Tom Hayden: Gone But Not Forgotten

If memory serves me well, I think it was 1966, and the war in Vietnam was stoking up and I was pretty deeply immersed in my own problems trying to compete for grades as a pre medical student when Tom Hayden came to campus as part of a blandly titled panel discussion, "Options for Students with Respect to Military Service."  There was a pretty big crowd of undergraduates, no co-eds (women did not have to serve) but for pre meds to show up, and engineers, you knew everyone, in his own mind, had come to the conclusion he needed to know about this.


There was a marine sergeant, who worked at a recruiter station in Providence, who outlined our obligations under the law, which in that year meant each of us could be drafted until age 36, and for each year of deferment we took in college, we would tack that on so for one year, we'd be eligible until age 37, two years 38 and so on.


Then a guy who had graduated the prior May and who had opted to go to jail talked about what that was like.


Another guy talked about how he had crossed the border to Canada and begun the process of renouncing his American citizenship and becoming a Canadian citizen.


Another guy talked about becoming a conscientious objector and working in a hospital on an Indian reservation, before being sent to jail.


None of the options struck me as being at all attractive.


Then Tom Hayden summarized my thoughts:  Canada, jail or the draft. Then he nodded to the marine on stage, "But as bad as the other options are, think about what joining him would mean for you."


We had all seen it on Walter Cronkite every night.  Guys just like us, guys our age, slogging through swamps, past villagers in rice paddies who looked at American soldiers as if they were aliens from outer space--which wasn't far from the truth. American soldiers holding children who had been napalmed, shot or otherwise maimed by a war machine that had nothing to do with serving our country or defending it. 


Muhammad Ali would say, "I ain't got no argument with them Cong."


And we all agreed with him.


Of all the speakers that night, Tom Hayden stood out. Without making any grand speeches, without saying much more than, "You guys are bright enough to know what you ought to be doing," he convinced most of us, the right thing to do was to avoid service, if we could figure out how.


Hayden's life did not follow the arc he might have wished for, but what he did in the mid 1960's mattered more than what most of us, including people like Ira Magaziner, who doubtless was there that night, later did.  What he said that night shaped my attitude toward Bill Clinton's avoidance of service, and formed my attitude toward military adventurism and eternal war. Hayden died this weekend. What he said and did will outlive him.