The Last Word On Nothing

I need you to know this: I had my name before he was famous. And though my family moved from Detroit to Saskatoon during the Vietnam War years that made him so, I need you to understand that my father was never a draft dodger. I have no quarrel with the decisions, to flee conscription or, more improbably, to name a child after the author of the Port Huron Statement. But those are complicated life histories and they belong to others. Those are not my circumstances; that’s someone else’s Tom Hayden.

A name, presumably, feels personal to anyone. Writers’ names, though, are tied especially tightly to the work we do, printed as they are above the words we write, search-engine optimized to the good we hope we’ve done in the world. But for the 20 years that I’ve been a journalist, my name, my byline, and the assumptions about who I am that go with it, have never been exclusively mine. So even though he was older than me by decades, more famous by far, and died just last week, can we call him the Other Tom Hayden, just for today?

OTH’s fame, first earned as an American civil rights and peace activist of the 1960s and ’70s, was at once substantial and very specific to place and generation. His shadow, accordingly, was largely absent from my Canadian childhood. But then I moved to the United States for graduate school in the 1990s … and the Hey, how’s Jane Fonda? jokes began, after OTH’s famous ex-wife. More amusingly, I also started getting his phone calls. I had moved, unknowingly, to the west Los Angeles State Senate district he represented at the time, and only one of us had a listed phone number.

Sometimes, not often, constituents called. Once, a reporter from the Guardian gave me my first introduction the inner workings of journalism by leaving a long, meandering, sycophantic message seeking commentary on some issue or other. Melanie Griffith made a better impression when she called and left a much more eloquent message for OTH on the same long-since-lost answering machine tape.

I don’t remember all the details, but the actress had met the political star somewhere glamorous-sounding—a desert retreat, maybe, or a mountain getaway? And left her home phone number. It felt like glimpse at that other, more famous Los Angeles, the one beyond the experience or conception of a paycheck-to-paycheck oceanography grad student. Could those seven digits arcing across from the LA of golden dreams to the LA of tedious reality have represented an access point, a portal? I’ll never know: I was away at sea when Griffith left her message, and a friend of mine returned the call in my place. He offered OTH’s office number and suggested they meet for coffee—thereby simultaneously providing Griffith with valuable information and robbing her of the chance to turn down the real, wrong Tom Hayden.*

I have been named Thomas three times in my life. First, at Baptism, by my parents’ choice and in honor of the saint and my father’s good friend. Second, by my own choice at Confirmation. The third time, though, OTH made the decision for me. I was a new journalist first committing to a byline. OTH was at least 10 books into his ridiculously prolific career as a writer by then, and too obviously partisan for the mainstream media of the time. His Tom made mine impossible. So Thomas it was, yet again and ever since, a name very few people had ever called me before outside the context of a sacrament.

And still, I’ve had to contend ever since—and as recently as the week before he died—with awkward humor and genuine confusion about our overlapping names and intersecting identities. I don’t think I’ve suffered any professional harm because of it, and there may have been a few benefits. Since OTH’s fame is politically polarizing and as specifically Baby Boomer as it is American, people’s reaction, or lack thereof, to hearing my name has been reliable as a quick way to judge both the approximate age and the political leanings of many sources I’ve cold called. Jane Fonda once good-naturedly agreed to an interview because of my name, and Roger Ailes nearly declined for the same reason. I was no less amused than I assume OTH would have been by the raft of angry letters to the editor that US News & World Report received when my byline first appeared there.

OTH was obviously a more important writer than me. But it’s the sheer volume of his oeuvre, more than any literary or social value it may hold, that makes me feel particularly churlish about this: I’ve barely read of word of it. 20 books he wrote, and hundreds of articles and blog posts, and he had to die for me to read a few excerpts on Wikipedia. I don’t know exactly why. But we’ve both written books about war, and peace; we’ve both focused on the environment; we shared Irish heritage, and California residency. I have always assumed our writing is as distinct as I hope my personhood is—I have tried to be more science based, less politically partisan, more of a consensus seeker; he struck me as more combative, with a tendency toward New Age platitudes and a weakness for celebrity culture. But perhaps I’ve also preferred not to test that assumption too closely, lest I find something of my own distinctness fading as I turn his pages. All I know for sure is that it felt like a small victory when he followed me on Twitter before I followed him.

Still, I’ve never felt especially bad about which particular public figure I’ve been linked to all these years. (Spare a thought for my poor father, Michael: at least my namesake was always on the right side of the torture-don’t torture debate.) Sure, I’ve often seen OTH as a little smug, and sometimes downright loopy. But he had an admirably consistent public life across five decades of pushing for more peace, more equality, and a cleaner environment. I share those values, even if I haven’t always shared his approach or sensibilities.

So my emotional response to his passing surprised me: I feel ever so slightly elated. It’s not just the frisson of still being alive after hearing from students and friends that for a moment, on hearing the news reports, they feared I wasn’t. More than that, it’s a sense of a constant, half-noticed drag being relieved—of finally getting one’s underwear arranged properly after walking all day with an awkward twist. I wish OTH peace, finally, and I’m thankful for the good he did in the world. But I’m grateful for the small bit of extra breathing room he has left behind, too. So grateful I might even get around to reading a little of what he wrote, eventually.

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*Memories diverge: I recall him pretending to be me for the call; he says now there was no posing. Regardless, the portal remained closed.

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Thomas Hayden is the founding Director of the Master of Arts in Earth Systems, Environmental Communication Program at Stanford University. He has been on staff at Newsweek and US News & World Report.  He’s freelanced all over the place.  He is coauthor of two books, On Call in Hell and Sex and War, and co-editor of the Science Writers’ Handbook.  He briefly taught science writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with his wife and fellow science journalist, Erika Check Hayden.  Both were early Persons of LWON. You should probably just call him Tom.

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Photo credits: Clockwise from top left Wikimedia commons, unknown, Trish Tunney, Wikimedia commons