nineteen sixty-nine was the year when Abbie came closest to finding himself—when he was funniest, but also when he was most frightened; when he acted the most courageously and also when his childlike antics were most pronounced; when he espoused violence, and also when he experienced his own nonviolence most deeply. It was the year when he became a bona fide world-class celebrity, when his audience was largest, and also when he felt most urgently the need for the closeness of his family, only to find that the effect of his notoriousness on Dad had finally put their relationship beyond repair.
The event that both consumed and defined Abbie in 1969 was the Chicago Conspiracy trial. It has been called the most important political trial of the century. And for Abbie personally it was to be the seminal event of his life, acting upon him with the force of destiny. The Chicago trial was where, for a short time, Abbie’s fate and the fate of the nation seemed inextricably intertwined.
The decision of who was to be indicted in the Chicago trial had been made at the highest levels of the Nixon administration, the FBI, and the Chicago prosecutor’s office. As early as October 23, 1968, J. Edgar Hoover had drafted a memo urging prosecution against the leaders of the Chicago demonstrations, writing that “a successful prosecution of this type would be a unique achievement for the Bureau and should seriously disrupt and curtail the activities of the New Left.”1
Throughout the winter of 1968 and early 1969 there were minor skirmishes as the government poked and prodded the various codefendants, testing for weaknesses, and straining the defendants’ scant resources. Abbie and Anita had to fly to Chicago several times for court appearances on minor charges stemming from the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention that were separate from the central conspiracy indictments to come, and for new nuisance charges such as Abbie’s arrest for carrying a small switchblade in his pocket during one such flight. Sometimes there were fines to pay, other times Abbie was sentenced to jail terms of up to two weeks.2
On March 20, 1969, came the main charges—indictments handed down against an array of anti-government leaders, not all of whom were planners of the Chicago demonstrations, and several of whom hardly knew each other. The eight coconspirators were, in the order in which their names appeared in the indictment, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, John Froines, and Bobby Seale. By casting the net as widely as possible—grouping together the Yippies! (Abbie and Jerry), the Mobe (Rennie was national coordinator for the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam), SDS (both Tom and Rennie were among the founders of Students for a Democratic Society), The Black Panthers (Bobby Seale was National Chairman of the Black Panther Party), the New Left (particularly Tom and Rennie), the Old Left (Dave Dellinger was a prominent pacifist), and the university-based Left (John Froines and Lee Weiner were both antiwar academics)—the government planned to portray all those fighting to end racism, injustice, and the war in Vietnam as part of a deeper, darker conspiracy. The government hoped for a Soviet-style show trial, one that would paint the entire Left as anti-American and show Americans that these leading activists were mere criminals.
The indictments made use of an anti-riot rider that had been attached by Senator Strom Thurmond and other Southern Democrats to an open housing bill passed by Congress a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968. The bill had originally been intended as a tribute to Reverend King. But the anti-riot rider made it a crime to cross state lines to incite or promote violence. Ironically, the Southern Democrats wanted it to help rid them of civil rights activists in general, and prevent SNCC leaders H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael in particular from stirring up more trouble in the South.
When the law was first proposed, progressive Attorney General Ramsey Clark lobbied against it, voicing the view of many legal experts that its crude language was constitutionally dubious and could hinder legitimate political activity. After all, the law defined a riot as any public disturbance involving as few as three people and an act of violence endangering another person or property. By that definition, a jury might come down against the organizers of a peaceful protest after their peaceful actions were disrupted by violent counterdemonstrators. Even before the Chicago convention, some anti-war leaders, including Tom Hayden, expressed concerns that the rider would be used to clamp down on dissent across the country.3
Shortly after the Democratic Convention ended, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley requested that Attorney General Clark invoke the new anti-riot law against the protesters. The liberal Clark refused. And when the voluminous, blue-ribbon Walker Report, whose purpose was to unearth the origins of the violence, concluded that “the vast majority of the demonstrators were intent on expressing their dissent by peaceful means” and that the predominant cause of the violence had been a “police riot,” Clark went even further and ordered a federal grand jury in Chicago to begin investigating policemen who might have been in violation of federal laws.4 Eventually, painstaking research conducted by the writer John Schultz among others would reveal that the notion of a “police riot” was actually an understatement for what had been, in fact, a systematic and planned police assault.
With the election of Richard Nixon in November 1968, and his inauguration in January 1969, the point of view of the Department of Justice swung completely around. Leaders of the Left across the country found themselves under assault; still searching for a unified post-Chicago strategy, they came under increased levels of harassment from the police and government. Clark issued a warning in the early days after the election: “If the new Administration prosecutes the [Chicago] demonstrators, it will be a clear sign of a hard-line crack-down [on dissent].” Soon afterward, Nixon’s new Attorney General, John Mitchell, pressed the Chicago U.S. Attorney, Thomas Foran, to balance out the indictment with demonstrators. The eight coconspirators were chosen to equal the eight already indicted policemen. But there ended any notion of equality: Seven of the officers were charged under an ancient law that forbids public officials from inflicting summary punishment, the eighth was accused of perjury; all were acquitted.5
As he began preparing for the trial, touring the country making speeches at campuses to raise money for the defense, and participating in demonstrations, Abbie was increasingly a recognized and popular national figure. His face appeared regularly on television. Reviews of Revolution for the Hell of It were beginning to appear, and it was selling well. The Chicago Conspiracy trial indictments served to enhance his national stature, identifying him as a defender of civil rights, a voice of conscience.
Nineteen sixty-nine happened to be the tenth anniversary of Abbie’s “Class of 1959” college graduation. And on April 17, a questionnaire from Brandeis found its way to Abbie. “Please write below a short resume of your activities since graduation,” it urged, in a pleasant, collegial voice, “including such things as: marriage date, names and ages of children, graduate schools attended, degrees received, honors received, travel, community activities, occupations, etc.” A whole world of implication. The rest of the page was left open for the alumnus to sum up his achievements of the past decade. Abbie filled in his response without missing a beat:
40 arrests—facing 10 years for crossing state lines to commit riot, 7 years for felonious assault on a pig, 30 days for wearing a shirt flag, 15 days for resisting arrest in Chicago, one year for possession of loaded guns, $50.00 fine for not fastening my seat belt on an airplane, 1 year for tackling a policeman at Columbia. Sorry to have missed Lester Lanin at the Brandeis Reunion in New York. Send us some bread to help us plant a tree in Chicago during our trial—make checks payable to “The Conspiracy”/109 No. Dearborn St./Chicago, Ill.
It’s all right there in a nutshell. There were these two worlds. One held class reunions and marked its progress according to marriage dates, names and ages of children, degrees, and honors. The other was by its nature revolutionary. Anybody else but Abbie would have assumed that the two worlds were mutually exclusive. Abbie understood that the two worlds were carrying on a conversation all the time. He saw no contradiction in being a Jew, a patriot and an outlaw, a college rah-rah and a revolutionary.
The tree he mentions is a reference to planting trees in Israel. When we went to temple as kids, after Israeli independence in 1948, Ma would give us a quarter each to give to the teacher, and eventually we’d contributed enough to have a tree planted in our names in the homeland. Millions of trees were planted that way in the late ’40s and ’50s, living symbols of the solidarity American Jews felt with the Jewish state, with the power to turn desert into fertile gardens. Tree-planting may have been Abbie’s earliest lesson in political propaganda. To suggest planting trees in Chicago twenty years later was to imply that, because of the trial, the city had become a kind of new Holy Land.
Abbie had been hearing rumors about an upcoming rock concert on farmland a couple of hours north of New York City since late spring. He saw the event as “an opportunity to reach masses of young people in a setting where they felt part of something bigger,”6 but he feared that the promoters were going to use the counterculture to make a fortune for themselves. If that were allowed to happen, then no matter how good the music might be, the message would be one of greed, not enlightenment, a rip-off that would be bad for the Movement.
Abbie reached the organizer of the event, Michael Lang, and demanded $10,000, two hundred free tickets, an area for tables offering political literature, and the right to leaflet the crowd. In return, Abbie offered to help deal with some of the problems that were going to arise, things the promoters weren’t prepared to handle, like large numbers of people on bad acid. At first, Lang refused. Then, to Abbie’s amazement, Lang said yes. Abbie got the money and immediately spent half of it on a press to print political leaflets on-site, to make sure issues would remain an essential part of the concert.
Lang had pulled together an amazing roster of musicians that included Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Richie Havens, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, The Who, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and many others.7 The promoters were expecting about 75,000 fans. Abbie felt there was a good chance the crowd would be much larger.
As Woodstock began, so did the rain, but people just kept coming. On Friday afternoon, people with nine-to-five jobs joined the rush. Nearly half a million people had showed up by Saturday despite the rain that had turned the entire area into mud. Abbie couldn’t have been happier. To him, the phenomenon of Woodstock held special meaning that no amount of adversity could alter: It meant the Yippie! myth of peace, love, and music bringing people together was becoming a reality. Abbie felt that his job was to keep the struggle—against injustice at home and war in Vietnam—a part of the celebration.
Near dawn on Saturday morning, Abbie, high on acid, decided, rightly, that the instant metropolis that had risen around the forty-acre field was ridiculously unprepared for medical emergencies. Although he had no authority to do so, he commandeered the press tent alongside the stage, threw out all the journalists there, and announced that it was now a hospital. By 7:00 a.m., Abbie was barking his orders through a bullhorn. He had even commandeered a helicopter and made arrangements for more doctors to be flown in. Abbie may have acted obnoxiously but showed nearly perfect judgment that morning, and without the field hospital Woodstock might have been remembered very differently than it is.
The music was scheduled to begin on Saturday afternoon and last through Sunday. The New York Port Authority had stopped selling bus tickets to the area. National Guard troops had been mobilized. There was a rumor that the concert had been declared a disaster area. But the music was incredible, and by Saturday night the concert organizers knew they had pulled it off. Between sets, as The Who was getting ready to go on, Abbie sat on the side of the stage talking with Lang about the possibility of devoting a percentage of any movie revenue to a bail fund—in his mind was the recent imprisonment in Michigan of activist John Sinclair for possession of one marijuana joint.
Suddenly, Abbie decided it was the right moment for him to make a speech; still high on the LSD, maybe mixed in with some speed, he walked up to the mike and started rapping—about Sinclair, about the war in Vietnam, and the war at home. He went on for twenty minutes or so, then someone turned off his microphone. Angry, Abbie kicked over the mike and walked off. Peter Townshend of The Who was walking on. He passed Abbie and whacked him with his guitar, pushing him off the stage.8
Abbie wasn’t seen again that weekend. In the Woodstock movie you don’t see Abbie and you don’t see his hospital. He continued talking about Woodstock Nation, and he would continue to feel that this was the nation to which he belonged. But he was shattered by the rebuke he had suffered. It put the fear in him that maybe other people didn’t share his aspirations, didn’t always care about the same things he did. I think it was the first time he felt like the leader of a party of one.
Years later, Townshend would tell Rolling Stone: “I deeply regret [kicking Abbie offstage]. Abbie at Woodstock really was correctly despairing. He was fucking right. If I was given that opportunity again, I would stop the show [to let Abbie speak]. Because I don’t think Rock & Roll is that important. Then I did. The show had to go on.”9
Back in the city, Abbie camped out in the Random House office of editor Christopher Cerf, son of publishing legend and Random House founder Bennett Cerf, and started filling yellow legal pads, writing longhand in a burst of manic energy. Random House had wanted a sequel to Revolution for the Hell of It. In Woodstock Nation, Abbie was able to give them the book they wanted by, in effect, finishing off the speech he had begun on the Woodstock stage, redefining the rock concert as a political event and counterculture symbol, and affirming in print what he had been prevented from affirming at the concert.
Dedicated to Lenny Bruce, the book is a breathless and random collection of essays, vignettes, poster-like images, and photographs whose most striking characteristic is that it obliterates the distinctions between politics and culture. He called it a “talk-rock album,” and the chapters are referred to as “song titles.” Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin are there, and so are Elvis Presley, Che Guevara, John Sinclair, and Norman Mailer. The politics of the book are pervasive, but nowhere as clear or as striking as in his other writings. The central theme is Abbie’s recent Woodstock experience, an understanding of which in many ways still eluded him. The passion of the book is intense and appears on every page. But the frenzied quality of the writing denies it the saving grace of Abbie’s other books, where underneath the zaniness you can feel the presence of an utterly clear mind and an uncluttered heart. For all its virtues, Woodstock Nation is a tract written to even the score by the guy who was thrown off the stage.
Back in Worcester, Dad’s friends were giving him hell about Abbie. They bombarded him: Who did Abbie think he was? What was he trying to prove with all his antics? Wasn’t he just making it worse for the rest of us, making people think badly of the Jews? Did he really think the powers that be were going to let him get away with it? And Dad could only shake his head and agree with all these criticisms. Abbie was his son, but he didn’t know him the way a father should know his own son, and that made him mad. Dad felt that the underlying sentiment seemed to be a criticism not of Abbie but of himself: You’re his father, control your son; what’s wrong with you that you can’t?
Then there were more sinister forms of harassment. Starting shortly after the Chicago convention, a couple of local FBI agents had become regular visitors to the store when Dad was around. Their visits were only quasi-official. They were guys who’d always come by the store to buy their vitamins. Dad wasn’t against talking with them, just like he did with all his customers. But after Chicago, they started to get heavy, pressuring Dad about Abbie. Two agents from the Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms also started coming around, questioning us about any guns we, or Abbie, possessed.
A few friends and neighbors told us that they had been visited by the FBI and questioned about the Hoffman family—disturbing news since it made us wonder about all the friends, neighbors, and perhaps even relatives who were interviewed by the FBI and never told us. The harassment may have been subtle, but the toll it took was real and constant. It was almost as if the FBI were building prison walls around you in the minds of your friends and neighbors.
When Abbie’s FBI files were released to me recently for the research for this book, again and again there appeared three categories of informants: neighbors, friends, and business acquaintances; the names of the individuals are crossed out, and often whole paragraphs or whole pages are crossed out as well. Whatever it was that these people did, to date none has come to me to say, “Those days are gone now,” or “I wish I hadn’t done what I did,” which tells me that in the minds of many the battle lines are still drawn.
You’ve got to remember that this was all happening pre-Watergate. There was much more trust in government and in what government stood for than there is today. When FBI agents and other U.S. government representatives started to suggest that subversives like Abbie, and by extension the Hoffman family, were a criminal element, most of our friends and neighbors must have felt that they had to side with the government. To some people we must have appeared as traitors of the same stripe as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whom people still thought of as archcriminals. Jewish acquaintances might say to me, “What is your fucking crazy brother up to now?! He’s an embarrassment!” And—it still makes me mad today when I think of it—gentiles would look at me and say, “Your dirty Communist brother, why doesn’t he go back to Israel where he belongs?” or they would accuse me of “tearing down the flag.” And they weren’t being funny or ironic. They were angry, as if personally offended. It was often scary. And we knew no way to respond other than by walking away.
Dad felt pushed and shoved. He found that he was in fundamental agreement with those among his friends and business associates who despised his son. He loved Abbie and would never disavow him. But he believed that Abbie was striking out at him personally, hurting his business, hurting his standing in the community, hurting him, and for no reason. His instinctive loyalty toward his son was strong, but so was his sense of what was right. Dad had already decided against attending the upcoming trial, and now he prohibited Ma from going as well.
One day in the middle of September 1969, at the height of the media feeding frenzy surrounding the start of the Chicago Conspiracy trial, Dad closed the door of his office, sat down at his desk, and began to write Abbie a letter—not so much in the hope that Abbie would listen to him but out of a feeling of resignation: there were times when certain things needed to be said. “I will try my very best to talk to him,” Dad seemed to be saying, “and then, whatever happens, I will wash my hands.” It was as close as Dad would ever come to turning his back on his eldest son.
The letter he wrote filled three or four pages in careful longhand, and he showed it to me before he sent it. Despite its condemnation of Abbie’s actions, the letter had taken heartfelt effort on Dad’s part, and in its heavy tone of resignation was the expression of a sad faith, almost as if Dad were transmitting his blessing by expressing what he took to be the wisdom of our people, the wisdom of survival.
The letter decried the shame Abbie had brought on the family, and even listed some of his more notorious stunts. It extolled the virtues of America as the land of true freedom and democracy, and drew a comparison to the hardships Jews had historically experienced elsewhere, including pogroms and the camps. But mostly the letter asserted, timidly, the importance of respect. I cannot remember the exact words, but I recall the thoughts and the emotions they expressed as if it were yesterday. You must learn, Dad wrote to his eldest son, to conduct yourself in a respectable manner in the courtroom during the upcoming trial. And there are other things you ought to respect as well.
Dad didn’t say outright that one of the other things Abbie ought to respect was his father—he didn’t dare. And maybe that was the saddest thing about the letter. But I think Dad was trying to express that somehow the idea of respect was bound up with the idea of self-preservation. Without respect, he wrote, what have we left? Without respect, Abbie could read between the lines, they will put you in jail for a thousand years and your father won’t be able to stop them.
After he read Dad’s letter, Abbie took his copy of Revolution for the Hell of It, opened it to pages eleven and twelve where he had recounted his version of the biblical history of Abraham and Isaac, and wrote in the margin, “Letter to Dad”:
Placing his son upon the carefully constructed altar, he binds and gags him to let his son know that he loves him, and yet he does not need to do that because the boy too loves his father and needs no bindings. There would be no pain.10
Linking his own troubled relationship with Dad to the biblical tale of mercy—where God asks that Abraham be willing to sacrifice that which he loves the most, his son, and then spares him that sacrifice—helped Abbie forgive Dad, even if Dad still wasn’t ready to forgive Abbie. The margin note embodied his wish that he and Dad could be reconciled somehow someday.
Civil war occurred in most American families that year. Ours was far from the worst. During the research for this book, I spoke to a retired FBI special agent, who still has not spoken to his son after twenty-five years.
The pretrial proceedings, including the swearing in of the jury, took place on September 24 and 25, with the trial itself beginning on the 26th. The gist of the government’s case was that the eight defendants had crossed state lines to incite people—who had planned to come to protest peacefully—to violent and illegal rioting. On the face of it, all the government had to do to win was to persuade the jury to accept its own reading of a naturally ambiguous series of events involving the defendants. For example, it had to convince the jury that when various defendants requested permits and sanitation facilities to allow half a million protesters to march through the streets and sleep in the park, the defendants were making unreasonable demands that they knew the city of Chicago could not grant, thus creating an ungovernable situation. And that this was the desired result on the part of the defendants.
But the government had two immense problems. The first was that in order to make its case it had to produce a seemingly endless parade of barely reputable witnesses: government agents, FBI informers, surveillance experts, and undercover police officers who had been paid to do the dirty work of the state. During the Democratic National Convention, leaders of the movement, including all of the defendants, were tailed around the clock, often by several local, state, and federal agencies simultaneously. Many of those doing the tailing and infiltrating were people with prison records or other unsavory marks of character. The government had paid them to lie and to deceive in order to infiltrate the demonstrators’ ranks. And even though one could argue that they were doing so out of patriotism, the image they projected was nonetheless one of dishonesty and worthlessness. In many cases, it was the government agents themselves who had encouraged acts of violence, not the demonstrators. In order to make its case, the prosecution had to unmask itself, in effect admit that it used questionable methods and tarnished operators to deny citizens their basic constitutional rights of privacy and freedom of speech.
In the early weeks of the trial, as the prosecution brought to the stand its procession of witnesses who had worn disguises, grown their hair long, sprouted beards, pretended to be members of motorcycle gangs, and posed as bodyguards for Abbie, Jerry, and other leaders, it was the prosecutors, not the defendants, who were turning the courtroom into a freak show. With each passing hour, America seemed less like the land of the free and the brave. In that courtroom the American people were allowed to see our government in its most terrifying aspect.
The second problem the prosecution had was that the defendants and defense attorneys, particularly William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, were in fundamental ideological accord. Despite the wide range of political philosophies they represented, they were united in viewing the trial as a political one, with trumped-up criminal charges, and thus an opportunity to put the government on trial. Ironically, the prosecution shared this view. Each group saw itself as the guardian of democracy in the fight against totalitarianism.
One of the first things Abbie had done after arriving in Chicago before the trial began was to survey the tops of the buildings surrounding the courthouse to get an idea from where a sniper might be likely to shoot. He felt that there was a distinct risk of being shot while going to and from the trial. Death threats had been made in letters and on call-in radio programs. At the same time, he felt that the courthouse itself was, strangely, a place of refuge. He believed he was innocent, and that nothing he might say in criticism of the justice system would impinge on its ability to find him innocent. Thus it was his underlying optimism that would enable him to stand so proud throughout the trial—his courage was inseparable from his naivete.
The three-ring-circus atmosphere that would evolve during the trial has always been blamed on the defendants. But it was a natural response to the constant and relentless scorn of the prosecution, a survival response to the pressure-cooker atmosphere, in which the bravado of the defendants was pitted against the combined power of the state, the FBI, and the federal government. And partly it was an expression of the defendants’ belief that they were going to be acquitted regardless of what they did in court.
Abbie’s mood as the trial opened on the morning of September 26—despite the fear—was playful, almost joyful. In front of the courthouse he did a front somersault, like he used to do when we were kids. An hour later, as the proceedings began in the courtroom on the twenty-third floor, the court transcripts describe a fleeting exchange between one of the prosecuting attorneys and the judge that eloquently records Abbie’s gentle exuberance:
mr. schultz [Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Schultz]: Thank you, Your Honor.
In promoting and encouraging this riot . . . two of these defendants, the defendant Abbie Hoffman who sits—who is just standing for you, ladies and gentlemen—
the court [Judge Julius Hoffman]: The jury is directed to disregard the kiss thrown by the defendant Hoffman and the defendant is directed not to do that sort of thing again.
The early weeks of the trial were characterized by incessant jockeying for position on both sides—with most of the antics, although unwitting, coming from the judge and prosecutors.
On October 17, 1969, Bill Kunstler and Abbie, free on bail, addressed the radical National Lawyers Guild at Northwestern Law School in Chicago. That day Abbie cracked the jokes—“We sent Judge Hoffman so far about seventeen gallons of Geritol” and “Maybe America is the most violent country that ever was. I know where I live, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan . . . we’ve got a plant that’s been mugged”—and left the heart of the matter to Kunstler’s justly famous oratory. Kunstler began:
They [the defendants] are saying to that jury, we don’t think the institutions [of America] are beyond reproach . . . we are not going to bend to them, we’re not going to genuflect to them, and we’re not going to genuflect to you. If you want to convict us, convicted then we are and as we live and as our lifestyles exist, but if you want to acquit us, don’t acquit us because we bend a knee and bow a head to you and your institutions.
The larger question posed by the Chicago trial, according to Kunstler, was whether the American justice system could cope with dissent and whether the courts were being used to crush dissent:
I am not one who believes that we have, at this moment, a fascist state in the United States. But I am one who believes that there is handwriting on the wall . . . the faint outline of the swastika. . . . If we fail here [in Chicago], I’m not saying this is the end of fairness and the sweet life of free expression, but I say that if we fail here that the shadow on the wall will be darker . . . because this case was deliberately designed to put dissent on trial. . . . The state is attempting to silence hundreds and thousands of others through these eight.11
Both Abbie and Bill Kunstler seemed to believe that the Chicago trial was bringing us close to the brink of revolution in America, and that people were going to have to choose sides, for change or against it.
Outside of the courtroom Abbie would switch crash-pads almost every night, for security reasons and because he was sleeping with a variety of different women. Anita was flying in for key press conferences and the like, but most of the time she was back in New York living her life and participating in the early activities of the nascent women’s movement.
Charles R. Garry, attorney for the Black Panther Party, was originally to have been chief trial counsel for all eight defendants. But Garry had had to undergo gallbladder surgery and was unable to appear in court. Seven of the defendants were comfortable being represented by the other defense attorneys. But before the jury was selected and sworn in, Bobby Seale informed the defense attorneys that, in Garry’s absence, he wished to defend himself, as was his constitutional right. Judge Hoffman was notified of this request and simply denied it.
For the next six weeks, until Judge Hoffman severed Seale’s connection with the trial, Seale attempted to represent himself at every appropriate instance, wishing the jury good morning as the proceedings began each day and standing to cross-examine any witnesses who testified against him. And every time he spoke, Judge Hoffman silenced him with the words, “You have a lawyer to speak for you.” The exchanges between Seale and Hoffman were at first the most entertaining, and then the most horrifying of the trial, as reprimands and contempt citations gave way to regular beatings of Seale by marshals in full view of the packed courtroom.
One by one the polite conventions on which the U.S. court system prides itself were thrown out the window, until Seale’s struggle to defend himself became the bitterest and most lasting image of the trial. Over and over, Seale was brutally wrestled back into his chair by the marshals thereby exposing a darker side of American justice.
In the third week of October Sheila, Andrew, and Amy joined Abbie in the courtroom. He seemed uncomfortable with their presence at first. But they were only there to show their support, and before long Abbie was bragging to reporters how already Andrew had gotten into two fights at school on account of who his father was.
On October 29, Judge Hoffman declared that there would be a short recess during which he instructed marshals to take Bobby Seale into a separate room and “deal with him as he should be dealt with.” When the proceedings resumed, the defendants found Seale seated on a metal chair, each hand tightly handcuffed to the leg of the chair. A gag was tightly pressed into his mouth and tied at the rear, so that when he attempted to speak, a muffled sound came out. Seale still managed to be heard through the gag and could wrench his arms free, so for the next several days the courtroom watched the spectacle of marshals adding ever heavier and more elaborate bindings.
On the afternoon of November 5, unable to silence him, Judge Hoffman severed Seale from the case and found the Black Panther chairman guilty of sixteen separate counts of contempt, sentencing him to three months on each: a four-year sentence. Ironically, it was never clear to any of the defendants why Seale had been included in the trial in the first place, since he had come to Chicago for only one day, had not been involved in organizing any of the demonstrations, and none of the defendants except Jerry Rubin had even met him before. But in the end it was Seale who set the standard for the rest of the defendants. He showed courage in the courtroom as if it were a battlefield and taught his codefendants that you can’t reason with the enemy. Abbie ended up feeling that Seale’s refusal to waive his right to defend himself was in many ways the most significant act of the whole trial, since by it Seale had forced the court to show its ugly face. And it was Seale’s performance most of all that would inspire Abbie’s testimony later in the trial.
At around 5 a.m. on the morning of December 4, 1969, fifteen state’s attorney’s police in Chicago raided the home of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, and shot him dead in his bed. Hampton had been a friend of the defense and had visited Seale in jail early on. The defendants felt that the police were making a point, showing what they had the power to do. Out of mourning for the dead leader, defense attorneys requested a half-day recess, which Judge Hoffman denied. It felt as if a monster had been awakened. At night each defendant found himself wondering if he would be the next one the Chicago police would murder in his sleep.
On December 5, the government presented its last witness, and on December 8 the defense began to tell its side. One thing was immediately evident: While the government had called mostly lower-level employees of the police department, the FBI, or the state, the defense produced presidents of colleges, Members of Parliament, ordained ministers including Jesse Jackson, then employed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, famous singers like Phil Ochs (who, when asked on the stand if he could identify Abbie and Jerry, said, “Yes, Jerry Rubin with the headband and Abbie Hoffman with the smile”), Arlo Guthrie, Country Joe McDonald, Pete Seeger, and Judy Collins, the poets Allen Ginsberg (whom the prosecution tried to ridicule by having him read his poems to the jury) and Ed Sanders, the authors Norman Mailer and William Styron, the historian Staughton Lynd, the comedian Dick Gregory, former Harvard professor Timothy Leary, Georgia state congressman and SNCC leader Julian Bond, former Attorney General of the United States Ramsey Clark, the president of the Public Law Education Institute Thomas Patterson Alder, and others. Again and again, these well-known public figures described unprovoked instances of police officers randomly assaulting protesters and clubbing them viciously during convention week in late August 1968.
The defense team decided not to put all the defendants on the witness stand. Only Rennie Davis and Abbie would testify: Rennie because he would appear to the jury as such a responsible kid, and Abbie because, although he’d appear to be a prankster and a troublemaker, he would strike the jury as harmless and nothing like the dangerous criminal the prosecution was portraying.
Abbie went first, in response to questions from defense attorney Leonard Weinglass. It was December 23, 1969. The trial had been going on for three months during which it had become increasingly bitter on both sides of the aisle. Miraculously, in that congealed and stultifying atmosphere, Abbie presented himself, more or less spontaneously, in a way that had power and poignancy and yet was utterly nonconfrontational, transcending the bitter armed-camp mood of the courtroom. It was to be one of his defining moments.
Abbie raised his fist in the power salute before lifting his arm for the swearing in, and repeated the gesture at the end of the oathtaking. When asked to give his name, his first words of testimony were, “My name is Abbie. I am an orphan of America.” The words reverberated, and still reverberate today, with the power of his indignation.
As he continued, dwelling on questions of identity, not conflict, and describing himself with wit and humor as both an activist and an artist, Abbie spoke of Woodstock Nation, and though the name had been around since the rock concert four months earlier and had served as the title of his most recent book, it was in Chicago that Abbie gave it meaning:
I live in Woodstock Nation. . . . It is a nation of alienated young people. . . . It is a nation dedicated to cooperation versus competition, to the idea that people should have better means of exchange than property or money, that there should be some other basis for human interaction. . . . It is in my mind and in the minds of my brothers and sisters. It does not consist of property or material but, rather, of ideas and certain values. . . .
mr. weinglass: Between the date of your birth, November 30, 1936, and May 1, 1960, what if anything occurred in your life?
the witness [Abbie]: Nothing. I believe it is called an American education.
mr. weinglass: Can you tell the Court and jury what is your present occupation?
the witness: I am a cultural revolutionary. Well, I am really a defendant—full-time.
mr. weinglass: What do you mean by the phrase “cultural revolutionary?”
the witness: Well, I suppose it is a person who tries to shape and participate in the values, and the mores, the customs and the style of living of new people who eventually become inhabitants of a new nation and a new society through art and poetry, theater, and music.
During his testimony, Abbie asked several times for water, adding, “The trial is bad for my health.” Then, beginning with a fit of coughing he couldn’t stop, he had a bronchial episode while on the witness stand—a bad one—and had to be rushed to Michael Reese Hospital. That night, a call came from Chicago to my home in Framingham—I don’t remember if it came from our sister Phyllis, who was working in the defense office, or from Jerry Lefcourt, Abbie’s lawyer. The message was that Abbie wanted me there.
That was on a Friday. Sunday morning I took an early flight to Chicago and took a cab directly to the hospital. The driver talked constantly about the trial during the ride, cursing the Chicago 7 (now that Seale’s case had been separated from the others) and Abbie in particular. My natural urge was to say, “I’m his brother.” But something had changed, not in me but out there in the public’s perception of Abbie, as if it were no longer a question of whether what Abbie was doing was right or wrong. What was new, and I felt it clearly in the back of that cab, was the perception that Abbie was dangerous, a public enemy. Phyllis had warned me that there were so many off-duty cops in Chicago that you just had to keep your mouth shut. And so I did.
At the hospital entrance stood two U.S. marshals, looking the part right up to their beige trenchcoats. When I asked for Abbie’s room number at the front desk, I noticed a delayed response from the receptionist. I couldn’t tell anymore if it was the criminal thing or the celebrity thing. She said I had to wait, and a few minutes later a federal marshal came down to escort me. As we walked, he machine-gunned me with questions to prove my identity, starting with Ma’s maiden name. By order of Judge Hoffman, Abbie was still under oath and thus under federal protection, the marshal explained. I’d only planned to visit my sick brother, but here I felt I’d unexpectedly entered a brave new world.
Outside Abbie’s door were two more marshals. When I got inside, the first thing I noticed were the tubes coming out of Abbie’s nose and the oxygen mask connected to a large tank by the bed. Abbie himself looked badly beaten up. I was horrified. But right away Abbie pulled the cannulas from his nose and spoke to me: “Hey, brother,” he said in his hardiest, most gravelly voice. And once he’d started talking he kept going a mile a minute: “So what do you think of Chicago? Are you hungry? You want steak, lobster? I can get you whatever you want.”
I stayed right through the afternoon and evening. Strangely, there were no other visitors. My brother kept up the Abbie road show for me, trying to entertain me with constant small talk. But you could see he was at the end of his rope, exhausted to the point of physical breakdown. “You’ve got to understand,” he said, “I’m the star of this show,” meaning the Chicago trial. We played cards, gin, and we watched a football game on TV. Then he sent me home to the lodgings he’d arranged for me, an apartment where Tom Hayden was also staying, with instructions that I meet him the next morning at the courthouse.
Abbie was waiting for me when I arrived, looking washed out but high spirited. I followed him through the most extensive security apparatus I’d ever seen, as he told each guard that I was his brother. A month or two earlier I had sent Abbie my driver’s license, and he’d been using it to gain admittance for a stream of friends and celebrities, including the actor Jon Voight, since family members were allowed in without special passes. Now one U.S. marshal asked, “How many brothers do you have, Abbie?” Abbie grinned and said, “This is the only one.” And when the man hesitated, Abbie pushed me through ahead of him, saying, “If he doesn’t get in, I don’t go in.”
No matter how worn out Abbie was by the onslaught of the trial and the strain of touring the country on speaking engagements to raise money for the defense when court wasn’t in session, his image as depicted in the media was so robust and so clearly defined that no one seemed to see his physical frailty. Or rather, they saw it, but they didn’t see it. Even as fine a reporter as J. Anthony Lucas, writing in the New York Times of December 29, 1969, fell for Abbie’s presentation of the facts over the facts themselves: “Abbie Hoffman came off his sickbed today to give a colorful performance at the Chicago conspiracy trial.” The accompanying photo shows him smiling and bright-eyed, sitting in his wheelchair outside the hospital, pushed by a pretty nurse, with several microphones pushed near his face by reporters:
He was released early this morning, still a bit groggy from the sedatives. (“It ain’t my usual stuff,” he said.) But when he resumed the witness stand he quickly showed he was fully recovered.
Winking, sighing, gasping, stretching, waving, making eyes at the judge and jury and hugely enjoying the whole thing, the 33-year-old defendant dominated the proceedings for nearly five hours.
Abbie worked hard for that kind of coverage. In his autobiography, Abbie has a photo of himself in the hospital in December 1969, with an oxygen tube going into his nose, looking terrible. In the photo’s caption, he says he was only faking pneumonia. But I never believed that.12
I sat three or four rows back while Abbie’s testimony continued. I found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying, so overwhelmed was I by the tension in the small courtroom. Two or three marshals were pacing up and down the aisle that divided “their side” from “our side.” They being the white-stockingbowling-league supporters of the prosecution, ours the long-hair-slacker-drugeating-free-love-making-Communist side. The marshals kept their eyes fixed on our side, tapping us on the shoulder if we so much as coughed. Judge Hoffman also kept his eyes on us, his head barely rising above the bench. Now and then, U.S. attorney Tom Foran or one of his assistants turned to glare at us too.
mr. weinglass: Abbie Hoffman, prior to coming to Chicago, from April 1968 on to the week of the convention, did you enter into an agreement with David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner or Rennie Davis, to come to the city of Chicago for the purpose of encouraging and promoting violence during the convention week?
the witness [Abbie]: An agreement?
mr. weinglass: Yes.
the witness: We couldn’t agree on lunch.
During the cross-examination, Abbie took a slightly different approach, taking the force out of the prosecution’s absurd argument by agreeing with much of it and making light of what was too funny to agree with:
mr. schultz: Mr. Hoffman, while you were in Chicago, you deliberately told your police tails that you had had a fight with Rubin—
the witness [Abbie]: Yes. Deliberately.
mr. schultz:—in order to destroy any charge of conspiracy, isn’t that right? Isn’t that right, Mr. Hoffman?
the witness: Yes. God, I was sneaky. Yes, I told that to the policemen. It didn’t work obviously. . . .
mr. schultz: Mr. Hoffman, while you were negotiating with City officials, you were secretly attending meetings and planning for spontaneous acts of violence during the Democratic National Convention, isn’t that right?
the witness: How do you plan for spontaneous acts of violence? I would have no idea how to do that.
Again and again Schultz put forward his perception that what happened in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 was the result of a carefully conceived and methodically executed plan to entrap the local government into actions that would lead to violence in the streets. Thus the Yippies!’ repeated requests for permits to sleep in Lincoln Park were seen as a ploy, self-defense seminars in the park designed to teach how to avert violence were portrayed as violence-generating, and the attempts of the Yippies! to help people keep calm were seen by the prosecution as ingenious subterfuges. Again and again, Abbie countered by trying to explain that Schultz was confusing Yippie! mythmaking with reality, and again and again Schultz demonstrated that he actually did not understand the difference.
Schultz had carefully read Revolution for the Hell of It and carried his heavily marked-up personal copy with him into the courtroom. (Once again it was Abbie’s enemies who proved to be among his most diligent students.) Repeatedly, Schultz took statements made by Abbie after the convention, and tried to present them as being revelatory of Abbie’s conspiratorial intentions before the convention. Incredibly, Judge Hoffman seemed wilfully blind to the absurdity of Schultz’s argument.
“Isn’t it a fact that you said that a society of love must be brought about with violence?,” asked Schultz, referring to a speech Abbie had made at the University of Maryland almost a year after the Chicago convention. “I said that in order to love we had to learn how to survive, and in order to survive we had to learn how to fight,” Abbie responded. A little later Schultz flatly stated, “Mr. Hoffman, you wanted to wreck this society.” Abbie answered, “I feel that in time the society will wreck itself, and our role is to survive.”13
Attempts by the defense to introduce the notion of Yippie! mythmaking as a possible alternative to the prosecution’s dangerous conspirators theory were systematically frustrated by Judge Hoffman and the prosecutors. The prosecution’s case relied on its vision of a two-dimensional world without myth. Yet Abbie’s personality, his wit and spontaneity, belied the prosecution’s case better than any counterargument could have. It was almost impossible to imagine Abbie as a conspirator. Nonetheless, after two weeks, including the time in hospital, Abbie’s testimony was abruptly cut short by a vote of the defendants, reasoning that for all his bravado and brilliance he wasn’t advancing their case.14
The week I spent with Abbie in Chicago had a powerful effect on me. To get in and out of the courthouse, you often had to pass through a crowd jeering “Commie bastards” and other insults. One day a guy in the crowd pointed at me and yelled, “That’s his brother. He’s a Commie bastard too.” But despite such moments of unpleasantness, there was an electricity emanating from the trial, the feeling that this was history in the making, and you felt a tremendous pull to be a part of it.
I headed back to Framingham, my head filled to bursting with new ideas. I had to get back to the business since Dad and Ma were in Florida again. And I had to get back to be with Joan and our son Justin, since Joan would never stand my being away on New Year’s. But I had also decided to become more politically active. I felt that as a veteran medic who’d seen some of the first body bags return from Vietnam and as a businessman with a stake in America, I had something to say that people might want to hear.
For a few months I kept the momentum going. I would show up at speaking engagements in a suit and tie, making a very different impression than Abbie did. Then one day two FBI agents visited me at my office and asked me to walk with them outside. I’d been invited to speak at an American Legion dedication of a park in Auburn, Massachusetts. As we walked, they explained that they feared trouble at the dedication. They also mentioned that customers of mine were friends of theirs. They were concerned, they said, that I could be hurt, and that my business could be hurt, if I went to the park dedication. The veiled threat couldn’t have been more obvious. I suddenly understood why Abbie liked to travel light. The more ties you have, the more ways there are to hurt you. Without even having to think twice about it, I called the American Legion and told them I wouldn’t be able to participate in the dedication.
But I didn’t really believe the dedication was what the FBI agents wanted me to back out of. They wanted me to know just how vulnerable I was, and they succeeded. The thought that they were paying visits to customers scared me much more than it angered me. In that sense, I was an easy target for them. I simply did not feel that I had the option to let the business fail. I never for a moment doubted that its success was my primary responsibility. I understood, with a sad resignation that reminded me of Dad, that Abbie and I weren’t separated so much by our views on how to end the war as by what we each felt commanded our primary loyalties. Abbie’s allegiance was to his beliefs, mine was to my wife, our parents, my employees, and others to whom we were connected by fragile threads that would be broken if the business failed. Today I know that Abbie’s way was brutally hard. But at the time, it seemed that the hard way to go was mine. And it only partly raised my spirits to think of us as playing different positions on the same team, Abbie shaking the world while I kept the home fires burning. I began to miss Abbie again, to understand him more intensely, even as I saw that the road he was traveling was taking him from us.
On February 14 and 15, after having already sentenced Bobby Seale to four years’ worth of contempt back in November, Judge Hoffman conducted contempt proceedings against the remaining seven defendants and both attorneys. Abbie got eight months. The harshest sentence went to attorney Bill Kunstler, who got four years and thirteen days. David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, and Jerry Rubin each got more than two years; Tom Hayden and attorney Len Weinglass each got more than a year; Lee Weiner and John Froines each got less than a year.
Despite the four years’ worth of contempt sentences received earlier by Bobby Seale, no one had expected such harshness. Especially frustrating was the fact that Judge Hoffman had the power to impose the sentences unilaterally, without the defendants having any recourse to seek justice from a jury. Everyone was crushed. The only strange sidenote here was that, of all the defendants, Abbie, who had been the most contemptuous after Seale, got the mildest sentence. Abbie always felt that Judge Hoffman’s lenience bespoke the judge’s actual fondness for him. Pretty amazing, considering that on one occasion, after David Dellinger’s bail was revoked and the pacifist was carted off to jail, Abbie had stood up in the courtroom and shouted at the judge: “You’re a disgrace to the Jews . . . a shande fur de goyim.”
Abbie sent me a letter. I know the exact date because I still keep it in its envelope, with its wavy lined postmark over the six-cent Franklin D. Roosevelt stamp. He addressed it to me “c/o Worcester Medical Supply” rather than at home, and in the upper left corner of the envelope he wrote, “A Hoffman/Cook County Jail/26th & California/Chicago, Ill.” The envelope is torn where I must have ripped it open. The reason I have preserved the letter with such care is the same reason why Abbie wrote the name of the jail on the envelope (he could have written the address only). For both of us, it is difficult to understand that they would actually put him in jail for the Chicago case.
The jokester in Abbie flaunted the fact of his imprisonment; he always boasted of his jail time. But another part of him felt shocked and betrayed that the country he had loved, the nation he had tried to keep honest to itself, at great personal risk, would lock him up as a criminal. And jail was scary, filled with scary people. And for somebody like Abbie, confinement for an extended period and the sharing of a 10' × 7½' cell (Abbie would reduce the dimensions of the cell for dramatic effect during his closing argument) placed him in an environment that was intolerable from one moment to the next, never mind for weeks, months, or years.
The letter inside, which was not mailed until February 23, was dated six days earlier, on the 17th. Mostly, it contained instructions. He wanted me to contact the mayor of Worcester, who happened to be a family friend, and ask him to call for a congressional review of Judge Hoffman’s contempt citation or impeachment of the judge. But the letter was also reassuring, funny, and unflinchingly stoic. Before signing off he added that everything was okay, although Cook County Jail was no Grossingers.
Grossinger’s was the Catskills luxury hotel for Jews; interestingly, Abbie hadn’t yet been there, but I had and had described it to him: “Israel has a few more Jews, Abbie, but Grossinger’s got better food.” Abbie may have had in mind both the terrible food and the paucity of Jews in the jail.
On February 18, the jury—which Judge Hoffman had sent out of the courtroom so many times that they had missed about a third of the proceedings—found all the defendants not guilty of the main count of conspiring to cross state lines to incite a riot in Chicago.15 Abbie, Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, and Jerry Rubin were found guilty of crossing state lines to incite a riot individually.
Lee Weiner and John Froines were found not guilty of anything and would have been free to go had it not been for the contempt sentences.
Two days later, on February 20, Judge Hoffman reconvened the court and surprised those convicted by sentencing them without prior warning, after first allowing each an improvised statement on his own behalf. Jerry took the opportunity to say how happy he was about the entire trial, ending with, “This is the happiest moment of my life.”
Abbie began by recommending that the seventy-four-year-old Judge Hoffman try LSD, and then even offering to fix him up with a good dealer. Then Abbie talked seriously about his feeling that what he’d done in Chicago and here at the trial brought him closer to founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Regarding the horrors of the Cook County Jail, Abbie said: “It wasn’t funny last night sitting in a prison cell, a 5' × 8' room, with no light in the room. I could have written a whole book last night. Nothing. No light in the room. Bedbugs all over. They bite. I haven’t eaten in six days. I’m not on a hunger strike; you can’t call it that. It’s just that the food stinks and I can’t take it.” He made you feel his vulnerability, his hurt. Then he ended with, “I’ll see you in Florida, Julie”—the proposed site of the 1972 Democratic and Republican National conventions. After each of the five remaining defendants had spoken, Judge Hoffman sentenced them equally. Ironically, it was the first democratic-seeming gesture of the trial: Five years, plus a $5,000 fine and court expenses.
Despite the five convictions, Judge Hoffman pointed the finger at himself alone on sentencing day. Abbie and his co-defendents had survived. They had put the justice system on trial. And they had been acquitted by a jury of the main accusation against them: that they had “conspired together,” with its tacit implication that the entire Left was a conspiracy rather than a movement.
I gave a long interview to the Hartford Times during which I announced that I planned to write a book about my brother, to be called “Dear Abbie,” so proud was I of him. During the interview, I tried out some of Abbie’s more inflammatory rhetoric in my own slightly tremulous voice, perhaps understanding his ideas for the first time as I spoke his words. I claimed that the prison sentences handed down against five of the codefendants represented the imprisonment of “every kid who has stood up for peace and civil rights.” I bristled at the suggestion that Abbie leave the country: “What can you do in Canada?” I fired back at the reporter: “The fight is here.” And a few minutes later I added, “I believe in our legal system . . . but it was distorted in Chicago. If this is what [it has become], maybe it is time for a revolution.”16
Two weeks after Judge Hoffman had denied bail to the five convicted defendants and sent them to Cook County Jail, an appeals court reversed the decision and the five were released. Two years later, in May of 1972, the appeals court ruled that Judge Hoffman had also been wrong not to allow Seale to defend himself, and at the same time reversed all the contempt citations against the defendants pending a new hearing.
In November 1972, the court of appeals threw out all the convictions due to various errors committed by Judge Hoffman and the prosecuting attorneys. And one year later, the new appellate court judge assigned to the case, Judge Edward Gignoux from the state of Maine, ended the case by upholding a few of the contempt charges but limiting sentences to time already served.
More facts came to light only years later, toward the end of the decade, as Freedom of Information Act files began to be released. It was revealed that Judge Hoffman was directly and indirectly acting as an FBI operative at the Chicago Conspiracy trial. Examples are numerous. On April 14, 1969—months before the trial had begun and nearly a year before Judge Hoffman handed down his outrageous contempt citations against the defendants and their attorneys—the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago office was able to report to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Foran had assured him that Hoffman planned to hold the defendants and their lawyers in contempt. And several months later, in October 1969, just two weeks into the trial, the same Special Agent had received assurances of the upcoming contempt charges from the judge himself: “Judge Hoffman has indicated in strictest confidence that, following the trial, he definitely plans to consider various individuals for possible contempt of court.” Remember that both of these reports came before the contempts had occurred! On several occasions during the trial, Judge Hoffman quashed defense motions immediately after the FBI had expressed its wish that they be quashed. The one juror the defense considered potentially sympathetic was coerced into getting herself excused through an FBI ruse with Judge Hoffman’s full cooperation. And repeatedly, meetings of the defendants and of defense counsel, including ones that took place in New York City and Newark, New Jersey, were illegally wiretapped by the FBI or local police forces, and the information passed on to the assistant prosecutor in Chicago, who ignored his legal obligation to inform both the judge and defense counsel. Through this system of wiretapping, the prosecution often knew defense strategy even before all the defendants did.17 So it turns out that there was a conspiracy behind the Chicago Conspiracy trial after all—one between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Chief Assistant Prosecutor Richard G. Schultz, U.S. Attorney Thomas A. Foran, and Judge Julius J. Hoffman.
Abbie had bragged in a December 1967 letter to Father Gilgun that he planned to bring 250,000 people to the Democratic Convention, 100,000 of them to be committed to disruption or sabotage. So, in a sense, he had indeed conspired, eight months before the fact, to cross state lines in order to incite to riot. But what he, his codefendants, and their attorneys were able to show, by their original action and throughout the lengthy trial, was that we have a constitutional right to protest in an organized way, and to cross state lines to do so, and to challenge unjust laws that seem to make such actions illegal, and that in the long run the justice system will uphold that right.
In subsequent years, Abbie would make it sound as if he had been the emcee of the Chicago trial, fully in control and having the time of his life, but while he did enjoy the constant attention the trial provided, the fact is that from the outset he was unprepared for the intensity and zeal of the government’s attack in the federal courthouse. In his heart he believed in his innocence and was convinced that the justice system would acquit him and his codefendants, and after enough time passed that belief was for the most part upheld.
You could say that the Chicago trial had been a personal triumph for Abbie, and Abbie did say so. The trial had given Abbie and the other defendants the opportunity to prove to the American people, in a court of law, the injustice of the justice system. The trial was the vehicle that catapulted him to stardom and gave him his largest audience. But his triumph came at great personal cost. The trial had taken him away from his work as a community organizer and cast him in a different role; it had estranged him from his family; it had placed Herculean demands on his energy; it had kept the Yippie! party from growing during the critical two-year period after Chicago, which in fact had put an end to the Yippies! as a political force. Perhaps most important, the experience of the trial had taken much of the sweetness out of Abbie’s vision and replaced it with a new militancy. After Chicago, Abbie no longer believed you could have a revolution for the hell of it—all fun and no one gets hurt. But that conversion left him in a quandary, since Abbie wasn’t suited to be a bomb thrower. Once again Abbie had to redefine who he was.
On March 4, 1970, a townhouse on West Tenth Street just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan suddenly exploded into tiny pieces, killing three members of the Weather Underground who had been making bombs inside it. The accident was important, because it derailed plans for increased acts of violence, in particular the bombing of Columbia University. Of the townhouse explosion Abbie would write a decade later that it was both a tragedy and a “blessing in disguise,” since the bombs had been intended to take innocent life: “People are flesh and blood, not symbols. Not only is this kind of terrorism an unworkable strategy, it is one which could only replace one heartless system with another.”18 But at the time, Abbie and Anita maintained significant contact with members of the Weather Underground and felt great empathy with their search for ever-more-extreme means to end the escalating war in Vietnam. Even if Abbie stopped short of endorsing their particular form of revolutionary activism, he avoided criticizing it.
In speeches, Abbie’s words often turned harsh. The FBI decided that his “philosophy and activities portray him as an individual who would constitute a threat to the national defense of the country in time of a national emergency.” This identified him as “Priority I,” which meant that they were following him at all times. Agents taped his speeches everywhere he went, studiously transcribed them, and each speech was then transported, in a burgeoning file, to key FBI metropolitan centers across the country.19
On March 15 at Columbia University, sharing a platform with French playwright Jean Genet and Afeni Shakur of the Panther 21 before a crowd of 2,500, Abbie roared: “Have you heard the weather report? Seattle—boom! San Francisco—boom! New York—boom! boom! boom!” The Yippies!, he said, “believe in violating every law, including the law of gravity!”20
In New York City on March 27, Abbie appeared for thirty-five manic and confrontational minutes on The Merv Griffin Show. In answer to a question from Griffin as to why he was not currently in jail, Abbie cried out, “I’m not in jail because five hundred thousand brothers and sisters of mine took to the streets and burned the Bank of America and other state institutions . . . the government found it more expeditious to let us out than to keep us in.” And when Merv suggested that Abbie was provoking and instilling fear in people with his promises of violence in the streets, Abbie warned against complacency, saying of those who might feel that the Chicago trial had been unfair but didn’t think they had to do anything about it, “That’s just what the good German said.” A bitter dispute developed between Abbie and another one of Merv’s guests, Virginia Graham. After a while, Abbie stood up and said, “It’s getting a little hot.” Then he removed his suede leather jacket to reveal his red, white, and blue flag shirt underneath.
If you lived in parts of the country that aired the show live, you saw Abbie wearing Old Glory for a few seconds, after which the shirt appeared black on the television screen. And most parts of the country didn’t even get those few seconds of red, white, and blue. The blackout was explained the next day in a statement by CBS president Bob Wood as having been necessary to avoid, “legal problems . . . because of the possibility of violation of the law as to disrespect and desecration of the flag and to avoid affronting many of our viewers.”21
At an outdoor rally at New York University a few days later, Abbie spoke before a crowd of 250, taking the platform, according to the Washington Square Journal, while “blowing his nose with a small American flag,” saying, “It’s just Old Glory blowing in the wind.” Then he got serious: “All trials in America are political trials.
All prisoners are political prisoners. . . . Ninety percent of the people in jail are black. Ninety percent are young. Ninety percent haven’t had a fucking trial. Everyone should go to a minimum security jail like NYUs. . . . We’re all niggers. We’re all Vietcong.”22
On the evening of April 7, Abbie was in Fort Collins, Colorado, addressing a crowd of fifteen hundred at Colorado State University. Again Abbie began by blowing his nose into a tiny American flag, saying,
I have to apologize for not being stoned or having a colds. . . .
They let us out [of Cook County Jail] on one condition: we’re not allowed to give any seditious speeches. I hope everything I say is seditious. I hope everything we do, live, breathe and eat, fuck and shoot is seditious because we find ourselves in a state of war.
The Yippies believe in banks. We invested in the Bank of America, Santa Barbara. That paid off heavy.23
We have to redefine the language and one of the words we got to reorient ourselves to is the word violence. We have to talk about institutional violence.
And I’ll tell you, revolution is about life, it’s not about dying. You don’t die for the revolution, you live for it.
I said I want to confess because I felt the government was calling me an enemy of the state and I am an enemy of the state.
Everybody knows Mayor Daley and his cohorts were responsible for what happened in the streets of Chicago. [But] there isn’t a court in America where you could put that pig on trial. Only in the streets. And that’s where we’re going to have our jury of our peers, in the streets of this country. It’s going to be a long hot summer if Bobby [Seale] doesn’t get out; it’s going to be a burning fucking summer, and all winter is going to burn. Because [Bobby Seale] isn’t there because of some murder in New Haven, he’s there because he’s the chairman of the Black Panther Party.
We’re reasonable, we want everything; we’re rational, we want it now; we’re responsible, we’re going to take it.
The university is a base for launching guerrilla attacks, that’s all it is. It ain’t a fucking place to get an education. It ain’t a place to get a degree. It’s a place where there’s a mass of people, a place to launch a guerrilla attack on an institution of America and use it as such and that’s all it’s there for.
Tell your kids we belong to another nation. We ain’t in this nation. We don’t understand it. We’ve got chromosome damage. We never take baths. We’re spaced-out freaks, anything you want to call us—commies, pinkos, freaking assholes, fags, hippies, revolutionaries. We don’t give a fuck. Then they say, ‘Why don’t you salute the flag?’ It ain’t my flag.24
On April 14 Abbie came home to Worcester to speak at Holy Cross College. He slipped into town around dusk, and I met him at Weintraub’s delicatessen, where his first question as we sat down was did I have Dodo Cotton’s number. I asked him what he was talking about. He seemed to see the Holy Cross speech as his best opportunity to finally impress the one girl from high school he couldn’t get out of his head. She was married now, but it was very important to him that she hear his speech.
Then he turned to the subject of his recent speaking engagements. “Did you hear the fuckers threw me out at Rice? Did you see how I blew my nose in the flag at Colorado?” Et cetera. It was ironic—this did you hear, did you hear, did you see—because Abbie sometimes called to tell me what he was going to do before he did it, and always told me what he’d done afterward, and then again the next day. Did I hear? I felt I knew some of his exploits better than he did. It was as if Abbie himself couldn’t quite believe his own exploits and needed to see them reflected in my eyes for them to be real to him.
When we arrived at the Holy Cross gymnasium, we were met by a mob of hostile jocks determined to block Abbie from entering. As we pulled up to the back entrance, some of them began to rock the car, banging on the doors and the roof. I said to Abbie that I didn’t think we should go in under the circumstances. “I’ll take care of it,” Abbie said, and jumped out of the car before I had a chance to stop him. He pulled out a knife and went right up to the largest guy he could see. I reflexively turned my head the other way. But then the crowd began to move away, leaving our path clear. I bounded from the car, grabbed Abbie, and pulled him into the gymnasium.
Abbie hopped onto the stage and started right in talking about the trial, giving his usual stump speech. Then he got onto the subject of Worcester, about things that were wrong here, about the reasons why he wasn’t proud to be from Worcester anymore, and no longer considered it his home. He mentioned how his friends Country Joe and the Fish had gotten busted in Worcester for lewd and lascivious behavior during a performance of “The Vietnam Rag” at the local auditorium (part of “The Vietnam Rag” is the “F-U-C-K” cheer: “It’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for . . . Gimme an F, gimme a U,” etc.). Abbie used that occasion as the springboard, saying something like, “I heard my friend Country Joe got busted here. Well, I only got this to say about that: Fuck the auditorium that put the show on and made money from the show, fuck the courthouse with its inscription, ‘Obedience to the Law Is Liberty,’ fuck the justice system, fuck the city council and the mayor, fuck Robert Stoddard and his Worcester Telegram and Wyman and Gordon, fuck the administration of Holy Cross College, fuck all the chickenshits that didn’t want me to speak here, fuck the FBI that are here tonight transcribing every word I’m saying.” He went on for about fifteen minutes like that, cursing every hallowed institution of the city that he could think of, offering a complete tour of Worcester on a four-letter word.
He got off the stage and I grabbed him and held on, just wanting to get him out of there as quickly as possible. The first words out of his mouth were, “Did you see Do?” He wanted to know if Dodo Cotton had been in the audience, and that was the only thing he wanted to know.
Abbie’s speech at Holy Cross was said to have cost the university half a million dollars in alumni contributions, and that summer, when it came time for Dad to renew his subscription to the Holy Cross football season—he’d had the same seats for the past twenty-five years, and they comprised one of his greatest pleasures—he was told his seats had been taken. Dad, who had been the first Jew on the Holy Cross Homecoming Committee, was offered a pair of seats in the end zone instead. Out of pride, he declined, ending an era in his life. He never went to a Holy Cross game again. You couldn’t even mention the name Holy Cross in our home ever again. Although he grieved for the loss of his season tickets, it was the first catastrophe Abbie had caused for which Dad didn’t blame him, so angry was he at Holy Cross.
On April 29, 1970, Nixon invaded Cambodia. At the same time, the secret B-52 bombings of North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were a horrible, daily, round-the-clock phenomenon. Demonstrations broke out all over the country as May Day approached. I remember driving into Harvard Square in Cambridge to find the campus an armed camp with police everywhere. Shortly afterward, Boston-area schools, including Harvard and Boston University, closed their doors early and sent the students home.
Then on May 4, 1970, four students were killed, and another nine wounded, by a National Guard contingent that opened fire without warning or provocation at Kent State University in Ohio. That week, thirty ROTC buildings on campuses across the country were burned or bombed.
In New York, Abbie received death threats and arrived at speaking engagements surrounded by bodyguards. At the Pace College strike center, truckloads of longshoremen assaulted students with baseball bats. At a demonstration in Foley Square, right-wing-vigilantes armed with meathooks destroyed equipment and beat up strike coordinators. And what was happening in New York was happening all over the country.
“Without doubt,” wrote Abbie, “this was the period of greatest struggle and tension of the era, [with cries of] ‘All for Vietnam,’ and ‘Avenge the Kent State Four.’”25 It was a moment, perhaps the moment, when the floodgates might have opened. Suddenly everyone felt that revolution might be nearer than anyone could have guessed just weeks before. And people started thinking of the price in young lives that such a revolution would cost. Then the moment passed.
On May 9, the Mobe brought together 100,000 people in Washington, D.C., to protest the war and the Kent State killings. For Abbie, the protest promised to be the most explosive demonstration ever, with massive civil disobedience—a heightened response to the new level of government violence in Vietnam and at home. He urged people to drop everything and head for Washington.
But the demonstration turned out to be just another large protest. Once again, it was the same old speakers warning Nixon about what was going to happen next time. Abbie’s frustration with the “new” Left was intense. He felt betrayed. He railed against “people [in the Movement] who lack imagination, who failed to modify their tactics one iota during six years of protest, and who for all I know are still carrying out the same rally, with the same list of speakers, on the same corner of Union Square today. Left wing moonies!”26
A week later, on May 14, two students were killed and nine wounded at Jackson State, an all-black college in Mississippi, after troops fired over three hundred rounds at a women’s dormitory during protests there. This time there was no national outcry.
The reasons the revolution stopped before it began may have had less to do with a lack of leadership and more to do with the silent efficacy of government agencies such as the FBI, whose business it was to suppress dissent, and who had grown much better at their job since their clumsy efforts to derail the civil rights movement early in the decade. The general prosperity of the country also tended to dampen revolutionary ardor. And the essential elasticity of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights further diluted the need for revolution by making other forms of change seem possible. Over the next two years, the level of student protest would decrease steadily from this high-water mark.
In a way, Abbie—who saw better than anyone what was happening to the country—didn’t see what was happening to Abbie. His long, tangled, curly hair had become a national icon, just like Bella Abzug’s hats and Gloria Steinem’s glasses. Abbie took great pleasure in his stardom. In 1970, as he remarks in his autobiography, “Who did your hair?” was the question asked of him most frequently by reporters, prompting this answer, “Oh, I just lay down on Second Avenue and let a truck run over it.” This media fetishism wasn’t yet something that he complained about, as he would come to, bitterly, starting a year later when Steal This Book was published. He handled it well on the surface. But it was eating away at him all the same.
In recognition of his celebrity status, all kinds of businessmen offered him deals that would have made him rich. There were six-figure offers to endorse laugh gadgets and “Abbie Dolls.” Publishers offered him tens of thousands of dollars for various book projects. Random House suggested that he head a counterculture division within the parent company. The business world wanted to get hip to the counterculture’s hundred million potential customers, but the armies of the counterculture and those of the establishment culture were so sharply divided that America’s business community had no inside track leading to America’s youth. One group wanted Abbie to write a pricey industry newsletter on “things happening in the youth scene.” The William Morris Agency wanted to package him as a “multitalented property,” and promised that they could put him into the “top tax bracket.”
Abbie turned down the merchandising offers one and all. And when he did earn substantial royalties from Revolution for the Hell of It, $25,000 went to bail out one of the Panther 21, and was forfeited after the Panther, Richard Moore, jumped bail.27 The profits from Woodstock Nation went to the Chicago trial, to the Movement Speakers Bureau, to the defense of John Sinclair, and to the East Village anarchist group, the Motherfuckers, and the IRS.28 But he reveled in his fame. As clear-minded and incorruptible as he was when it came to money matters, the temptations of his fame were another story. And it was in yielding to the price of his fame, in letting others try to define who he was, that, piece by piece, in 1970 Abbie’s world showed the first signs of unraveling.
On June 3, 1970, the New York Post published an article entitled “Solid Gold in Haywire Left.” The article featured Abbie and Jerry as youth-culture entrepreneurs, living in “two worlds,” one the world of revolution in the streets, the other of “literary agents, royalty checks, sales percentages, lecture fees, book and movie contracts.” Abbie hated the article and others like it that appeared around that time. He suspected FBI dirty tricks, and it may well be that COINTELPRO was behind the story. The Counter-Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, was the FBI’s effort to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” leftist movements in the sixties. 29 At the same time, there were grains of truth in the story, and people quoted in it included Abbie’s lawyer, his agent, and his editors. The problem for Abbie wasn’t the idea that he would be familiar with the language of royalty checks, lecture fees, and movie contracts. He did, after all, earn his living from his public speaking and his writings; that he could do so was what permitted him to be a full-time political activist. The problem was that he was no longer in the driver’s seat, publicly or privately, when it came to defining who he was.
Within the Movement, Abbie’s reputation remained a question mark, even as his fame grew. Some saw him as the clown whose disruptions gave the Movement a bad name. Others saw him as the one leader who made revolutionary struggle fun, funny, and human, and thus the one leader with the power to affect masses of people. But few people within the Movement felt that they knew this man well enough to follow him.
Abbie was saying to the world that he was a visionary Jewish road warrior, a full-time political activist, a revolutionary. But the world, as represented by the media and the government, was no longer simply taking Abbie’s word for it. They were coming to their own conclusions. The New York Post had decided that Abbie was an entrepreneur. J. Edgar Hoover believed Abbie was an ideologue and a potentially dangerous political assassin, who had shown “evidence of emotional instability” and “a propensity for violence and antipathy toward good order and government.”30 Every revolutionary dare, every taunt, and every exaggeration found its way into the voluminous memoranda on Abbie that crisscrossed the country between FBI regional offices. And during this period, Abbie, perhaps somewhat flattered by the notion of himself as a successful entrepreneur, and savoring the irony of the FBI perception that he was dangerous, sensed a certain amount of respect in both portraits. In time, these misperceptions would become sources of deep bitterness to him. But that would come later. For now, lacking the kind of respect he sought within the Movement, he bounced back and forth among the various public misconceptions that were forming, a kind of itinerant freelancer, taking solace where he could find it. To his credit, Abbie never became either an entrepreneur, as Jerry Rubin eventually did, or the kind of public enemy the FBI wanted him to be. In the end, as much as he tried to transform his natural optimism and naivete into the politics of the gun, something in him refused to make that leap.
In the media, Abbie was thriving, almost to the point of being predictable in his unpredictability. And Abbie was doing everything possible to live up to his media image. But there were cracks in the surface. The person was straining to keep up with the media personality, and was in fact failing to keep up.
Abbie seemed to me to be in trouble emotionally. The lines that distinguished who he was from who he wanted to be, and what he believed from what he said, had become dangerously blurred. He was exhausted physically. He spent most of his time on the road and didn’t see much of Anita. By the spring of 1970, the constant activity that had become his lifestyle had gradually taken over his life. He no longer chose which engagements to do based on any reasonable justification. Instead, he showed up at as many dates as he could muster, did his act, and proceeded to the next city on his itinerary, like a passenger without a destination. Sometimes he would call me long-distance to ask what city he was in. And he wasn’t kidding. Most of the time, the truth was that he was too tired to stop moving.
I could understand at least a little of the temptation his fame represented to him. Even as I recognized his pain and confusion, I relished his celebrity. Losing control didn’t seem an unreasonable price to pay. Wherever he went there seemed to be new fans and a new woman to sleep with; Abbie considered sexual prerogatives to be one of the perquisites of his job. The July Mademoiselle named him one of the sexiest men in America. Abbie loved it. “For Movement women who are not off men completely,” wrote Mademoiselle, “Abbie is the going sex symbole. . . . It’s partly because he’s funny and bright and stuff, but that’s not all of it. It’s partly the vitality and the action and the guts, but that’s not all of it, either. Here’s the paradox—what makes Abbie so appealing to the women is that, in the midst of radicalism rampant, he has an almost old-fashioned reverence and respect for his wife. . . . Abbie Hoffman—are ya ready—is the Rhett Butler of the Revolution.”31
A clean break seemed to have come between Abbie’s cluttered and confused inner life and the flawless persona he showed to the world.