Tom Hayden (1939–2016)
Tom Hayden and the radicals who built Students for a Democratic Society weren't products of "the 1960s counterculture." They were political from start to finish.
The New York Times gets a great deal wrong in its obituary today for Tom Hayden, starting with the first sentence’s claim that he “burst out of the 1960s counterculture.”
The tired cliché that reduces the sixties to sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, in this case as so many others, distorts both chronology and significance.
Hayden burst out of the Midwest, not Haight-Ashbury. He cut his teeth on the Michigan Daily, not the East Village Other. He was a working-class Catholic from Royal Oak, Michigan, one of the outer rings of Detroit. To see him as a product of the counterculture gets it precisely backwards.
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