Defining Tom Hayden

Tom Hayden is out of a job. After 10 frustrating years in the California Assembly, where the liberal Democrat was largely thwarted or ignored, and eight slightly less frustrating years in the state Senate, it has come to this. The once-angry young man with the 22,000-page FBI file, the man who aspired to be governor in 1994 and got beaten badly, the man who challenged Richard Riordan to be mayor in 1997 and got trounced, is 60 years old--60!--and running for the Los Angeles City Council. After four decades in public life, four decades battling injustice and exploitation, this is not how it was supposed to be. But if Hayden wants to avoid becoming irrelevant, this may be the best he can hope for. And that’s not the worst of it.

The “Chicago Seven” activist who stormed the 1968 Democratic National Convention to protest the Vietnam War and then married Jane Fonda must now face the question of his legacy. According to a recent poll, a generation of dot-com kids doesn’t know who Tom Hayden is. In a way, it seems, he has spent his life pondering that question himself. It is something of a puzzle.

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hayden and i meet on a dreary spring afternoon at a family-run mexican restaurant in a Silver Lake strip mall. Although he’s a fixture on various talking-heads shows and writes opinion pieces for alternative and mainstream newspapers, he’s wary of the media that made him famous. It took me two months of lobbying before he agreed to a meeting.

Hayden and his second wife, Barbara Williams, recently adopted a baby, and he was up late the night before with little Liam. As the senator munches tortilla chips and chats intermittently on a cell phone, he looks beat, his hazel eyes bleary and tight. He’d spent the morning at a panel discussion downtown, decrying what he sees as the “persecution” of gangs by the media and the middle class. Soon he will be off

to meet with leaders of D2KLA, the protest group planning its strategy for the Democratic National Convention in August. For the moment, though, he’s stuck with me.

“So, what are we doin’ here?” he asks suddenly.

“It’s a get-ta-know-ya,” says Rocky Rushing, his chief of staff.

“Oh,” says Hayden.

Not that he’s unpleasant. When his tortilla soup arrives, he keeps holding out his spoon, urging, “Have a sip, have a sip.” He pulls out pictures of the baby. But soon he dispenses with the small talk. Here’s the deal, he says. He doesn’t think anybody can write a 4,000-word piece about someone’s life--in this case, his--and do it justice. As if offering evidence of the task’s impossibility, he says: “I’ve been in politics 40 years.”

Friends and loyalists accept this stance. Duane Peterson, Hayden’s former chief of staff, goes off about “journalists who spend 40 hours researching a subject and then pretend to know someone.” Asked a simple question about Hayden’s 17-year marriage to Fonda, Hayden’s former publicist Stephen Rivers snaps: “Not relevant to this article.” Warren Beatty and other “Haydenistas” don’t respond to my interview requests.

Part of Hayden’s prickliness apparently stems from two profiles that appeared in the mid-’90s. The first, in the now-defunct Buzz magazine, was largely positive except for allegations that he once drank heavily. The second, in the left-leaning L.A. Weekly, was more harsh, positing that Hayden had managed to avoid the post-’60s obscurity of most radicals by clinging to Fonda’s fame--but that her money, by insulating him from fund-raising, had made him a dilettante.

Hayden’s supporters are especially annoyed by that view, writing it off to envy. Says longtime friend and state Democratic Party advisor Bob Mulholland, “As long as I’ve been around Tom, there’s been jealousy.”

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The cozy Sacramento office that Hayden will soon be leaving is a mess. Along with piles of books, Native American wall hangings and Norman Rockwell prints is a photo gallery charting the politician’s life. There’s Hayden, the die-hard aficionado of adult baseball leagues, playing right field; Hayden with Hillary Rodham Clinton at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, and, perhaps most telling, a small photo of former Klansman David Duke circa 1968, wearing a swastika and carrying a sign demanding: “Gas the Chicago 7.”

If you were going to pick the kid who’d grow up to be charged with inciting a violent conspiracy against America, you wouldn’t have picked Tom Hayden. Home was a middle-class suburb of Detroit, and his dad, Jack, a World War II Marine, worked as an accountant at Chrysler. He also drank. One night he came home smashed and banged on his wife’s locked bedroom door with a hammer. Shortly after, he told his son that he and mom Genevieve were getting divorced. Determined to support her only child, Genevieve took a job as a film librarian. Hayden remained close to his father, who took him on fishing trips in the wilderness and to big-league baseball games in the summer.

A brainy kid, Hayden attended a Catholic elementary school, where he read aloud to the nuns and learned to fear hell. (Years later, he would ponder his religious upbringing in “The Lost Gospel of the Earth,” one of the 10 books he has written or co-written, many of which involve a strong element of self-scrutiny.) The boy often had his nose in a book, but his other passion was baseball. He played until he was 12, his father cheering from the stands. In high school, he was a typical adolescent: He battled acne, groped girls in his mother’s Rambler and edited the school newspaper. Holden Caulfield, the misunderstood teen of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” became his literary hero, and the novel remains a favorite. Like Holden, Tom and his friends chafed at their parents’ bland, middle-class lives, but he was more wise guy than rebel. As a senior, he planted the hidden message “Go to hell” in an editorial. He received a diploma but wasn’t allowed to attend the graduation ceremony with his class.

At the University of Michigan, he worked on the school’s muckraking newspaper, interviewing Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent leaders, intending to become a journalist. But soon he was gripped by radical politics. In the early ‘60s he helped create Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and co-authored the most famous student document of the period. The “Port Huron Statement” called for a kinder America, with power rooted not in possession or privilege, but in “love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity.” Invigorated, Hayden dived into one movement and protest after another. During the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others led massive protests, infuriating Mayor Richard Daley, the party leadership and the Chicago police. He also ventured to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, in part to try and understand the enemy’s perspective, he said. It was on the antiwar circuit that he met and fell in love with actress Jane Fonda.

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When I ask Hayden about those notorious protest days, he winces--not out of regret for his politics, but because of his avowed desire to keep his public and private selves separate. That separation, of course, is impossible, as the 539 pages of his memoir, “Reunion,” make clear.

One of the most poignant threads in that 1988 book concerns Hayden’s father who, increasingly enraged by his son’s politics, broke with him over Vietnam. For more than a decade, including the years Hayden faced prison for his “Chicago Seven” activities, they didn’t speak. Hayden periodically sent him pictures of Jane, their son, Troy Garity, his stepdaughter, Vanessa, and heard nothing. (The defendants were eventually acquitted on charges of conspiracy to commit a riot.) Finally, in 1978, his dad wrote out of the blue and they reconciled. Hayden’s father never did see him enter electoral politics. He died the morning Hayden won the 1982 Assembly primary.

To understand Hayden in all his complexity, look at his relationships with his father and his older son, and at his connection to the young man he was during a period to which many attach near-mystical importance--the 1960s.

In August, the film “Steal This Movie!” a sympathetic take on the era and on the radical Hoffman, returned Hayden’s focus to that time. Playing Hayden was Garity, his son with Fonda. In a promotional online interview about the movie, Hayden mused about the unusual combination of acting and radical politics in his son’s heritage and about the role: “For him it was an opportunity to get inside the way I was while being himself. . . . For me it was an opportunity to relive [the period] through my own flesh, and see my age and feel sort of astonished at how I was--was I ever really that young?”

Garity says that Hayden tried not to repeat the mistakes his dad had made. “I think it was very important to my father that he and I communicate. And I think the trial and the pain of the whole time really made him value what he loves.” Garity, 27, shares his father’s leftist views and calls him his “soul mate” and “challenger.” When the Democrats came to town in August, father and son protested corporate globalization at Staples Center. Garity even got nailed by a rubber bullet when the police moved in.

Garity has many good memories of his youth: veterans approaching his parents and embracing them; Dodger games with his dad; summers at their Laurel Springs Ranch near Santa Barbara, where Hayden and Fonda ran a camp for needy children; the emphasis his father placed on knowing his immigrant heritage (Garity carries his grandmother’s maiden name. When he turned 26, Hayden gave him a picture of the field where Garity ancestors once lived in Monaghan County, Ireland.)

As a teen, Garity went through a rough period--drinking and fighting. “I was very angry,” he says, “the separation of my parents, the hypocrisy I felt in school.” Hayden flew home from Sacramento almost every night, offering acceptance and support. One Christmas, they stayed in the Brazilian rain forest, taking long boat rides down the Amazon at night. After Garity spent a night drinking, he woke to find a letter from his father. “He really opened his heart to me. And we’ve been copacetic ever since.” Soon after that, Hayden quit drinking. “He was an alcoholic for many years,” Garity says. “He put it down and never needed it again, and apologized for any attention it might have taken from our relationship.”

When I try to broach this period with Hayden, his voice turns icy. “I don’t generally talk about things that are personal and have no particular relevance to politics or public affairs,” he says. “If that means I can’t share with the readers how I’ve grown, I’m really sorry about that.”

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In Sacramento, Hayden typically eats dinner alone at a Spanish cafe, retreats to his room at an ersatz Victorian bed and breakfast to write and maybe gets in a visit to the gym. So I’m surprised one afternoon when he announces: “We’re going to Sen. Jack O’Connell’s house to watch the Laker game.” Hayden, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, takes the wheel of his unkempt state car and hands me the directions. Rushing is in the back seat. Soon we’re in suburban hell, a sea of dung-colored tract houses and cookie-cutter apartments and mini-malls. When Hayden finally pulls up to the address, the two-story home looks deserted. “It looks like a crack house,” he quips.

Inside is no better. Except for a recliner, a couch, some ratty stuffed animals on the mantel, the place is bare. As for dinner, O’Connell offers this: Coke, diet Coke, mint chip ice cream, pretzels, chips. Surveying the scene, Hayden jokes, “It’s a world of men without women.”

For once he enjoys himself. “Look at Shaq!” he marvels, pointing to the TV, as the Laker MVP hammers in a dunk. During the game, Hayden lies on the carpet, doing sit-ups. But as soon as the final buzzer sounds, he leaps up and is ready to go. “I don’t think you become close to people in Sacramento,” he says later. “It’s a mistake to think you’re there to make friends.”

Making enemies, on the other hand, has never been a problem. When he got to Sacramento, legislators who refused to forgive him for his antiwar activism or his marriage to “Hanoi Jane” tried to prevent him from taking his seat. “There was a time when no Republican would vote for any of his bills,” says Sen. John Burton, a Democrat from San Francisco. Former state Sen. Quentin Kopp, now a Superior Court judge, blames the animosity on “fear of his purity of purpose and method.”

Hayden’s relations with Democrats haven’t always been much sweeter. In 1991, then-Speaker Willie Brown and fellow Democrats eliminated his Assembly district during the redrawing of legislative lines. Furious, Hayden spent $600,000 of his divorce settlement from Fonda to run for state Senate, winning the primary by a scant 580 votes. Some Democrats still seethe over what they claim were Hayden’s dirty tactics against Democratic incumbent Sen. Herschel Rosenthal. And many still blame Hayden for the Democrats’ losing the governorship in 1994, when he jumped into the Democratic primary. Darry Sragow, candidate John Garamendi’s campaign manager at the time, criticizes Hayden for entering a race he clearly couldn’t win. “He destroyed any chance at all that John Garamendi could beat Kathleen Brown,” he says.

Despite his passion and intellect, Hayden never did become a leader in the Legislature. “There is a certain camaraderie and give and take among legislators,” says Sen. John Vasconcellos, a Democrat from Santa Clara. Successful lawmakers learn early to ease off on their personal agendas to accommodate a common purpose and effort, he says. “I didn’t see signs he was willing to do that.”

It’s easy to find stories about how Hayden has ticked people off, even from those who like him. “He does weird things,” says Kam Kuwata, campaign manager for U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Kuwata recalls how he bumped into Hayden at the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago. Several Chicago Seven defendants were there and, to mark the occasion, someone was filming Hayden wherever he went. When Kuwata asked that the video camera be turned off, Hayden refused. Kuwata snarled an expletive and stalked off.

Hayden’s maverick streak wins him plenty of on-camera time and seems to attract admirers in Hollywood. But critics say it has undermined his effectiveness as a lawmaker.

One afternoon, he calls reporters to the Criminal Courts building in downtown Los Angeles to announce that he has succeeded in getting $100,000 to study California death penalty cases. Hayden has rallied actor Mike Farrell and a tanned and bubbly Martin Sheen. The cameras are there, but Gov. Gray Davis kills the budget item.

In Sacramento, Hayden gets nowhere with another pet issue: labeling of genetically altered foods. In a packed hearing, he waxes indignant about the health risks and damage to crops. He may as well be talking to a herd of cows.

Then there is the afternoon in late June when he suddenly calls a staff meeting at 5:30. The U.S. Supreme Court has just struck down the right of Massachusetts to boycott products from Myanmar (formerly Burma), which is ruled by a brutal dictatorship. Hayden decides to announce a new Senate committee to study the issue of global trade and its effect on California. At the press conference the next day, only four reporters show. One of them wants to know: Why should the average person care about Burma? “Anyone with a conscience should care that their tax dollars are subsidizing torture,” Hayden asserts.

Afterward, Hayden swings by a cafeteria in the capitol building, grabs a ham sandwich on wheat, an orange smoothie and a raisin salad. Doesn’t he get frustrated being so progressive, and hence so out of step, I ask? He’s grumpy. “I accepted that idea when I came here,” he growls. “I would feel bad if I fell short of what’s possible. But this is about trying to push the possible.”

The problem is that even when people agree with Hayden on an issue, they often don’t pay attention to him. Shortly before the Democratic convention this summer, he tried to persuade the party’s platform committee to include a plank denouncing what he sees as exploitative practices by the World Trade Organization. Nothing happened. At the close of this year’s session in Sacramento, Davis killed more than a dozen of the Democrat’s bills, earning Hayden the honor of amassing more vetoes than any other lawmaker.

When you ask people to reflect on Hayden’s political legacy, they stammer, hem and haw, toss out words such as “courage” and “‘integrity” and point out his role as an all-important “conscience” or “agent of change.” Perhaps the most striking response, though, is disinterest. Several people, including former U.S. Sen. George S. McGovern and Bobby Kennedy Jr., don’t bother to return calls, while others beg off. “I’m afraid he’s not going to be able to help you out,” a woman in Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown’s press office says in a message, even though Hayden served in Brown’s administration when he was governor. Willie Brown, now mayor of San Francisco, is also disinclined to offer his perspective on Hayden. “I don’t think he’s given a whole lot of thought to Sen. Hayden’s career,” says Brown’s press secretary.

Some say Hayden spent too much time penning op-eds and pontificating on talk shows and not enough doing the tedious work of politics. Others criticize him for being unfocused, for tackling too many issues without following through. “He’s fighting for better schools, for a cleaner environment, he’s fighting for immigrant rights, that’s all great,” says Kuwata. “But at the end of whatever period, you look back: have you seriously moved the ball forward? I think he is a public servant in need of a great editor.” Says another influential Democrat: “I say, give me his legacy--he’s been in office almost 20 years. What has he done?”

Defenders reply that Hayden has been a relentless, often behind-the-scenes force on many important bills. His Web site notes that he has been named “Legislator of the Year” by the California League of Conservation Voters, the California Public Interest Research Group and other organizations. Says Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, who’ll be filling Hayden’s Senate seat, “I think he’s been very successful in ways that a lot of people don’t know about because his name isn’t always associated with his big wins.” Among his biggest wins are those that focus on Holocaust victims. One law enabled slave laborers to seek compensation from companies that benefited from their enslavement during World War II. A second law pressured insurance companies to pay up on survivors’ insurance claims or face suspension.

As the legislative session winds down before summer recess, he scrambles to wrap up about 40 pieces of legislation, including a plan to create a Central American Studies Institute at Cal State Northridge, a bill to give parents facts about the quality of public schools in the state and a measure to reform sky-high prison phone rates, which Hayden characterizes as “Reach Out and Gouge Someone.”

By most accounts, however, Hayden is less interested in making laws than in pursuing a higher cause--riveting attention on the issues that he feels really matter. His take: “I don’t carry bills that are prearranged winners.”

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Every month or so, a social worker takes the winding road through a Brentwood canyon to make sure Hayden and Williams are responsible parents. For various reasons, the couple decided to adopt. Though they’re in close touch with the mother, the father, who wasn’t keen on the adoption, doesn’t know their identity.

Williams, who grew up on a remote Canadian island, is a down-to-earth woman in her mid-40s. She and Hayden met at a Raymond Carver reading in Santa Monica, and were married in 1993 in a Canadian rain forest. She was first attracted to Hayden because of his ideas on religion and the environment, and enrolled in a course he taught on the topic at Santa Monica College. “I’ve always been somewhat of a political activist,” she says. “But I didn’t feel there was a spiritual basis to politics.”

She and Hayden bought their house four years ago and promptly renovated it. They plan to keep it, even though, to qualify for the 5th District council seat being vacated by Michael Feuer, he is renting a home in Sherman Oaks. By neighborhood standards, the Brentwood home is practically a shack: a one-story ranch, with Japanese cabinets, Irish pine furniture, tile floors and framed prints of Native Americans that Williams picked up at a yard sale.

On a cool summer evening, Williams is back and forth from the kitchen, where she is whipping up fajitas, to the deck, where Hayden is perched, feeding Liam a bottle of milk. Every so often Williams returns to pour lemonade and lavish their son with kisses. “Look how she smothers you,” Hayden says.

The baby has changed everything, including the nature of his ambition, Hayden says. As he faces another life change, he has thought hard about his future and his legacy. To clarify where he sees himself in life, he refers to a long Native American parable. As he puts it, there are four phases of life, each symbolized by an animal. The eagle stands for youth, the ability to see injustice, the way he was 40 years ago. The coyote stands for ambition, symbolizing the beginning of his career. “Then you’re ready for stewardship, and the symbol of that phase of life is the bear, where you’re looking up at the whole habitat.” That’s the perspective leaders should have, he says. Finally, at the end of the life cycle is the white buffalo, the symbol of wisdom. “So I’m past coyote, but I don’t know if I’m past bear,” he says.

Which raises the question: Is the Los Angeles City Council proper habitat for either a bear or buffalo? Is it the place for a man who seems more inclined to tackle Burmese brutality than potholes on Ventura Boulevard?

Hayden and his supporters point out that he began his career working on grass-roots issues and that most of his legislative battles naturally focused on Southern California. He was one of the first politicians, for instance, to promote a preventive approach with gangs. He hires former gang members as staff members, and two years ago he secured funding for a program for gangsters and at-risk kids to laser off their tattoos. (It has since been expanded.) After months of talks between L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and leaders of gang intervention groups, he recently shepherded a bill enabling at-risk kids to have their names removed from the state’s controversial gang-member database if they finish an anti-violence program. Father Gregory Boyle, founder of the gang-intervention project Homeboy Industries, praises Hayden for understanding the complexity of gang violence. “But way beyond that, he is unwilling to write off this whole sector of the population, and every other politician is willing to do that.”

In another local skirmish, he fought to save downtown’s St. Vibiana Cathedral from the wrecking ball. Two of the city’s most serious power brokers--Cardinal Roger Mahony and Mayor Riordan--were determined to erect a new cathedral on the site. To bring the earthquake-rattled structure down, they had to get past the environmental committee Hayden chaired. The concrete landmark still stands and, in July, the legislature approved $4 million to turn the building into a cultural center. “I had to put up with that pressure that says you are like, breaking all of the furniture here. It was the ultimate in not going along.”

Hayden says he would have relished another run for higher office. But he acknowledges that the time is likely past. Which is why he is running with nine other candidates for the Feuer seat. Characteristically, he waxes philosophical on the subject. “I’m aware more than previously that each choice could be my last,” he says. He says he looks at the City Council job as an opportunity and is content with the prospect of helping to make Los Angeles tick. “With all the race and ethnic problems and traffic jams, the idea of L.A. truly working has always interested me.”

But at times he sounds ambivalent, as if he is still trying to convince himself. “I know that in all things, from journalism to academia to politics, there’s a status ladder contest that guarantees people will feel frustrated if they are not at the top. The other way to look at it is everybody has a role to play.”

For now, it’s 9:30 on a Saturday night. The senator wants to go to bed. The baby will be up soon, needing to be fed. As I stand in the living room talking with his wife, Tom Hayden begins to turn off the lights.

The Hayden Dossier

Dec. 11, 1939: Hayden born in Detroit, Mich.

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1960: Becomes editor of the University of Michigan Daily; later travels to the South as freelance writer and is beaten while covering integration.

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1962: Drafts Students for a Democratic Society’s “Port Huron Statement.”

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1965: Makes first visit to Hanoi, North Vietnam.

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1968: SDS, Yippies and others disrupt Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

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1969-1970: Hayden and fellow “Chicago Seven” defendants stand trial for activities at convention.

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1973: Marries Jane Fonda. Their son, Troy Garity, is born later that year.

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1982: Hayden elected to the state Assembly.

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1992: Hayden elected to the state Senate.

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1994: Loses bid to become governor of California.

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1997: Loses bid to become mayor of Los Angeles.

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2000: Term limits prevent him from running for state Senate again. He enters Los Angeles City Council race.