Tom Hayden was the enfant terrible of 1960s America. He was the author of the Port Huron statement (the radical manifesto that preceded by a half-dozen years the student upheaval in Paris) and the defendant in the "Chicago Seven" trial that followed the riotous Democratic Party convention of 1968 when police batons bashed the heads of delegates and demonstrators alike.
Yet there he was, quiet-spoken and conservatively dressed, at the Capitol Hilton Hotel, talking about the great Irish Famine of 150 years ago and how the Irish discovered America.
For those who did not know that Mr Hayden no longer is the Robespierre of Chicago but a California state legislator who has represented Los Angeles since 1982, the transformation was perhaps astonishing.
His record proves he is a good legislator, or his constituents would long ago have dispensed with his services. Of course he is no longer considered a threat to the status quo, which surely helps.
If any note-takers for the FBI or the CIA - who are forbidden by law from involving themselves in domestic politics - were present at the Capitol Hilton the other night to observe the State Senator manipulating his own slides and discussing his topic knowledgeably in most moderate tones, they were not obvious.
His audience consisted of Irish-Americans, and he seemed to know many of them by their first names. He touched briefly on the notable fact that Irish-Americans still remain strongly Irish despite the temptations to be otherwise. Past political faults of the breed were mentioned, but only in context of his family background.
He noted the role of some Irish-Americans as pointsmen of reaction in the 1930s, when their guide was Father Charles E. Coughlin, the "radio priest" of Oak Ridge, Michigan, described by Fortune magazine at the time as "just about the biggest thing that has ever happened to radio".
Millions listened to his broadcasts. Father Coughlin was a social demagogue who preached anti-Semitism. "I speak for the little man," he said, and that was true as far as it went: which was that many little men have deep prejudices.
HIS big-city following was mainly Irish-American working class. But all ethnic groups followed him, especially Germans and Scandinavians.
Maybe the Irish were more conspicuous, especially in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, because Father Coughlin was "one of our own". State Senator Hayden barely touched on the subject, other than to note that he himself was a former altar boy in Father Coughlin's Michigan parish church.
In the 1950s Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin had a strong following of Democratic Irish-Americans, although a Republican from the Midwest. Not that party affiliation or region had much to do with these matters, or were reasons for his attacks in the era of the great "Red scare".
Tom Hayden's interest in the great Irish famine is due to the fact that two sets of his great grandparents were driven from the stony fields of Monaghan to the US when the unknown blight rotted their potato crops in 1845, 1846 and 1847. Faced with starvation they fled to the US.
Hayden is editor and compiler of a new book, Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine. The publisher in the US is Roberts Rhinehart of Boulder, Colorado, and in Ireland Wolfhound Press.
The 25 contributors include poets Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan, Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.
He compares the pre-Famine Irish with the native people of North America, citing what Kevin Whelan - also a contributor - says about their rich oral culture: "Singing, dancing and story-telling emerged as the prize art forms. All this life was intricately interwoven . . ."
Hayden writes of the Famine emigrants: "Poverty and prejudice in America made assimilation arduous. Alcohol and schizophrenia ravaged Irish communities everywhere.
"The Irish language was nearly lost along with the accents and the hyphenated names. (For a very long time there were no prizes for being Irish). Those days are ending now for the Irish and native Americans, and for many other peoples once suppressed.
"The Irish today remember that an Indian tribe in America sent them $170 in Famine relief funds in the 1840s. Those same Indians were forced on their own `trail of tears' in the American South."
A Hayden Bill in the California state legislature "encourages officials to consider including the Irish Famine of the 1840s in our public school curriculum".
The Bill passed the Senate on a bipartisan vote of 27-4, and the Assembly by a bipartisan vote of 62-8. Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, signed the Bill into law.