Abbie Hoffman VINTAGE COUNTERCULTURE book signed with THUMBPRINT !

Description: Author: Hoffman, Abbie Title: Soon to be a major motion picture. Introduction by Norman Mailer. Book Description: 304p., wraps heavily creased, illus., signed by Hoffman with his thumb print, minor internal handling wear. Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman (November 30, 1936 – April 12, 1989) was an American political and social activist and anarchist[1][2][3] who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies").Hoffman was arrested and tried for conspiracy and inciting to riot as a result of his role in protests that led to violent confrontations with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, along with Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. The group was known collectively as the "Chicago Eight"; when Seale's prosecution was separated from the others, they became known as the Chicago Seven. While the defendants were initially convicted of intent to incite a riot, the verdicts were overturned on appeal.Hoffman continued his activism into the 1970s, and remains an icon of the anti-war movement and the counterculture era.[4][5]Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Early protests 3 Chicago Eight conspiracy trial 4 Controversy at Woodstock 5 Underground 6 Back to visibility 7 Personal life 8 Death 9 Bibliography 9.1 Books 9.2 Record 10 Media 10.1 Interviews 10.2 Appearances in documentary films 10.3 Appearances in feature films 11 Legacy 11.1 Portrayals 11.2 Theatre Festival 12 See also 13 References 14 Further reading 15 External linksEarly life and educationHoffman was born November 30, 1936 in Worcester, Massachusetts, to John Hoffman and Florence Schanberg, both of Jewish descent. Hoffman was raised in a middle-class household and had two younger siblings. As a child in the 1940s–50s, he was a member of what has been described as "the transitional generation between the beatniks and hippies". He described his childhood as "idyllic" and the '40s as "a great time to grow up in." On June 3, 1954, 17-year-old Hoffman was arrested for the first time, for driving without a license. During his school days, he became known as a troublemaker who started fights, played pranks, vandalized school property, and referred to teachers by their first names. In his sophomore year, Hoffman was expelled from Classical High School, a now-closed public high school in Worcester.[6] As an atheist,[7] Hoffman wrote a paper declaring that "God could not possibly exist, for if he did, there wouldn't be any suffering in the world." The irate teacher ripped up the paper and called him "a Communist punk." Hoffman jumped on the teacher and started fighting him until he was restrained and removed from the school.[8] After his expulsion, he attended Worcester Academy, graduating in 1955. Hoffman engaged in many behaviors typical of rebellious teenagers in the 1950s such as riding motorcycles, wearing leather jackets, and sporting a ducktail haircut. Upon graduating, he enrolled in Brandeis University, where he studied under professors such as noted psychologist Abraham Maslow, often considered the father of humanistic psychology.[9] He was also a student of Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, whom Hoffman said had a profound effect on his political outlook. Hoffman would later cite Marcuse's influence during his activism and his theories on revolution. Hoffman graduated with a B.A. in psychology in 1959. That fall, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed coursework toward a master's degree in psychology. Soon after, he married his pregnant girlfriend Sheila Karklin in May 1960.Early protestsPrior to his days as a leading member of the Yippie movement, Hoffman was involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and organized Liberty House, which sold items to support the Civil Rights Movement in the southern United States. During the Vietnam War, Hoffman was an anti-war activist, using deliberately comical and theatrical tactics.In late 1966, Hoffman met with a radical community-action group called the Diggers[10] and studied their ideology. He later returned to New York and published a book with this knowledge.[10] Doing so was considered a violation by the Diggers. Diggers co-founder Peter Coyote explained: Abbie, who was a friend of mine, was always a media junky. We explained everything to those guys, and they violated everything we taught them. Abbie went back, and the first thing he did was publish a book, with his picture on it, that blew the hustle of every poor person on the Lower East Side by describing every free scam then current in New York, which were then sucked dry by disaffected kids from Scarsdale.[11]One of Hoffman's well-known stunts was on August 24, 1967, when he led members of the movement to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The protesters threw fistfuls of real and fake dollar bills down to the traders below, some of whom booed, while others began to scramble frantically to grab the money as fast as they could. [12] Accounts of the amount of money that Hoffman and the group tossed was said to be as little as $30 to $300.[13] Hoffman claimed to be pointing out that, metaphorically, that's what NYSE traders "were already doing." "We didn't call the press", wrote Hoffman. "At that time we really had no notion of anything called a media event." Yet the press was quick to react and by evening the event was reported around the world. Since that incident, the stock exchange spent $20,000 to enclose the gallery with bulletproof glass.[14]In October 1967, David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam asked Jerry Rubin to help mobilize and direct a March on the Pentagon.[15] The protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial as Dellinger and Dr. Benjamin Spock gave speeches to the mass of people.[16] From there, the group marched towards the Pentagon. As the protesters neared the Pentagon, they were met by soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division[16] who formed a human barricade blocking the Pentagon steps.[15] Not to be dissuaded, Hoffman vowed to levitate the Pentagon[16] claiming he would attempt to use psychic energy to levitate the Pentagon until it would turn orange and begin to vibrate, at which time the war in Vietnam would end.[17] Allen Ginsberg led Tibetan chants to assist Hoffman.[16]Hoffman's theatrics were successful at convincing many young people to become more active in the politics of the time.[17]Chicago Eight conspiracy trialMain article: Chicago EightHoffman was arrested and tried for conspiracy and inciting to riot as a result of his role in anti-Vietnam War protests, which were met by a violent police response during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.[18] He was among the group that came to be known as the Chicago Seven (originally known as the Chicago Eight), which included fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, future California state senator Tom Hayden and Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale (before his trial was severed from the others).Presided over by Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation to Hoffman, about which he joked throughout the trial[19]), Abbie Hoffman's courtroom antics frequently grabbed the headlines; one day, defendants Hoffman and Rubin appeared in court dressed in judicial robes, while on another day, Hoffman was sworn in as a witness with his hand giving the finger. Judge Hoffman became the favorite courtroom target of the Chicago Seven defendants, who frequently would insult the judge to his face.[20] Abbie Hoffman told Judge Hoffman "you are a 'shande fur de Goyim' [disgrace in front of the gentiles]. You would have served Hitler better." He later added that "your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room."[20] Both Davis and Rubin told the Judge "this court is bullshi#." When Hoffman was asked in what state he resided, he replied the "state of mind of my brothers and sisters".Other celebrities were called as "cultural witnesses" including Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie, Norman Mailer and others. Hoffman closed the trial with a speech in which he quoted Abraham Lincoln, making the claim that the President himself, if alive today, would also be arrested in Chicago's Lincoln Park.On February 18, 1970, Hoffman and four of the other defendants (Rubin, Dellinger, Davis, and Hayden) were found guilty of intent to incite a riot while crossing state lines. All seven defendants were found not guilty of conspiracy. At sentencing, Hoffman suggested the judge try LSD and offered to set him up with "a dealer he knew in Florida" (the judge was known to be headed to Florida for a post-trial vacation). Each of the five was sentenced to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.[21]However, all convictions were subsequently overturned by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The Walker Commission later found that in fact it had been a "police riot."Controversy at WoodstockAt Woodstock in 1969, Hoffman reportedly interrupted The Who's performance to attempt to speak against the jailing of John Sinclair of the White Panther Party. He grabbed a microphone and yelled, "I think this is a pile of ship while John Sinclair rots in prison ..." Pete Townshend was adjusting his amplifier between songs and turned to look at Hoffman over his left shoulder. Townshend shouted "Fucc off! Fucc off my stage!"[22] and reportedly ran at Hoffman with his guitar and hit Hoffman in the back, although Townshend later denied attacking Hoffman.[23] Townshend later said that while he actually agreed with Hoffman on Sinclair's imprisonment, he would have knocked him offstage regardless of the content of his message, given that Hoffman had violated the "sanctity of the stage," i.e., the right of the band to perform uninterrupted by distractions not relevant to the show. The incident took place during a camera change, and was not captured on film. The audio of this incident, however, can be heard on The Who's box set, Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (Disc 2, Track 20, "Abbie Hoffman Incident").In 1971's Steal This Book in the section "Free Communication," Hoffman encourages his readership to take to the stage at rock concerts to use the pre-assembled audience and PA system to get their message out. However he mentions that "interrupting the concert is frowned upon since it is only spitting in the faces of people you are trying to reach."[24]In Woodstock Nation, Hoffman mentions the incident, and says he was on a bad LSD trip at the time. Joe Shea, then a reporter for the Times Herald-Record, a Dow Jones-Ottaway newspaper that covered the event on-site, said he saw the incident. He recalled that Hoffman was actually hit in the back of the head by Townshend's guitar and toppled directly into the pit in front of the stage. He does not recall any "shove" from Townshend, and discounts both men's accounts.[citation needed]Part of a series onLibertarian socialismConcepts[show]Models[show]People[hide] Gerrard Winstanley Thomas Müntzer Charles Fourier Josiah Warren Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Joseph Déjacque Francesc Pi i Margall Mikhail Bakunin Louise Michel Peter Kropotkin William Morris Oscar Wilde Benjamin Tucker Errico Malatesta Leo Tolstoy Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia Emma Goldman G. D. H. Cole Ricardo Flores Magón Gustav Landauer Diego Abad de Santillán Rudolf Rocker Otto Rühle Antonie Pannekoek Buenaventura Durruti Nestor Makhno Sylvia Pankhurst Paul Mattick Mahatma Gandhi Wilhelm Reich Dorothy Day Herbert Marcuse Cornelius Castoriadis Paul Goodman Colin Ward Chris Pallis Daniel Guérin Murray Bookchin Guy Debord Raoul Vaneigem Abbie Hoffman Antonio Negri Takis Fotopoulos Noam Chomsky Gilles Dauvé Michael Albert Subcomandante Marcos Janet BiehlPhilosophies[show]Significant events[show]Related topics[show] Anarchism portal Socialism portal Libertarianism portal Philosophy portal Politics portal v t eUndergroundIn 1971, Hoffman published Steal This Book, which advised readers on how to live basically for free. Many of his readers followed Hoffman's advice and stole the book, leading many bookstores to refuse to carry it. He was also the author of several other books, including Vote!, co-written with Rubin and Ed Sanders.[25] Hoffman was arrested August 28, 1973 on drug charges for intent to sell and distribute cocaine. He always maintained that undercover police agents entrapped him into a drug deal and planted suitcases of cocaine in his office. In the spring of 1974, Hoffman skipped bail, underwent cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance, and hid from authorities for several years.[citation needed]Some believed Hoffman made himself a target. In 1998, Peter Coyote opined: The FBI couldn't infiltrate us. We did everything anonymously, and we did everything for nothing, because we wanted our actions to be authentic. It's the mistake that Abbie Hoffman made. He came out, he studied with us, we taught him everything, and then he went back and wrote a book called Free, and he put his name on it! He set himself up to be a leader of the counterculture, and he was undone by that. Big mistake.[26]Despite being "in hiding" during part of this period (Hoffman lived in Fineview, New York near Thousand Island Park, a private resort on Wellesley Island on the St. Lawrence River under the name "Barry Freed"), he helped coordinate an environmental campaign to preserve the Saint Lawrence River (Save the River organization).[27] During his time on the run, he was also the "travel" columnist for Crawdaddy! magazine. On September 4, 1980, he surrendered to authorities; on the same date, he appeared on a pre-taped edition of ABC-TV's 20/20 in an interview with Barbara Walters.[28] Hoffman received a one-year sentence, but was released after four months.Back to visibilityIn November 1986, Hoffman was arrested along with 14 others, including Amy Carter, the daughter of former President Jimmy Carter, for trespassing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[29] The charges stemmed from a protest against the Central Intelligence Agency's recruitment on the UMass campus.[30] Since the university's policy limited campus recruitment to law-abiding organizations, the defense argued that the CIA engaged in illegal activities. The federal district court judge permitted expert witnesses, including former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and a former CIA agent who testified that the CIA carried on an illegal Contra war against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in violation of the Boland Amendment.[31]In three days of testimony, more than a dozen defense witnesses, including Daniel Ellsberg, and former Contra leader Edgar Chamorro, described the CIA's role in more than two decades of covert, illegal and often violent activities. In his closing argument, Hoffman, acting as his own attorney, placed his actions within the best tradition of American civil disobedience. He quoted from Thomas Paine, "the most outspoken and farsighted of the leaders of the American Revolution: 'Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. Man has no property in man, neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.'"Hoffman concluded: "Thomas Paine was talking about this Spring day in this courtroom. A verdict of not guilty will say, 'When our country is right, keep it right; but when it is wrong, right those wrongs.'" On April 15, 1987, the jury found Hoffman and the other defendants not guilty.After his acquittal,[30] Hoffman acted in a cameo appearance in Oliver Stone's later-released anti-Vietnam War movie, Born on the Fourth of July.[32] He essentially played himself in the movie, waving a flag on the ramparts of an administration building during a campus protest that was being teargassed and crushed by state troopers.In 1987 Hoffman summed up his views. You are talking to a leftist. I believe in the redistribution of wealth and power in the world. I believe in universal hospital care for everyone. I believe that we should not have a single homeless person in the richest country in the world. And I believe that we should not have a CIA that goes around overwhelming governments and assassinating political leaders, working for tight oligarchies around the world to protect the tight oligarchy here at home.[29]Later that same year, Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers wrote Steal This Urine Test (published October 5, 1987), which exposed the internal contradictions of the War on Drugs and suggested ways to circumvent its most intrusive measures. He stated, for instance, that Federal Express, which received high praise from management guru Tom Peters for "empowering" workers, in fact subjected most employees to random drug tests, firing any who got a positive result, with no retest or appeal procedure, despite the fact that FedEx chose a drug lab (the lowest bidder) with a proven record of frequent false positive results.[citation needed]Stone's Born on the Fourth of July was released on December 20, 1989, more than eight months after Hoffman's suicide on April 12, 1989. At the time of his death, Hoffman was at the height of a renewed public visibility, one of the few 1960s radicals who still commanded the attention of all kinds of mass media. He regularly lectured audiences about the CIA's covert activities, including assassinations disguised as suicides. His Playboy article (October, 1988) outlining the connections that constitute the "October Surprise," brought that alleged conspiracy to the attention of a wide-ranging American readership for the first time.[33]Personal lifeIn 1960, Hoffman married Sheila Karklin[8] and had two children: Andrew (born 1960) and Amy (1962–2007), who later went by the name Ilya. They divorced in 1966.In 1967, Hoffman married Anita Kushner in Manhattan's Central Park.[34] They had one son, america Hoffman, deliberately named using a lowercase "a" to indicate both patriotism and non-jingoistic intent.[35] Although Hoffman and Kushner were effectively separated after Hoffman became a fugitive, starting in 1973, they were not formally divorced until 1980. He subsequently fell in love with Johanna Lawrenson in 1974, while a fugitive.His personal life drew a great deal of scrutiny from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By their own admission, they kept a file on him that was 13,262 pages long.[36]DeathHoffman was 52 at the time of his death on April 12, 1989, which was caused by swallowing 150 phenobarbital tablets and liquor. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1980.[37] At the time he had recently changed treatment medications and was reportedly depressed when his 83-year-old mother was diagnosed with cancer (she died in 1996 at the age of 90). Some close to Hoffman claimed that as a natural prankster who valued youth, he was also unhappy about reaching middle age, combined with the fact that the ideas of the 1960s had given way to a conservative backlash in the 1980s. In 1984 he had expressed dismay that the current generation of young people were not as interested in protesting and social activism as youth had been during the 1960s.[38] Hoffman's body was found in his apartment in a converted turkey coop on Sugan Road in Solebury Township, near New Hope, Pennsylvania. At the time of his death, he was surrounded by about 200 pages of his own handwritten notes, many about his own moods.His death was officially ruled as suicide. As reported by The New York Times, "Among the more vocal doubters at the service today was Mr. Dellinger, who said, 'I don't believe for one moment the suicide thing.' He said he had been in fairly frequent touch with Mr. Hoffman, who had 'numerous plans for the future.'" Yet the same New York Times article reported that the coroner found the residue of about 150 pills and quoted the coroner in a telephone interview saying 'There is no way to take that amount of phenobarbital without intent. It was intentional and self-inflicted.[39]A week after Hoffman's death, a thousand friends and relatives gathered for a memorial in Worcester, Massachusetts at Temple Emanuel, the synagogue he attended as a child. Two of his colleagues from the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial were there: David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin, Hoffman's co-founder of the Yippies, by then a businessman.As The New York Times reported: "Indeed, most of the mourners who attended the formal memorial at Temple Emanuel here were more yuppie than yippie and there were more rep ties than ripped jeans among the crowd..."[40]The Times report continued: Bill Walton, the radical Celtic of basketball renown, told of a puckish Abbie, then underground evading a cocaine charge in the '70s, leaping from the shadows on a New York street to give him an impromptu basketball lesson after a loss to the Knicks. 'Abbie was not a fugitive from justice,' said Mr. Walton. 'Justice was a fugitive from him.' On a more traditional note, Rabbi Norman Mendell said in his eulogy that Mr. Hoffman's long history of protest, antic though much of it had been, was 'in the Jewish prophetic tradition, which is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.'[40]BibliographyBooks Fucc the System (pamphlet, 1967) printed under the pseudonym George Metesky Revolution For the Hell of It (1968, Dial Press) published under the pseudonym "Free" Revolution for the Hell of It: The Book That Earned Abbie Hoffman a 5 Year Prison Term at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (2005 reprint, ISBN 1-56025-690-7) Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album (1969, Random House) Steal This Book (1971, Pirate Editions) Steal This Book (1996 reprint, ISBN 1-56858-217-X) Authorized online location Vote! A Record, A Dialogue, A Manifesto – Miami Beach, 1972 And Beyond (1972, Warner Books) by Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders To America With Love: Letters From the Underground (1976, Stonehill Publishing) by Hoffman and Anita Hoffman To America With Love: Letters From the Underground (2000 second edition, ISBN 1-888996-28-5) Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (1980, Perigee, ISBN 0-399-50503-2) The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman (2000 second edition, ISBN 1-56858-197-1) Square Dancing in the Ice Age: Underground Writings (1982, Putnam, ISBN 0-399-12701-1) Steal This Urine Test: Fighting Drug Hysteria in America (1987, Penguin, ISBN 0-14-010400-3) by Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers The Best of Abbie Hoffman (1990, Four Walls Eight Windows, ISBN 0-941423-42-5) Preserving Disorder: The Faking of the President 1988 (1999, Viking, ISBN 0-670-82349-X) by Hoffman and Jonathan SilversRecord Wake Up, America! Big Toe Records (1970)MediaInterviews Ken Jordan interview from January 1989, published in Reality Sandwich, May 2007Appearances in documentary filmsHoffman is featured in interviews and archival news footage in the following documentaries: Last Summer Won't Happen (1968), film by Peter Gessner & Tom Hurwitz; "a sympathetic but not uncritical document of the East Village in New York during that year (1968), capturing the movement's internal conflicts and contradictions".[41] Growing Up in America (1988), documentary on radical politics in the 1960s, First Run Features, ASIN 6304564775[42] Lord of the Universe (1974), satirical documentary, winner of the DuPont-Columbia Award in broadcast journalism, ISBN 0-89774-102-1[43][44] My Name Is Abbie (1998), Hoffman's first interview after seven years in hiding, Mystic Fire Video, ISBN 1-56176-381-0[45] Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune (2010), biographical documentary on the life and times of the singer-songwriter, First Run Features[46][47]Appearances in feature films Born on the Fourth of July (1989); Hoffman appears as a strike organizer in Syracuse during a protest against the Vietnam War. He died before the film was released, and a dedication to him is included in the credits.LegacyPortrayals Michael Lembeck portrayed Hoffman in the 1987 HBO television film Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8. Hoffman was portrayed by Richard D'Alessandro in the 1994 film Forrest Gump, speaking against "the war in Viet-fuccing-nam" at a protest rally at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool facing the Washington Monument. Hoffman's life was dramatized in the 2000 film Steal This Movie!, in which he was portrayed by Vincent D'Onofrio.[48] Hank Azaria's voice is heard as the animated Hoffman in the film Chicago 10 (2007). Thomas Ian Nicholas portrays Hoffman in the 2010 film titled The Chicago 8.[49] Bern Cohen played the lead role in the 2011 Off Broadway play Abbie.[50][51] Jen Kirkman played Hoffman in the Dead Authors podcastTheatre FestivalThe Mary-Archie Theatre Company in Chicago started the "Abbie Hoffman Died For Our Sins" Theatre Festival in 1988. This festival runs every year for 3 consecutive days as a celebration of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair of 1969. Festival website preface "I' M A B B I E HOFFMAN " Myths are the only news, and the only thing that stays true all the time is a lie. Abbie Hoffman, 1968 Cultural Revolutionary I knew Abbie Hoffman—whom I think of as the quintessential spirit of the sixties—for almost twenty years, and for much of that time I wasn't sure when he was acting, when he was for real, and when he was acting for real. I suppose that's why I have such contradictory feelings about him. Looking back at Abbie from the vantage point of the nineties, it seems to me that he was the first American cultural revolutionary in the age of television. He was a very funny and a very sad character who saw his life and times as a story that he could tell and retell again and again as he went along. The point, of course, was to inflate himself and deflate the established order. What most of us think of as "objective reality" didn't exist for him; while he managed to outwit it time and again, it finally caught up with him. In the end, Abbie the comedian became a tragic figure. He also embodied the sensibility called postmodern. Nowadays, postmodernism is a cliche that has lost most of its clout. But long before it entered the academic world, Abbie was a walking, talking postmodernist. A great many critics have tried to define the term, but no one, it seems to me, has done it as well as the writer E. L. Doctorow, who published Abbie s first book, Revolution for the Hell of It, when he was an editor at Dial Press, and who created an Abbie Hoffman-like character named Artie Sternlicht in his radical novel The xvii xviit / Preface Book of Daniel. "There is no fiction and no nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative," Doctorow asserts in his essay "False Documents." Moreover, he explains, "history is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history." Abbie would have agreed. Almost all of Abbie's books, including his unreliable autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, are "false documents" in Doctorow's sense of the term. All of them blend fiction and history, news and entertainment. Moreover, Abbie's dramatic life itself is a "false document": a fabulous story that blurs the line between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, autobiography and mythology. While it makes for fascinating reading, it also creates nightmares for fact-hungry biographers. After his suicide in April 1989, at the age of 52, the New Yorker observed that "Abbie Hoffman led three lives. . . social activist, yippie anarchist and white-collar impostor." By my count he led more than half a dozen lives. Abbie was orphan, imp, outlaw, martyr, patriarch, prodigal son, lost soul, and tragic hero. Moreover, he consciously tried to be Prometheus, Dionysus, Wandering Jew, Ulysses, Faust, Robin Hood, Pied Piper, and Road Warrior. He was like a contemporary incarnation of Proteus, the god who was continually changing his form—who ought to have served as the deity of the sixties, an era of unprecedented transformation and metamorphosis. "The thing about movements is that they move," Abbie explained in an interview with the East Village Other in May of 1969, near the apex of the political and cultural movement of the sixties. "That's what a movement does—it moves and if you are a part of a movement, you have to recognize that . . . you and your tactics have to change and at that very rapidly." Like the sixties themselves, Abbie was constantly moving and always in motion, which is why I see him as the quintessential spirit of the era. Elusive, mercurial, and ambiguous, he was and still is hard to pin down, hard to define. He believed his lack of definition meant he couldn't be co-opted by the "square" culture he wanted to transform. While he was still young and energetic, he seemed capable of changing forever. As he aged, however, he became increasingly locked in habitual gestures, and his inability to give rebirth to himself depressed him. The manic boy wonder turned into a cranky old man. The first time I saw him, I was on a panel with Susan Sontag at the Preface / xix Socialist Scholars Conference in New York. It was 1967 and the topic was the moral and political responsibility of intellectuals vis-à-vis the war in Vietnam. Abbie showed up in the audience as a cowboy, firing off a toy cap gun and complaining that in the movement there was too much analysis and too much intellectualizing, and not enough socialism or direct action. The next time I saw him was on the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I was an assistant professor of English and American literature. He was again in costume, but this time he was accompanied by Jerry Rubin, his on-again, offagain sidekick during the cultural revolution of the late sixties and early seventies. Abbie and Jerry and a few friends had just created the Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies, a kind of roving anarchist theater group whose antics were designed to make the powersthat-be sit up and pay attention. Driving cars they had made to look like police vehicles, and wearing the uniforms of Keystone cops, Abbie, Jerry, and the Yippies descended on the campus and announced they were looking for drugs. The loony performance was in protest of a drug raid by the Suffolk County Sheriffs Department that had been staged for television to make students look like drug-crazed freaks. Over the next year or so I saw Abbie several times on the stage of the Fillmore East on the Lower East Side. On one occasion he described how he'd been arrested by the Chicago police, shortly after the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, for carrying a concealed weapon: a penknife. Pacing across the stage, and talking nonstop, he casually tossed the weapon in the air—with blade open—and caught it in his bare hand. On another occasion he appeared onstage wearing a white shirt, tie, and jacket, and explained how he'd evolved from his existence as a mundane salesman for a pharmaceutical supply company in Massachusetts into a bona fide long-haired, pot-smoking hippie in Manhattan. As he talked, he changed his clothes to emphasize the possibilities >for change. By the end of the performance he was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and boots; his long curly hair, which had been carefully held down, was now unruly. For years we were at the same places at the same times, but so were thousands of others. We were at the March on the Pentagon in October 1967 to protest the war in Vietnam, and we were arrested during the student takeover of Columbia University in April 1968, but we never xx / Preface met. Then, in 1969,1 reviewed Hoffman's second book, Woodstock Nation, for Liberation News Service, the movement's self-styled answer to the Associated Press. Soon thereafter, Abbie called to say he appreciated my favorable comments. We finally met face-to-face at the Law Commune, an office of radical attorneys who were defending the Black Panthers, Yippies, and Columbia students who had been arrested for occupying campus buildings to protest the university's discriminatory policies. From time to time we saw one another at political events and parties on the Lower East Side, and at "hip" restaurants like Max's Kansas City in Union Square. "We didn't become friends, however, until the winter of 1970, when he was 34 and I was 28. By then the Chicago Conspiracy trial was over, and Abbie was a media celebrity and the movement s male sex symbol, an icon of the revolution. For countless young men who wanted to defy the system and at the same time become famous, Abbie was a fleshand-blood role model. By then, too, I was no longer a straight-andnarrow academic. I had been arrested and pummeled by a dozen or so New York City policemen after a demonstration to protest the murders of two Chicago Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and the Village Voice had splashed my picture on the front page with the caption "Moratorium Man Beaten." I'd taken a leave of absence from teaching to write a book about the British empire and British literature, and when I wasn't in the library I was a reporter and activist in the movement. Among other tasks, I carried messages between members of the Weather Underground, who envisioned themselves as armed revolutionaries, and their aboveground contacts, including organizers, journalists, lawyers, family members, and friends. One afternoon at Macy's I received an envelope and was asked to deliver it to 114 East Thirteenth Street in Manhattan. Under no circumstances was I to engage in conversation with the individual who answered the door. The document was, of course, for Abbie, and I soon learned that it outlined how he might help the underground. It also inadvertently served as a letter of recommendation for me and proof of my radical credentials. As a professor I didn't carry much weight in Abbie's scale of nonconformist values, but as a courier who had access to the underground I was a force to be reckoned with, at least in his eyes. Without a moment's hesitation he invited me into his rooftop Preface / xxi apartment, introduced me to his wife, Anita, who was making stuffed mushrooms, and gave me a tour of his clean, cozy rooms. This bourgeois scene was hardly what I would have imagined for the King of the Yippies, but it made me feel more comfortable. Abbie opened the letter and read it, laughing as he did. Then he handed it to me, knowing that he was breaking the underground's rules. Matter-of-factly, Abbie explained that he was the Howard in "Dear Howard." Howard was his alias as well as his real middle name: Abbott Howard Hoffman was his full, legal name. The "Molly" who signed the letter, he told me, was none other than Bernardine Dohrn, a graduate of the University of Chicago who had been a key organizer for both the National Lawyers Guild and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading radical organization on college campuses in the mid and late sixties. Now Bernie, as Abbie liked to call her, was the leader of the Weather Underground, and her "Wanted" poster appeared in post offices from coast to coast. Soon after I delivered the letter to Abbie, I not only converted to the irreverent Yippies, but even became the Yippie minister of education. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and I were driving together in the Bronx one day when I suggested that the Youth International Party, as the Yippies were now calling themselves, needed a minister of education and a series of provocative manifestos for students on the subject of schooling. Jerry and Abbie agreed and immediately conferred upon me the title Youth International Party Minister of Education. Wasn't it necessary to conduct a discussion or hold an election by the general membership? I asked. Not at all, they insisted. If I said I was the minister of education, that was good enough—not only for them but for all the Yippies. Soon thereafter I began to define myself as the Yippie minister of education, a title that I took to be part put-on, part real. The straight world took it at face value, and when my book about culture and empire was reviewed in the press, I was described solemnly in the Times Literary Supplement as the Minister of Education for the Youth International Party. For years I had defined myself as a Marxist intellectual. I had assumed that there was a real world, that it was governed by certain immutable, historical laws, and that it could only be changed by a revolution engineered by a disciplined party, a working class, and its allies. xxii / Preface Now, slowly but surely I began to shed my Marxist skin, and to accept the notion that "reality is made up," as Abbie put it: that everything is a fiction. I came to accept the idea that generational rather than class conflict was crucial for historical change, and that cultural rather than political or economic revolution was the key to the transformation of society. Moreover, I accepted the idea that radicals could use the mass media to transform consciousness and change institutions and values. Though these ideas weren't original with Abbie, he popularized and exploited them more effectively than anyone else. For a while in the late sixties and early seventies, his movie—his version of reality—seemed more compelling than anyone else's, not only to me but to an entire generation of young, white men. Life proved to be a lot more of a lark for me as a Yippie than as a leftwing intellectual. There were games to play on the basketball court and at peace movement meetings. Abbie and I were pals. We watched TV together, made the rounds of law and magazine offices, and schmoozed in bookstores and restaurants. On Saturday mornings we made our weekly pilgrimage to the Luxor Baths and kibitzed with the middleaged businessmen who were sweating it out in the sauna and the steam room, and who approached Abbie as though he was a Mafia don who could solve their problems. "They ask me for advice about their kids," he chortled. "They want me to tell them how to keep them in school and off drugs." The irony of the situation delighted him immensely: he was being asked to conspire with the fathers and to bridge the very generation gap that he wanted to widen. It was the seventies now, but the sixties hadn't ended. We organized antiwar protests, demonstrated in the streets, and marched outside courthouses to demand freedom for the Black Panthers, including Bobby G. Seale, their chairman and cofounder (with Huey P. Newton), who was on trial in New Haven, Connecticut. Abbie and I traveled to Europe together; we met with the French Yippies and with Parisian editors and publishers who were looking for hot American literary properties like Abbie's Revolution for the Hell of It and Jerry Rubin's Do It! In Algeria a Yippie delegation that included myself, Abbie's wife Anita, and Bernardine Dohrn's younger sister Jennifer conferred with Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver and tried to create a new, all- Preface / xxiii encompassing international organization that would harbor Yippies, hippies, Weathermen, and Black Panthers. But there were too many conflicting egos, too many political disagreements, and, much to Abbie s dismay, the megaorganization never got off the ground. Underground Fiction For a while we lost track of one another. Then, in the summer of 1973, Abbie was arrested for selling three pounds of cocaine to undercover narcotics agents in Manhattan, and once again we were in cahoots. He had never even hinted that he'd been involved with the cocaine trade, but now that he'd been caught, he wanted me to know that he was guilty and that he needed help. He was desperate to go underground and avoid what he felt would be an embarrassing media trial, conviction, and long prison term. There was nothing for him in prison, he felt, no way to create a new identity for himself. The underground, he insisted, offered the possibility to generate another persona. The Weather people had provided Abbie with fake identification papers, and I helped him rehearse what he thought was going to be his new role: a college professor, an expert on Walt Whitman's erotic poetry. We met in out-of-the-way restaurants in the Village and planned his getaway, where he'd live, and how he'd survive. He was wearing slacks and Harris tweed jackets now, and he'd exchanged his trademark Massachusetts accent for the generic voice of academia. One day at the Bronx Zoo he asked me to contact a lawyer in midtown Manhattan and pick up an envelope containing ten thousand dollars in cash. I remember being impressed that he'd managed to stash away that much money, and when I handed it over, I said good-bye, thinking I'd never see him again. Then one day in April 1975, he was on the telephone with me again as though he'd never been away. He was in Los Angeles. I was on my way to Mexico City to write a book about B. Traven, the German anarchist who settled in Mexico in the 1920s, where he wrote a number of books, the best known of which is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. We met at a hotel near the L.A. airport, and the first thing Abbie did was to lift his T-shirt and urge me to hit him in the stomach as hard as I could, an offer I easily declined. He was Barry now: he was physically xxiv / Preface fit and working as a Hollywood screenwriter and producer about to make his first blockbuster movie. That afternoon, Ken Kelley, a former underground newspaper editor who was now working for Playboy, interviewed Abbie about his underground adventures. We watched on television as helicopters lifted frantic survivors from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon and drank champagne to celebrate the end of the war in Vietnam, which had seemed so endless that it had come to define our lives. Abbie explained that he'd had an operation for hemorrhoids and was in a great deal of physical pain. Indeed, he was unable to sit down, even on a toilet, and much to my alarm he was popping pills and snorting cocaine. He claimed to have sold the idea for a movie about two fugitives, a Black Panther and a Yippie, who travel incognito down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and from there to Havana and Fidel Castro's protection. The story sounded a lot like Mark Twain's classic American novel with Abbie as Huck Finn and Huey Newton as Jim, but Abbie had added his own upbeat ending: his fugitives would join a Cuban baseball team and defeat the New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium. In the film's last scene, the governor would pardon them. It was the kind of resolution he hoped to write for his own problems with the law. It was hard to tell how much he was acting and how much he was for real, but he seemed to be in much psychic pain brought on by the death of his father, John. His grief took me by surprise. For as long as I'd known him, he'd spoken of his father as though he was the enemy: the epitome of blind authority and the stereotype of the raging bull. Now he was expressing a sense of loss for his dearly beloved "Papa." He was angry that he'd been unable to attend his father's funeral in Worcester; if he had gone, he'd have been arrested. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had swarmed all over the synagogue, expecting him to put in an appearance and hoping to arrest him. He had known his father was going to die, so he'd packed a "funeral suit," as he called it, and schlepped it across the underground. As though to prove the depths of his devotion, he flung open the doors to the closet, and pointed to the rather ordinary-looking suit he would have worn. When the news of his father's death finally arrived, it was too late to go home, he explained. No one in his family had bothered to tell him in Preface / xxv time. Even worse, his father s brothers were blaming him for Johns fatal heart attack. If only he hadn't been busted for cocaine, they were saying. If only he hadn't gone underground and broken his poor father's heart. The underground had become a prison for Abbie, but it was also a playground. He explained that he had recently remarried and showed me photos of what looked like a wedding ceremony. He said that since he hadn't divorced Anita he was now a "monogamous bigamist." I could see that the idea tickled him tremendously, and he liked the idea, too, that his new wife had met him and fallen in love with him as "Barry," the pauper of the underground, rather than with Abbie, the prince of the sixties. Once again he was telling tall tales. His wife's code name was "Jane," but her real name was Johanna Lawrenson, and not only was she was a shiksa, he said, but a world-class model whom he'd spotted and fallen in love with on a fashion runway in Mexico City. Abbie often made Johanna out to be apolitical and anti-intellectual, but that wasn't the case. She had been raised in a highly intellectual and very political family, and much of that background and breeding showed. Her father, Jack Lawrenson, had been a Communist and a leading trade union organizer in the thirties and forties, and she identified with the workers of the world. Her mother, Helen, whom Abbie had met under his alias, wrote for Esquire and Vanity Fair and had made a reputation for herself on the basis of two articles, "Latins Make Lousy Lovers" and "In Defense of the American Gigolo." It had been a difficult act for Johanna to follow, but by living on the lam with Abbie, she was doing her best to emulate her legendary mother. When I met Johanna on the way to Las Vegas, I felt that I had as much in common with her as with Abbie since, like me, she'd grown up in the culture of the Old Left during the heyday of McCarthyism in the fifties. She had grown up feeling un-American, while Abbie had been an ail-American kid in an ail-American family, playing sports and collecting trophies. But nowj in the underground, Abbie had adopted a new family and embraced a new set of parents. He wasn't a Hoffman anymore but a Lawrenson, and he was thrilled to belong to a family of communists and bohemians, literary and political celebrities. In the neon world of Las Vegas, mild-mannered Barry vanished and flashyiAbbie came alive again. At the Hilton Hotel he registered under a pseudonym, and after settling in our suite, we took a sauna in the xxvi / Preface basement, "just like old times at the Luxor Hotel," he said. But before we could work up a sweat, Abbie vanished, and by the time I caught up with him, he was back in the room, fully dressed. He was standing as though paralyzed, holding suitcases in both hands. He had been recognized in the sauna, he insisted, and it would only be a matter of time before the police arrived to arrest him. It didn't do any good to tell him that we had been alone in the sauna. His mind was made up: he had to get out. When Johanna returned from her own sauna, we made plans to escape from the police, whether they were coming or simply a figment of Abbie's paranoid imagination. The situation might have been hilariously funny, but instead it was terribly frightening. I used a pay phone in the lobby (since the phone in the room was undoubtedly tapped) and spoke to one of Abbie's lawyers, who promised to send reinforcements. Then I went back to the room and began to load the luggage into the van. Abbie was talking nonstop now, but I didn't understand what he was saying or what he meant to say. It was all hieroglyphics. The last night in the hotel he became violent and menacing. He slapped me across the face, and my glasses flew across the room. Then he whacked Johanna across her face and pulled her hair so hard that she screamed. We held him down in the bed, and Johanna tried to soothe him, but he tossed us off his back, then dashed out of the room in his underwear and a T-shirt, screaming "I'm Abbie Hoffman! I'm Abbie Hoffman!" A few guests in the hall heard him, but no one seemed to care. It didn't matter to me whether he was for real or acting, crazy or sane. I wanted out. I don't think that Johanna ever forgave me for leaving her with Abbie, but I had my own life to save. I grabbed my suitcase, took a cab to the airport, and flew to Mexico City, pausing only long enough to leave my address and to have Johanna write down their address and phone number in Teopotzlan, a small village not far from Cuernavaca. I remember thinking that Abbie had taken an immense fall from his triumphant days. His behavior was aberrant and deranged. It was also reminiscent of other sixties figures—such as Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and Rennie Davis—who had lost their way now that the revolution was over. Three weeks later, I met up with Abbie again. Only this time he was a different person: apologetic, polite, and anxious to be my friend. He Preface / xxvii was speaking Spanish as much as English. He'd turned into just another North American tourist who had fallen in love with Mexico. Wha t he wanted to tell me most of all was that the incident in Las Vegas would never, could never, happen again. He had it all under control now. He had it all figured out: he had cracked up at the very moment that the American Empire was falling apart in Vietnam. It didn't make sense to me, but it did to him. For years, he said, he'd been preoccupied with the war, and now that it had ended, his own identity had come unraveled. He had allowed himself to go crazy, and in going crazy he had regained his sanity, or so he insisted. Shouting out his real name was self-destructive, he admitted. It was as though he wanted to be recognized, apprehended, and incarcerated so that he could escape from his fugitive life. I could see his argument, of course, but to me what seemed apparent was his inability to adapt to the underground and to the undramatic life of the seventies. He wanted to be Abbie Hoffman, the media personality and the star of the sixties, all over again. Though he'd changed his name and his appearance, he'd been unable to make more fundamental changes in his personality, and that was sad. It also seemed to me that crying out his name had been an existential act of defiance and rebellion, a refusal to play by the rules o f the fugitive game, even if it meant that he'd be captured. He was Abbie Hoffman. He wasn't going to deny his name or his identity. He wasn't going to shut up, be invisible, remain anonymous. Years later he appeared on the T V show 20I20 with Barbara Walters and described the crack-up in Las Vegas as "the most painful thing in my life." He persuaded me to go on TV, too, and describe the incident. Soon Las Vegas became an archetypal place in the odyssey of Abbie Hoffman: a place of ultimate pain, but also a place where he'd made a crazy declaration of his own independence. Abbie and I spent time together in Mexico and in California in the mid- and late seventies. In Mexico we visited landmarks of the revolution and milestones in the life of Emiliano Zapata. We wandered through the labyrinth of Mexico City, visited museums to see the work of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, explored ancient ruins, and drove to small towns in the countryside. We played at being exiles and gringos, hungry for new food, new landscapes, a new culture. There was a constant stream of visitors from the United States, most of them sixties people, and more often than not it was the sixties that we talked about. xxviii / Preface Abbie was also writing about the sixties in his autobiography, which had the working title "Kiss and Tell." I watched him as he created a "false document" about his own life, and I was fascinated. I listened to him talk about himself, then read chapters in which he exaggerated, aggrandized, and embellished on his activities—for example, in the civil rights movement in the South. Anxious to get to the truth of the matter, I interviewed him. When he was growing up, were his parents middle-class? I wanted to know. "Ruling-class," he said, smirking. "How many cars did your parents have?" I asked. "Too many," he said, without missing a beat. His answers to my questions about his background and his past were almost always ambiguous and playful. When he insisted that he was now living a working-class life, I pointed out that he had an apartment in Mexico City and a large house with a swimming pool and horses in the countryside. Wasn't that rather aristocratic? I asked, only to learn that I'd hurt his feelings. It was a transitional time for Abbie. Little by little, he began to see how he could use the underground to break into new territory. Inspired by B. Traven, whom he called "the world's greatest fugitive" and "the best working-class writer that ever lived," he created his own fugitive personae. Traven had taken other names and other identities, including T. Torsvan, the Norwegian anthropologist, and Hal Croves, the American literary agent. Abbie took the names and identities of Barry Freed and Howard Samuels, among others, and began to develop a career for himself as a political activist. He also began to write articles about his adventures in the underground—such as his trip to Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb—that were part fiction, part nonfiction, though he no longer seemed able to tell the difference. In 1976 I moved to California and kept in touch with Abbie by mail. Later he and Johanna stayed briefly in San Francisco at the home of Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Starship, then, in the winter of 1979-80, moved into my house in Sonoma County. Abbie was finishing his autobiography and preparing to turn himself in to the authorities. I learned that a psychiatrist had diagnosed him as suffering from manic-depressive illness and that he was taking lithium for his mood swings, but I'd long observed that he could be down as well as up, so the medical terms didn't mean much to me. I remember a conversation about the eighties that suggested the distance Preface ¡ xxix between us. Abbie thought that the decade ahead was going to be a replay of the sixties, but I foresaw years of conservatism. Soon he was accusing me of cynicism, and I was accusing him of hiding from his own despair. He was happy, he said, and showed me a treatment for a movie about himself and Johanna, which he insisted was "completely true to life," though almost none of it was. He was Billy. She was Sally. They were ecowarriors in love and on the run from the FBI. In the proverbial nick of time they would elude the dragnet and escape to Hollywood, where they would sign a contract for a blockbuster romantic comedy about themselves, then literally walk into the sunset and live happily ever after. As it turned out, the eighties weren't very funny or romantic for Abbie, though he put up a good front and insisted in public that they were better than the sixties. His story definitely didn't have the conventional happy ending. In April 1989, when I heard the news that he had committed suicide, I had the strange feeling that he had cried out one last time, "I'm Abbie Hoffman!" and that his cry exuded not only the optimism and joy of the sixties but also its darkness and despair. His suicide by a drug overdose surprised me but also seemed a fitting way for him to die, much as Huey Newton's death by an assassins bullet in the streets of Oakland later that year seemed also appropriate, given the violence of his life. For years Abbie had talked about committing "revolutionary suicide"—consciously borrowing the phrase from Newton— of dying on the barricades in battle against the system. But he was never a violent revolutionary, and most of his political and cultural confrontations with the system were symbolic. I remembered that in Mexico in 1975, Abbie had borrowed The March to the Montería, one of B. Travens proletarian novels, and when he finished it had explained that he wanted to exercise the ultimate power, which to him meant choosing "the moment to die." I was disappointed that his family members denied the clear evidence of his suicide. "They found no drugs around him," his 83-year-old mother, Florence, told reporters from the home in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Abbie had been raised. "I think suicide may be ruled out," she added. Florence's youngest son, Jack, explained to the media that Abbie had merely been "careless with pills." His death was an accident, not a deliberate, willful act, Jack insisted. Many radicals from xxx / Preface the sixties were also in denial about Abbie's death, reflecting the movement's failure to confront grief, acknowledge personal tragedy, and accept loss. Dave Dellinger, a pacifist and one of Abbie's codefendants at the Chicago Conspiracy trial, told the New York Times, "I don't believe for one moment the suicide thing." No suicide note had been found, Dellinger pointed out. But to Jerry Rubin the absence of a note was entirely in character. It was, Rubin suggested, a way of "making a statement and stirring discussion through the mystery." Many people were determined to create a murder mystery about Abbie's death. Others found the notion that he might have been murdered enticing. "Who or what killed Abbie?" Bruce McCabe asked in an article entitled "Why did Abbie Hoffman die?" that appeared in the Boston Globe and gave rise to far-fetched speculations about his death. From my perspective there was little if anything that was mysterious about Abbie's suicide. The big question wasn't why he died, but why he had lived. Who, in fact, was the man who cried "I'm Abbie Hoffman!"? What did his life have to say about the life of the sixties and sixties people? Were we really self-destructive and suicidal? This book is an attempt to answer those questions. I have drawn on my own memories, recollections, and interviews with Abbie, but this book is also based on over 250 interviews with Abbie's friends, comrades, and family members as well as on FBI files, public documents, newspaper accounts, court records, letters, and T V and radio broadcasts. For the Hell of It is Abbie's biography, but I have also viewed it as a historical interpretation of the times. In that sense it is a contribution to what Tom Hayden described in his memoir, Reunion, as "an ongoing struggle today to define the sixties," an enterprise that has now been highly contested for three decades. While Abbie appears in documentary films about the era, and while Abbie and Abbie-like characters have appeared in Hollywood films (such as The Big Fix [1978], in which F. Murray Abraham plays "Abbie"), Abbie the historical figure has been largely omitted from books about the sixties. For example, Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage unfairly lumps Abbie together with Jerry Rubin and does both of them a disservice by describing them as "public nuisances." The neglect of Abbie is unfortunate but understandable. As the American historian and civil rights activist Staughton Lynd observed in an inter- Preface / xxxi view with me, "sixties history tends to get written as the history of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and since Abbie was never a mover or a shaker in SDS or SNCC, that made him prima facie left out." By focusing on organizations like SDS and SNCC, the historians of the sixties often make the activism of the era seem much better organized and more carefully directed by political leaders than it really was. Focusing on Abbie reveals the sixties as a rough-and-tumble era that was messy, unpredictable, wildly imaginative, and more than a little bit crazy. Focusing on Abbie also shows that certain individuals really did alter the course of history. In his biography of Hoffman, Martin ("Marty") Jezer, a long-time sixties pacifist, observes that "Abbie played the youth revolt like a maestro, pitting the hip counterculture against the straight mainstream culture with spectacular effect." He goes on, however, to note that "cultural issues .. . are always explosive" and that "Abbie s Yippie years are a warning against fighting political battles on cultural turf." But criticizing Abbie Hoffman for waging cultural warfare when he should have engaged in political campaigning is like criticizing a leopard for having spots, or a fish for swimming in water. Cultural revolution is what Abbie Hoffman did best, and cultural rather than political or economic revolution was what the sixties were largely about. Granted, sixties protest resulted in profound social change. It ended legal segregation in the South, gave birth to contemporary feminism, and together with an international protest movement helped end the war in Vietnam. But the sixties did not bring about the fundamental redistribution of power or wealth achieved in other revolutions, whether in France, China, Russia, or eighteenth-century America. The sixties did usher in revolutionary changes in the ways we think about the world and about ourselves: black and white, male and female, gay and straight, Anglo and Latino, working-class and ruling-class. Abbie was a major figure in that revolution in consciousness. As John Simon, one of his editors at Random House, observed, "Abbie knew that once you got into peoples' heads, you could change their minds." The sixties were mind-blowing, as we used to say. They made revolution i' popular idea again in a society that had come to think of revolution as something to be feared and destroyed—something un- xxxii / Preface American. Abbie helped to recapture the word and the concept of revolution. Why not have a revolution that was not for peace, bread, and land or for liberty and equality, but was a revolution that Americans could understand and take part in, a revolution of the sixties, by the sixties, and for the sixties: a revolution just for the hell of it.

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