O.C. Conservatives Still War With Archenemy Hayden : Politics: State senator takes on bankruptcy, UCI clinic issues. Accused of revenge, he says his purpose is pure.

To understand the relationship and all its strange textures, one needs to go back to 1969, when Tom Hayden was tried and convicted on federal charges of inciting riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

By that time, Hayden, one of the Chicago 8, had been a frequent visitor to the enemy capital of Hanoi in repeated attempts to end the Vietnam War, which he felt was crippling a generation and sending America on an ill-fated course.

Hayden’s conviction was later overturned, but in Orange County, the damage was done and a memory begun. In this bastion of rock-ribbed conservatism--the birthplace and heartland of Richard Nixon--many have never forgotten or forgiven Hayden’s radicalism.

“To Tom Hayden, we represent little more than a den of rich Republicans . . . capitalists. To him, we’re the Valhalla, the den of his enemies,” said former Newport Beach Assemblyman Gil Ferguson, who in 1986 tried to have Hayden ousted from the state Legislature on grounds of wartime treason.

The Vietnam War is long over. But even now, at age 55, Hayden remains the political antithesis of Orange County.

As a Democrat from Santa Monica, Hayden has been hurling thunderbolts at the county over its disastrous bankruptcy and the scandal at UC Irvine’s Center for Reproductive Health.

It was Hayden, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Higher Education, who decided to convene a hearing into charges of abuse and misconduct at the once-prestigious fertility center.

It was Hayden who ordered 10 people subpoenaed to Wednesday’s session in Sacramento.

And, just a few months ago, it was Hayden who took a highly critical role in seeking to probe the bond crisis, which prompted the former student radical to introduce a series of reform-minded bills aimed squarely at local governments.

But while Hayden and former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) have long ranked as stick-in-your-eye nemeses to Orange County’s Statehouse delegation, it is Hayden--unmistakably--who stands as the area’s leading political tormentor.

“Willie loves capitalists, and, he’s gotten a lot of money out of Orange County,” Ferguson said. “He actually likes successful businessmen.”

“Whereas,” he continued, “Hayden assumes they probably cheated on their income tax, cheated consumers through faulty products and probably dumped pollution into the nearest bay. When Willie sees a businessman, he sees a source of potential income. When Tom sees a businessman, he sees an enemy. It’s as simple as that.”

So, is Hayden’s sudden involvement in Orange County affairs motivated by a lust for revenge?

Nonsense, the senator said.

“Revenge is not an emotion I particularly like to see cultivated, so that would be the last thing on my mind. My appearing [to be out for revenge] is purely an accident,” Hayden said. “It certainly has nothing to do with reality.”

But the reality of Orange County’s antipathy for Hayden resulted in an emotion-charged debate and vote before the full 80-member Assembly in 1986 on the question of whether Hayden should be expelled for his wartime actions.

The effort, spearheaded by Ferguson, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, failed. But the residue lingers--on both sides.

“To care about whether Gil or Assemblyman [Mickey] Conroy [R-Orange] don’t want me around and call me a traitor every chance they get is, again, succumbing to that cycle of vengeance, which I don’t want to do . . . and won’t do . . . I can’t,” Hayden said. “Maybe I’m starting to learn the history of my Irish past a little more.

“See, cycles of vengeance never end. The likes of [Ferguson and Conroy] are entitled to their opinions and to put me through the gantlet as often they see fit, but what I object to--still--is someone trying to take me out of office, after the voters had elected me.”

Hayden’s longtime chief of staff, Duane Peterson, defends his boss, saying, “Tom Hayden does not have an adversarial relationship with Orange County, and never has.”

As Peterson sees it, the senator has never attacked the county’s interests in the state budget or “crashed around in purely local issues in which he neither has expertise or a statewide interest.”

That’s only true in part, Ferguson said, adding, “Hayden would have gotten involved with the fertility scandal even if it had happened at UCLA. You’ve got to give the devils their due. Hayden has always had his nose into higher education.

“But one thing’s for sure,” said Ferguson. “He would have never gotten involved in the bankruptcy if it hadn’t been Orange County. He must have wanted to just rub our noses in it.”

Au contraire , Hayden said.

“I’m very interested in breaking the cycle of Wall Street types immersing themselves in local political concerns,” he said. “Their increasing role creates a vested interest in the high-risk investment of public money, and that’s not right.”

Assemblyman Conroy, 63, who staunchly supported Ferguson, 72, in trying to have Hayden removed from office, is, like Ferguson, a war veteran. Conroy cites 1969 as the beginning of his awareness of Hayden and his loathing of what he stands for.

“Mickey sees him as a treasonous criminal, a traitor who shouldn’t be in the state Senate,” said Chris Manson, Conroy’s chief of staff. “Mickey believes that Hayden is illegally serving in the Senate and that he illegally served in the Assembly. Hayden gave comfort to the enemy during a war, so in Mickey’s mind, he fits the legal definition of a treasonous traitor.”

But Ferguson, who served in the Assembly from 1984 to 1994--Hayden’s tenure lasted from 1982 until 1992, when he won a Senate seat--said he actually admires what he calls his opponent’s honesty and courage.

“I never, ever called Tom dishonest, nor would I,” Ferguson said. “Because he isn’t. He’s one of these ‘do what you say, talk the talk, walk the walk’ guys. But I think it would be awfully hard to be Tom Hayden.

“I mean, everyone wants to be liked . . . don’t they? But Tom has always gone against the wind. We may not like what he wants to do--or like him for doing it--but he wants to effect change, and I respect him for that.”

The man the New York Times has called “the single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement” spent much of his 20s and 30s in Southern jails, North Vietnamese villages, a Chicago courtroom and a Berkeley collective, living a life that Ferguson calls “anathema to Orange County.”

Raised in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Mich., Hayden left high school bent on becoming a foreign correspondent. But at the University of Michigan, he joined Students for a Democratic Society, and in 1961, a year after claiming his diploma, found himself in a roach-infested cell, surrounded by drunks and pools of urine on the floor.

Hayden and his fellow freedom riders were trying to desegregate a railway station in Albany, Ga. Four years later, he made his first trip to Hanoi, a journey into enemy territory that prompted his father to sever relations with his son. The two men didn’t speak for 13 years.

Ferguson said he knows how the father felt.

“That’s why a guy like Tom has such a problem in Orange County and always will. Orange County is different from most of California and most of America. Even in the ‘60s, with the war raging, we didn’t have marches in the street. We didn’t have draft-card burners. Our sons and daughters were in the military, like we were,” Ferguson said.

“Orange County was built by veterans of World War II. When Hayden and [his former wife, actress] Jane Fonda--’Hanoi Jane’--did their thing, people here were aghast. They couldn’t believe an American would do the things Tom Hayden would do. And you know something? We still can’t. We’ve never really forgiven him. And I doubt we ever will.”

But Peterson argues that Orange County today may have more in common with Hayden than many of its constituents realize--or would ever admit.

“Tom’s interest in the county’s fiscal nightmare stems from its root cause, which in his mind is the influence of special interests cozying up to government,” Peterson said.

“Along comes Merrill Lynch and other bond houses lavishing [former Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron] with campaign contributions,” said Peterson, “and what do you know--a cozy relationship develops where Wall Street gets its way and the people of Orange County have to pay, big-time.”

The bond crisis presents a subtext of “lack of oversight and accountability by others”--which, Peterson said, is what troubles Hayden the most about UCI and its relationship with the fertility clinic.

Under the direction of internationally renowned fertility specialist, Dr. Ricardo H. Asch, and two other doctors, the center is the focal point of a widening investigation.

Asch and his colleagues stand accused of transferring eggs and implanting them in other women without the consent of either donor or recipient; performing research on patients without their consent; giving patients fertility drugs not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and fiscally mismanaging the center.

The school has filed suit against the doctors, whose former patients are also threatening to sue.

“First and foremost, what was the role of the University of California in the scandal and its potential cover-up?” said Peterson, who notes that Hayden chairs the body he founded, the Senate Select Committee on Higher Education. “Secondly, as for the substance of the scandal, what is the state of fertility research and treatment in California, and do our laws adequately protect patients’ rights?

“I can’t believe that even the issues in Tom’s past would cause the people of Orange County to go against Tom in getting to the bottom of both bonds and ‘fertility.’ Who knows . . . Orange County may end up finding that it has more in common with Tom than the Fergusons and Conroys realize.”

* BLOWING THE WHISTLE: UCI fertility center worker to hold news conference. A18