Old War Propels Conroy’s Fight With Hayden : Politics: Assemblyman has toiled for years to oust Vietnam anti-war protester from Legislature. The battle’s not over yet.

The Vietnam War has been over for nearly two decades, but for some a truce is not yet in sight. Mickey Conroy is a case in point. He won’t relent until the final skirmish is settled.

With bulldog persistence, the Orange County assemblyman has toiled for 10 years to get erstwhile Vietnam anti-war protester and current state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) bounced out of the Legislature.

First as private citizen and later as a lawmaker, Conroy has written scores of letters, circulated petitions, filed lawsuits and lobbied state legislators until red in the face. He has pleaded with prosecutors and placed newspaper advertisements in Hayden’s home base of Santa Monica denouncing the onetime Chicago Seven defendant as a traitor. All to no avail.

But the former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran is not about to give up. It burns in him. After all, while Conroy was flying combat missions, Hayden was fraternizing with communists in North Vietnam. When Americans were dying in the jungle, Hayden was spouting anti-war rhetoric on Radio Hanoi.

Herein lies the conflict that has brought this pair brow-to-brow in the backwaters of the state capital, two bare-knuckled Irishmen on opposite ends of the Sacramento spectrum.

Conroy believes Hayden violated a state constitutional provision that bars from elected office anyone who advocates the support of a foreign government engaged in hostilities with the United States. Hayden flatly denies it.

If Conroy gets his way, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren will settle the matter. Short of that, Conroy vows to move to Santa Monica and run against Hayden when the Democrat’s state Senate term is up in 1996.

“I’ll tell you what, I’d give him a real tussle, and there would be only one issue I’d run on,” said Conroy, a folksy, white-haired Republican. “As long as I can breathe a breath, I’ll be pursuing this.”

Through it all, Hayden has kept a tight, poker-faced grin--and tried to bear it. He survived the scrutiny of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon Justice Department. For him, the dogged protestations of Mickey Conroy and his bunch are hardly cause for alarm.

Yet he hasn’t sat by idly. Hayden has worked hard to fend off the flurry of charges Conroy has fired his way. But frankly, Hayden says, it’s all grown a bit tiresome. As he sees it, Conroy’s persistence is as much a product of political strategy as it is one of ideological bent. Hayden suspects his Republican adversary has seized the issue in part to help fund raising for veterans groups he champions.

“My basic position is that everything I ever said or did about Vietnam has been heard by the voters of my district and they’ve taken it into account and feel good enough to elect me six times,” Hayden said.

Amid the unrelenting, decade-long attack, Hayden has grappled with internal conflicts over his past. During a recent trip to the black granite wall in Washington that memorializes Vietnam dead, Hayden gazed at the endless list of names etched in stone. A debate raged in his mind.

“There were voices playing in my head . . . haunting voices,” the state senator recalled. “ ‘If people had listened to me, no Americans would have died.’ ‘If it hadn’t been for Hayden, we would have won the war and saved lives.’

“Did I shorten the war and save lives or lengthen the war and cost lives?” he asked himself. The answer came quickly: “I feel I was right in opposing the war, militantly, but I did cross the line into irrationality and anger.”

Those days are of fading importance for voters, Hayden believes, a reality he says Conroy has failed to grasp.

“He goes around to the Assembly, to the Senate or to reporters and, except for the hard core, the eyes roll,” Hayden said. “I know the type. I’ve got a bit of that streak myself. He’s addictive. Faced with massive rejection (of his crusade), he just thinks people don’t have enough information.”

Conroy himself admits he lacked much information when he began his quest. His was a cause of the heart, of the soul, of patriotism and emotion. As a Marine pilot during Vietnam, he was well aware of the leftist activities of Tom Hayden and his former wife, actress Jane Fonda. He learned to loathe them both.

Right after Hayden made an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate in 1976, Conroy became something of a student of the foibles of the man who founded the leftist Students for a Democratic Society and Campaign for Economic Democracy.

His irritation was fueled in 1979, Conroy said, when former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.--on Hayden’s advice--appointed Edison W. Miller to fill a vacancy on the Orange County Board of Supervisors. Miller had been accused of collaborating with the North Vietnamese while a prisoner of war.

When Hayden won an Assembly seat in 1982, Conroy said, “I got really upset.” It was then that the burly, 5-foot-6 workaholic made it his avocation to force Hayden from office. He fired off telegrams to state officials. During off hours from his job and work as leader of a veterans group, Conroy began poring through documents to make his case and gathering upward of 100,000 signatures on petitions demanding Hayden’s ouster.

During the hunt for evidence to aid their case, Conroy and his compatriots came across an obscure state constitutional provision approved by voters during the McCarthy years of the early ‘50s. The law prohibits anyone “who advocates the support of a foreign government against the United States in the event of hostilities” from holding office.

Conroy also discovered a little-used process by which citizens can introduce a bill into the Legislature. Each year, Conroy petitioned the Assembly asking that the liberal lawmaker be removed from office. Each year, it was killed.

In the mid-1980s, Conroy gained a valuable ally in Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who served in three wars. Ferguson made an emotional, teary-eyed speech in 1985 calling Hayden a traitor, and the next year he asked fellow lawmakers to oust their liberal colleague. But they rebuffed him, divided roughly along partisan lines.

While Ferguson made the headlines, Conroy organized more than 200 veterans who picketed the Capitol and filled the Assembly chambers during the hearing.

“What I did was for Mickey,” Ferguson says today. “He desperately needed somebody inside the political world to stand up against Hayden. Mickey did all the work.”

Conroy also tried to unseat Hayden via the courts. He filed a lawsuit in 1984, but it was rejected. Undeterred, he pushed Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner and state Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp to prosecute Hayden for perjury, arguing the lawmaker had lied during his oath of office by pledging to uphold the state constitution. When the two prosecutors refused, Conroy sued to force the issue but was unsuccessful once more.

All along, Conroy said, his efforts were hurt because he lacked irrefutable proof that Hayden backed North Vietnam against the United States. “At first, Gil and I were operating on personal feelings. We were trying to re-fight the Vietnam War,” Conroy says. “That was the problem. We lacked the smoking gun.”

Conroy said he found it in the archives of the California State Library, uncovering records of a December, 1968, hearing of the now-defunct Committee on Un-American Activities. During the session, Hayden acknowledged he supported the North Vietnamese.

Hayden doesn’t deny any of that today, but insists the laws of the land are on his side. The most ready proof, he said, is a 1986 legal opinion from the state Legislative Counsel.

It concludes that Hayden could only be in violation if he had already been found criminally guilty of supporting a foreign government. Short of that, the statute of limitations on any crime Hayden might have committed had expired long ago, the opinion noted. Moreover, it suggested that Hayden’s wartime statements may have been protected under the First Amendment.

Conroy hoped the tables would turn when he won a seat on the Assembly in a 1991 special election to fill a vacancy from Orange County. Now he was on the inside. But so far, it has not paid off.

When Hayden won a Senate seat last year, Conroy tried to turn the liberal lawmaker’s new colleagues against him. Although many of the fraternity-like Senate members had vocally opposed Hayden--even contributing more than $200,000 to his Democratic primary opponent--they turned a blind eye to Conroy’s request.

“Mickey is very sincere in his patriotic efforts and I can certainly understand his deep emotional commitment to this issue, but this has been a futile effort,” said Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), a Conroy ally. “The Assembly rejected this, the Senate showed absolutely no interest in reviving the issue. After a while it seems futile to fall on your sword every time you go to battle.”

Conroy contends his failure has come about mostly because of partisan politics and an uncooperative Sacramento press corps. He remains convinced that the public would reject Hayden--if only they knew the truth.

Now, his avenues of attack are dwindling, but he has his sights set on an arena where judges and fellow legislators won’t matter--the 1996 election.

Hayden, meanwhile, hardly seems perturbed.

“In comparison to other things I’ve been through in my life, I can live with Mickey Conroy. I’m sorry he can’t live with me.”