Jane Fonda? The answer could depend on your politics: some may think his (by 1979) 22,000-page, three-foot-high FBI file is the definition of immortality. Whatever the answer, it is clear that Tom was born to give of himself wholly.
He was, in fact, born in 1939 in Royal Oak, Michigan to Genevieve and John Hayden, both of Irish descent. After graduating from Dondero High School, he went on to the University of Michigan, where he was editor of the Michigan Daily. At the time, the National Student Association still held sway with its Cold-War, anti-communist politics. Tom joined with others to found the Students for a Democratic Society, and he was its president in 1962 and ‘63. During this time, he also traveled through the South as a Freedom Rider to desegregate public areas like train stations, and he was the central drafter of SDS’s Port Huron Statement. Its first sentence opened the door to the students and intellectuals who were to burst upon U.S. consciousness: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” Indeed, its ambition was to kick-start “a radically new democratic political movement,” one based in participatory rather than representative decision-making. The essay quickly became a founding document of both the emerging student movements and the New Left.
Tom musing at his FBI file in 1979. (Imagine its size by 2015!) First appearance in the Los Angeles Times in 1979; later in “The Hunters and the Hunted” by Seth Rosenfeld, New York Times, October 5, 2012.
Quite early in the appearance of skepticism regarding United States involvement in Vietnam, in 1965 Tom, Quaker peace activist Staughton Lynd, and Communist Party U.S.A. leader Herbert Aptheker traveled to North Vietnam and Hanoi. The buildup to the U.S.’s eventual full-out participation—at that point mainly via “advisors”—was only just becoming evident, and it was a daring maneuver for citizens, on their own, to not accept what the newspapers reported, but to actually check up on their government’s deeds. The trip laid the basis of a primary theme in Tom’s life. In 1968 he was one of the main organizers of the anti-war protests outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and six months later the Chicago 8 were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to inflame violence. Tom was convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot, but the charges were reversed upon appeal. He went on to found the Indochina Peace Campaign that, from 1972 until the U.S. pull-out in 1975, organized protests, and demanded unconditional amnesty for draft dodgers.
I was on a speaking tour in the mid-’90s. Needless to say, I was more than thrilled when Tom and Barbara showed up at my talk on ecopsychology in Los Angeles. My routine was to choose a musician from the community who could improvise an on-the-spot “sound track” for the lecture; I would turn to this person at intervals, and the given task was for her/him to bounce off of my stories using musical expression. The approach had been a wild success at the Prescott College ecopsych gathering in Arizona the year before, where a passionate young singer who sang throughout my presentation brought the house down and we shared a raucous standing ovation. In this case I was directed to a tall Swedish man whose only melodious talent, it turned out too late, was to bang on a chair seat. Afterward, Tom pulled me aside to advise that the talk was great—but the musician … well … “he had to go.”
I agreed heartily, and our post-crush friendship was off to a comical start. What followed was a tour of L.A. with the Williams-Hayden duo, including lunch on the Santa Monica boardwalk amid bathing suits and roller skaters, a peek at the ‘hood of his gang friends, an unexpected car breakdown—and superb conversation. What I encountered was a man more multifaceted than I could have imagined or appreciated in the ‘60s. One might posit that a political animal doesn’t need to be or doesn’t have time to be reflective—Dan Quail being the best example of what level of intelligence it takes to be successful in Realpolitik; Adlai Stevenson an example of what can happen if one is too much the “egghead.” But Tom was swirling with questions and insights, and he wanted to know what I thought. What about this new phenomenon of multiculturalism? What would happen to U.S. society if it truly took hold? How would established religion need to change if it were to embrace ecology? How might one talk to religious leaders to make that happen?
Several years after our time together in Los Angeles, upon flying into the airport in Albuquerque he called to see if he might visit me. And so it was: on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 2005, Tom drove from Jane Fonda’s ranch south of Santa Fe north to Chimayó. We sat for a spell in the Santuario and ate lunch at Rancho de Chimayó, where sopapillas con miel reign supreme. My jaw just about spilled the half-chewed delight when he invited me to come to Bolivia—in four weeks. I resisted. It sounded like a preposterous thing to do: the trip was too soon, Bolivia was too far away, it would be too expensive. But Tom gazed at me through those saltand-pepper eyes. “You have to come. After all the dictatorships, they have elected their first indigenous president, a campesino named Evo Morales,” he insisted, and then revealing his ever-present awareness that we would not last forever: “Such a thing will never happen again in our lifetimes.”
He was right. Bolivia was literally dancing upon its boulevards and dirt paths, people were either crying or singing for joy on street corners, in buses and cafés everyone was feverishly talking politics. Tom stayed for four days to gather information for an article in The Nation and then launched off to do interviews in Venezuela, to be followed by his annual jaunt to the L.A. Dodgers fantasy baseball camp in Arizona.
I, on the other hand, was so taken by the spirit of the Bolivian people that I returned—and stayed for the rest of my life.
At a certain point a wrinkle in Tom’s and my differing political styles surfaced. Political focus, I believe, is shaped by the Zeitgeist into which we are born, the particular injustice in our midst, and the education that we receive. The wrinkles and labyrinths of our personalities also contribute a great deal to the themes and means of our politics as well—and appear to explain the different paths Tom and I followed.
Tom is the kind of visionary who enacts his ideals for making a better world through concrete acts in society as it exists right now. In the 1970s he and Jane Fonda organized the Campaign for Economic Democracy that, in cahoots with California Governor Jerry Brown, promoted such issues as renters rights and solar energy, and whose most astounding claim to fame was participating in the closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo, California, via referendum. Despite serving the state legislature under Republican governors for sixteen of his eighteen years in office (twice surviving expulsion hearings propelled by conservatives), he managed to get over 100 progressive measures passed—including achieving equal access to state universities for the disabled, funding for tutors in after-school programs, monies to restore Native sacred springs, requirements for trigger locks on guns, funding for gang-intervention programs, and the largest state park and environmental restoration bond in U.S. history. He also ran as the Democratic candidate for mayor as well as for U.S. Senate.
I cheer such accomplishments, but I am made from a different mold: my work stems from a systemic view of the dysfunction of civilization as a whole and, against the constant onslaught, seeks to preserve the archetypal in the human experience, so rapidly being shredded in this age of capitalist techno-globalization. Too, my sensibility leans more toward the hyper-creative, anarchistic, pre-institutional phase of a social movement; writing/passing legislation and negotiating with government have never been my fortes.
Despite Tom’s unsuccessful attempts to convince me that I should join him in a campaign to legalize Bolivia’s coca plant for medical use in the U.S., he displayed the wisdom of his long experience in politics: he didn’t let disappointment get in the way of our connection. I watched him move like Baryshnikov past the chasm widening between us—and I, with so much more maturity than the flailing tentacles of a mad crush, truly loved him for it.
And the man just kept keepin’ on with his commitment. In 2015, at the height of Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the
