The Long Trip From Chicago And Back

Our cause was both just and rational, even if all our methods were not. Our values were decent ones, even if we could not always live up to them.

--Tom Hayden in his 1988 autobiography, “Reunion.”

SACRAMENTO

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It’s still 11 weeks until Tom Hayden returns to Chicago for another Democratic convention and he can’t yet bring himself to focus on the ironies, the meaning, the regrets and nostalgia.

“I’m trying, but I haven’t gotten very far,” the state senator says. “I’m so busy. I know by the time I get there, the place will be thick with memories. No doubt about it.”

Ideas are germinating, however.

“Ironies aside, the events of ’68 need to be remembered. You can’t escape the past if you call a convention in Chicago. There should be some memorial event, some drawing of conclusions. I’m thinking about [having it in] Grant Park, right across from the Hilton, where I got pushed with ‘crowd people’ through a window into a bar.”

[The cops’] eyes were bulging with hate and they were screaming with a sound that I had never heard from a human being. . . . Someone kicked in the window behind us and we fell through the shattered street-level opening to the Hilton’s Haymarket Lounge. . . . The police leaped through the windows . . . turning over tables in the swank lounge, scattering the drinkers, breaking glasses and tables. Now the inside of the Hilton was a battleground.

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To convention attendees in 1968, the Hilton Hotel was synonymous with antiwar protests, cops with clubs and Mace clouds. This August, it will be the headquarters of the California delegation. In 1968, Hayden was a rebel leader, a street fighter. This time, he’ll be walking through the front door as a delegate--not just any delegate, but the top vote-getter among the nearly 1,000 who ran for a spot on the 424-member slate.

That’s one of the changes forced by the ’68 turmoil. Party reforms led to election of most delegates by grass-roots activists at open caucuses, no longer by a handful of political bosses in private.

“On the one hand, I want to count my blessings. Many good things have been achieved. This might not have been possible in countries where protesters are put away for life or beheaded,” Hayden says. “On the other hand, we still have further to go than I would have imagined then. If you have only the counting of blessings, you don’t see why so many people are still angry and in despair.”

Segregation now is illegal, Hayden notes, but “we’re not closer to racial harmony. . . . We’ve withdrawn from our inner cities. . . . Power has shifted from old line machines--which were ethnic and based on getting out the vote and patronage--to new money machines that choose candidates by endowing them with cash to run. The people still are robbed.

“I’m drafting a platform plank that calls on the Clinton administration to eliminate the corrupting power of lobbyists and big money.”

So it’s too simple to say Hayden has taken up with the establishment. He’s a rebel within the system, a provocateur. In Sacramento, he’s viewed by many as a loner and a thorn, nettling Gov. Pete Wilson and trying to protect students and the environment.

At least, he says, “we don’t overreact so brutally to massive protests. . . . I got beat up a few times and got arrested twice. We were shadowed by tails, big bullish guys. I escaped them, but sooner or later they’re going to find you.”

It was [the morning] before the official opening of the convention. I was sleeping late. The bedroom door opened. Drowsily, I saw a naked woman, who had risen earlier. Maybe she’ll come back to bed, I was thinking, when she said quietly: “There’s a man outside with a gun.” Well. No need for coffee now. . . . I dressed and composed a plan. Grabbing an apple, I jumped out the kitchen window [and] ran several blocks.

*

Hayden eventually was charged with fomenting a riot, tried with “the Chicago 8” and sentenced to five years in prison, but his conviction was overturned.

Now 56 and eyeing a race for L.A. mayor, the Santa Monica lawmaker says he no longer hates “authority or anyone. It fills up every part of your body and it’s painful. . . . I hated the Vietnam War.”

And he admired the enemy, even traveling to Hanoi.

Time has proved me overly romantic about the Vietnamese revolution. The other side of that romanticism was a numbed sensitivity to any anguish or confusion I was causing to U.S. soldiers and to their families--the very people I was trying to save from death and deception.

In 1968, Hayden angrily confronted Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police. In 1996, he and Daley’s sons--Mayor Richard M. and advisor William--are amiably conferring. There’s talk of a convention speech.

It’s compelling drama--and also a bright spotlight for somebody who’d like to be L.A.’s mayor.