Congressional District, assuming Alan Cranston retires and Levine makes a run for the US Senate in 1992...

...In the 1960s the New Left had a slogan that "the personal is political...

...At a recent gathering to mark the 20th anniversary of the Columbia strike a documentary film about the strike was shown...

...What he fails to acknowledge is the extent to which, in an earlier phase of the movement, he benefited from and indeed perfected the manipulative possibilities of an "anti-leader" leadership style...

...there hasn't been any single act or statement he's made that in itself has been regarded by his former comrades as unforgivable...

...Hayden was present at the creation of the New Left, and swiftly emerged as first among equals in its leadership...

...In both SNCC and SDS organizational problems were complicated by a popular anti-leader bias that led, in Hayden's words, "to a resentment of anyone with significant authority and a dire fear of formalizing it, even if that authority was based on achievement or could be useful for communicating through the media...

...Hayden introduces himself to his readers in Reunion's preface as man-child in the promised playing fields: The sun is shining over Santa Monica, and I am playing my usual position, right field, and batting seventh for the Hollywood Stars...

...and in the later 1970s he led a portion of the New Left back into the Democratic party through his Campaign for Economic Democracy...

...And Franny, though still busy with her Kleenex, looked over at him...

...No one there expected him to keep playing the rumpled student visionary forever...

...Good sons deserve to be rewarded by their fathers...

...But it was a strange movement to lead...

...His "simple hope," he tells us, is that Reunion "will stir a therapeutic chord in all those who lived through, or are still affected by, the unique trauma of the sixties...

...Here were the models of charismatic commitment I was seeking—I wanted to live like them...

...That's the way...

...He provided valuable support to the southern student civil rights movement in its formative years, on occasion at the risk of his personal safety...

...The young black southern activists he met at a National Student Association convention in 1960 impressed him not just because their cause was right, but because of the kind of people they had become through their involvement in the movement: They lived on a fuller level of feeling than any people I'd ever seen, partly because they were making modem history in a very personal way, and partly because by risking death they came to know the value of living each moment to the fullest...

...You can do it, son...

...The line between Hayden's identities as son and father is kept deliberately indistinct in this passage, and it foretells the major theme of the book, the arrival at maturity through a return to boyhood innocence...

...That's the way...

...In the 1980s he carved out a respectable niche for himself in California politics as a hardworking and progressive state assemblyman...

...That's the way...

...My life, and my original values, resurfaced intact from the depths of alienation...

...Leadership went to those newer recruits who were most adept at simulating the requirements of "charismatic commitment" through the medium of militant rhetorical posturing...

...Instead, through yet another expenditure of ersatz humility, Hayden scrambled to get back in the vanguard of the movement whose control had slipped his grasp...

...He] was committed to revolutionary destruction, sarcastic and smugly dogmatic...

...there he tried unsuccessfully to contact the white thug who beat him up on his first visit and left a message, "Tell him Tom Hayden was passing through McComb and wanted to see him about the old days...

...For Franny and Zooey a style of mystical simplicity was its own reward, a means in an apolitical decade of setting oneself apart from and at the same time adjusting to a world full of "phonies...

...If the world (or at least the 27th C.D...

...He hesitated...

...Hayden hasn't become an apostate, like David Horowitz, or a clown, like Jerry Rubin...

...It was a style of leadership that was difficult to sustain over the long haul...

...he visited his former wife in Atlanta, to whom he talked "gently about our breakup...

...For me it felt like a return, not of everyone's favorite son, but not a prodigal one either, just a native son...

...I detect a campaign theme in the making...

...he drove down to McComb, Mississippi, which he last saw as a civil rights worker in 1961...

...I love you...

...Tomorrow I will coach his team in Culver City, yelling to him, as my father did to me, "That's okay, son...

...In 1968 he took on the project for which he is most famous (or notorious), organizing the protests at the Democratic convention, which led to his indictment and trial in the Chicago Eight conspiracy case...

...While still living in Newark he began to turn his attention to antiwar organizing, traveling to Hanoi on several occasions, publicizing the effects of the U.S...

...Of course, Hayden's lower middle class Catholic upbringing in Royal Oak, Michigan could not have been further removed from the Upper West Side world of the Glass stories...

...Reunion, so transparently designed as an exercise in autobiographical spin-control, is going to do little to persuade the skeptics...

...For Hayden in the 1980s the political has become the personal...

...Hayden was disconcerted by the "new type of campus leader" he now encountered, as exemplified by Mark Rudd at Columbia: At age twenty, he was only nine years younger than I was, but already there was a world of difference...

...Hayden's image was booed by former SDSers in the audience every time it appeared on the screen...

...bombing and helping secure the release of some American POWs...

...In the early 1970s he helped bring antiwar protest back into the political mainstream through his Indochina Peace Campaign...

...Those simple words, so hard to say, were all I needed to hear...

...In the concluding chapters of the book Hayden pulls out all the stops...

...He went to his thirtieth high school reunion in Royal Oak, where he found a spirit of "real caring, real values, each for the other...

...For example: "What if we were to stay here for six years and not come to a decision...

...On his "long odyssey" from the sixties through the eighties Hayden tried to make the world fit my idealistic American values and met discord, then rejection, from my parents as well as the state...

...Franny and Zooey...

...If much has changed in Hayden's life since the 1960s, Reunion makes it clear that some things have not...

...I reacted in ways which compromised my best judgment, and I experienced what Albert Camus called "the temptation of hatred...

...Sometime in 1986 or 1987 (the chronology gets a little vague here) Hayden set out on a trek around the country...

...You still looking, Franny...

...If I can remember what it was...

...How fast can he shed the requisite amount of political baggage necessary to make it in FALL • 1988 • 501 Books the big time without exacerbating already existing suspicions about his character...

...In one of the few comments he offers on contemporary politics Hayden complains that since Ronald Reagan's election "the official mood of the nation has been contrary to a spirit of reconciliation...

...There is just something about the ease with which—in the sixties and since—Hayden has been able to move from one political stance, strategy and identity to another, without regard to continuity, logic, or the feelings and beliefs of those he has successively left behind, that has made him an easy man to dislike...

...It is the fifth year since I started playing hardball again...

...For four years he lived and worked in the Newark slums until the long hot summer of 1967 foreclosed any meaningful role for white organizers in a black ghetto...

...He turned in a representative performance at a 1964 SDS national meeting, as described in Jim Miller's Democracy is in the Streets: Hayden controlled the flow of discussion with non sequiturs presented as if they were Zen koans...

...Much of the entertainment value of J. D. Salinger's Glass family stories consists in watching intellectually and emotionally complicated characters work their way through to simple (or, if you're not a Salinger fan, banal) truths...

...Hayden seems disappointed that President Reagan won't just call him up and say, "That's okay, son...

...In the mid-sixties he helped launch a community organizing program that would both influence and stand as a reproach to the limitations of the federal War on Poverty...

...The pose of holy innocence and the employment of the prophetic voice tell us something about the conventions of American autobiographical literature— and even more, I suspect, about Hayden's career ambitions...

...Perhaps Rudd and the events at Columbia did inspire misgivings in Hayden, but if so they were not evident in any of his public statements at the time...

...Students at Columbia discovered that barricades are only the beginning of what they call 'bringing the war home.' " I don't think Hayden was booed at the Columbia SDS reunion because he "sold out" or "went Hollywood...

...the audience had careers, families, mortgages of their own to contend with, factors which tend to encourage in all but the most ideologically hidebound a measure of tolerance for the accommodations that others have made along the way...

...He is still a complicated man, still engaged in the strenuous endeavor of appearing simple...