Hayden Defends 1960s Activism on ‘Politically Incorrect’

Taking his underdog mayoral campaign onto national television, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) Thursday defended the activist 1960s as an era that improved America.

And he won.

Helped by comedian/television producer Jeff Cesario and actress Annie Potts, Hayden stood his ground on the irreverent late-night talk show “Politically Incorrect” against an attack by a conservative commentator who blamed the ills of the 1990s on the decade marked by student protest and free love.

“You can pass all the laws you want, this is about the cultural breakdown,” syndicated columnist Cal Thomas declared during a semi-comedic round-table discussion of last week’s North Hollywood bank robbery-turned-gunfight. “There’s a disrespect for life. A disrespect for law.”

Thomas also attributed the country’s climbing divorce rate, burgeoning gangs and drug scourge to the movement Hayden helped lead.

The former president of Students for a Democratic Society, who spent his 21st birthday in jail after getting arrested during a protest, shot back.

“These poor guys didn’t have prayer in the schools, so they suited up . . . like the Addams family in full body armor? That’s because of the ‘60s? Give me a break,” Hayden said. “My parents were divorced in 1950. I remember the day my dad drove away. . . . Divorce wasn’t caused by the ‘60s.”

Bill Maher, the show’s host, held up a book written by onetime Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and said it attributed the unraveling of society to the Port Huron Statement, a manifesto Hayden helped write in 1962 to launch the student protest movement.

“Yeah, it was actually found on the bodies” of the North Hollywood bank robbers, Hayden quipped. “The guys had it with them.”

In the no-holds-barred format of the successful talk show, Cesario, who currently works on the “Larry Sanders Show,” and Potts, the “Designing Women” staple who now is on the television series “Dangerous Minds,” helped Hayden make his case. They noted that the 1960s led to the women’s movement and voting rights for minorities, then asked Thomas where he was at the time.

“I was with Martin Luther King Jr. at the ‘I have a dream speech’ on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial,” Thomas claimed. “Tom, where were you?”

“I was there,” Hayden said quickly.

“If you both were there,” Cesario chimed in sarcastically, “there just shouldn’t be this tension.”

After a break, however, Thomas acknowledged that he had been at the historic speech as a journalist. “Am I supposed to apologize because I wasn’t there as an activist?” he asked the increasingly hostile panel.

“No, but for misleading us,” Maher scolded. “You made it seem like King was [saying], ‘Hey, blood, give me some advice.’ ”

At one point in the cross-fire, Cesario said to Thomas that if the debate was a game show, “Tom and I would be kicking your ass.”

Throughout the half-hour show, which millions of Americans watched at midnight Thursday on ABC, Hayden refrained from mentioning Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, neighborhood councils, LAPD Chief Willie L. Williams or any of the issues driving the campaign.

But when the lights came up, he couldn’t help but target the 150 potential voters in the studio audience.

“I understand I’m not allowed to say I’m running for mayor of Los Angeles,” Hayden said. “How many of you know that there’s an election on April 8?”