Abbie, age 8, and Jack, age 5, in front of Kanef’s drugstore. (Jack and Phyllis Hoffman)
of course, abbie wasn’t giving up. He never would—not until the very end. But in subtle ways, by mid-1970, he was beginning to shift allegiances and beginning to recuperate from the high-wire act of Chicago. He was looking for something new, distrustful of much of the traditional Left, and willing to try to settle down in some small way. He was a survivor and he didn’t like to show his vulnerability. But at the same time, he was vulnerable, bruised, banged up, and undeniably bitter: The ’60s were over, the smoke had cleared, and his side had not won: The war in Vietnam was worse than before; the people in power in Washington were worse than before. There were greater numbers of demonstrations and greater numbers of arrests. But at the same time, the Left was disaffected and disjointed. The emotion with which one went to demonstrations was often disillusionment. Even as we marched, there was the feeling among us that it was pointless, that nothing was going to change, that our earnestness was wasted on the politicians and policy makers.
That summer Abbie and Anita saw the Grand Canyon and gambled in Vegas. Wherever he went, he met people in the counterculture and asked them for their best survival tips. On July 15, back in New York, Abbie pled guilty to two criminal charges in New York City Criminal Court, one on criminal trespass charges relating to his arrest at Columbia University two years earlier, the other for resisting arrest on April 11, 1969. And on July 22, 1970, he paid fines totaling $1,050. This was a tactical retreat, showing Abbie choosing his battles more selectively. In Chicago, he’d had a taste of his own mortality. And while Abbie never let himself be terrorized by his enemies, he had begun to respect the damage they could inflict. He was still determined to win, but he no longer considered winning a foregone conclusion.
On August 30, 1970—one week after an anti-war activist bombed the University of Wisconsin army mathematics research center and killed an innocent graduate student in the name of peace—Abbie and Jerry Rubin were in New Haven, Connecticut, among a group of thirty or so demonstrators participating in a solidarity vigil while awaiting a verdict in the murder trial of a Black Panther Party member. In memoranda circulated by FBI agents, Abbie and Jerry are described “sitting on a low brick wall across the street from the court house,” declining to be interviewed by “newsmen ‘except for members of the revolutionary press,’” and unwilling to “‘talk to a crowd of less than 1,000.’”
The image conjured up by the FBI documents speaks volumes in describing the grim cat-and-mouse game that had evolved. On one hand, scores of FBI agents, fully aware that Abbie’s and Jerry’s presence in Connecticut without having informed the U.S. Marshal’s office in Chicago constituted a breach of the terms of their recent bail bond, knowing they were free to arrest the two, yet choosing not to. And on the other hand, Abbie and Jerry, knowing they could be arrested at any time, and not really caring; uninterested in speaking to the press, disappointed in the number of their followers, unwilling to make speeches. There was weariness and bitterness in the air. Nothing in the description of Abbie and Jerry recalls the excitement and sense of danger that had characterized the FBI’s descriptions of them through the long months of the conspiracy trial. The trial, now that it was over, had left the former defendants weak and tired.1
Abbie always used grass and LSD socially with friends. Except for the kind you shoot into a vein, which he considered dangerou and counterrevolutionary, Abbie endorsed drugs of all kinds, considered them an integral part of the counterculture, and used them when he felt like it. He believed they opened up the mind. He liked to give them away, too. In his mind this was just one more way to spread freedom and revolution. But now the nature of his drug use shifted, without his necessarily even realizing it. He started to take uppers when he felt he needed to work long hours, and downers to keep himself on an even keel. These drugs weren’t so much part of his counterculture lifestyle as practical aids to help raise his energy level to where he liked it to be, or to control and subdue his mania, and they were addictive, physically and emotionally. I couldn’t help thinking he was using them to compensate for a sense of meaning and fulfillment that was suddenly missing from his life.
But out of the ashes of his exhaustion, and in the midst of his natural, and sometimes drug-induced, manic periods, there were new shoots pushing through, new life. As he began to recover from the trauma of the trial, the confrontational and violent rhetoric of his speeches diminished. And new ideas began to flow. Sometime in the late spring of 1970, he conceived the idea for his most ambitious book project. Fascinatingly, it originated in Abbie’s mind as a challenge to his publishers, daring them to issue a book that advocated stealing it right on its cover. Random House had wanted him to write a sequel to Woodstock Nation, focusing on the Chicago trial. Instead, he offered them Steal This Book.
Here’s Abbie describing a mid-1970 conversation with Random House editorial heavyweight Jason Epstein:
epstein: What book are you going to do next?
abbie: Jason, I’m going to write a book no one will publish.
epstein: (roars with laughter)
abbie: I’m going to call it Steal This Book, and it’ll be a handbook for living free, stealing, and making violent revolution. I’m going to turn on the entire publishing industry.
I want to test the limits of free speech.
epstein: You’ll lose, Abbie; everybody loses in the end.
abbie: We’ll see.2
Random House eventually gave him a contract, and he started pulling together his notes into a manuscript. The project became his passion. He loved the idea of it and loved the prospect of pushing the buttons of publishing industry executives, coming up with an idea that would press people to go further than they would have thought they could go. That was how you expressed the power of what it meant to be free.
After publishing two books successfully, the profession of writing was actually the only one Abbie could call his own, the one that paid the rent. Where five years earlier he had thought of himself as an activist and organizer, pure and simple, now he considered himself more a voice for the Movement, and book publishing was actually the realm in which Abbie held the most respect, the most power. Writing provided him with the natural freedom and stature in which to act.
Abbie continued crisscrossing the country, ferreting out alternative ways of getting along in America as a citizen of Woodstock Nation, watching his book grow. “I traveled cross-country interviewing doctors, fugitives, dope dealers, draft dodgers, private detectives, country communalists, veterans, organizers, and shoplifters. Every time I met someone living on the margin I asked about a good rip-off or survival scheme. People love to tell how they screw the establishment.”3 Some of the best and most exciting chapters of the book would describe strictly illegal activities—everything from shoplifting and marijuana growing to making bombs. As Marty Jezer notes in his recent book on Abbie, “Steal This Book deliberately obliterated the moral distinction between legal and illegal activity.”4 But most of the book would have to do with survival techniques that were necessary, sometimes lifesaving, and perfectly legal, ranging from first aid and birth control to advice on how to start a newspaper, hitchhike safely, or run a farm. Notes for the underground chapter came from real-life fugitives Abbie talked to. The legal advice came from hip attorneys.
The beauty of the final manuscript of Steal This Book was that, since it was a handbook, it didn’t explain or defend Woodstock Nation so much as simply presume its existence. Just like Abbie himself at this point in his life, Steal This Book envisioned, and in a sense helped create, a nation of individuals entirely free of ’50s materialism, a society whose culture survived in America and lived off America precisely the way a new living organism lives off a carcass.
The enormous power of Steal This Book stemmed from the fact that not a word in its 330 pages was hypothetical or theoretical. Every page describes actions and techniques that were already in use in all fifty states. Steal This Book simply brought it all together and put it in the palm of your hand. And by doing so, it said, in effect, “Look around you, people, the revolution we’ve been talking about for so long is already in process, it’s already here.” That was the one thing Abbie most wanted to say to anyone who would listen, the one thing he most wished to be true. And he knew that no one else in America could say it as well as he could. No one else would have had the manic energy to talk to that many people in the counterculture, the access that made them want to talk back, and the vision and imagination to pull it all together into one seamless text. “Free Speech is the right to shout ‘theater’ in a crowded fire” goes a Yippie! proverb. That was Steal This Book in its essence—a provocation, but not just a provocation.
In September, Abbie and Anita requested permission from the Chicago U.S. Marshal’s office to travel to Europe on vacation and to visit publishers there. Permission was granted. Abbie submitted what he’d written of Steal This Book to Chris Cerf, his editor at Random House. And on September 30, Abbie and Anita boarded a plane at Kennedy Airport bound for Italy. Their itinerary included Rome, Florence, Venice, Split, Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and London, and they wouldn’t be back in New York until the end of the first week of November. In Abbie’s absence, Cerf fought for Steal This Book, but Random House executives insisted that certain changes would have to be made, and one in particular: The author would have to change the title. Apprised of the situation on his return, Abbie refused.
He shopped the manuscript around. Thirty publishers rejected it, Abbie would later say (and on the back cover of the published book he would later list them). In at least one case, a publisher offered him a forty-thousand-dollar advance, if only he would change the title.
Again, he refused. In December 1970, just before leaving New York to spend thirteen days in a Chicago jail on a prior conviction for having written “Fuck” on his forehead during the Chicago “disturbances,” Abbie put the manuscript into the hands of Thomas Forcade, a counterculture entrepreneur, who had come to New York to direct UPS, the Underground Press Syndicate. Forcade had a mixed reputation. He was basically a hustler, not a politico. But since he had dealt successfully with Madison Avenue before, Abbie felt he might be just the right person to build bridges for the book between the counterculture and the mainstream establishment.
On Abbie’s return, two weeks later, Forcade presented Abbie an “editing” bill for $5,000. Abbie ignored Forcade’s editing and his bill, offering to pay $1,500 of it, which seemed to him a fair compromise. Then Abbie decided he would finish the book, and publish it himself. He met with Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who told him that if he could deliver one hundred thousand finished copies, Grove would distribute them.
Meanwhile, on December 4, 1970, this FBI memorandum circulated among its major metropolitan and regional headquarters:
COINTELPRO Recommend the N.Y. office be authorized to anonymously mail a leaflet to selected new left activists designed to broaden the gap between Abbott Howard Hoffman and Jerry Clyde Rubin . . . to fragmentize the organization and hopefully lead to its complete disintegration.
Below this statement was attached the following letter, drafted by the FBI, handwritten with doodles attached to make it look like a bonafide Yippie! communication:
Abbie Oink Hoffman
Wanted
Wanted
For ripping off the street people, for pissing on the revolution, for shitting on the revolution, for fucking Jerry Rubin and Yip—looks like a comic book prince (fag) talks with forked tongue (snake) favorite words: bread, cash, gold, me.5
I cannot read this FBI file without feeling a cold chill down my spine. Vintage COINTELPRO literature, it would have been sent to dozens of Movement leaders and would have increased their uncertainty about Abbie, who was already such an enigmatic figure to many. It was typical of the COINTELPRO attacks on Abbie, and shows how intent the FBI was on lessening his effectiveness. It also shows how much they had learned over the years about creating divisions, and their imitation of the Yippie! style was frighteningly real. Six months later, these were things that were being said about Abbie on the street and printed in the mainstream press. The people who drafted and distributed this memo could have been the same people who were calling Abbie at 3:00 a.m. wanting to crash at his place, the same people who were doing countless other things to harass him, to erode his effectiveness often from within the Movement.
On January 18, 1971, Abbie had attorney Gus Reichbach (now a New York judge) file incorporation papers for Pirate Editions, Inc., “to conduct a publishing business in all its phases.”6 Its sole purpose was to publish Steal This Book. The logo for Pirate Editions displayed the Random House cottage in the process of being demolished by a bomb, and in the foreground a revolutionary who looked a lot like Abbie setting off the explosion.
In a matter of weeks, Abbie raised $15,000 from friends and was able to have the book designed, edited, illustrated with drawings, diagrams, and photographs, typeset, pasted up, and printed. One hundred thousand copies were delivered to Grove Press. Ads were designed. Hundreds of copies were mailed to reviewers. Abbie immediately gave away thousands of copies to groups in the Movement, and circulated a letter to underground newspapers saying they could reprint as much as they wanted free.
On January 21, 1971, Abbie spoke from 12:45 p.m. to 2:10 p.m. to a group of two hundred seniors at Mamaroneck High School in Westchester. And on that day’s FBI report on Abbie’s activities a curious paragraph was appended to the three-page document: “In view of fact that adequate security could not be assured as to the utilization of agent personnel with recording devices in a metropolitan area high school without the possibility of resultant embarrassment to the bureau, no attempt was made to institute such coverage on this appearance of the subject.” In other words, since the FBI didn’t yet have sixteen- and seventeen-year-old agents on hand, sending in a couple of old farts in gray raincoats holding tape recorders to blend into the sea of high school students might just cause a riot—best to let it go. One reason the FBI might have been so sensitive about getting adverse publicity of its surveillance of Abbie was that they might have felt they already had him where they wanted him—in increasing isolation—and needed to avoid any Chicago-like opportunities for him to regain his support within the Movement.
On February 9 Abbie spoke to the “Dade County Young Lawyers” in Miami. As he went down the list of ironies and absurdities that made up his stock speech, each point was beginning to sound almost like poetry, so condensed had it become after the years of enduring, and speaking out about, the same iniquities. Speaking of Chicago, where the judge had issued the heavy contempt sentences prior to the conclusion of the trial, he claimed for himself and his codefendants “the distinction of having been sentenced before a verdict was returned.” Speaking of his arrest for desecration of the flag, noting that Dale Evans had not been arrested for the same offense, he stated, “It’s not what you do, but who’s doing the what.” Questioning why the real culprits behind the violence in Chicago—Mayor Daley et al.—couldn’t be put on trial in America, he said, “The law is there to protect the forces of order, not to guarantee the freedom of the people,” then appending his own adaptation of the words of Lenny Bruce: “In the halls of justice in America, the only justice is in the halls . . . and out in the streets.”
Back in New York on February 10, Abbie filed papers of incorporation for a nonprofit radio production company, WPAX (Pax for peace, of course). The idea was to produce four hours of half-hour and hour segments a week of news, music, and features totally free from army censorship and make it available, free of charge, to any and all radio stations, from the Armed Forces Network and Radio Free Europe to Radio Hanoi, which was heard all over South Vietnam, but which was currently broadcasting nothing GIs much wanted to hear. The plan was to go light on ideology and heavy on music, including soul, folk, underground rock, and jazz. Abbie and the others behind the idea—John Giorno and John Gabree—wanted to steer clear of the Tokyo Rose approach, especially since Radio Hanoi had already expressed interest in carrying the programs. WPAX would be peace-oriented, and would include news the GIs didn’t usually hear, as well as such things as rap sessions about the problems of Vietnam vets, but it would stop short of pleading with soldiers to lay down their arms. Legally, the existence of WPAX relied on a fine point of the war—it had never been declared by Congress. Otherwise, anyone associated with the effort could have been tried for treason.
Eventually, WPAX broke down due to internal squabbles. It might have become a rallying point. But its brand of internationalism went beyond the comfort level of many within the Movement in the same way that the tactics of the Weather Underground did, although without the violence.
Many bookstores and book distributors were refusing to carry Steal This Book. Libraries across the country banned it. Stores that were willing to carry it were stocking just one copy and keeping that in the manager’s office. Canada banned it—the first time in its history that the importation of a book was banned for a reason other than its being considered pornography. In Oklahoma, a class-action suit was filed against Abbie for “corrupting the youth.” Meanwhile, corporations, and especially the phone company, scrambled to redesign their systems to prevent theft according to the scams detailed in the book. Many states passed laws making it a crime to publish information on how to cheat Ma Bell. In the whole country, only the San Francisco Chronicle would run the advertisements Abbie had prepared to promote the book. Every other mainstream newspaper and magazine rejected the ads.
At the outset, at least half of Grove’s distribution outlets nationwide refused to carry Steal This Book. In his own informal canvassing, Abbie found that not one bookstore carried the book in Pittsburgh, Boston, or San Francisco, and in Philadelphia the only store he could find that carried the book was charging a dollar over the cover price. The Doubleday bookstore chain was boycotting the book, with the odd apology that, “We object only to the title. If it was called ‘How to Live for Free,’ we’d sell it.” Presumably, that way, by the time people read the section on shoplifting, they’d already have paid for the book. Seeking clarification on that reasoning, Abbie stationed himself outside the flagship store on Fifth Avenue for an entire week, selling copies of Steal This Book out of a shopping bag.
Quietly at first, Steal This Book did gain a following. In many communities it became a lightning rod for debate in schools and libraries. And while the country seemed to unanimously condemn it, the book’s supporters were not always shouted down, and, somehow or other, large numbers of people were going out and buying the book, despite the invocation of the title. Once again, Abbie’s ability to garner publicity, even bad publicity, was attracting attention and selling books.
Abbie enjoyed the book’s notoriety and had fun promoting it in the face of such overwhelming opposition. He thrived on the conflict and loved the action. But what was a little surprising, even to him, was the way in which the bad publicity surrounding Steal This Book, which wasn’t necessarily hurting sales, was being used to impugn Abbie’s character and reputation. The lies about him, which had shifted from a trickle to a cascade with the publication of Steal This Book in the spring of 1971, began to take their toll. The attacks in the media, to some degree prompted by misinformation aggressively disseminated by the FBI, fueled attacks coming both from the establishment press and from within the Movement. Abbie could understand being hated by his enemies. But what he couldn’t stand was being scorned from within the Movement.
In the March/April issue of Liberation magazine there appeared a long analytical piece by Norman Fruchter, attributing the crisis of the Left, in part, to the disavowal of solid organizing practices in favor of media grandstanding by certain Movement leaders. Abbie was furious at what he perceived to be a personal attack on him.
Fruchter’s analysis was at least partly justified. Abbie had metamorphosed from a grassroots organizer to a full-time revolutionary celebrity. Abbie’s reasoning was that there was no difference between the two. As a media celebrity, he was simply reaching more people, getting the word out to tens of millions of America’s youth instead of pockets of true believers on university campuses and at meetinghouses here and there. But how much had Abbie come to tailor his message in 1969, 1970, and 1971 to the needs of the network programmers rather than to the needs of the Movement? What was the effect of his again and again promising a revolution that was not forthcoming? These were not questions that Abbie wanted to face. And the problem was, Abbie loved the attention he got. One could argue, as Fruchter did, that leaders like Abbie were a dangerously distracting influence. But with equal force, one could argue that had the New Left been less mistrustful of Abbie, had people like Fruchter had the imagination to share Abbie’s vision and to follow his lead, the Movement might have been infinitely stronger, strong enough, perhaps, to have ended the war years sooner. Indeed, the deep concern and fear that Abbie inspired in members of Nixon’s closest circle at the time would suggest the feasibility of precisely such a scenario.
On April 17, Abbie and Anita appeared together on The Arnold Zenker Show in Baltimore. Abbie was in a serious frame of mind, and, in response to a call-in question, he gave what may be his most meaningful interpretation of the meaning of his most famous battle cry, “revolution for the hell of it”: “There is a revolution going on in this country,” he began. “I don’t think we want to explain it. . . . I am saying perhaps there is no historical corollary for this particular kind of revolution, where young white children, from families who have a great deal, look around and realize that in order to keep the silver spoons in the mouths they are going to choke, the way their parents [are choking]. They run off from home and become involved in different lifestyles than their parents. There is no real revolution that comes because you are pressed against the wall in a physical sense. The Vietnamese have no choice but to fight. Black people in the ghettos have no choice but to fight. It is a matter of survival. To the young white kid, it seems to be a psychic need . . . a need to strike out.” Toward the end of the show, a member of the studio audience asked Abbie what were the means to achieve a classless society. “They are violent,” he responded. Intrigued, host Zenker asked Abbie if he considered himself a violent revolutionary. Abbie’s earnest response: “We keep a Buddha in the kitchen to guard our cooking and a shotgun in the bedroom to preserve our sleep. People have the right to defend themselves and their culture.”7
Abbie and Jack, Thanksgiving 1987, in front of their mother’s house on Ruth Street in Worcester. (Jack and Joan Hoffman)
Abbie (front row, second from right) on the wrestling team in his junior year at Brandeis University. (Ralph Norman)
The Hoffman family at Abbie and Sheila’s wedding in Warwick, Rhode Island, July 10, 1960. Left to right: Jack, Phyllis, Ma, Sheila, Abbie, Dad, the Bubbe. (Jack and Phyllis Hoffman)
Abbie takes a break from the revolution on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, August 8, 1968. (© Stef Leinwohl)
Anita and Abbie at Thanksgiving 1970. (Jack Hoffman)
Photographs retouched by the FBI showing Abbie as he might appear with different hairstyles, circa 1973 (FBI file #88-15696. Jack Hoffman Archive #1733)
Abbie and Ma on the streets of Northampton after the victory over the CIA in 1987
