SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- Tom Hayden, a '60s anti-war activist whose name became forever linked with the celebrated Chicago 7 trial, Vietnam War protests and his ex-wife Jane Fonda, has died. He was 76.
Hayden died on Sunday after a long illness, said his wife, Barbara Williams, noting that he suffered a stroke in 2015.
Hayden, once denounced as a traitor by his detractors, won election to the California Assembly and Senate, where he served for almost two decades as a progressive force on such issues as the environment and education. He was the only one of the radical Chicago 7 defendants to win such distinction in the mainstream political world.
He remained an enduring voice against war and spent his later years as a prolific writer and lecturer advocating an overhaul of America's political institutions.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti praised Hayden. "A political giant and dear friend has passed. Tom Hayden fought harder for what he believed than just about anyone I have known. RIP, Tom," Garcetti said Sunday night on his Twitter account.
Hayden wrote or edited 19 books, including Reunion, a memoir of his path to protest and a rumination on the political upheavals of the '60s.
Hayden was there at the start. In 1960, while a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he was involved in the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
In 1968, he helped organize anti-war demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that turned violent and resulted in the Chicago 7 trial. It began as the Chicago 8 trial, but one defendant, Bobby Seale, was denied the lawyer of his choice, ordered bound and gagged by the judge and ultimately received a separate trial. After a circuslike trial, Hayden and three others were convicted of crossing state lines to incite riot. The convictions were later overturned, and an official report deemed the violence "a police riot."
Thomas Emmet Hayden was born Dec. 11, 1939, in Royal Oak, Mich., to middle-class parents. At Michigan, he took up political causes writing fiery editorials for the campus newspaper and contemplating a career in journalism. But upon graduation, he turned down a newspaper job. As he wrote in his memoir, "I didn't want to report on the world; I wanted to change it."
He joined the fledgling Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, went freedom-riding during civil-rights protests in the South and was beaten and briefly jailed in Mississippi and Georgia. He married a fellow activist, Sandra "Casey" Cason in 1961, but the union ended two years later.
Yearning for a more influential role, Hayden returned to Ann Arbor, where he was enlisted by the SDS to draft the Port Huron Statement, a call to action he hoped would spread to the rest of the country.
In 1965, Hayden made his first visit to North Vietnam with an unauthorized delegation. In 1967, he returned to Hanoi with another group and was asked by North Vietnamese leaders to bring three prisoners of war back to the United States.
In 1971, Hayden met actress Jane Fonda, a latecomer to the protest movement whom he later married. They stayed married for 17 years and had a son, Troy.
With heavy financial support from Fonda, Hayden plunged into California politics in the late 1970s. He was elected to the Assembly in 1982. In 1992, Hayden won election to the state Senate where he advocated environmental and educational issues. By then, he and Fonda were divorced.
Hayden went on to marry actress Barbara Williams, and they had a son, Liam.
In 1994, Hayden was defeated in a run for the state governorship, and he lost a bid to become mayor of Los Angeles.
After leaving public office, Hayden wrote and traveled extensively, lecturing, teaching and speaking out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A Section on 10/25/2016