Word: hayden
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Like military commanders following a major war, radical survivors of the embattled 1960s have been emerging from their bunkers to tell it like it really was. The latest is Tom Hayden, 48, who rose to New Left prominence as the drafter of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the Magna Charta of the Students for a Democratic Society. Hayden appears to have been something of a crisis junkie, getting adrenaline fixes in confrontations with authority's billy clubs and tear-gas canisters in the Mississippi Delta and Newark, at Columbia and Berkeley. He acquired national notoriety as a demonstration leader...
...scale of interesting lives, Hayden's probably rates about 8.5. Alas, he retells it in a cliche-strewn prose, participles adangle, that rarely rises above a 5. Still, readers who can endure the rhetorical posturing -- New York police, at one point, become the "expected forces of the military- industrial complex" -- should find his account of the Chicago convention and trial fast paced and diverting. There is also a moving, elegiac coda in which Hayden revisits Mississippi with his ex-wife Casey and tours Port Huron, Mich., in search of the spot where the SDS was born...
...such issues as black civil rights and the Viet Nam War. But error, for the most part, is acknowledged through gritted teeth. Reunion contains a breathlessly credulous account of his 1965 visit to Hanoi, replete with references to the pride and dignity of the North Vietnamese. In an afterthought, Hayden admits that he was "blind to the core of authoritarianism" in Hanoi. It is a "yes, but" apology, balanced with renewed assaults on the flaws in U.S. policy, and it appears to carry a subliminal message: We radicals were on the side of the angels; we did not deserve...
Quoting liberally from his earnest student diaries and poetry, as well as from correspondence with influential period figures such as Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby and Martin Peretz, he brings an extraordinarily charged period to life with skill and decency. Drawing on song lyrics, wall posters, street leaflets, Movement manifestoes and period literature, he creates a compelling picture of a time when world revolution was just around the corner and every political and cultural event seemed to be another manifestation of the same overarching zeitgeist...
...many former activists simply tuned out and dropped out to Vermont and Marin County, where they forgot politics in favor of T.M., hot tubs and whole grain wheat. Others like Tom Hayden, now a California State Assemblyman, chose to moderate some of their radicalism in order to attain a measure of influence within the system. But the Movement as such was a spent force by the end of the decade...