Beginning with early efforts to galvanize support for his run the U.S. Congress in 1960 through his defeat at the hands of Republican incumbent Silvio O. Conte two years later, this series includes dense documentation of Bill Hefner's skills as a political organizer and his stance as a peace candidate. In addition to relatively mundane materials on campaign finances and getting out the vote, the series includes a strong selection of Hefner's stump speeches, his platform, publicity materials, and a thick run of correspondence with well known activists and antiwar supporters, including the singer Richard Dyer-Bennet, A.J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, and Benjamin Spock, and outgoing letters from Hefner to these and others. The series provides a detailed framework for understanding Hefner's attempts to enter Democratic Party politics, to marshal support and wage a peace campaign, and analyze the results. The campaign diary represents a slender, but engrossing chronicle of the 1962 election, and the campaign evaluations for that election provide a keen retrospective.

The series also contains significant materials relating to Hefner's involvement in supporting peace candidate H. Stuart Hughes' campaign for the Senate in 1962, including correspondence with campaign organizers, candidate's statements, press releases, newsletters, fliers and ephemera, and a series of notes on the campaign.

Although Hefner's involvements in reform activity were many and varied, he was particularly embroiled in the antiwar and civil rights movements. This series contains a wealth of correspondence, memoranda, ephemera, and other materials relating to Hefner's political activities in the 1950s and 1960s, with particular emphasis on his work with Turn Toward Peace and other disarmament and antinuclear groups, and in the early anti-Vietnam War struggles. Among other organizations that appear are the Greenfield Peace Center (which Hefner helped to found in 1963), Platform For Peace, SANE, and the World Without War Council.

Hefner's support for the civil rights movement is less thoroughly represented, however there is valuable material relating to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and scattered materials on integration and race.

A founder of Political Action for Peace in 1959, Hefner kept a strong record of its early years. In many ways, this series contains the incunabula of the organization: documents pertaining to the exploratory committee and the early efforts at propagating their ideas to the public, minutes of committee meetings, and correspondence with the organization's officers and supporters. Inevitably, the series contains material relating to the elections of 1960 through 1964 and should be read in tandem with the other series in this collection.