Movies

Tom Hayden's remarks at the Chicago 10 preview screening

Tom Hayden was a leader of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and one of the defendants in the Chicago conspiracy trial; he went on to serve terms in the California State Assembly (1982-1991) and State Senate (1992-2000). On February 26, Hayden appeared at Columbia College’s Film Row Cinema for a preview screening of Chicago 10 and a panel discussion on the changing nature of political activism. Following are some excerpts of his remarks. –J.R. Jones

February 28, 2008

On the film and legacy of the Chicago conspiracy trial:

I think that the film captures the spirit of the time. The time was ’68 to ’73. Sixty-eight would have been the murders of King and Kennedy, the Chicago summer, through the trial, the retrial on contempt, the arguments before the Seventh Circuit, the final freedom for the defendants. You’re talking about a five-year period. And this trial has been performed, as a movie and as a stage presentation, several times, and I expect it will be again. I don’t mean Steven Spielberg’s version, I mean ten years from now. I don’t know why, whether it’s the media or us, but we like round numbers. This is the 40th year since, so the 50th will be ten years from now. And Brett Morgen, who first made the film, for him it was a prenatal experience; in other words, he wasn’t born yet. So his take on things is interesting. You can tell he’s kind of a late-blooming Yippie member. That’s his orientation to the times. And it’ll be done different ways, I suppose; it’s like an inkblot.

The big thing that’s missing, through no one’s fault, is it’s hard to contextualize this stuff. Why are these people running around like wild men? Why is Bobby Seale ranting and raving? Why are Abbie and Jerry wearing police shirts and judicial robes and American flags as costumes in court? What’s going on here? … People were shaped by the events. They were engaged, and it was an extreme time that called out extreme responses. . . . People couldn’t vote. The war was going on. People were being drafted. There were 15 times as many American deaths in Vietnam by ’68 as there’ve been in the five years of Iraq. So comparisons are hard.

What’s really missing is: Fred Hampton was murdered. Mark Clark was murdered. Robert Kennedy was murdered. Martin Luther King was murdered. What’s missing is students at Kent State were murdered. Jackson State, murdered—murder most foul, as Shakespeare would say. And this was a devastating time of highs and lows, and it’s very difficult in the film, that’s contained in the streets one year and the courtroom the next, to fully capture the exploding dynamic in the world that was going on. And it’s not the fault of the film; it’s our imagination hasn’t really processed anything that happened in that five-year period. But it’s a start, and I look forward to the conversation about it.

On the role of Christians in opposing the Vietnam war, and the Iraq war:

Speaking of the institutional evangelicals, speaking of the institutional Jewish community, you find a lot more interest and millions of dollars spent trying to save lives in Darfur, whereas there’s a noticeable absence compared to the 60s when we look at the religious community’s response to Iraq. . . . There is a crusader dimension to our policy in Iraq. . . . I could give you 20 examples of the fact that the Christian Crusader instinct, or the Western Crusader extinct, has not perished. It’s only gone inert, and can be reactivated like any other disease. And of course, the Israelis are probably the only country, maybe there’s one other, on earth that supports our policy in Iraq. I don’t want to go further, because it takes us away from Chicago ’68, but I do think that with respect to ending the war in Iraq, the occupation of Iraq, the organized religious communities have been notably weaker than in their opposition to Vietnam. And that is a big deficit that prevents us from having a full mobilization of our capacity to end the suffering in Iraq.

On the fact that public opinion has turned against the Iraq war more quickly than it did against the Vietnam war:

That’s absolutely correct. And I think it’s because of Vietnam. You could not suppress what we learned in Vietnam. When they invaded in ’91, George Bush the first said, “Thank God we have stopped the Vietnam syndrome.” Syndrome is a weird word. It’s a medical term, right? Like there’s something wrong with us if we don’t want to send our sons and daughters off to fight in places we know nothing about. It’s unhealthy that they have this syndrome. And they’ve been trying exorcize and eliminate the syndrome, but the syndrome is back, with people here who are fabricating the reasons for a war, deception in the White House, shredding of documents, spying on people, innocent civilians being killed, secret death squads. There’s a lot of reminders of Central America and Vietnam. So yes, public opinion turned against the war in Iraq faster, according to the Gallup Poll, than it did during the Vietnam war. And we should be thankful for that.

On the corrupting influence of power:

"When I was . . . in the legislature, the FBI came to me, of all groups. And they said, “Can we ask you a couple questions?” I didn’t call a lawyer; I was just too curious. “Yeah, bring it on. What do you want to know? I’ve been wanting to talk to you for many years!” They said, “Would you consider speaker Willie Brown to be a loyal American citizen?” . . . I said, “Yes, in my judgment he is a loyal American citizen.” Not knowing if I’d doomed him or something! It meant that he as speaker was going to be on the board of regents at UC, and they have a nuclear weapons contract at Los Alamos and Livermore, so he might have access to classified information. And they’re asking Tom Hayden if Willie Brown can be trusted with classified information about nuclear weapons!

The point is, you can be a dissident politician, but when you get into power . . . you become what politicians are meant to be, which is Machiavellian. It’s all there in The Prince. And the role of the Macchiavellian is to preserve the state, preserve the incumbent. And the preservation of that machinery is about reputation and resources. So it’s very difficult to go from being an antiwar politician--as Barack Obama might find out, or Hillary Clinton might find out--to become an antiwar president. Because suddenly you’re invested in your mind and you’re surrounded with people who are like the people surrounding the pope in the 1500s, who are telling you that the identity of America is at stake. The identity, the reputation, and if a mistake is made, there’ll be chaos, and all kinds of violence will erupt, and by the way, Mr. President, you will be run out of office.

So you have to create the conditions in public opinion so powerful that it’s more in the interest of the president to get out than for the president to stay. If antiwar fervor lessens, as it might, even an antiwar president who wants to get out will find it impossible, and the whole push will have to start again. Now, I’m very, very involved in politics. I know it inside out. I’m a supporter of Barack Obama and I do support Hillary Clinton. I do not support John McCain; I like him, I like a lot about him, but I think something happened in his life that made him too militaristic to handle this. But it’s about public opinion. If public opinion is strong enough, any one of them can be forced out of Iraq. If public opinion is weak, even the most dovish of them will find reasons to stay. It’s just a, call it a Hayden Law of Experience, that’s what will happen.

On lessons he learned as a professional politician:

I’m trying to compose an article called “How to Sell Out.” Because I think there’s some . . . lessons that aspiring politicians or political activists can learn. It’s not a simple thing like, “Yeah, give me some money and I’ll vote for your bill.” You become conviced that you really haven’t sold out; that’s the most dangerous person of all. You become convinced that you’re actually right, that you’ve changed your position.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t compete politically or vote or anything like that, it’s to say that in those situations where I’m like the left wing of the . . . 120 members of the legislature, I got 120 or 115 bills passed and signed, almost all by Republican governors. That meant I had to get Republican votes. That meant I had to go to what Cheney refers to as “the dark side.” I don’t mean torture people, I mean that you had to calculate, “What can I do to move this conservative politician to vote for me?” And a lot of it is in your head, you can’t say it, there’s a lot of rules about it. But you do find yourself slowly being sucked into that place of opportunism. But you think of it as being effective. My voters said two contradictory things: “Give ’em hell, Tom,” and “We want results.” And so you do get caught in that abyss. I got out of it, I think, more or less with my integrity intact, but damaged.

On what the current antiwar movement can learn from the Vietnam antiwar movement:

I think the easiest way to consider the stateman’s or Machiavellian’s position is cost-benefit analysis. The cost of staying in Iraq has to be less than the benefit of getting out, or however you want to formulate it. That’s all I’m saying. So it’s not a simple thing of just, the people will force him out, or her out, it’s there will have to be a way to end the occupation--and I’m saying this carefully--that also allows the Machiavellian to save face to the extent that they can. They may make the argument that the Democrats do, that we really need to have troops available for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and on and on and on, and therefore we have to end the war in Iraq in order to fight the war on terrorism. And McCain will say, “How can you lose Iraq if you’re gonna win Pakistan?” And on it will go. But you do have to think of a way for them to get out.

What I would suggest is that the Vietnam model is deeply imperfect, because you had a more or less unified national independence movment led by an organized communist party, that had a leadership, a structure, a platform, a series of demands, alliances with Europe, with the Soviet Union, with China. You compare that to Iraq. Iraq has a Sunni nationalist insurgency, it has a Shia majority that was displaced and suppressed by Saddam. They have a hard time working together. You have a Kurdish movement that wants autonomy. So you don’t have a unified opposition with a platform to negotiate with. That’s the biggest single difference.

The second, which follows from the first, is that the Vietnamese defeated us. . . . That’s what happened in ’75. Congress was hemming and hawing, but the Paris peace agreements that Kissinger negotiated--and we’ll never negotiate anything with Iraq--allowed for North Vietnamese troops to remain in South Vietnam and a decent interval for the United States to get out with its honor and its POWs. And when the decent interval was over, then the next offensive came, and the South Vietnamese, Saigon government collapsed under the pressure of the North Vietnamese offensive. And our guys were on helicopters leaving by the rooftops.

Now that could happen in the Green Zone, the Green Zone could explode. That’s possible. But I think it’s more likely that they’ll make a calculated decision that the benefits are no longer there and something has to be designed to get out. In my book on Iraq I interviewed the head of the CIA, [John Mark] Deutsch, under Clinton, the CIA director. And I asked him, “How do we get out?” . . . And he said, “It’s not complicated. There’s two decisions that have to be made. One, you have to decide to get out. And two, you have to negotiate with Iran. I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because Iran is the only country that can make it difficult for us to get out.” But they’re not negotiating with Iran--or maybe they are on some back channel. So they currently haven’t decided to get out, and they’re currently in aggressive mode with Iran.

But he meant by that, we need a face-saving way out and Iran can guarantee that on the Shia side of the equation, it’s relatively orderly, and the Sunnis want us out anyway, so that’s the way to do it. And you have to recognize there’s a lot on the table between the United States and Iran and enter some negotiation that leaves Iran with a security agreement that they won’t be attacked. That’s essentially what he was saying. And that’s how I think it will end, when and if it ends.

On the racial component of the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the fact that some leaders of the antiwar movement were privileged whites:

The primary reason for the Chicago protests was the war in Vietnam, there’s no question about that. But it could not be separated from the racial issue, because from the escalation in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968, there were a hundred uprisings, rebellions, or riots, depending on your political correctness, in American ghettos. And all of those had to do with the shift of national priorities to Vietnam and away from poverty programs and stuff like that, and the disproportionate number of black people who were being drafted and coming back strung our or coming back with bad papers; 500,000 people came back with dishonorable discharges. So there’s simply no way to separate the two. But the notion was that only by ending the war in Vietnam could you even begin to return to try to address the race issue.

Now, as to privilege, I would say that there is a racial dimension to all of our consciousness. In this movie, the poster says, “The convention was drama, the trial was comedy.” I didn’t think it was comedy. Abbie, at the end of the trial, said, “I thought this was supposed to be funny.” This trial was about the gagging of a black man; this poster is about the gagging of a white man. A white man was not gagged. These are hidden, privileged forces at work, even in the mind of the most gifted director or artist. They’re just there. Was the trial about Bobby Seale or Abbie Hoffman? When I asked Brett Morgen last night, he said, “Well, it couldn’t be just about Bobby Seale, because he was hardly there in Chicago.” And my answer to that is, “He was chained and gagged in the trial, when, you’re right, he wasn’t there the year before. So why was he singled out for chaining and gagging?”

One of the most forgotten chapters of the anti-Vietnam movement is the Chicano moratorium in downtown Los Angeles. People were killed! It’s not mentioned. 1968, 1969, it’s not mentioned. And the reason it’s not mentioned is that it’s subconsciously written out of history, as if the antiwar history is white history. And there were complaints then that the blacks and browns took the brunt of the suffering but were not in leadership roles in the antiwar movement. . . . So it’s a long, hard story, but it can’t be avoided much longer. As you know, in California we had a million people demonstrate last year. I don’t know how many in Chicago, but we had a million people. It was the biggest thing I’ve seen since the 1960s. The organizers were beside themselves, because they thought they were going to turn out 25,000 or 50,000, and the city just stopped. It was completely overrun. And everybody was out in the streets.

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