nineteen sixty-eight may have been the most eventful, the most changeful year in American history—and not only for the quickening pace of the anti-war movement and the galvanizing effect of the presidential elections, although I think these things, like the acrid smell of fire in the air, lent a sense of drama to a wide range of events, large and small. The year had begun with a laugh (Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In hit the tube on January 22), saw the unexpected success of the McDonald’s “Big Mac” hamburger which was “invented” that year, and ended with a nationally televised trip around the moon. It was a year of great leaps between large distances. And the trip to the moon was symbolic of, but not more extreme than, the distances that stretched that year between millions of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and brothers.
No longer was the anti-war movement perceived as a marginal trend. Martin Luther King, Jr., had begun speaking out against the war, connecting what he recognized to be its immorality to the struggle of the civil rights movement. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were actively involved in anti-war protests of one kind or another, a majority of the American people said they opposed the war, and Vietnam veterans against the war, whose sense of disillusionment and betrayal were based on first-hand experience of the war’s horror, gave to the movement a new grounding and a driving force. Anti-war activism became a sort of gold standard of right and wrong. It was dividing families, and it was changing America.
Our family didn’t fight about the war in the ways that many families did. No one was drafted and killed, and there were no screaming arguments, but the war came home to us in other ways. Abbie was arrested over and over in 1968, more often than during any other year of his life. Dad used to complain that UPI and AP were more likely than he was to know where in hell Abbie was: “Now we have to read the papers to see which jail he’s in,” he’d say bitterly. I felt like the bouncing ball going back and forth between Abbie and Dad, bound by my feelings of loyalty to them both.
Abbie and I were both active against the war. But Abbie took it a step further. To him, American middle-class values amounted to the same hateful point of view that had gotten the country into Vietnam in the first place. At the same time, part of him seemed still to appreciate and enjoy my conventional success. “Well, you got the business,” he would say with a laugh. I think he liked to think we were a team, that between us we had all the angles covered.
But there was no real closeness between us. Just as the year before our parents had experienced Abbie as a stranger in their home when he visited for Thanksgiving, now I experienced that strangeness.
The funny thing was, Abbie loved what was going on; he loved 1968. He saw the walls of postwar ’50s America finally crumbling and he thrilled to the excitement of it. To him it didn’t just mean the destruction of something, it also meant new beginnings, the opportunity to get things right for once—revolution in all its glory. That’s what he thought was happening in 1968. In his autobiography, Abbie would call it “The Year That Was,”1 and by that I think he meant that it was a year that had everything, everything that could be desired.
On Friday, March 22, the night of the spring equinox, the Yippies! held a “Yip-in” in Grand Central Terminal, at midnight, designed as a foretaste of the Festival of Life planned for Chicago. Participants had been asked to bring “Flowers, Beads, Music, Radios, Pillows, Eats, Love and Peace.” Afterward, there was going to be a sunrise celebration in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow to “Yip Up the Sun.”
Thousands showed up at Grand Central, expecting a peaceful party reminiscent of the 1967 Be-In in Central Park. No one anticipated violence. But when they found Forty-Second Street cordoned off and hundreds of police milling about, people weren’t put off by the threat of violence, either. This was very different from encounters with the police that had taken place before.
As the “Yip-In” got going, one Yippie! climbed the information kiosk and pulled the hands off the clock. Suddenly, cops advanced in droves, using the enclosed space of the cathedral-like main hall to flush out and corner their prey, beating people left and right. Several partygoers were thrown by police through plate glass. Abbie was beaten unconscious and had a vertebra smashed, and he would refer afterward to the “Grand Central Massacre” as having been more frightening than anything that would happen in Chicago. Many others were badly hurt by marauding police units. But the partygoers also exhibited a new defiance in Grand Central that night. Instead of getting away as quickly as they could, large numbers of Yippies! and Lower East Siders kept coming back to face the cops, and hours after the police had started breaking up the “Yip-In,” it was still going on.
Abbie went from Grand Central to Bellevue Hospital, where he was bandaged and released. Then he went straight to WBAI radio, where he sat in on his friend Bob Fass’s late night show to put a Yippie! spin on what had happened, claiming the bloodshed signified a new political activism and a new determination to end the war—which interpretation would be picked up the next day in the New York Times’s front-page description.
Out of the field of Democratic presidential candidates that had gone into the February New Hampshire primary, one had survived, the candidate of hope and peace, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had come in right on the heels of the incumbent Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy seemed to be the candidate to galvanize the youth vote and the anti-war vote. Then, in March, Bobby Kennedy joined the race. And on March 31, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. Suddenly, peace candidates were everywhere.
But Abbie wasn’t interested in the election. However left-leaning a Democratic candidate might be, he was part of the establishment, Abbie felt, and the establishment wasn’t where change was going to come from. Instead, Abbie concentrated his energies on the forthcoming Festival of Life, which he hoped was going to steal the thunder from that summer’s Democratic National Convention. Together with Jerry Rubin, Abe Peck, editor of the Chicago-based alternative newspaper, The Seed, and other Yippie! organizers, Abbie was busy applying for the proper permits for the Chicago festival and getting people energized.
Then on April 4, in Memphis, Martin Luther King, Jr., was gunned down, and that day everything changed. Everyone even peripherally associated with the civil rights movement took the hurt very personally. It was as if an attempt had been made to kill not just a man but a movement as well. There was rioting and police violence in 126 cities, mostly in black ghettos, resulting in 21,000 arrests, hundreds of injuries and 46 deaths. On Chicago’s South Side, Mayor Daley showed his iron fist. In Washington, federal troops guarded the White House and a machine-gun post was installed on the roof of the Capitol. Suddenly a lot of people who had been standing on the sidelines began to take sides.
Tom Hayden would say that the spring of 1968 signified the “decapitation” of liberalism, referring to the despair that so many people, black and white, felt after King’s death, and the journey it sent them on toward new types of approaches to the problems we were all trying to solve. To Abbie, King’s murder made the counterculture alternative, represented by the Yippies! and the Festival of Life, seem all the more important, and he stepped up his organizing efforts.
In New York, emboldened by the uprisings in the inner cities, the Columbia University campus was heating up around a combination of events, some related to the War in Vietnam, and others concerning local issues. The university president, Grayson Kirk, had gone on record as saying that Columbia was not a military contractor, and then it was revealed that he had lied, and in fact Columbia was a major weapons research contractor, part of a secret consortium of universities doing military work for the government. At the same time, Columbia was getting ready to build a new gym in the Morningside Heights area of Harlem, one that would destroy housing and a large part of the park and yet be off-limits to community residents. A group of students, led by Mark Rudd, decided to shake up the campus, and invited Abbie and other organizers from downtown to lend them some experienced help.
Help came, and the demonstrations succeeded, partly due to the discovery of a network of underground tunnels beneath the campus, which allowed the protesting students to maintain a siege. But before it was over, the university administration, working closely with New York police, chose a tough approach, aimed particularly at those they considered “outside agitators.” Abbie and a number of his friends, including Gus Reichbach (now a New York State judge), Marty Kenner (his old buddy from U.C. Berkeley), and writer Jonah Raskin, were arrested on April 30 on charges of criminal trespass.2 Abbie was badly beaten up by police at Columbia, and other demonstrators were beaten as well in full view of the crowd. The Columbia University actions that April and May were another critical stop on the road to the Chicago Democratic Convention, revealing a nation increasingly at war with itself, in which there were no ivory towers, no neutral observers.
These were the days when Yippie! was still in its infancy and needed all the nurturing Abbie and his cohorts could give it. And that’s where Abbie’s energy was going. It became an obsession with him, as all his projects did. Yippie! became the expression for Abbie of his joy, disillusionment, theatricality, McLuhanisms, Mailerisms, and Maslowisms. And the more Yippie! grew into something he felt could be a force for change, the more he saw the opening up of the electoral system to more progressive ideas as a threat to Yippie!. He saw McCarthy as a threat, and he feared Bobby Kennedy most of all.
Bobby had jumped in with a crusader’s vehemence, opposing Humphrey, the Democratic Party’s machine candidate. He was adamantly against the war and really seemed intent on listening to people’s grievances. Bobby singlehandedly raised the flag of liberalism off the bloody battlefield and was the only candidate who looked like he could lead us to victory. But Abbie believed that Kennedy would be unable to bring about the revolutionary change that was necessary to end the war by working through the system.
Throughout April and May, Bobby Kennedy just seemed to get better and better—more committed to civil rights, more the people’s candidate—and his popularity soared. And as Bobby’s popularity grew each day, Abbie sensed the prospects for Yippie! sink:
Yippie stock went down quicker than the money we had dumped on the Stock Exchange floor. Every night we would turn on the TV set and there was the young knight with long hair [Bobby K.], holding out his hand (a gesture he learned from the Pope): “Give me your hand—it is a long road ahead.”
When young longhairs told you how they’d heard that Bobby turned on [smoked grass], you knew Yippie! was really in trouble.
Yippie! grew irrelevant.
National action seemed meaningless. . . . by the end of May we had decided to disband Yippie! and cancel the Chicago festival3
Then, on June 5, in Los Angeles, Bobby was shot to death. Like all the rest of us, Abbie “shuddered at the recognition of our collective frailty,”4 but politically he didn’t miss a beat:
The statement [to disband Yippie!] was all ready when up stepped Sirhan Sirhan, and in ten seconds he made it a whole new ball game.
We postponed calling off Chicago and tried to make some sense out of what the hell had just happened. . . .
The United States political system was proving more insane than Yippie! Reality and unreality had in six months switched sides.
The calls began pouring into our office. They wanted to know only one thing: “When do we leave for Chicago?”
As the summer drew on, more and more of Abbie’s time was spent planning for the Festival of Life in Chicago, and with each passing week the plans seemed to grow larger, as events and the general mood of the country seemed almost to necessitate some kind of confrontation. The story Abbie liked to tell was that after his bags were packed, the last thing he did before leaving for Chicago was to call Ma in Florida.
“Chicago? What are you going there for?” she asked him.
“To wreck the Democratic Party, Ma,” Abbie answered.
“Well, dress warm, it’s a windy city,” Ma replied.
In the spring of 1968, Ma and Dad had extended their annual stay in Florida. I had moved the offices of Worcester Medical into a building on Chandler Street we purchased with the help of a 3 percent loan from the Small Business Administration. Business in 1968 was booming, after I’d gotten us out of pill sales and expanded into new areas. I even owned a race horse. But psychologically and emotionally, I was at a low point. Joan was threatening divorce because of all the time I spent at the Scarborough racetrack. And the unhappier she seemed to be, the more time I spent at the track, just to avoid having to deal with our problems. We went bimonthly to a marriage counselor, which hardly seemed to help.
Dad was largely ignoring the medical advice he’d gotten from his doctor following his first heart attack, and was well on his way to his second. Abbie called frequently, not really to see how I was doing but for me to pass along word of his exploits to our parents, to Phyllis, and to his old friends in Worcester. Not exactly home-town boy makes good, but home-town boy makes bad, which was even better.
Dad liked to say that he was staying in Florida because of Abbie’s notoriety: “My son’s driven me from my home.” But really, Dad loved Florida. Miami Beach was like his second religion. Cruising his four-door dark brown Lincoln sedan down Ocean Drive meant something. So did the white shoes he wore and the game of golf he played every morning. Of course, there was a catch. For Dad, retirement came on the heels of the collapse of the pill end of our business. So rather than being just a status symbol, time spent in Miami Beach became for Dad a kind of heroic act of defiance against what he saw as his failure in life. It hurt him to know that his pill palace had gone down, that his old enemies the pharmacists had beaten him in the end. Before leaving for Florida, he had watched as a wrecking crane reduced to a heap the building that had housed Worcester Medical Supply all those years.
Near their apartment in Florida, Ma and Dad were surprised one day by two FBI agents, who jumped out of the bushes and started snapping pictures. I don’t think J. Edgar Hoover needed the photos. It was harassment, pure and simple, but in its own way highly sophisticated, because unlike Abbie, we—and especially John and Florence Hoffman—didn’t know how to respond to this kind of attack. Did Ma and Dad somehow share responsibility with Abbie for whatever it was he had done? That was the implication. Dad had worked all his life for a place among the alter kockers, the big shots sitting in their deck chairs down in Miami, only to find that he himself was the father of their worst nightmare. At the spa, on the beach, Dad would hear comments about Abbie: “He’s going to ruin it for the rest of us.” “He’s an embarrassment to the Jewish faith.” He would just shake his head, basically in agreement with their criticisms, but unwilling ever to give up his son.
That summer, Phyllis was in Mexico, where she had a job as a guide at the Summer Olympics and where she would meet Hilario, her future husband. Dad and Ma stayed in Florida, spending most of their time inside where it was air-conditioned. Joan and I took our first trip to Europe that July, before starting our family (Justin, our first son, would be born exactly one year later). On our return, I mentioned to Abbie that some friends of mine were going to the Festival of Life and I was thinking of going, too. Chicago was a kind of hometown to me since my stint at the University of Illinois. Abbie warned me against coming. He expected large-scale violence, he said. He almost ordered me not to go. I wasn’t looking for trouble, and when Joan also expressed concerns about the trip, I canceled my plans and put Chicago out of my mind.
On the night of August 7, the Yippies! met with Deputy Mayor Stahl, and on August 8 submitted yet another of many applications for the Festival of Life to take place in Lincoln Park. Yet another application for which they would receive no reply. And on Friday, August 23, began the week which, for the rest of his life, Abbie would refer to not as a point in time but as the place where he entered the history and mythology of the nation: Chicago. What I have of the events of that week are the stories, like snapshots, which Abbie relayed to me at different times over the years. They don’t always describe the main events, since Abbie’s role was to participate in something free-flowing and chaotic. But they do give a sense of just how improvisatory, and at the same time how responsive and intense, Abbie’s involvement that week was.
The only killing that occurred at the Chicago demonstrations took place on Thursday, August 22, several days before the convention opened. A Native American named Dean Johnson was shot dead by two police officers. Abbie was stunned when he heard the news, fearing that this might be the first of many murders by Chicago police. Mayor Daley’s tough stance had already succeeded in scaring off most protesters from coming. Things were ludicrously unbalanced: some twenty-five thousand uniformed police officers, undercover agents, national guardsmen, and army reserve units faced off against a few thousand demonstrators. The protesters were determined to play it light and easy, but the forces of law and order had been pumped up by so much misinformation about the plans of the agitators—some of it put out by the Yippies! themselves—that the situation was out of hand before it began. Members of the police actually thought that their drinking water was going to be laced with LSD, and that Yippies! posing as taxi drivers were planning to kidnap convention delegates. Everything that the Yippies! said as a joke was turned into a threat within Chicago’s law enforcement community. Abbie, perhaps alone among the activist leaders, saw the communication potential of the situation that had evolved. The more the protesters were outnumbered, the better it would look on television. And the more it became clear that far fewer people were going to show up than the festival organizers had hoped, the more Abbie insisted the festival go forward according to plan.
The next day, Abbie led a group of fifty or sixty protesters in workshops on self-defense and first aid in Lincoln Park. The group was surrounded by two hundred to two hundred and fifty police, both in and out of uniform, taking pictures and monitoring the group. And late that afternoon, police nailed signs all around the park announcing an eleven p.m. curfew. The Yippie! candidate for president, a large pig named Pigasus, was “arrested,” together with Jerry Rubin, and the singer Phil Ochs.
On Saturday morning, August 24, Abbie turned around and faced the two undercover cops tailing him and demanded that they take him to see Police Chief Lynskey, who was in charge of the Lincoln Park area. When they found Lynskey, he told Abbie that under no circumstances was the Festival of Life going to be permitted, and furthermore, that if anyone broke a single city ordinance the police would clear the whole park, and that if Abbie in particular did anything wrong, Lynskey planned to arrest him personally. Lynskey suggested to Abbie, “Why don’t you try to kick me in the shins right now?” Abbie responded that he didn’t want to do that just then since NBC wasn’t around. This prompted Chief Lynskey to praise Abbie for being honest, at least.
Later in the day Abbie helped organize a hash cookie production line. By mid-afternoon there were two thousand people in the park singing, smoking grass, eating hash brownies, and enjoying the lazy weather. At a planning meeting, Abbie argued in favor of disobeying the curfew and trying to sleep in the park. He was outvoted by more moderate Yippies including Ed Sanders, Paul Krassner, and Allen Ginsberg. And at curfew, the remaining demonstrators left the park for the streets, only to be chased and clubbed anyway by waiting police.
On Sunday, the official inauguration of the Festival of Life, there were so many police and journalists in Lincoln Park that the festival didn’t have a chance. Instead, there were skirmishes between jeering protesters and cops who yelled back at them. Abbie, dealing directly with Chief Lynskey now, managed to get him to allow the demonstrators to plug into the electricity at the refreshment stand for the rock concert part of the Festival. But then Lynskey was nowhere to be found and, at around 6:30 in the evening, with no warning and four and a half hours before being in the park would have become illegal under the curfew, a phalanx of two hundred police poured into the park and began bashing heads and making arrests. Abbie learned what had happened from Stew Albert, who had been clubbed and was bleeding profusely from the head and face as he relayed the information to Abbie. As Abbie would describe it in Revolution for the Hell of It: “The first blood I saw in Chicago was the blood of Stu Albert, Jerry’s closest friend. . . . I embraced Stu, crying and swearing—sharing his blood.”5 Abbie grabbed a microphone and said to the people who had gathered around that the police had busted up the Festival of Life, that it was over. Then, sobbing, he introduced Albert, saying, “Here is one of my brothers from Berkeley; his blood is all our blood.” At first the television crews had been prepared to turn the smallest Yippie! incidents into a national debate on decency and respect for authority. But now they had a better story to present to the nation: police brutality against the peaceful and unarmed children of America. The footage that aired on the nightly news shocked and frightened people everywhere.
Late that night, around 2 a.m., Abbie called Deputy Mayor David Stahl at home. By Abbie’s account, when Stahl answered the phone, Abbie said, “Hi, Dave. How’s it going? Your police got to be the dumbest and the most brutal in the country.”
At 6 a.m. Monday morning, Abbie joined a friend to pray in church. Later he went to police headquarters to check on Rennie Davis and Wolfe Lowenthal, who had been arrested for deflating a squad car’s tires. That night, after most of the demonstrators left Lincoln Park at curfew, about a thousand stayed, and at around 11:30 Abbie and Anita returned to the park to join them. Shortly afterward, a wedge formation of police attacked, clubbing people left and right, with tear gas canisters exploding everywhere. And again there were cameras to record what was happening.
At 6:00 a.m. Tuesday morning, Abbie hitched a ride with the cops who were tailing him and asked to be taken to the beachfront section of Lincoln Park, where there was going to be a sunrise service. Arriving at the beach, he found Allen Ginsberg and about 150 or 200 people, some of them with bandages on their heads and blood showing through, sitting in the lotus position, chanting and meditating. As he recounted it a year and a half later at the Chicago Conspiracy trial, Abbie joined the group and after a while stood up and spoke:
What is going on here is very beautiful, but it won’t be on the evening news tonight. The American mass media is a glutton for violence, and only shots of what is happening in the streets of Chicago will be on the news. America can’t be changed by people sitting and praying, and this is an unfortunate reality that we have to face. We are a community that has to learn how to survive. We have seen what has happened the last few nights in Lincoln Park. We have seen the destruction of the Festival.
I will never again tell people to sit quietly and pray for change.
Of course, I can’t recall Abbie ever telling anyone to sit quietly and pray for change in all the years I knew him. But inside, I think he did respect that point of view. The question of nonviolence was one he was always wrestling with internally. And I know that the sight of Allen Ginsberg in Chicago had moved him enormously. He had seen the poet chanting O-o-m-m-m-m, playing the part of Yippie! religious leader, Gandhi-like, right in the middle of the worst police violence. He admired and respected Ginsberg for his courage in Chicago but still had to find his own way.
Later Tuesday morning, Abbie showed up at a Mobe press conference, carrying the branch of a tree and pissed off at the Mobe for advocating nonviolence. As he would say again and again over the years, Abbie believed arguments pitting violence against nonviolence presented a false dichotomy: “I burst in with karate jacket, helmet, and heavy club made from the branch of a tree. I announce to the press that we are arming the Yippies! and whatever the pigs dish into the park, we’ll dish out. I keep slamming the club against my other palm.”6 Then he had a koan-like conversation with a reporter, one that crystallized, if not the spiritual synthesis of violence and nonviolence Abbie was seeking, at least the imaginative power of such a synthesis:
reporter: Are you armed?
me: I’m always armed.
reporter: Is that your weapon?
me: This (holding club in the air and smiling), this is part of a tree. It symbolizes my love for nature.7
Abbie could reconcile himself to violence as a tactic. He could admire those who practiced revolutionary violence, but he was never able to join them. And yet the determined brutality of the police smashing heads night after night, as large numbers of them stormed into Lincoln Park and gave chase through the streets, challenged Abbie to the point where he was no longer comfortable with his own nonviolence, either.
And that was why the words he had uttered in Ginsberg’s presence at the sunrise service on Tuesday morning were so emotionally charged. They show him casting off a pacifist point of view which, although he had never publicly endorsed it, had attracted him and one which, were it not for the violence he’d seen in the previous seventy-six hours, he had hoped to be free to embrace when he felt ready. But now, because of the violence in Chicago, Abbie seemed to feel distinctly less free to do so. As he would tell author John Schultz twenty years later just days before his death, “It wasn’t in my head to pick up rocks and throw them [before Chicago]. In later years it was in my head—after Chicago. Chicago made us more militant.”8
All his life, Abbie flirted with violence, liked to talk about it, admired the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground for arming themselves, even kept a gun in his apartment in New York at one point. But the truth was he was never comfortable with the prospect of shooting back. At heart, he may have felt closer to the pacifism of Ginsberg or Liberation editor and Mobe spokesperson Dave Dellinger. Abbie thrived on making things, dreaming up the Festival of Life, writing books, organizing demonstrations. But he felt caught between violence he couldn’t really handle and his own sense of the insufficiency of nonviolence in such violent times.
On Tuesday afternoon, there were workshops throughout the park. At around 2:00 or 2:30 p.m., Abbie addressed a gathering of over a hundred people, saying, “America . . . is bent on devouring its children.” In a speech later on that day, he made one of his more famous pronouncements: “The system is falling apart,” he said, “and we’re here to give it a push.”
Tuesday evening, Abbie joined Phil Ochs, Ed Sanders, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Dick Gregory and Dave Dellinger before a crowd of some six thousand at the Chicago Coliseum. When Abbie’s turn to speak came, he told the crowd, “When you march to the amphitheater tomorrow, you should keep in mind a quote from a two-thousand-year-old Yippie with long hair named Jesus, who said that when you march into the dens of the wolves you should be as harmless as doves and as cunning as snakes.”
Wednesday morning, Abbie rose very early, as he usually did. Forewarned by his police tails that he was going to be arrested that morning, and not wanting the event to become a media feeding frenzy, he took a black Magic Marker and wrote the word “Fuck” on his forehead, reasoning that it would keep newspaper editors from putting his picture in the paper. The word also summed up his attitude toward the deteriorating situation in Chicago. He then dressed in his cowboy boots, brown corduroy pants, and a work shirt, and pulled a gray felt ranger cowboy hat down over his eyes. At around 6:00 a.m., Abbie, Anita, Paul Krassner, and a friend of Paul’s named Beverly Baskinger went out to eat breakfast, accompanied by the two police officers tailing Abbie and two others who were tailing Paul.
At the restaurant, the two cops came in and said that they had orders to arrest him for something he had under his hat. Abbie asked them if they had checked it out with Commander Braasch, a ploy that had worked the day before when Abbie had used it to get rid of a group of cops that were bashing heads in Lincoln Park. The cops left the restaurant but returned a short while later, joined by four or five patrol cars that surrounded the restaurant. The cops again asked Abbie to lift up his hat, and when he complied, they pounced on him, threw him to the floor, handcuffed him, and arrested him.
Wednesday night was the climax of convention week, with the nomination of the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, on the convention floor, and the Michigan Avenue–Balbo Drive free-for-all between police and demonstrators out in the streets. Once again, the nightly news featured footage of Chicago police spilling the blood of America’s youth. Abbie spent the night in jail.
After he was released on Thursday, August 29, Abbie led an anti-war march from Grant Park along Michigan Avenue in the direction of the amphitheater. The convention was in progress within, and there was no way the authorities were going to allow the demonstrators to reach it. Tempers were ragged on both sides after the police violence the night before. At Sixteenth Street, the march was blocked by the fixed bayonets of the National Guard, backed up by an armored personnel carrier, on top of which, in full view, had been installed a large machine gun. Meanwhile, two blocks back was a line of Chicago police preventing the marchers from returning the way they had come. In between, on either side, there was a solid wall of buildings. The thousands of demonstrators were trapped. As John Schultz has pointed out, if Abbie had wanted a Plaza de las Tres Culturas (where, in October 1968, the Mexican army would shoot over five hundred students), if Abbie had wanted more violence in the streets of Chicago, as would be argued by the prosecution in the Chicago Conspiracy trial, this would have been the perfect opportunity to accomplish that goal. Instead, Abbie helped arrange an orderly retreat past the row of police behind them.
The night before, as I watched the convention coverage on TV with my friend Harry, the images of the police beating up the demonstrators in front of the Hilton seared my brain. My thoughts went to Abbie. The whole nation was shocked by what they saw. No one on the outside had expected it. I don’t know how much the fear I felt was different from what Americans all over were feeling. Almost immediately, the phone started ringing, as it had each night that week. Phyllis from Mexico, Ma and Dad, along with local journalists. They all wanted to know if I’d heard from Abbie, but I hadn’t, since Abbie was in jail, although I didn’t know it at the time.
On Thursday night, around 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., out on bail, he called, sounding exhausted and exhilarated, and told me to tell everyone he was safe. “We’re winning the war, Jack,” he told me.
In 1989, days before his death, Abbie would say, “We expected many, many more people in Chicago than came” and “We expected there would be killing in Chicago.”9 The Festival of Life had been planned as the ultimate showdown. Seeing the Yippies! as revolutionary warriors, Abbie had looked to the third week in August 1968 as a good time to die, and went to battle like the Indian fighters we used to emulate as kids. To Abbie, winning in Chicago would have meant bringing down the Democratic Party and the U.S. government with it. And that didn’t happen.
The nomination of Hubert Humphrey may have represented a defeat for the Yippies!. All the bashed heads hadn’t had even the slightest impact on the decision-making of the Democratic party bosses. Hubert Humphrey’s position on the war was hardly different from the dethroned President Johnson’s. Not until October did Humphrey seem to grow more enlightened in his position on the war, and his standing in the polls began to increase, but it was too late to beat Nixon. By then many of us had already decided on a protest vote for Dick Gregory. Many others just didn’t want to vote at all, disillusioned by the available choices.
I could argue that the election of Richard Nixon represented a victory for the Yippies!. But only in theory. After Nixon’s election in November, the Yippies! lost their momentum, and it wouldn’t be until his second term in office that Nixon would finally end the war.
By the time of Chicago, Abbie had learned how to put on a show in such a way that the television networks would present it exactly as he wanted. He wanted to see the war in Vietnam end, and he thought that wreaking havoc on prime time was going to ensure that end more decisively than getting the better candidate in office would. Through television he wielded enormous influence and was able to exercise a surprising amount of control over how the television cameras presented him. Again and again, during the Chicago demonstrations, Abbie had been able to show the nation the inhumanity of the government’s police next to the humanity of the protesters. Almost no other public figure at this time both understood the power of television and was able to effectively use it to communicate with so many people. Abbie’s legacy was that he knew how to present his ideas as images. Frank Stanton, head of CBS News, has said that Abbie understood television better than the networks themselves did at the time, that he was in fact ahead of the networks. Abbie knew that you had to make the news, not just talk about it.
In the weeks after Chicago, back in New York, Abbie worked furiously to finish writing his first book.10 His publisher, the Dial Press, had promised to have Revolution for the Hell of It out by the end of the year if he finished it on time. So in a span of just two weeks, if you believe my brother, he gathered together all his notes and wrote a fresh manuscript, longhand. It would come to 230 printed pages, and even if it took him a day or two more than two weeks, it was a phenomenal achievement. Of all his books, Revolution best expresses the historical moment in which it was written, mixing metaphysics with mania and capturing the exuberance that was always the Yippies!’ greatest asset.
Revolution ranges from biblical reinterpretation (Abbie has Abraham “exhausted with joy [in an] orgasm of consciousness” after sparing Isaac), to recitations of the more recent glories of Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, to McLuhanesque insights into contemporary American middle-class values (“‘God is dead,’ they cry, ‘and we did it for the kids.’”) Much of it is in journal form, flashbacks on Abbie’s actions in 1967 and 1968; all of it is hallucinatory. Some of it is a Yippie! how-to organizing manual (“Never explain what you are doing. . . . Always create art and destroy property. . . . Never forget that ours is the battle against a machine, not against people. If, however, people behave like machines, treat them as such”), and some of it is Abbie ego-tripping on what it’s like to be Abbie (“At eleven I could deal off the bottom of the deck in poker; by thirteen I didn’t have to, I was so good”). I think my favorite phrase from the book is “The ground you are standing on is a liberated zone, defend it.” Curiously, he chose to publish the book under a pseudonym—sort of. On the cover was a Richard Avedon photo of Abbie in mid-leap, holding a toy rifle and with the word “Free” written on his forehead (changed from “Fuck” to please some editor or other). “Free” was also listed as the book’s author. There was even a biography of “Free,” using all the facts of Abbie’s life. Abbie Hoffman was mentioned at the end of the bio as one of Free’s aliases.
One of the most beautiful passages from Revolution for the Hell of It describes preparations for the 1967 Be-In in Central Park. And although it was written not more than a year after the events it describes, already there is in the writing an almost elegiac tone, as if the spring and summer of 1967 were a golden era long past:
Today I asked Joel [a runaway] . . . to go and buy three flowers: one chrysanthemum, one daffodil, and one daisy—and he did and returned with the change. We had a technological problem. Which flowers would be best suited to throw out of an airplane into the YIP-Out [the Be-In]? . . .
So up the twelve flights of stairs I trudged, three flowers in hand, exhausted, puffing, out of breath. . . .
There were two men on the roof. Two old men, one in his late forties, the other about sixty-five. Old Italian men with old ways and old hats feeding pigeons, hundreds of them. It was their thing. “You can’t come up here” one started screaming. . . . We did not speak the same language, and one old man ran into a little wooden shed on the roof and came out with a butcher knife, and the younger one restrained me as I stood with three flowers raised over my head ready to attack, and after we had all shouted I went down the stairs and there was Joel staring upward, and I said, “Joel, we’ll try it from across the street.” I climbed six flights to the roof of the Electric Circus, signaled to Joel, and threw the flowers down. First the chrysanthemum, then the daffodil, and finally the white daisy. Klunch, klunch, klunch. Each hit the sidewalk intact. I ran down the stairs and Joel, puffing, met me halfway and said, “A kid stole the chrysanthemum and somebody stepped on the daffodil.”
He was clutching a white daisy in both hands. He was smiling. The Scientific Method leads to joy. Daisies would make it to the YIP-Out.11
You can feel Abbie’s exhilaration in every word, as if he were free-falling from a plane, joyously, and without a parachute. The two old Italians who chase him from their roof are described with affection and understanding. Abbie was often generous toward opponents and always liked to have hecklers at his speeches. I think Abbie’s fantasy was that he really had no enemies, that underneath we were all on the same side, that the goal, for everyone, was nothing less than totality—utter freedom in an accommodating universe.
I was going to turn twenty-nine in September, and I wanted to make sure I spent my birthday with Abbie. Joan and I drove down to New York, and when we arrived at his apartment on Thirteenth Street, Abbie took us up to the roof of the building and pulled out a wad of fresh airline tickets, probably supplied by some Yippie sympathizer who worked for an airline. Then he asked us, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you want to go?” I looked at Joan, and in unison we both said, “China.” Abbie flipped through the stack until he found a pair from Kennedy to Hong Kong, stamped and ready to go, and held them out to us. With that diabolical twinkle in his eye, he seemed to be saying that he had the power to make our fantasy reality. We laughed, shook our heads, and wouldn’t touch the tickets. But we marveled, a little shocked, as we considered the possibilities. And Abbie got a kick out of seeing us stretch our imaginations.
On a Sunday night in September 1968, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Dale wore a shirt that looked like it was made from a U.S. flag. A few days afterward, Abbie called me, elated: He’d bought a flag shirt from the same store where Dale had gotten hers, he said, and he was going to wear it to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing. The hearing had been called to investigate the Chicago demonstrations, and Abbie had been subpoenaed to appear before the Senate subcommittee in early October. And ever since receiving the “invitation,” he’d been racking his brains to come up with the right thing to wear. To him, HUAC itself was the sum of all that was un-American, with its anti-Communist hysteria and its culture of finger-pointing and hate. He’d seen the hearings in action in Berkeley around the time of his earliest political awakening, and in the early ’60s had toured Western Massachusetts with a film on those HUAC hearings, explaining to often unsympathetic audiences just how un-American they were. Now Abbie was as excited as a young debutante on her way to the ball—the hearing—with the cherished invitation, the subpoena, and the knowledge that no one else’s dress would outshine his.
On October 2, the first day of the HUAC hearings, things went off without a hitch. Jerry Rubin brandished a toy M-16 rifle, while several Yippies dressed as witches moaned in the aisles, and for the most part the people conducting the hearings ignored the agitators. Abbie’s carefully choreographed plan, set for the second day, was to paint a life-size, full-color Vietcong or Cuban flag directly onto the skin of his back underneath the flag shirt, in case some zealous cop tore the shirt off him.
On October 3, Abbie made his way to the HUAC subcommittee hearings wearing the flag shirt with two political buttons pinned to it: “Wallace for President, Stand Up for America,” and “Vote Pig Yippie! in ’68.” He was arrested as he entered the building and charged with desecrating the American flag, under a law passed that summer. The law made it a federal crime to cast “contempt” upon the flag, carrying maximum penalties of one year in prison and a $1,000 fine. Abbie was also charged with resisting arrest.
He pleaded not guilty, told the judge that he was owed $14.95 for the ripped shirt, and was jailed overnight. Anita had jumped on the back of the cop arresting Abbie and was charged with felonious assault on a police officer (the charges against her were later dropped). Since no one ever tried to arrest Dale Evans for the same offense, Abbie’s argument that the disturbance was caused by the police, not him, wasn’t unreasonable.
Jerry Rubin, shirtless and wearing a Vietcong flag bandanna, made it to the second day of the hearings and spent the day sitting in the audience. He listened impassively as Cook County state’s attorney undercover investigator Robert Pierson—who had infiltrated the Yippies! at the Chicago demonstrations as a friendly motorcycle gang member and personal bodyguard to Abbie and Jerry—testified that the Yippies! and other groups were intent on “overthrowing the United States Government by force.” Pierson claimed that there had been plans to execute Chicago policemen and to bomb a ball-playing field in Lincoln Park. He even quoted Jerry, from memory, as having said, “We should kill all the candidates for president.” Through it all, Jerry, besmirched with red paint and carrying a toy M-16 rifle close to his chest, listened quietly. As the hearings progressed, paid spies like Pierson testified while, one after another, the legitimate Movement leaders refused to take the stand, and HUAC failed to unearth a Communist plot associated with the Chicago Democratic Convention protests.12
On October 9, 1968, a front-page article appeared in the Worcester Telegram based on an interview with me conducted the day before. What was unique about this article was that it was about me. Abbie was the pretext, but the subject was his brother’s story.
The copy that I’m looking at is off microfilm from the local library, a pockmarked negative I obtained only recently. On that day, events kept me reeling, and I couldn’t hold on to a copy of the newspaper for longer than a few minutes before one person or another asked to see it and it was gone. But even in the ghastly electric-white photograph that accompanies this microfiche, my clean-cut jacket, tie, and fresh trim are apparent. I remember that I had gone out and bought the jacket and tie and sat through the haircut a few days before—not to fool the interviewer but to make sure he understood that Abbie’s brother was respectable, which was the truth. I knew that my respectability would give more weight to my words. The article, under the heading “An Idealist Brother Defends Abbie’s Position,” began:
“There are all these stories appearing in the paper, and none of them actually tell you what Abbie Hoffman is trying to do,” said Jack Hoffman, vice president of Worcester Medical Supply Co. Inc. . . . “[Abbie is] trying to prove that this isn’t a free society. He’s trying to show that a person can’t dress the way he wants, say what he wants, or do what he wants without somebody like the police or HUAC persecuting him. . . . Abbie is trying to show that a man can’t be himself in this society; that the freedoms guaranteed to you and me in the Bill of Rights no longer exist. . . . Abbie knows we will eventually return to being a free society. . . . However, before we can get there, Abbie believes, we have to rebel completely against the hypocrisy of our present society. That’s what my brother is doing.”
The newspaper had accurately printed what I had said to the journalist. It didn’t show me explaining Abbie away, or defending him exactly, but standing by him, doing exactly what any brother would do, I thought. The reporter might have asked me whether I agreed with my brother. If he had, he would have gotten a very different-sounding article. I would have said that I had many of the same criticisms of my brother that most people had. But he never asked me that, so what he got was a brother’s empathy, understanding, and loyalty. I continued:
All Abbie is saying is, “If a kid wants to wear his hair long—let him. If he wants to wear African clothes to school—let him. Let him do whatever he wants, short of hurting someone else.” He’s no more a Communist than the president of the United States. . . . He hopes that maybe freedom can be achieved by making an issue out of it. . . . So he gets investigated by HUAC. For running down the street with a pig, he’s suspected of being un-American. . . . Why don’t they investigate something really un-American, like the Mafia, or themselves?
I walked into my office on the morning of October 9, 1968, looking forward to a great day. Regardless of what one thought or felt about Abbie, everyone would admire a man standing beside his brother. It occurred to me that there had been something priestly in the way I had handled the situation: I had sought to mediate peacefully between warring camps. And besides, I was only talking about freedom and democracy, basic American beliefs; whichever side people found themselves on, these were things on which everyone could agree, so I thought. Already, as soon as I arrived that morning, my secretary had told me how handsome I looked in the front-page photo that accompanied the article. I felt ready and deserving. Jack would bask in the limelight for a change. And I thought I had performed my role honorably.
The calls started coming in almost right away. But they weren’t what I had expected. I picked up the receiver to hear expressions of hate from people whom I had known all my life and considered friends. They would begin with: “How dare you say those things?”
“What did I say?” I asked.
“You know, the garbage you put out about your brother, how could you defend him?”
“But he’s my brother,” I tried a few times. No one was interested.
Then there were the threats: “You won’t get home to your family tonight,” and others. Somehow, the most painful calls that day were those that were strictly business. I don’t know why, but there’s something particularly hurtful about being attacked by someone who doesn’t even really know you. “We do not want to do business with your kind of people.” There were two or three of those calls that day. The purchasing agent from one of our most important accounts, Memorial Hospital in Worcester, let me know that “If I buy from you I have to worry about LSD getting into the aspirin.” With those words—which left me speechless—he ended our relationship, despite the fact that for as long as I could remember I had called on that account once a week like clockwork, order or no order. It was only business, but it was personal as hell. And although it happened a week or so later, I still remember and associate with October 9 the nursing home owner in Westfield—someone with whom I had already done significant business—who said, “You’re Abbie Hoffman’s brother?” and then tore up a $25,000 contract right in front of my eyes, right after his secretary had congratulated me on what I’d said in the newspaper. Many people stopped doing business with us because they despised Abbie, and yet I cannot recall a single individual or company that ever started doing business with us because they supported what Abbie was doing.
A woman sent me a note, which I have never forgotten. Her halting and awkward use of English made it clear that she was from the old country; and behind her anger you could taste her fear. Of course, what particularly pissed her off was having to share our religion and our last name. She said she had read my interview and because of it could not even address me as “Dear Sir.” She added that she was ashamed of Jewish radicals, who “spoil it for good people.” Her letter ended with the words, “God Bless America.”
Of course, within the small circle of our closest friends, the article didn’t cause the slightest stir; they already knew everything the article said, and most important, they knew Abbie firsthand. The deep misunderstanding, and the hate that grew from it, lay with people who didn’t really know us, and especially those who saw my brother only in the papers and on TV.
By four o’clock that day, several people in the Worcester Medical Supply office had gone home early out of fear. I was scared to leave the building. I was in a state of shock. If someone had told me this was going to happen, I would not have believed it. The things I learned that day came to me completely out of the blue.
After the Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention, and throughout the few remaining months of the year, the country was made well aware of certain aspects of the conflict. The youth culture, the revolution culture, the generation gap would all be adequately, if not excessively, described in the media. But there wasn’t a whole lot of attention being paid to the reaction all this rebellion was producing. Most people who were in the Movement, or peripherally involved like I was, had no idea of the level of fear and hate they were prompting in mainstream society. And you wouldn’t find out about that by reading the feature articles in Time and Life, or from a twenty-second segment on the evening news.
The conflict described in the media was between extremist elements on the Left and the police—as we had seen in the streets of Chicago—and portrayed the vast majority of Americans looking on silently, as more or less objective witnesses. But that wasn’t it at all. The battlefield wasn’t the streets of Washington and Chicago, or even the jungles of Vietnam; it was the hearts and minds of normal Americans. Leaders like Abbie were fighting for the support of America’s youth. America’s parents had little choice but to stand helplessly on the sidelines as everything they had fought so hard for, everything they believed in, was trashed by him and other leaders of the youth culture. I don’t think many of them understood or cared much about the First Amendment to the Constitution. Many of them were not raised here, or—if educated here—had been raised, like us, in homes where the air was still heavy with the values of the Old World. The First Amendment was truly a foreign idea to them. What they understood and believed in was freedom, but not Abbie’s kind of freedom. What many of America’s parents believed in was the more universally understood freedom that came as a reward for hard work: freedom to buy, freedom to own (and which, ironically, was as much in tune with the intentions of the founding fathers as was Abbie’s vision).
But Abbie was attacking all that; he preached anti-materialism as the siren-song that would help him entice the children of America away from their parents’ old world. In the old El Morocco, Abbie’s favorite restaurant high up on one of the hills of Worcester, Joe Aboody, the Christian Lebanese proprietor and our lifelong trusted friend, kept an autographed photograph of Abbie hanging prominently on the wall. An angry patron ripped it from the wall and smashed it. The fifty tables in the quaint restaurant were occupied at the time, and not one person objected to that act of desecration. We tended not to think about occurrences like that. How could we? They didn’t seem real to us.
I can’t say that October 9 radicalized me. It didn’t. I’m not a revolutionary. But it left me more informed about what it meant to be Abbie Hoffman’s brother. Among other things, to be the brother, sister, or parent of someone so publicly loved and hated as Abbie promises a high degree of isolation. Since you don’t believe the same things he does, you can’t quite be part of his community. But since you are undeniably his brother, it is difficult to join any other group. You find yourself in the middle, often unaccompanied. To be accused, even hated, for things you didn’t do or beliefs you don’t hold is a desert of a place to find yourself. Yet that is exactly where all the members of Abbie’s family found ourselves in 1968. We were awakened to things, like how what others say about you can hurt, and how easy it is to be frightened.
I say to myself over and over: No, 1968 was not a very good year, not a good year at all. I remember 1968 as a year of sadness, when heroes died and many people let themselves be overcome with hate, and when my brother became so deeply immersed in his new life that for much of the year I lost track of him altogether. I hardly knew him, yet I felt tied to the things he did almost as if I had done them. The funny thing about the fall of 1968, despite all the trouble, was how proud I felt of Abbie, proud of all the trouble he was causing, proud of how important he had become. And I was one among hundreds of thousands of young people who felt that way.
In the fall of 1968, Abbie contracted hepatitis and found himself in Albert Einstein Hospital in a wheelchair. After a day or two, a young resident named Lawrence Epstein visited him. Dr. Epstein had a depressed and dying leukemia patient, he told Abbie, who had pictures of Abbie on the walls of his room. Epstein asked Abbie if he would come and visit him. Abbie jumped at the chance, saying how he was trained as a psychologist and was good at it. The patient turned out to be a schoolteacher in his early twenties, and every day Abbie would wheel himself down the hall and lock himself in with the young schoolteacher. During the ten days Abbie visited him, the patient emerged from his depression and began to laugh and be more talkative. His parents, who were visiting him every day, noticed the difference and asked Dr. Epstein if he had put their son on some new miracle cure. He told them, no, but that he was seeing a new therapist. The schoolteacher died about six months later, and the young resident never forgot how Abbie had been able to lift the young man’s spirits.13
And then, along with my renewed identification with Abbie, came doubts. If it was just revolution for the hell of it, was it worth it? Now that we know that people were really watching and listening, did Abbie really know what he was doing out there? Was he a leader after all? Was he—indirectly and unintentionally, but nonetheless—hurting people?
It was important for me to be able to ask these questions. Still, in the end it wasn’t so difficult to answer them. The threat that Abbie posed to the American way of life was largely a distorted shadow thrown by a national imagination run amok. In reality, Abbie fought for people power as propounded in the U.S. Constitution, and nothing more.
And people who hated Abbie—the majority of them—were fighting equally hard on behalf of authority, injustice, and the rights of privilege. If the youth of America, led by people like my brother, were calling the older generation liars, they were not altogether wrong. Did anyone believe Vietnam was a just war in 1968? Yes, of course. But many people on both sides believed it wasn’t; for every young person who believed that it was wrong and unacceptable, there was an older person who thought that it might be wrong but was acceptable. For every young person who considered our society to be sexually repressed, there were two older people who knew it was. And for every young person searching for meaning, there were two older people trying and failing to find happiness in the trappings of the American Dream, or in alcohol or prescription drugs.
Dad voted for Nixon twice around. If you asked him why we were in Vietnam—and I did—he would say, “Because the government’s right. And who are you to ask questions?” Abbie, so much his father’s son, fought against that war with every particle of his being. The difference wasn’t so much in their opinions: It went deeper, to the core value system one accepts. Somehow the younger generation had come away with a radically different set of values from their parents.
“Don’t trust anyone over thirty” were words Abbie spoke often, and which people on both sides of the generation gap remembered. The older generation—in some ways rightly—saw him as a modern-day pied piper of Hamelin, and feared him. But just as Abbie’s public often seemed to miss the seriousness in his antics, so did they miss the playfulness in many of his headline-grabbing pronouncements: At the moment he told us to trust no one over thirty Abbie himself was already thirty-two.
Nineteen sixty-eight saw the height of the conflict in the U.S., a conflict that would stop just short of ending in a civil war. Police violence, and the threat of greater violence, had occurred throughout the year and in all parts of the country—not just in Chicago. In New York; in Madison, Wisconsin; in San Francisco . . . The assassinations of the early part of the year can be understood as expressions of the same deep-seated anguish, frustration, and hate, which I felt directed at me on October 9. Everywhere, America teetered on the brink of larger acts of extreme physical violence between fellow Americans. In a way, the country had gone mad. And at many of the crucial junctures, the grinning face that appeared in the newspaper, the one that symbolized the conflict for millions of Americans, was Abbie’s.
More and more, the cruelty of the war in Southeast Asia was the context for Abbie’s type of theater. His was the politics of confrontation. He wanted to draw fire from the jungles of Vietnam onto himself. He knew that our government could continue to prosecute the war only as long as it could uphold two standards of behavior: one, the kid-glove treatment for the protesters at home, the other, the brutality of the genocidal bombings in Vietnam. And, of course, Abbie was right about so many things during this period, but he alienated many of us.
Although I would not have been able to articulate it at the time, what began for me in the aftermath of Chicago, and dawned on me forcefully on October 9, 1968, was a recognition of the possibility of Abbie’s utter seriousness. In our family we were already used to believing Abbie capable of anything. He had convinced us that he was able to do whatever he wanted and get away with it. We considered him blessed and beloved. And things he told us about himself—some of it wildly exaggerated—we willingly took at face value, whether it was his grades at school or what he called his eidetic memory. But one thing he never took pains to convince us of was his seriousness. We always assumed that whatever he did, he did for the fun of it. That had always been true of Abbie growing up. That this could have changed was the hardest thing for us to accept.
In early 1992, the interviewer David Frost asked the writer Norman Mailer, “How would you like to be remembered?” Mailer had to consider the question for only a split second before answering, “I would like to be taken seriously.” The problem wasn’t just Abbie’s. I believe that many public figures from the ’60s, if they are honest, would answer that question the same way. It goes with the territory. In the ’60s, the distinction between what was serious and what was not was blurred, because all of a sudden a variety of people doing a variety of strange things were having an impact. But to take someone seriously—especially when they were fooling around all the time the way Abbie was—you had to see them sweat and worry; you had to see their ideas evolve. And only a few people ever knew Abbie that way.
The dazzling first live pictures of the surface of the moon were televised on December 29 from Apollo 8. But by then there were over half a million American troops stationed in Vietnam and more than thirty thousand had been killed. And while Nixon—who would truly desecrate the flag by breaking the law countless times while in office—prepared for his presidential inauguration, Abbie was convicted of desecration of the U.S. flag for the HUAC arrest and sentenced to thirty days.14 After finding him guilty, the judge asked if Abbie had any last words. Striking a solemn pose, Abbie gleefully delivered a speech that ended, “Your honor, I only regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.”15
Like many of the battles Abbie fought, he would win this one eventually. On March 30, 1971, the U.S. Court of Appeals would reverse the flag desecration conviction, finding that Abbie Hoffman did not desecrate the American flag by wearing a shirt that looked like one, since his “flag-style shirt was intended to cast contempt on the [HUAC] Committee but not on the flag.” The Appeals Court judge, George E. MacKinnon, agreed with Abbie’s contention that he was convicted “because of his well known public image which is highly controversial” and not because he had been contemptuous of the flag. In the two years after Abbie’s conviction, there were many other convictions for flag desecration in a number of states. Thus the 1971 reversal was seen, by the ACLU among other organizations, as a decisive victory for freedom of speech. But as happened so often, by the time it came, Abbie’s victory had cost him heavily and paid him no reward.16