Hayden: a Revolutionary L.A. Can Skip

Tom Hayden and I were once comrades-in-arms in a movement to overthrow America’s democratic institutions, remake its government in a Marxist image and help America’s enemies defeat her sons on the field of battle. Now he is running for mayor of Los Angeles and many people are asking me, “Does this past matter?” I think it does.

Hayden was serious about his revolutionary agenda. He traveled many times to North Vietnam, Czechoslovakia and Paris to meet with leaders of the communist dictatorship. He came back from Hanoi proclaiming he had seen “rice-roots democracy at work.” According to people who were present, he advised the communists on how to conduct psychological warfare against the United States. He arranged trips to Hanoi for Americans who would be friendly to the communists while blocking entry to those whom the communists could not trust. He dismissed as “propaganda” reports of the torture of American POWs, and then attacked the POWs as “liars” when they returned to America to tell their stories. Even after America withdrew its troops from Indochina in 1973, Hayden lobbied Congress to end all aid to the anticommunist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. When the cutoff came, the regimes fell and the communists conquered South Vietnam and Cambodia and slaughtered 2.5 million people. When anti-war activist Joan Baez protested the human rights violations of the North Vietnamese victors, Hayden called her a tool of the CIA.

On the domestic front, Hayden advocated urban rebellions in America’s cities. He called for the creation of guerrilla groups to resist police and other law enforcement agencies. His own group was a left-wing militia, called the “Red Family,” which had a “Minister of Defense” who trained members at firing ranges and instructed high school students in the use of explosives.

Why does all this still seem important? It is not that I think a man cannot learn from his mistakes or change his mind. Far from it. I myself recently published a memoir rehashing my own activities in the radical left, a past that I now regret. What makes Hayden’s history relevant is that he has never been fully candid about his past and for 30 years has concealed the more disturbing parts of his radical career. In addition to suppressing crucial details about his dealings with the enemy and the agendas of his left-wing militia, he has remained silent about the criminal activities of the Black Panthers, whom he promoted at the time.

Hayden’s silences have helped to fuel the racial paranoia of elements in the urban community who are convinced that there was a government plot to eliminate their leaders, and even their community. In his own memoir, Hayden included many pages of his FBI dossier, along with sarcastic comments to suggest that the agents who kept an eye on him were no different from the agents of a police state trying to suppress unpopular ideas.

This readiness to sow suspicion of legal authority is troubling in a man who proposes himself as the leader of a city that has many political, racial and economic fault lines, and in which visible tensions exist between its diverse communities. On Feb. 22, Hayden, communist Angela Davis and other ‘60s leftovers led a march on City Hall organized by something calling itself the “Crack the CIA Coalition.” Among its demands were “Dismantle the CIA” and “Stop the media coverup of CIA drug involvement,” a reference to a story discredited by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The story claims that the CIA flooded Los Angeles’ inner city communities with crack cocaine. Another slogan of the march called for a reduction in sentences for drug dealers selling crack cocaine.

It is only five years since a mob in South-Central, inspired by profound distrust of public authority, went on a rampage that killed 58 people, burned 2,000 businesses and destroyed a large section of this city. Los Angeles cannot afford to have as its chief official a man who inspires a profound distrust of public authority and who actively encourages doubts about the institutions of civil law and authority, Our city, and our democracy, deserve better.