“I’m Learning to Talk to the Middle Now”: Tom Hayden’s Campaign to Bring Mainstream Antiwar Politics in the 1970s

From his support of Daniel Ellsberg to leading Vietnamese history seminars with congressional staffers, Tom Hayden’s shift toward the mainstream was representative of one strain of antiwar activism during the war's final years. “I’m learning to talk to the middle now,” Hayden said to one reporter in 1974. After he stepped away from movement politics, the SDS founder embraced new, less confrontational tactics that did not back away from critiquing American imperialism. Together with his future wife, actress Jane Fonda, he created the Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC) in 1972. Beginning as an organization that sponsored Fonda and Hayden’s tour of Middle America in the fall of 1972, the IPC established a national network that distributed and eventually led a successful lobbying effort on Capitol Hill to cut funds to South Vietnam. “The Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC) kept alive the struggle against American genocide when the rest of the antiwar movement had collapsed.” wrote Mike Davis following Tom Hayden’s death in October 2016. The IPC was a turning point for Hayden, as he finally found a way to harness years of antiwar sentiment into a project that contributed to an expansion of the movement. It was also an extension of Hayden’s campaign to mainstream antiwar activism's past, present, and future. The memory of the Vietnam War was frequently at the forefront of Hayden’s presentations, as he identified history as a form of political power in the 1970s and in his later years.