Transcript of M.E. Sprengelmeyer's interview with Tom Hayden

Rocky Mountain News

Published August 10, 2008 at 11:29 p.m.

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CHICAGO 1968

* Nominee: Hubert H. Humphrey

* What happened: Bloody street fights between police and protesters. Intraparty squabbles in the convention hall. The image of a party that couldn't even keep its own house in order.

* Lessons: Sometimes, planning for worst-case scenarios can turn trouble into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

ADVICE

"It simply didn't have to happen. It takes two for a riot to occur. And if it wasn't for the FBI advisers, Chicago '68 would not have happened - repeat, would not have happened."

Tom Hayden, 68

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This is a transcript of an April 28, 2008, interview with veteran activist and former California state Sen. Tom Hayden, by M.E Sprengelmeyer of the Rocky Mountain News.

QUESTION: Based on the experience that happened in ’68 . . . and the results from that, what do you see as the big lesson, the big thing that people organizing the Denver convention need to keep in mind as they organize what could be another watershed convention?

TOM HAYDEN: I think that Denver officials would be well-advised not to believe everything that the FBI warns them about. That’s how things can get out of hand, due to fabricated, exaggerated projections about violence or protest. That’s what the FBI continually does. They have an awesome authority, combined with the Secret Service, and they imply that the next president’s life is at risk, and therefore the mayor, the city council and the local police should shut up and become servants of the national security forces. And that’s not, that’s not ever been proven to be appropriate in terms of accuracy, but the lesson of ’68 is the FBI was able to hoodwink Mayor Daley into believing that thousands of hairy Yippies were going to have sex in public while drinking from the LSD-laden waters of Lake Michigan. They actually believed that. And this sex in the parks on acid would occur at roughly the same moment that black revolutionaries would storm the convention with guns.

And if you look back, most people think, well, the older generation was out of touch, that’s one viewpoint. The other was that the young people should not have indulged in wild rhetoric. The truth is, the job of the FBI is to sort out fact from fiction, and they preferred the fictionalized version, because they tended towards Nixon or at least a candidate who would be a law-and-order candidate. So they wanted to project a worst-case scenario, deny permits and, you know, create a scene that would enable the law-and-order factions of both parties to benefit.

It simply didn’t have to happen. It takes two for a riot to occur. And if it wasn’t for the FBI advisors, Chicago ’68 would not have happened - repeat, would not have happened. And I don’t think anything like that will happen. It’s not a model for Denver in the least. If Barack Obama gets the nomination, there might be some minor, minor protesters outside and a small fraction of that minor faction might want to scuffle with police. This should be something that Denver police are used to handling and dealing with, and hopefully they’ll treat the protesters with respect and see arrests as the last resort.

If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, and if it even appears ever so slightly that she stole the nomination by savaging Barack Obama and then going to the superdelegates, then you do have a problem unique in the history of conventions.

Q: You don’t know what that would look like?

HAYDEN: No, because the Barack Obama supporters would be highly nonviolent and subject to wild emotional oscillation, so I don’t know what they would do. But their final opportunity to protest a stolen nomination would be at that convention. You know, you might have it surrounded by 20,000 people who are kneeling with signs. Or, you know, more like a Dalai Lama or Martin Luther King type of protest. But I don’t know what the authorities would do if the people refused to move, because from their point of view they’re trying to prevent the party from doing the ludicrous. They’re trying to save the party and the country from disaster in November. But you know, it’s much too early to know whether any of this will work out.

If I were, like, the chairman of the board of the American ruling class, Democratic Party division, I would say let’s steal it for Hillary and force Barrack to take the vice presidency to keep the crowds quiet and the blacks pacified.

Q: I wonder if he would accept that . . .?

HAYDEN: He might have no choice. Well, the parallel would be very inadequate, but Johnson didn’t expect to be asked by Kennedy. I was at that convention, too, and I can tell you there was no protest outside against Johnson. There was Martin Luther King with 100 people marching for a civil rights plank, and the discontent was very muted and confined to insiders. So with Denver, there will be a lot of insiders angry and a whole lot of outsiders angry if Barack is denied the nomination . . .

Q: . . . Is the key for Denver, in some sense, to make sure they accommodate with permits, and go ahead and accommodate the protest to in a sense give both sides what they need?

HAYDEN: Well, there is a First Amendment that should not be suspended for the selection of a presidential candidate in a democracy. It’s that simple. The FBI and some elements of the police will tell you it has to be suspended or amended for these five days. And their idea of the First Amendment is to cage the protests in a huge holding pen. And their lawyers will say, this is a “free speech zone.” And you’ll find no one will go in it, except people who want to hallucinate safely because the police won’t arrest you inside the cage. That has been done over and over and over, and the ACLU and others have tried to litigate. I’m not sure where the law stands now, but as I recall the First Amendment was supposed to require robust expressions of free speech, and case law was to allow the protests to be within the eyesight of the convention and the major hotels where the delegates are quartered. The FBI will say that’s unsafe now that we live under the war on terrorism, and they’ll always make the argument that’s unprovable that 10,000 peaceful people might include one person who’s a jihadist. But that would be true throughout the election year, and I see Barack and Hillary wandering through crowds with protection, but you know, they’re plenty unsafe already. And they would hardly be out in the streets in Denver. They would be behind barricades anyway.

So I think the best thing is to absolutely reject FBI final control, absolutely reject the cage, and negotiate with any serious groups, to give them permits and port-o-potties and transportation access, so they have a reasonable basis to protest the convention within eyesight of the convention or the hotels. And I guarantee you, very little will happen. It will be less than Denver has experienced in the past. It’s a manageable scenario, but it gets inflated into, you know, part of the war on terror. And that benefits - I hate to sound venal about this - but it benefits the police and FBI budgets. Here’s how that works. When I was in the state legislature, I discovered secret funding from the state to the Los Angeles Police Department for the 2000 . . . It was in the millions of dollars and it was for stuff that had nothing to do with the protests. But it was expanding the police department budget with weapons for future use against protesters or people in the ghettos and barrios - special equipment, all kinds of pepper spray launchers and so on. It became a big stink. The L.A. Times discovered that I was right, and rather than being embarrassed at losing the story, they built up the story. And the Senate stopped the funding, and I was accused of, I don’t know, leaving the city of L.A. naked before the anarchists. But it’s just an absurd and wicked game of getting more money for the police.

The exact same thing happened in Boston. They got millions of dollars. The exact same thing happened in Miami. Millions, tens of millions of dollars, for equipment, surveillance lights to be installed in the black community after the convention . . . This is for stuff to be kept in reserve for future, imaginary insurrections, using the convention as the pretext to get the money, because politicians don’t want to be accused of failing to protect the convention and the presidential candidates from the mobs.

And it’s always accompanied by false claims about the mob, the horde. In 2000 in L.A., it was repeated incessantly by the mayor and the FBI and the LAPD that there would be 75,000 anarchists. And there were, I don’t know, a few thousand people there; a small percentage of them could be described as anarchists. And if you take the police undercover anarchists out of that number, it becomes even smaller. And I know whereof I speak. I was meeting with police, I was meeting with anarchists. I was a delegate to that convention. My son was shot at that convention - he was shot with a rubber bullet in the arm.

And then in 2004, I was there and I was one who counseled that the protest should be at the Republican convention. There wasn’t much point at the Democratic convention. That’s the way it went. Nobody showed up to protest at the Democratic convention. They showed up to have a forum. And the cage went unused, but the police got millions of dollars. I think they even claim they kept the anarchists away . . .

Fast-forward to 2004 Republican convention. There were more arrests than in Chicago. Totally unnecessary. But the police got a lot of money for equipment they still haven’t used, like the gigantic machine that is said to turn you into jelly by hitting a vibration that blasts your ears out. It still hasn’t been used yet, but the occasion might arise, you know. So 600, 650 people were arrested. And the city’s taxpayers, hapless taxpayers, are still paying the bills for what the New York Police Department did, for which they were sued. There’s an endless series of cases where undercover agents provoked incidents, ran over people with motorcycles, you name it. And in case after case, the claimants are winning and the city is doling out this money, as if it’s just part of the budget. First you have to keep the anarchists out, and you get taxpayer money to pay for the alleged excesses. But at the end of the day, you keep millions of dollars for the police department, which they claim they need because they say the mayor and city council are stingy misers who don’t support law and order.

It’s just a preposterous game, and I guarantee you 100 percent, the game will be played in Denver . . . And it’s a scripted game. I can even tell you the script.

It’s already happened. Someone will come from the DNC, and somebody will come from the FBI and Secret Service. And they’ll claim to usurp the authority of the mayor and the city council, or else. At that point, your choice is to sue them, fight them, or give up. That game is already under way. The game will be supplemented by men in dark glasses bearing portfolios claiming to show how many thousands of anarchists are coming, with photographs of the anarchists. And then the police will accept the satellite role . . . you know, kind of like the Baghdad police under the coalition forces, as long as they get money. And so they’ll have a long list for the Colorado legislature and the city council of equipment they claim to need to hold off the badness. And you’ll notice the equipment is usable for a long period of time. It has nothing to do with the actual events on the ground in August. And if you ask them what evidence they have, they’ll say it’s secret. So you’re stuck. You have to have a mayor and council and politicians who have the guts to see that their city is being used as a battlefield in the war on terror: Afghanistan, Iraq, Denver. You figure, where’s the real fight? They’ll say, Denver is very, very important. And the reason they’ll win, they’ll roll over your city, is they’ll have . . . the argument that trumps is they have secret information about violent people who are somewhere in the crowd. About two years from now you’ll find those violent people are close collaborators of undercover FBI agents who wanted to use them for the occasion.

But if the politician thinks there’s one chance in a million that the city will be blown up, it’s a cheap vote to vote for money and vote away the Constitution for that week.

Q: When I read in your book that they could have prevented the events of Chicago ’68, if they just would have given some permits . . .

HAYDEN: They didn’t want to . . .

Q: I wonder if they’ve learned that lesson, if they’ve taken that lesson and used it just enough to give a facade of free speech . . . In all the conventions since then, have they expanded free speech at all?

HAYDEN: No, it’s a cage. They will argue legally that all you’re entitled to is a cage. They want to win that argument. Remember, it’s part of the Patriot Act and part of the Bush administration to leave civil liberties shrunken to the point of unimportance by the end of that Bush eight years, and to accuse any Democrat of being soft on terror if they stand up for civil liberties. So the Democrats can be expected to cave on Denver, just as they cave on Iraq. You know, they’ll talk about civil liberties, but at the end of the day, they’ll probably go for the cage.

Q: Lest they be accused of being soft on Tom Haydens?

HAYDEN: No, soft on what the FBI informs them . . . It’s like the weapons of mass destruction. They’ll be saying there are weapons of mass destruction in the crowd. And politicians will say, you know, “I want nothing to do with this.” And that’s what will happen.

The interesting question is the lack of a clear line between the rank and file of the Barack Obama movement, some of the Hillary Clinton movement, and on the other hand the radical, anti-political people. Are you going to deny permits to the Barack Obama people if they want to complain that the nomination has been stolen? There I think you’ll see they’ll give in on permits. So again, it depends on factors that are beyond anybody’s predictive power.

If Barack is the nominee, the protests will shrink. There will be no basis for getting the money. The FBI will be really frustrated. There won’t be any protests. Or the degree to which there will be protests, it will be like 1,000 people who are having forums on what’s wrong with the two-party system and why you should vote for Ralph Nader. Or, you know, 50 people trying to storm a fence a half-mile from the convention center. These are manageable problems. They should be allowed to run into whatever fences they want, shout for Nader, do whatever they want. They should be monitored and all that. And it should be assumed that they’re not going to cause harm to people or property until you get an independent reading on that.

Now, if Hillary is the nominee, the protest gets bigger. You have the Barack people, then you have a somewhat larger group of anti-Hillary, anti-war, anti-convention people, and some of them may want to stir things up because they have, you know, the reason: The democratic process has failed, their rights have been usurped, kind of like the stealing of the 2000 election in Florida from Gore, but with real people really mad in this scenario. I don’t think that is going to happen, but you see what I’m saying? There are only so many scenarios, and you could figure out what the protest is likely to be based on the scenario.

Q: When you look at the organizing committees organizing some of the big protests right now, one of them is called “Re-create ’68,” I wonder what that means to you.

HAYDEN: I don’t know what that means, and I don’t know how big it is. You would recreate ’68 if the nomination was stolen. Then it would be a combination of disenfranchised Obama people, very similar to the McCarthy people, and a large number of anti-war people, including myself, and they would have to discover what points of unity they had. And that would be argued out. And it might result in some arrests. I certainly doubt it would result in some agreement to attack property or attack delegates. I don’t think so. I think you’d have thousands of very angry people with purpose, with reason to be angry. And you handle that like any other large demonstration that occurs in New York, San Francisco, L.A., Chicago all the time, and probably has occurred in Denver. That’s the only thing that even remotely resembles ’68.

The other scenarios don’t offer much basis for a recreation. So we’ll have to see.

Q: Can you think back to this time in ’68 . . . This is the time when you were trying to put together those permits. This is the time when you were trying to organize those events. And also, there was a lot of history breaking in these next few months of ’68 around you. I want to know at what point did you realize this thing is destined . . . to something difficult.

HAYDEN: I think I had that view from the very beginning. But it was balanced by Dellinger having a different view, Rennie having a different view, and each of being willing to accept the possibility of the other’s views. I think Abbie and Jerry, I’m not sure if they had a view. They really needed permits if they were going to have a rock concert, because you need electricity, stages. And many in that camp wanted to call it off as it became obvious that they weren’t going to get any permits. Dave thought that we’d get permits at the last minute. It was a tactic of the government to keep crowds away and then, you know, a gesture toward the Constitution, avoid lawsuits and give us permits.

Rennie was our negotiator, a very able negotiator. The Justice Department credited him with being the reasonable one, and (Mayor) Daley being the unreasonable one. That’s in the record. And I was just waiting to see the outcome. I planned for multiple scenarios, not knowing which one would play out. But certainly, after the murder of Kennedy, coming on the murder of King, to me it was in the air that we were going to be busted, and face serious harm unless we surrendered and left the city and simply went along with the plan . . . That we just go along with our own disappearance.

Q: You talked about the parallels between ’68 and 2008, it seems like the thing really missing is the string of assassinations, which had reactions in the streets, and that fed into some of the paranoia on the part of the J. Edgar Hoovers, or the establishment figures that didn’t want to see any kind of explosion like that . . . You don’t have that. There doesn’t seem today, even with the war going on, there’s not conscription, the 18-year-olds are able to vote now, and they do or they don’t . . . But if you could go through what you think the best parallels to ’68 are, and what the limitations of those are.

HAYDEN: I think I’ve said it. They don’t learn. What you saw in 2000 was the claim that 75,000 anarchists were descending, the secret funding of permanent police equipment, the denial of permits for protesters. You saw the same thing in 2004, you will see the same thing in 2008. So they have their view.

They’ve learned nothing from ’68. The FBI thinks they won the election for Nixon in ’68. And even though the conditions in 2000, 2004 were utterly different than ’68, the Cold War was over, they relied on Seattle 1999 to generate the image of a new menace, and it didn’t matter that the menace never showed up in 2000 or 2004. The menace became Dennis the Menace. It didn’t matter, because politically they want law and order to prevail and in terms of budgets, you know, the departments really get beefed up. So they’re going to do the same thing.

Q: If you were in charge and you wanted to set up the right balance between security on the streets, but actually allowing people to get their voices heard for whatever the causes are, even some you don’t agree with . . .?

HAYDEN: I think I’ve already said that. I think Barack is right on the fundamental point that you have to exercise good judgment. It only gets worse once you exercise bad judgment. It’s harder to get out of Iraq than it would have been to not go in, right? Similarly, once you accept the scenario of an anarchist invasion of Denver, it becomes harder to deny funding and deny control by the FBI and undercover agents. So it’s gonna happen. Who will stand up? Who will simply say there is no anarchist invasion. Al-Qaida is not coming to Denver, and I will wage my political career on that? No one. So then, once you’ve given up on the main question, then you literally are down to negotiating the size of the cage and the distance from the amphitheater, and who will pay?

The feds will give money to state troopers, police. There’ll be a huge show of martial force and so on and nothing will happen. And then they’ll say, here’s the kicker. It’s the perfect package. They’ll say nothing happened because we mobilized against them. We scared them off. So it’s like, the same claim that we haven’t been attacked since Sept. 11, because we’ve warded off the attackers. We’ve killed them, we’ve arrested them, we’ve got them in Guantanamo. That’s why we’re safe. So it’ll take somebody of extraordinary guts and intelligence to reject it. I personally know that Howard Dean would feel that this is a nutty scenario. Then he will not say it . . .

That there’s not going to be an anarchist invasion of Denver, that there’s no justification for millions of dollars in federal money to beef up your police department. It’s nuts. He knows that. He’ll never say that. Somebody has to say that. It’s a win-win otherwise for everybody. The FBI wins, the Denver police win, the FBI wins. The public doesn’t know any different. They feel good. Oh, good, the convention was secured.

This isn’t Afghanistan. I mean, yesterday, there was a real shot taken at the president of Afghanistan. It’s the second time they blew up the ceremony. Now they’re going to say, that could happen here. Once you say it’s true, now you’re blending possibility with probability. It’s true that anything is possible. But that would argue for beefing up the police forces now by tens of millions of dollars at every event that McCain and Hillary and Barack attend, because any one of them could be another Kabul. Ka-boom! Somebody has to say uh-uh-uh. You’re building an edifice of police power and funding and scaring the public to death to set an agenda. And having said that, if I had the power I would simply, I’d meet with the FBI, ask them for their evidence. I would refuse to take evidence that was secretly obtained without knowing the sources. I’d reach out to the anarchist groups that I know across the West and ask them what they’re planning to do. I would call up, who is it, Re-create ’68, by going to their Web site and ask them what they’re planning to do. I’d establish liaison with those groups, establish liaison with Barack’s campaign, establish liaison with Hillary’s campaign. I would make very generous offers for space and permits on the condition that these groups agree to limit themselves to nothing beyond civil disobedience. No property damage or violence that would impact Denver residents or store owners or the convention. I would pursue active diplomacy, starting yesterday, with the view that the more space you give, the more you lessen the possibility for trouble. Because if you start from the assumption that people want to be heard, by giving them every chance to be heard, you lessen any basis for people, you know, who are interested in other scenarios. You can’t eliminate the possibility of other scenarios but you can reduce it to such a modest problem that it’s easily managed.

And I’d warn Dean and the Democrats, that one thing they must realize, if this nomination is stolen by Hillary, then all bets are off. We won’t need the FBI. We will need adults to explain this. The superdelegates will have failed the smell test of being adults. They will have been panicked into taking the nomination away from the person who won and giving it to the other person. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but that’s the political issue I think that would then create the political basis for huge numbers of people protesting, and even then I think the huge numbers would be leaning toward protesting with dignity because it’s the way Barack has conducted himself. It doesn’t seem to me they would want him denouncing them.

Q: How do you gauge the strength of the youth movement today, and also, basically that generation of people that’s the same age as you were in those early days of the ’60s and through ’68.

HAYDEN: The Barack Obama movement, as opposed to just himself, is the most historically important movement since the Bobby Kennedy campaign of ’68. It has all the characteristics of a social movement, despite the fact that it arises in the context of a campaign, a candidacy . . .

(Interview is interrupted by the entrance of Hayden’s research assistant, Emily. HAYDEN: Cross (the camera) so people can see what you’re wearing.)

HAYDEN: Encouraged would be a vast understatement. The Barack Obama movement is the single biggest and most important social movement since Bobby Kennedy’s campaign of ’68.

Q: Why . . .?

HAYDEN: Well, social movements usually are seen as mass movements outside the institutions. This is disguised because it occurs within the institution. But the institution has been changed somewhat since the ’60s. Because 18-year-olds have the right to vote. Blacks have the right to vote. So you see the same constellation of moral forces I saw in 1960 (sic): a unified black community and a huge, huge youth movement. And so from my own experience, good things happen when these forces come together, and you’d have to be kind of a fool to be opposed to Barack Obama’s movement.

Q: They’re also borrowing a lot of the participatory democracy techniques. They’re keeping every person in that movement as involved as possible in the day to day . . .

HAYDEN: I get my e-mails continually from (Obama campaign manager) David Plouffe, whoever he is. I always send them a small amount of money because I like the correspondence. “Tom, can you send us $50. If you do, we’ll hook you up to Elaine in San Francisco who says she’ll match your $50. And you can meet her on . . .” (Laughing.) There’s all these endless . . . So I always say, here’s $50. I know I’m going to give more, but I like to dribble it out because I like David Plouffe’s e-mail.

Q: Make them ask again.

HAYDEN: So there’s a lot of differences. One is, you know, the technology. We had mimeograph machines. If I go out on a campus now, students don’t know what a mimeograph machine was. They have no idea. The Internet just makes a huge amount of difference. I think we’re also, post-’60s, in a positive sense. That is, social movements usually involve a new generation making a name in its own way, making its own mark. They don’t want to be foot soldiers in some earlier generation’s movement. There’s pros and cons of that. We were called the “New Left” for a reason. Because we thought we were new. And the left was kind of an add-on category. So we were not the descendants of the old left. We were the new left. And the Obama movement is a new movement. And there’s a lot of heady exhilaration that comes from that. There’s a lot of innocence that goes with that.

(End first tape.)

HAYDEN: You’re getting a vast turnout of voters. You’re getting a vast turnout of new voters. You’re getting new voters who can replace the voters who won’t vote for Barack. You’re getting a realignment of the Wall Street Democratic Party. A lot is happening, and it will take many years to sort out what it all meant. There’s no way of knowing now. It has the qualities of a social movement.

Q: It also would seem to be, there’d be a lot of disappointment, based on what we were talking about earlier, about the convention if somehow after all this process, all those people who are in that movement were disappointed.

HAYDEN: I think you’re vastly understating it. Vastly understating it.

Q: Is it explosive?

HAYDEN: You’re worried about, it’s a false worry. These are flower children, and the blacks of Denver are going to do what Barack wants them to do. But they’re going to do something to show how democracy has been destroyed once again. Because their hope is that they don’t ever have to go through what my generation went through. Their faith is that they can start anew and if they learn that it’s the same old story, that will have a lifetime of consequences starting in Denver. And the consequences could include Hillary Clinton’s loss in the general election, millions of people not voting, the idea of hope being subjected to criticism and ridicule permanently. Because, you know, they’re not adolescents, but they’re in the period of life when lessons are learned forever. So why would you want the formative lesson for all of America’s 20-year-olds that politics stinks. But that’s what’s at stake here.

Q: Is there any way to sustain it?

HAYDEN: The Machiavellian move would be to force Barack to be the vice president, precisely to force the youth into line.

Q: But I mean is there a way for the people that would be disaffected by that decision - to take the nomination away from him - for that group of disappointed people, upset people, angry people who learned that lesson that this is what politics is about, for them to somehow sustain as a separate movement, and to use the Obama campaign still as the beginning of a larger movement.

HAYDEN: I think the steam will go out of it and the hope will be replaced by anger. There’s nothing more painful than having your hopes smashed. It’s not an inviting thing, people don’t say, “I want more. I want to send another $25 to David Plouffe.” They become, to use the word of the hour, “bitter.” And there will be some who say, “It’s just a stage along the way.” But the tone will change and the enthusiasm will decline and people will look for other approaches. But we don’t know any of this. You’re in the wrong month to be doing these interviews. There’s no way of knowing this.

Q: The Clinton-Obama factor, we’re going to know by the time we write . . . In terms of the anti-war movement, though, are you satisfied? Are you dissatisfied? What are your feelings about the anti-war movement of today vs. the anti-war movement of (1968)?

HAYDEN: I think the anti-war movement should have a presence in Denver because neither candidate is adequate on the issue of Iraq. I think a peace mandate in November that elects a new president may be a precondition for ending the war. If you look at the platforms of Obama and Clinton, they’re talking about maybe ending it in five or eight years, which is truly pathetic, truly pathetic. The fact that people have been so haunted by Nader’s role in electing Bush in 2000 - except for Nader people who think he didn’t have any role - will probably keep them from turning to Nader. But it will be abundantly clear that we have to elect a new president, and then generate massive demonstrations to keep that president under pressure to end the war. I don’t know what it is.

Q: Are you surprised that the massive demonstrations haven’t appeared to this point? There have been . . .

HAYDEN: There have been 11 demonstrations of over 100,000. Three of them have been over 300,000, 400,000, 500,000. At a certain point people say, “Why do that again?” But the measure to look at is public opinion between Vietnam and Iraq. A majority of Americans came to believe Iraq was a mistake faster than they came to view Vietnam as a mistake. They did dump the Republican Congress that all the smart pundits were claiming was part of a permanent Republican realignment, and they got a Democratic Party in Congress that has been positively critical of Bush but unable to end the war, or unable to end the war because they don’t have the Democratic majority. So you know, the hope that came in November ’06 has led to a deeper cynicism, in a sense, because people are asking, “What do we have to do?” I think it’s a remarkable peace movement because you don’t have the draft, you have one-fifteenth of the American casualties now that you had at this point during Vietnam, the establishment is doing everything it can to keep this war from impacting the American people. And yet people have seen through it, from 2004 on, which I think means the ghosts of ’68 are still with us. People know a quagmire when they see one.

So it’s a combination of the ’60s consciousness, plus the new consciousness that I think began with the suspicion of the 2000 election being stolen and has grown with Bush. So the anti-war factor in public opinion is very, very powerful, what’s going on.

Q: I hadn’t thought of it that way, that it’s a vindication, that it shows they learned the lesson, that they know how to recognize and come to that opinion faster.

HAYDEN: I don’t know any other explanation for it. Usually they say, “Well, the American people are really populist and they have to be dragged into wars.” But there’s no evidence of that. They just don’t want to recognize the salience of the ’60s, combined with all that Bush has done to anger people.

You know, I think if McCain is elected there would be street demonstrations. Whether there should be street demonstrations between now and November against the Democrats is a judgment call. I have no objection if the street demonstrations in Denver or elsewhere send a message that shows what’s short in the Obama or Clinton platform. But if they’re just demonstrations against the election, it will reinforce the image of the anti-war movement as being a tiny fragment.

For instance, a friend of mine, Chris Hedges, who’s a former Jesuit, elegant writer, I talked to yesterday, two days ago. He actually wrote an article saying now’s the time for Democrats to walk out of the Democratic Party by the hundreds of thousands. I said, Chris, that time might come, might not. But have you noticed that like a million young people have walked into the Democratic Party at the point where Barack’s future is on the line? How do you think they’ll feel about you, urging them to walk out? Should they walk out of the Oregon primary or the North Carolina primary, or Indiana? Which primary should they just, like, abandon? He’s completely out of touch, living in the guilt of the past for not having done enough when he was a New York Times reporter, and now he wants them to vote for Ralph Nader. Ding! If you go to the Obama movement and you don’t see it, you don’t feel it, it’s like not there, and you think they’re all mistaken . . . I urged him, please, attend an Obama rally. Leaflet it. And try to get up on stage and urge people to vote for Nader. They’ll like think you are out of your mind.

Q: Does Nader get as big of boos in some Democratic crowds as . . .?

HAYDEN: No, Nader. I’d certainly vote for Nader in states where the vote isn’t going to turn the election over to McCain. But the idea that Obama and Clinton don’t matter, and people should, like, walk out of the party, is a classic sign of certain people on the left being completely . . . they have no grip. Because the truth is, no one predicted the Obama phenomenon, not on the left, not on the right. Secondly, there’s never been anything like it for forty years. Third, it generally is composed of people who have never voted before, and there are millions of them. And they’re volunteers. So how can you not look at that with welcome, with tears, and a sense of appreciation. What kind of person would go to them and say, “Oh, you’re making a real big mistake, you 20-year-olds. You should . . . Let’s leave him and no one attend his rallies.” It’s not that I think Obama himself is all that progressive. I’m with a group called Progressives for Obama that thinks he has an inadequate position on Iraq, but there’s other reasons to make him the first African-American president than what he says on Iraq. We had a similar thing with Kennedy. Remember Kennedy had to go around begging the Baptists to accept him, and he got elected as a hawk, and he learned from bitter experience to trust his own instincts. And he became anti-Cold War and in favor of nuclear test ban treaty, and pro-civil rights. He was against the March on Washington. I was there. He was against it, then he was persuaded to change his mind. So Kennedy is the model I would give to, you know, the elders of my generation, how they misunderstood Kennedy, they missed it, and they’re missing what Obama represents potentially.

But above all, it’s the Obama movement, which is apart from Obama. I have never met anybody in the Obama movement who can’t wait for him to become president and bomb Pakistan. They’re all very anti-war people. So he’ll have to, like, answer to them if he wants to bomb Pakistan as president, which I think would be his Bay of Pigs, to keep up the Kennedy analogy.

Q: We’re talking about other conventions other than ’68? Can you remember the first time you attended a convention . . . as a delegate?

HAYDEN: Sixty, I was there as a reporter; ’64 I was there with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; ’68 I was there as a war protester; ’72 I was not there; ’76 I was there as a delegate; and all the rest as a delegate, except this one. If I go, I’ll just be going as an observer. Maybe last time, I think I had a badge that said “honored guest.” What year was Boston, ’04? Most of the time I ran as a delegate. What you do around here is congressional districts have caucuses and you run for delegate. So I was not a superdelegate, I was an elected delegate. I was in Chicago ’96 as an elected delegate; 2000 as an elected delegate.

Q: Did you talk to Mayor Daley in 1996?

HAYDEN: Yes. He welcomed us.

Q: How did that conversation go? Was it just brief, or did you talk at length?

HAYDEN: I’ve written about it. It was a very, very long, protracted negotiation. He wanted to say something to put the past behind us. And as I’m wont to do, I want to deal with the past before we put it behind us. So I wanted a monument in the park, and we had an Italian sculptor. There would be a peace monument dedicated to the people who came to Chicago in ’68. And the right wing of the Chicago Police Department went nuts. They were handing out T-shirts: “We kicked your dad’s ass in ’68. And then kicked your ass.” He knew it was the right thing to do, but he wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t worth the trouble he’d get from the police. But he came to our event. We had a memorial, a big celebration with hundreds and hundreds of people. He came and he did just the right thing. Unannounced he walked out on the stage and he said, “My name is Richard J. Daley. I am the mayor of Chicago and I want to welcome you to Chicago.” People were like startled and they laughed, and then they applauded him. It was perfect for him. There was nothing to quote. No downside, and it was a very nice moment. But he wouldn’t interfere with the police, the police union.

Q: Did you ask him any questions? This is what I want to ask him: How did he prepare his city for ’96, compared to the way he remembers his father going through those preparations?

HAYDEN: I don’t remember whether there was anything to worry about, was there? Clinton was the incumbent, he was going to be renominated. There was no war in Iraq, so I think there were some demonstrations, but they were quite small. Which goes to the point that it’s about the situation, not the protesters.

In this situation, it’s going to be Hillary or Barack, and we can easily predict what’s going to happen.

Q: What was it like the first time you were a delegate inside? How was that different than all your experiences organizing on the outside?

HAYDEN: There were a lot of people talking about vindication. I don’t know, I was part of a political movement in California in the ’70s. One of the things we did was seek positions at the convention or in the Democratic Party. I was on the platform committee a couple of times for the party and the DNC. Being inside the Democratic Party on those occasions does not strike me as unnatural. I’m very aware that when people look at me, they see Abbie Hoffman, or they see that I’m not wearing a shirt. I can’t get past that. I can’t help them with their problem. They can’t see me. I can be, like, 68 years old and I’m still trouble, because they’re thinking about something in Vietnam, or they’re thinking about Jane Fonda, or they think I slept with their daughter. They think I burned my draft card. It’s like a big Rorschach of things that I did do or did not do. I’ll give you the funniest example. When I was running for office sometime in the ’80s, the Republicans had a campaign going that I had burned buses, turned them upside down and burned buses in Miami in 1972. And I had to go to great lengths to establish that there was not a trace of evidence that I was ever in Miami in 1972. We thought that had been settled. There was no police record, not a news story, no plane tickets. And then it became: “He says he wasn’t there burning buses.” So I developed a new approach, based on a story of one of these people where I’m speaking and the guy yells I’m a communist. And I said, “No, I’m an anti-communist.” And he says, “I don’t care what kind of communist you are.” What can you do? These are the people that are sure Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Q: Did you view them, delegates, as being any different than those of you on the outside in the movement?

HAYDEN: When I was a delegate? Oh, yeah, there’s different planets, because the typical delegate to a Democratic convention has a liberal or radical background in a social movement. But they’ve transferred loyalty to the party as an entity. It’s like their church or synagogue. I won’t say mosque. But that’s the difference. They . . . not as much as the Republicans, necessarily, but they very much belong to the Democratic Party as their primary, if not only, community of meeting.

Q: So did they dispel any preconceived notions you had about them when you finally were on the inside as delegate?

HAYDEN: No, I mean, I had to win primaries with Democratic voters, so the voters, you know, who supported me did enough demonstrating of their independence. In fact, they generally like progressive newcomers, people like Barack. I wouldn’t have been in office if it wasn’t for Democratic voters. It wasn’t the Democratic Party but the voters, you know, are pretty open to sweeping change.

(Interruption as he bids farewell to his book editor.)

HAYDEN: The number of ’60s radicals who’ve run for office are few and far between unless you start including the Bill Clinton, pragmatic anti-war wing of the ’60s. John Lewis, he’s the real deal, and a number of mayors and city council people from around the country. But mainly the pragmatists of the ’60s generation ran for office. And the people who were the counterculture and oppositional movements have stayed out and played public roles, but in unions, as teachers in school systems, scientists. They’re around by the millions, but not elections, no. After what Barack has gone through, they’re all saying, “Thank God I never got into that stuff.”

Q: Did you see his pastor this morning? (Unintelligible.) It would help us to draw some of those stories of actual memories of the events that happened that you were part of in ’68 that relate to this free-speech issue, if you have an example of that first time . . . remember I was asking about the first time things were heading toward confrontation, that you thought things might not go well . . .

HAYDEN: You asked me that. There was no moment. I always felt that we were not going to get permits, but I was working with two people who thought we would. And so we just agreed to suspend doubt and go ahead and seek the permits.

Q: If you were planning the organized protests in Denver right now, would you be optimistic that you’re going to be heard this time?

HAYDEN: Well, I would be seeking permits and space because they’re really hard to come by. I would be talking with the local ACLU. I would be meeting with members of the city council and the mayor’s office to make the case for freedom of speech. And secondly I would be holding off to make a final decision about the demands until we see how this goes.

I already know the three scenarios. If it’s Hillary with Obama as V.P., the anti-war protests would have to be very, very strong. If it’s Obama as nominee, I think the protests would largely vanish into a celebration with skeptics taking a wait-and-see position because they wouldn’t think it would be appropriate to already be attacking him. When I say vanish, I mean down to a tiny handful of people.

If it’s Hillary without Obama, that would maximize the protest. You start making your signs right now. The key thing would be to propose ending the war while staying in Iraq for five years minimum is not an anti-war statement. It’s a lie, or it’s an attempt to fool the voters. The substance would be, don’t fool us. Peace in Iraq would be the slogan.

If the nomination was stolen, allegedly, then a stolen nomination would be the protest demand.

I’m pretty sure about these things. This is what’s going to happen.

The FBI’s there and they’re putting up the scare tactics. They’re finagling for the money. It’s all under way. The cage is being prepared. The lawyers to argue for the cage are already on assignment.

Q: Where will you be? Not in the cage?

HAYDEN: Well, if I go it will be to take part in forums and see what happens. I’m not going as an activist. I’m only going as a concerned observer.

Q: If it ended up in scenario number three, that one scenario you’re talking about, would you end up out there again?

HAYDEN: Yeah, I probably would be a participant-observer. And that would probably be led by U.F.P.J. or some appropriate anti-war group. It might be an ad-hoc group, I don’t know.

Q: Is there anything you’d like to add?

HAYDEN: No. My brain is tired, I was hot. Even if you open the doors it doesn’t help.

* * *

BELOW ARE EXCERPTS OF A FOLLOW-UP, TELEPHONE INTERVIEW WITH HAYDEN on JULY 1, 2008:

HAYDEN: “I do think they are playing around unnecessarily with the rights of protesters to protest . . . God, you know, the ACLU is right, but they’re in negotiations . . . Don’t know how the negotiations will come out, but you know, naming something a protest zone then not allowing it to be heard or seen, it’s a mockery of the First Amendment. Most importantly, it’s not necessary.”

“I’m scheduled to be on a conference call in early July to sort out the protests. It does seem to me there’s, you know, there’s a legitimate right to protest at stake . . . I don’t think the protests will be very large if Obama is the nominee . . . I don’t see the point in interfering with them. In my judgment, there’s no more threat than any other day of the week. Barack is out there and McCain is out there any day of the week . . . To use the threat argument as particular to a convention doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

“They go through this every convention . . . It has been a continual fight as far as I can call 2000. We’ve . . . It always comes down to a claim that there’s a threat that requires preventative action. Then it becomes keeping the protest out of sight of the delegates or the convention, which is like a mockery of the First Amendment. It also reveals it to be a public relations device. You don’t want a picture of the convention (with protests). . . It’s particularly crazy because most of the delegates at the Democratic convention have been in many demonstrations themselves.”

HAYDEN (talking about the recent security demonstrations, with helicopters buzzing downtown Denver, etc.): “I heard about it. I thought it was a scene from ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ We may need these people in some future national emergency. For the moment, we shouldn’t allow them to be paid tax dollars to act out their worst-case scenarios. Who is their message to?”

HAYDEN was asked what the message of the security demonstrations was: “That’s a very good question. The implication is very unsettling. The message was that the people coming to protest deserve this kind of repression if they get out of hand. Helicopters were used in Berkeley I ’69, ’70. They’re just trying to scare the public into justifying more tax dollars for a false sense of security, more gadgets for the police department . . .”

“The city can make a mess of it by denying them the right to sleep in the park. That’s the direction the city and the authorities seem to be on. That will keep people away. That will antagonize people and they’ll have no place to stay.”

HAYDEN is asked about potential violence between police and protesters: “Some units do have that interest. I don’t think the city does. Certainly the Democratic Party doesn’t have that interest . . . It could easily happen with inflaming protest instead of trying to absorb it and listen to it. It’s either that or deny, wish it away, repress it away . . .”

HAYDEN predicts mild civil disobedience during the convention - protesters sitting down at intersections to slow traffic, etc. “That’s about it . . . Been there, done that. Everybody in Denver knows that can be handled, whether they like it or not. I don’t know what the numbers will be. (In Chicago 1968) we had 1,500 people in parks. (It) grew to 10,000 . . . because of the police. If they had given us permits . . . I doubt there would have been much confrontation at all . . . What caused the rioting in the streets was the lack of permits and lack of a place to stay . . . Too much order creates disorder is the way I’ve always put it.”

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