For One Vietnam Vet, There Will Be No Cease-Fire : Politics: Now fighting in the trenches of Sacramento, Assemblyman Mickey Conroy battles to rout state Sen. Tom Hayden, once a war protester, from the Legislature.

SACRAMENTO — The Vietnam War has been over for nearly two decades, but for some a truce is not yet in sight. Mickey Conroy is a case in point. He won’t relent until the final skirmish is settled.

With bulldog persistence, the Orange County assemblyman has toiled for 10 years to get erstwhile Vietnam War protester and current state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) bounced out of the Legislature.

First as private citizen and later as a lawmaker, Conroy has written scores of letters, circulated petitions, filed lawsuits and lobbied state legislators. He has pleaded with prosecutors and placed newspaper advertisements in Hayden’s home base of Santa Monica, denouncing the onetime “Chicago Seven” defendant as a traitor.

The former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran is not about to give up. While he was flying combat missions, Conroy contends, Hayden was fraternizing with communists in North Vietnam; when Americans were dying in the jungle, Hayden was spouting anti-war rhetoric on Radio Hanoi.

Herein lies the conflict that has brought this pair brow-to-brow in the backwaters of the state capital, two bare-knuckled Irishmen on opposite ends of the Sacramento spectrum.

Conroy believes that Hayden violated a state constitutional provision that bars from elected office anyone who “advocates the support” of a foreign government engaged in hostilities with the United States. Hayden flatly denies it.

If Conroy gets his way, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren will settle the matter. Short of that, Conroy vows to move to Santa Monica and run against Hayden when the Democrat’s term is up in 1996.

“I’ll tell you what, I’d give him a real tussle, and there would be only one issue I’d run on,” said Conroy, a folksy, white-haired Republican. “As long as I can breathe a breath, I’ll be pursuing this.”

For Hayden, this is nothing new. He survived the scrutiny of the FBI during the ‘60s, of J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon Justice Department. For him, the dogged protests of Conroy and his bunch are hardly cause for alarm.

It has all grown a bit tiresome, Hayden says.

“My basic position is that everything I ever said or did about Vietnam has been heard by the voters of my district, and they’ve taken it into account and feel good enough to elect me six times,” Hayden said.

Under the unrelenting, decade-long attack, Hayden has grappled with his past. During a recent trip to the black granite wall in Washington that memorializes Vietnam dead, Hayden gazed at the endless list of names etched in stone. A debate raged in his mind.

“They were voices playing in my head . . . haunting voices,” he recalled. “ ‘If people had listened to me, no Americans would have died.’ ‘If it hadn’t been for Hayden, we would have won the war and saved lives.’

“Did I shorten the war and save lives or lengthen the war and cost lives?” he asked himself. The answer came quickly: “I feel I was right in opposing the war, militantly, but I did cross the line into irrationality and anger.”

Those days are of fading importance for voters, Hayden believes, a reality he says Conroy has failed to grasp.

“He goes around to the Assembly, to the Senate, or to reporters and, except for the hard-core, the eyes roll,” Hayden said. “I know the type. I’ve got a bit of that streak myself. He’s addictive. Faced with massive rejection (of his crusade), he just thinks people don’t have enough information.”

Conroy admits that he lacked much information when he began his quest. His was a cause of the heart, of the soul, of patriotism and emotion. As a Marine pilot in Vietnam, he was well aware of the leftist activities of Tom Hayden and his then wife, actress Jane Fonda. He learned to loathe them both.

When Hayden won an Assembly seat in 1982, Conroy said, “I got really upset.” He fired off telegrams to state officials. During off hours from his job and work as leader of a veterans group, Conroy began poring through documents to make his case and gathering more than 100,000 signatures on petitions demanding Hayden’s ouster.

During the hunt for evidence to aid their case, Conroy and his compatriots came across an obscure state constitutional provision approved by voters during the McCarthy years of the early 1950s. The law prohibits anyone “who advocates the support of a foreign government against the United States in the event of hostilities” from holding office.

In the mid-1980s, Conroy gained a valuable ally in Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who had served in three wars. Ferguson made an emotional, teary-eyed speech in 1985, calling Hayden a traitor, and the next year asked fellow lawmakers to oust their liberal colleague. They rebuffed him, divided roughly along partisan lines.

While Ferguson made the headlines, Conroy organized more than 200 veterans who picketed the Capitol and filled the Assembly chambers during the hearing. “What I did was for Mickey,” Ferguson says today. “He desperately needed somebody inside the political world to stand up against Hayden. Mickey did all the work.”

All along, Conroy said, his efforts were hurt because he lacked irrefutable proof that Hayden backed North Vietnam against the United States. Conroy said he found it in the archives of the California State Library, uncovering records of a December, 1968, hearing of the now-defunct Committee on Un-American Activities. During the session, Hayden acknowledged that he had supported the North Vietnamese.

Hayden does not deny any of that today but insists that the laws of the land are on his side. The most ready proof, he said, is a 1986 legal opinion from the state legislative counsel.

It concludes that Hayden could be in violation only if he had already been found criminally guilty of supporting a foreign government. Short of that, the statute of limitations on any crime Hayden might have committed had expired long ago, the opinion noted. Moreover, it suggested that Hayden’s wartime statements may have been protected under the 1st Amendment.

Conroy hoped that the tables would turn when he won a seat in the Assembly in a 1991 special election to fill a vacancy from Orange County. Now he was on the inside. But so far, it has not paid off.

When Hayden won a state Senate seat last year, Conroy tried to turn the liberal lawmaker’s new colleagues against him. Although many in the fraternity-like Senate had opposed Hayden, they turned away Conroy’s request.

“Mickey is very sincere in his patriotic efforts and I can certainly understand his deep emotional commitment to this issue, but this has been a futile effort,” said Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), a Conroy ally. “The Assembly rejected this, the Senate showed absolutely no interest in reviving the issue. After a while it seems futile to fall on your sword every time you go to battle.”