REVOLUTION : His Mark on Our Times : REUNION A Memoir <i> by Tom Hayden (Random House: $22.50; 539 pp., illustrated </i>

If whoever controls the past controls the future, as George Orwell suspected, it is perhaps not surprising that in America’s current ideological marketplace, the definition of the radical “1960s” is a key intellectual prize. On one side is the view associated with neoconservatism in general and Allen Bloom in particular that the decade was responsible not only for the collapse of American power abroad but the destruction of culture at home. On the other side is the view of such scholar-veterans as Todd Gitlin and other ex-activists that whatever its excesses--and these are universally acknowledged--”the movement” helped create a new consensus about the limits of foreign intervention and the necessity of domestic participation that finds its most vital expression in the broadening political base of Jesse Jackson. With the publication of “Reunion,” this debate is now further enriched by the concrete, detailed reflections of Tom Hayden, then perhaps the movement’s single most effective spokesman and organizer, now a member of the California Legislature. How he got from one place to the other, and what it means socially and politically as well as personally, is the subject of his memoir.

Born in 1939 in Royal Oak, Mich., to Irish Catholic parents, Hayden, like many of his contemporaries, spent the years following his graduation from the University of Michigan in 1961 seemingly everywhere simultaneously: the South, the Newark ghetto, the streets of Washington and Chicago, North Vietnam, and, finally, California, where, in the ruins of his old order, he found the beginnings of the new. If the outline of his autobiography could serve almost as a generational profile, however, the particulars are unique, for at virtually every point at which the events that gave the period its special character unfolded, he seemed to be naturally in the lead. Not only did he help found Students for a Democratic Society--he wrote the first draft of the Port Huron statement. Not only did he travel to a country with which the United States was fighting--he brought back the first prisoners of war. Not only did he organize the demonstrations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago--he was one of the victim-heroes of the subsequent conspiracy trial. Many of the things that happened to other people during the ‘60s happened to Tom Hayden, but they happened at a different level. During the 1967 riots in Newark, Gov. Richard Hughes sought--and followed--his advice. After his return from Hanoi with the POWs, he was called to Washington to confer with Averell Harriman. He had the respect of many politicians, including Robert Kennedy. Many people came to the movement through guilt about affluence or to discover a new identity, but not so Tom Hayden: I wanted, he says, to make “a mark on my times.”

The same qualities of intelligence and intensity that enabled him to do so in the movement are also present in this book. A one-time journalist--he was editor of the Michigan Daily--and author of previous books on Newark and North Vietnam, he is an excellent reporter, able to re-create complex situations and events with unusual clarity. His central thesis is that the violence that is generally believed to have led to the movement’s downfall was the result of a kind of generational betrayal; namely the “uncaring rigidity” of governmental authority when faced with legitimate demands for change. This thesis is not so much argued as shown in a number of concrete instances, such as the murder of black NAACP member, Herbert Lee, in McComb, Miss., in 1961, despite the appeal of civil rights workers for federal protection for Lee the evening before. Even though the government grew less passive in the South, its position hardened in Vietnam until eventually the only meeting between the government and the opposition was in the streets. While the radicals of the early ‘60s went South with the belief that “the Constitution, the President, and the American people were really on our side,” Hayden writes, people entering the movement later had no such illusions. Describing the “ugly atmosphere” in a detention cell in Chicago in 1968, he notes that among the detainees were several young SDS-ers who would shortly become Weathermen, but “whereas my first taste of violence in the South allowed me to hope for a response from the national government, their introduction to mindless sadism was coming at the convention of the Democratic Party and the Johnson Administration.” To those who believe the movement damaged the country, such distinctions among successive incarnations of SDS may seem, at best, irrelevant, but events have causes as well as consequences. The shift in political temper from the beginning to the end of the decade was extremely important, and Hayden’s examples go a long way to explain why it occurred.

The analysis of violence is not the only valuable aspect of the book. Another is the original use of documents retrieved under the Freedom of Information Act. These are not grouped together as illustrations but embedded in the text at the chronological point that they were generated, conveying an accurate--and highly telling--impression of the simultaneity of the actions of movement and government throughout the decade. Still another is the summary of the numbers of those killed, injured and arrested during the 1960s protests, a list, surprisingly, no one else has bothered to compile. Less satisfying, to a degree, are the aspects of the book dealing with private matters. Divorces, marriages, births and deaths are all faithfully recorded but, as might be expected of someone whose father broke a decade-long silence with, “Tom, in case you don’t have my number, it’s (313) 555-4393. Give me a call. Dad.”, they are understated, to say the least. While there is more than enough detail to justify the implication that the “reunion” of the title involves personal as well as political reconcilings, there is no doubt that this is the autobiography of an essentially political man.

At the opening of “Reunion,” Hayden remarks that “It took a long time for me to accept that far from becoming a police state, the system had worked,” and after the whole bloody story is told, he closes with the avowal, “I miss the sixties and always will.” Such balanced affirmation is not only refreshing, it may also be the beginning of a platform. If “Reunion” is the first campaign book of some no-longer-so-distant year, it can be said with reasonable confidence that not only is the debate on the meaning of the 1960s not yet over, it has barely started.