War Stories REUNION: A MEMOIR

By John Elson

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 at the ill-fated Democratic Convention of 1968, which led to his trial and conviction (subsequently overturned) as a member of the Chicago Seven. Today the proud husband of Jane Fonda pursues his version of the American dream as a member of the California state legislature.

On a 1-to-10 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.

Reunion attempts both to capture the immediacy of those old crises and to give them retrospective meaning. Unfortunately, the author has a somewhat blinkered sense of self-awareness. He rightly credits the student movement with helping to raise the nation's consciousness on 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 to be wrong.