Hanging with Tom Hayden and The Nation

What a high: I just dropped Tom Hayden off at his place in Sullivan Canyon, way up above Sunset Boulevard out towards the Pacific.

Tom Hayden, wow. Don’t know him? Go to https://tomhayden.com/biography/
before reading this…

He needed a ride home after seeing the premiere of, “HOT TYPE: 150 YEARS OF THE NATION,” Barbara Kopple’s documentary that traces the amazing history of The Nation magazine.

 

 

 

Attendees got a copy of the April issue of The Nation – 268 pages of great history, reporting, thinking, and Tom Tomorrow comic strips – seminal stuff!

Katrina vanden Heuvel, the always-striking publisher & editor of the magazine told us she began there as an intern in 1980 and interns are featured in the film – many continue on to staff positions. Katrina and director Kopple (she began with the Maysles Brothers before going on to make award-winning docs like, “Harlan County, USA”) gave a special shout out to Danny Schecter “The News Dissector,” and to other late great Nation writers like Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn.

The still living/still great Norman Lear introduced the film and he said the best folks in LA were here — I saw Robert Scheer, Haskell Wexler, Jody Evans from Code Pink, Peter Melhman, Judy and Bill Goldstein (also great).

“Hot Type” is a very well-made doc and an even better recruiting promo for idealistic journalists of the left.

After the short panel and drinks in the Hammer courtyard, Tom Hayden needed a ride home. This news came to me via Jerry Rubin – not the late 60s activist; this is a friend, the still-alive Santa Monica activist Jerry Rubin. Inside my Honda Civic, I asked Tom if The Nation had published his Port Huron Statement of 1962 – because they’d bragged in the doc about The Nation being started by abolitionists and Freedmen in 1865 and having pubbed everyone from Albert Einstein to Allen Ginsberg, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, including Ed Milliband, Marshall McLuhan, Langston Hughes and even MLK covering civil rights in 1961…

But Tom said no, his document had been mimeographed and distributed samizdat style. After Hayden helped found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1961 while studying at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, he wrote his Port Huron Statement — calling for a radical, fully democractic society. Tom told us it has had a long life, reprinted in at least four books.

His take on “Hot Type: 150 Years of The Nation”?
“It was a lot like the magazine,” Hayden said, praising scenes showing Amy Wilentz in Haiti and other Nation journalists covering the Monday Marches in North Carolina and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Tom still sits in on meetings every quarter at the Irving Place offices of The Nation, pitching ideas.

Running through the documentary is the “old media” aspect of The Nation; how to get young folks to even read a print magazine is difficult. (Richard Kim, former editor of www.thenation.com, comes across delightfully on screen.) But arguing how the mag is for all ages – the film concludes with a scene on the annual “Nation Cruise” where older subscribers (who are able to afford it?) get to schmooze with former editor Victor Navasky and writers like Hayden, Dave Zirin, and Tom Tomorrow.

Hayden has a new book out, “LISTEN YANKEE: Why Cuba Matters,” and he was excited to know if President Obama had removed Cuba from the state terrorism list; I said I only heard that Obama had been to the Bob Marley museum while visiting Jamaica that day (April 9).
“Obama seems to be doing more and more cool things,” said Tom from the backseat.

Hayden grew up in Detroit. As I did and also Gerry Fialka, sitting next to me in the front seat. As a boy, Hayden went to school at the Shrine of the Little Flower, that big Catholic Church one always drives past along Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak. This struck me.

Why?

Because Norman Lear, in his introduction tonight, said The Nation came into his life after, as a 9-year-old, he heard Father Coughlin on the radio ranting his anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi garbage from the pulpit of the very same church.

Tom said he’d been too young to know anything about Coughlin’s infamous past.

“He only spoke about Hell.” (Must’ve saved the stuff about Jews and Nazis for his radio audience.)

As I pulled the car up to his driveway — after winding past one address that read: 1968 Mandeville (“I almost drive off the road seeing that number every day!”) Tom left us with: “Okay boys, there may be nothing happening right now, but it could all be happening any minute!”

Nice farewell.

I’ve driven cabs in San Francisco, where folks like Beat poet Gregory Corso would fall into my backseat. But taking Tom Hayden home — wow, that’s right up there with driving Edsel Ford Fong, famous Sam Wo’s angry waiter in Chinatown, back home to Stockton Street in 1981!

 

Links to Gerry Fialka, the film, The Port Huron Statement, and Tom Tomorrow’s Nation cartoons:

https://laughtears.com (Gerry Fialka’s website of wonder)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4247276/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl

https://www.lsa.umich.edu/phs/resources/porthuronstatementfulltext

http://thismodernworld.com