if 1968 had been Abbie’s year, the year when you could only reach Abbie on his terms, then 1972 was the year he sought to meet people halfway, the year he wasn’t sure what to believe. Abbie’s resignation from the Movement would turn out to be more than a gesture. Not only in the remaining months of 1971, but in all of 1972, 1973, and 1974, and until the North Vietnamese finally conquered Saigon on April 30, 1975, the anti-war movement struggled on without Abbie Hoffman. And it was a struggle of diminishing returns, with fewer protesters and an increasing sense of futility, against a president whose view of government was essentially totalitarian, a president who felt he must never give in to the anti-war demonstrators, and who never did. In its way Abbie’s withdrawal proved, strangely, to have been a timely, almost a prescient, act. By “resigning,” he put us all on notice that he felt we were entering, as he would put it, “a world more complex than that of the sixties.”1 He honestly didn’t know what his role in this brave new world he saw dawning was going to be.
Part of the new complexity Abbie saw had to do with the war itself. Nixon had changed the stakes dramatically so as to pose a much greater challenge to the anti-war movement. American troop strength had been cut in half. By September 1971, only 220,000 American soldiers remained in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Nixon had vastly increased the far more life-threatening and indiscriminate air power. By November 1971, a Cornell University study concluded, Nixon had detonated more bomb tonnage in thirty months than the Johnson administration had in four years.2 Squadrons of B-52 strategic bombers were killing massive numbers of civilians and causing even greater numbers to die indirectly by destroying their means to grow food. Over and over again, Nixon would increase the level of the bombing. By mid-July 1972, U.S. planes would be conducting three hundred strikes a day against North Vietnam alone.3
This was the underlying truth of Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy: At the very moment when he was making good on his commitment to reduce American troop presence, he was actually escalating the war. By shifting the war from one where, essentially, soldiers faced off and shot at one another to one where incalculable waves of destruction were unleashed from thousands of feet in the air, Nixon had progressed from war as it is commonly understood to genocide. Anti-war analyst Fred Branfman called Nixon’s war the “Third Indochina War,” since it was so different from everything that had preceded it. It was waged, he wrote, with “a completely ahuman kind of mentality.”4 With the keenest cynicism, Nixon had chosen to prosecute the war ever more ferociously, but at a lower cost in American lives.
Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy meant hugely increasing the rate of destruction in Southeast Asia even as he sanitized the perception of the war at home. He was betting that the peace movement would not be able to successfully convey to the American people the horror, brutality and immorality of this new war game.5 Abbie saw the problem, but he didn’t know what to do about it. By February 1972, he was ready to forgo his virgin island for a chance to get back into the fray, but he was still without a game plan. In February 1972, he reunited with old friends Jerry Rubin, Ed Sanders, and Stew Albert and called a press conference to announce that the Yippies! would be at that year’s Miami Democratic National Convention in force. But there was no real planning being done by the group, and the ten thousand naked Yippies! they promised would join them were a pure fantasy. On April 23, early enough for it to be decisive, the Yippies! formally endorsed the presidential bid of South Dakota Senator George McGovern. They did so seriously and enthusiastically, since McGovern’s anti-war position was long-standing, but Senator McGovern’s campaign apparatus wanted nothing to do with the Yippies! The Yippies! of 1972 noticeably lacked the electrifying sense of the moment that had made them irresistible in 1968. Then as extremists, Abbie and Jerry had wielded enormous power; in 1972, acting as reasonable men, they were shockingly impotent.
Abbie, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders signed a contract with Warner to collaborate on a book consisting of their impressions of the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions. Meaningfully, the book would be titled Vote! There was no irony intended. Here were three whiz kids of the counterculture who had always told us to do something different, usually something everyone else told us not to do. Now they were telling us to work within the system, telling us to vote. The first thing the coauthors agreed on was that the bulk of any profit would be used to organize new Yippie! demonstrations, as if they felt they needed that added justification to validate the project.
One of the many paradoxes of 1972 was that once he’d endorsed McGovern, one of Abbie’s preoccupations became—after years of embarrassing candidates—how not to embarrass this one. Early on, Nixon’s campaign manager, Attorney General John Mitchell, had shown himself to be adept at publicly linking McGovern with his anti-war supporters in such a way as to present the senator as a fringe candidate. At campus appearances Abbie urged support for McGovern and moderation. But the role of teetotaler suited him no better than the role of bomb thrower had.
In the first three months of 1972, President Nixon conducted as many bombing raids on North Vietnam as in all of 1971. On April 15, bombing began of the largely civilian North Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, for the first time since 1968. And on May 8, increasingly on the defensive, with his whole Southeast Asia policy on the line, Nixon escalated the war yet again, ordering increased bombing of North Vietnamese roads and rail lines and the mining of all North Vietnamese ports. Nonetheless, the North Vietnamese were gradually, but decisively, winning the war militarily. There was a new surge of anti-war protests in April. But then, in May, Nixon went to Moscow to sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT I arms limitation agreement, and his approval ratings shot up. In mid-May, approval of Nixon’s Vietnam War policies rose to 59 percent, and his handling of the presidency received its highest national approval rating since November 1969.6 The new complexity which Abbie had foreseen continued to take the anti-war movement by surprise.
One month prior to the Democratic Convention, on June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into and attempting to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington, D.C. The men would turn out to be employees of the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP). But at the time, no one had any inkling that they might be the instrument of Nixon’s downfall. And the President’s tough claims of wanting “peace with honor” and “a lasting peace” were still succeeding in drowning out the calls of anti-war protesters, and increasing numbers of U.S. congressmen, for an end to the war.
In January 1972, I’d received a call from Mark Solomon, a Simmons College professor and Shirley Chisholm adviser. Mark wanted to know if I would consider running as a delegate in Framingham on the Chisholm ticket. I’d been involved since 1968 in anti-war activities, and routinely did volunteer work with developmentally disabled children. I’d been nominated as Employer of the Year by the Worcester Association for Retarded Children. That plus being Abbie’s brother made me a good Chisholm prospect.
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm was a former schoolteacher and the first black woman to make a presidential bid. She was running as a Democrat out of her home district in Brooklyn, New York. With her glasses and wig, she reminded you of a teacher you might have had in grade school, the one who really wanted you to make something of yourself. Very progressive politically, and a staunch admirer of Abbie, her platform was women’s rights, civil rights, and an end to the war in Vietnam. My idea of a wonderful woman.
But Shirley wasn’t about to sway conservative, parochial Framingham. I lost my race, but they invited me down to Miami anyway as a Chisholm campaign aide to work the floor. When I called Abbie to tell him I was going, I could hear the pride in his voice as he congratulated me. Kid brother makes good. He said he’d meet me there.
At three or four o’clock on a hot and humid Sunday afternoon preceding the start of the July convention, I walked off the plane at Miami International Airport wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and my prized Western boots. All the delegates I knew were going casual because this was gonna be the people’s convention. Just in case the weather changed and a more conservative wind blew in, I had my other uniform—sport jacket, tie, and loafers—safely stowed away in my suitcase.
Abbie was there waiting at the terminal, waving like I was his long-lost uncle, his hair predictably long and wild. He not only had a rental car waiting, but there was some kid behind the wheel acting the chauffeur. As soon as we got in, Abbie started going on about me to the kid. “Jack’s a delegate for Shirley Chisholm. He’s going to tell us all about how the convention works, and he’s going to get us in.” Meanwhile, he was watching me expectantly. I was flabbergasted. Here was the brother I’d always wanted: solicitous, deferential, close, willing to share the spotlight—brotherly. I felt that Abbie was expressing the love I had always hoped he felt for me but had rarely seen expressed except indirectly or for fleeting moments. He was treating me as a trusted colleague and confidant.
“Are you hungry? Do you need anything?” Abbie asked.
As long as I’d been running the family business and raising a family, Abbie had seemed disappointed in me. But seeing me a Chisholm staffer made him feel that I was making something out of my life. And seeing him feel that family pride was enough to make me happy. It was that simple.
“We’re on our way to the People’s Hotel,” Abbie said as we approached Miami. A few minutes later, we arrived in South Beach not far from the Convention Hall. Passing through the heart of the retirement community, passing old people beached here and there like flotsam, we arrived at the Albion Hotel. The Albion was hardly more than a concrete bunker with a nautical motif tacked on as an afterthought. There were portholes running up the side and something that resembled huge fins on the roof. But to us it represented the Miami of our dreams—white stucco, and with an interior pool and gardens. Abbie explained that, closer to the Convention Hall, the Yippies! also had an office in an upscale commercial building with real carpeting, where the name plate, “Youth International Party,” looked just as serious as the names on the doors of the neighboring suite of doctors’ offices.
Inside the Albion, the scene was pure chaos. The cost-conscious segment of the foreign media, including the entire Eastern European contingent led by several journalists from Pravda, was present in force, along with a variety of local newsmen. The low-budget crowd also included Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Yippies! Jerry Rubin and Ed Sanders. As we went up in one of the world’s slowest, but hardest-working, elevators, Abbie confessed to me that the Albion’s other distinction was that it had recently been targeted for bombing by the anti-Castro crowd.
“But don’t worry,” he added. He didn’t say why I shouldn’t worry.
Abbie had arranged for us to share a room with two twin beds. Like old times. With safety in mind, I dove for the bed furthest from the door.
Abbie stopped me: “Wait a minute, that’s my bed.” We flipped for it. I lost.
Abbie showed me a gun he had stashed under his pillow.
“Do you know how to use it?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied, “Do you?”
We were sitting together on one of the beds in the room. It was around dusk. I felt the light changing and then looked out the window to see endless rows of the same hotels. When I turned back, Abbie was holding a small vial in his hand that he must have pulled from his pocket.
“You gotta get stoned,” he said.
I didn’t especially feel like getting stoned. I was already racing from the excitement of being in Miami with my brother for convention week—but I tended to do things when Abbie suggested them. I’d never developed resistance to his enthusiasms. He explained how to put a drop of the hash oil on my tongue—just like a decade earlier he had shown me how to smoke grass.
The hash oil hit me almost immediately. The next thing I knew we were in a packed car on our way to a party for Democratic Senator Wilbur Mills of Arkansas. “I’ll show you how we get supper,” Abbie was saying. We crashed the party in the senator’s hotel suite, our whole group stoned out of our minds, all the backslapping pols drunk out of their minds. And we all got along pretty well. I remember schmoozing with Carl Albert, Speaker of the House. Women who didn’t look like wives seemed to be everywhere. A sumptuous spread of food lay across a table that might have gone neglected were it not for the hash-oil kings. We were determined to eat and eat well.
There was no political tension whatsoever. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Eventually, I passed out. Later I remember being revived by Abbie, and I vaguely remember being loaded into a car, again by Abbie. Back at the Albion, before going to bed, Abbie somehow managed to get me to help him move the full-size refrigerator from the kitchenette to block the door, so that if anyone tried to break in during the night Abbie would have time to get to his gun and learn how to use it.
Early Monday morning I awoke with a gripping headache and this thought: I came to Miami with my briefcase and best attitude, only to find my brother Abbie, master of ceremonies, launching what is certainly going to be a five-day party. It seemed undeniably clear to me that Abbie’s blissful and drug-induced insanity was going to subsume the entire convention in an irresistible whirlwind. For a split second I empathized with old Judge Julius Hoffman and wondered what he must have felt as Abbie set foot in his orderly and austere courtroom.
Before breakfast we headed off to the convention center to try and get passes for Abbie and some of the other Yippies!. I walked into the administration office in charge of verifying credentials and granting access to the floor of the convention with Abbie right behind me. I made the case that he was a special adviser to Chisholm, then I argued the case for press credentials for all the Yippies! Finally I requested special credentials for Abbie as the brother of a key Chisholm staffer. We left empty-handed, and in the end Abbie and I decided we would share my credentials.
It was too bad that Abbie wasn’t really one of Shirley’s special advisers. We could have used him. Our strategy, as worked out at meetings in Shirley’s hot and airless trailer, was to try to sway delegates from other camps to get her on the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee since her presidential bid was pretty much symbolic. Each of us in the Chisholm camp had a list of delegates from other campaigns who might be sympathetic to our cause. We met with Gary Hart, who was managing McGovern’s campaign. It wasn’t a bad plan, but Abbie would have gotten us to crystallize our ideas more. He would have pushed us harder, and found ways to convince us that Shirley was the very best vice-presidential candidate imaginable, enabling us to then go out and convince others.
Outside the convention center, Abbie encountered a group of young cops who seemed hip and open-minded. Impressed, Abbie asked them, “How long are you guys going to keep your jobs?” Their response: “We don’t know, things are changing. . . . How long are you going to keep your job, Abbie?”7
The mood on the convention floor was exhilarating. The people in power included farmers wearing overalls and miners wearing the work clothes of the mines. Twenty percent of the delegates were African American. Forty percent of the delegates were women. Feminist leaders like Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug were the real stars, spokespersons for a power base that had never before considered itself as such. It really looked like representative democracy in action. This was the first time the young and progressive were on the inside. Celebrities seemed to be everywhere, not as stars but as citizens. Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Robert Redford, Norman Mailer, Jack Nicholson, et al., came humbled before this new embodiment of the democratic process. Thousands of people filled the hall who were earnest and hopeful. In the Chisholm campaign we were all true believers. If the 1968 convention had been characterized by a kind of youthful savvy, a streetwise realism, the 1972 convention, by comparison, was delusional. We acted as if we believed the revolution had already been won. Abbie’s old teacher from Brandeis, Max Lerner, who had once been a lover of Marilyn Monroe, appeared on the floor, amused and worried-looking.
Most of the people I talked to on the convention floor were politely interested in the Chisholm campaign, and desperately, urgently, intensely curious about what Abbie was going to do in Miami. He had somehow attained the stature of a living legend. Many of the delegates had been on the outside with Abbie at the last convention, unable to get seated inside. To them, Abbie played precisely the same role here that Che had in Cuba following New Year’s Day 1959. Everyone wanted to know what Abbie and his crew were planning next. And everyone knew that what that question really meant was, Where will the spirit of revolution go next? As if Abbie were the personification of that spirit.
What people didn’t know was that at that moment Abbie didn’t have a clue. Many people still considered the Yippies! to be a political force. They didn’t know that the Yippies! were no longer a force, and in a way never had been. They were a myth, just like Abbie had always said.
It looked to me like Abbie was attracting more media attention than some of the presidential candidates, and as much as the movie stars. Every couple of hours, we gathered underneath the bandstand to do a little more of the hash oil. I decided Abbie wanted to keep me continuously stoned, but I couldn’t come up with the reason why. Newsmen were hounding us, wanting to know what Abbie was going to do. And Abbie was pulling me aside, asking me which interviews I thought he should accept. Meanwhile, the more stoned I got, the less I felt able to answer his questions reasonably.
On Tuesday morning, around 6:00 a.m., Abbie woke me up by dousing me with a champagne bucket full of ice. He was on his way to be interviewed by Barbara Walters for The Today Show and wanted me to accompany him. He’d kept the interview a secret until now so that it would have the fullest effect on me. I tried to roll over and go back to sleep, but he was insisting. I was hung over, befuddled from lack of sleep, and completely disoriented, and his persistence horrified me.
He kept on saying, “Come on, Jack. This means free breakfast at the Fontainebleau.” Wet and shivering from the ice, I crawled out of the bed. One hour later, on the terrace of the Fontainebleau Hotel, Abbie, in his tie-dyed shirt, was slouched low in an easy chair responding confidently to Walters’s questions. A few minutes earlier, off-camera, Walters had said to Abbie, who was thirty-six years old, “But you’re a nice Jewish boy from Worcester.” She herself is a nice Jewish girl from nearby Brookline.
For the most part, the nationally televised seven-minute interview continued in the friendly bantering tone of the preinterview. In response to a series of questions on his leadership role in any demonstrations planned for the upcoming Republican National Convention, for example, Abbie quipped, “You’re trying to get me in another trial, Barbara.” But when asked if his political ideology had changed, Abbie quietly said, “No, some of the tactics have changed, but not the goals.”8
But the truth was that Abbie was bluffing Barbara Walters that morning. He didn’t currently have any tactics.
Back on the convention floor things were just getting crazier and crazier. By now the hash oil was being referred to by a half dozen different names by the dozens and dozens of delegates Abbie was turning on under the bandstand—“number one” and “honey” are the ones I remember. Abbie was dabbing the tongues of so many delegates so unabashedly, including Wallace supporters from Louisiana, that we heard that the Secret Service thought it was a throat remedy.
That afternoon Abbie introduced me to one of his “phone phreaks”—counterculture telephone systems experts who in 1972 were the rough equivalent of today’s computer hackers. Abbie had gotten to know the best of them during his research for Steal This Book, and he’d stayed in touch. This particular guy had somehow gotten hold of the blueprints for the entire phone network of the city of Miami, and he had the notion that it might be fun to shut it down during next month’s Republican Convention as an act of protest. We all headed back to the Fontainebleau, where we descended on the hotel room of Jack Anderson, syndicated columnist and noted muckraker. Abbie made the introductions and, to elude any wiretaps, Mr. Phone Phreak and Jack Anderson went into the bathroom to talk, turning on the shower just to be doubly sure they couldn’t be bugged.
While Abbie and I waited in Anderson’s room, we discussed the chances of beating Nixon in the fall. Our optimism was unqualified; we were euphoric. We already felt like winners. We Democrats represented the people. We were going to thrash Nixon. We were going to make him choke on his ugly war in Southeast Asia, on his Plain of Jars (a beautiful region in Laos that had been secretly laid waste), on his Bach Mai Hospital (a hospital in Hanoi that had been bombed repeatedly), on his Thieu (the last puppet president of South Vietnam), and on his Phoenix Program (a secret U.S. plan to assassinate North Vietnamese sympathizers, which took thousands of lives). We couldn’t even conceive of the possibility that we could lose, that the American people might not care about, or might not believe, what was happening in Vietnam. We were filled to overflowing with hope. How wrong we were.
Ironically, with the longhairs and the minorities dominating the convention, the old-timers were complaining that there wasn’t as much horsing around as they were used to at a national convention. Maybe not for them. Allen Ginsberg could be seen seated in the lotus position not far from the podium chanting long Ahhhhs (having discovered that this worked better than Ommmmms). A Yippie!, all excited, ran up to Abbie to tell him that he had just cast a vote high on acid, the first-ever delegate to do so. As Abbie, Jerry, and Ed would write in Vote!, “We lost in the courts, but we won in the Democratic Party.”
Coming back to the room at the Albion that night I found Abbie in bed with a girl I recognized from earlier in the day: a wide-eyed, twenty-year-old Jesus freak from Toronto, who had just filed her first story for her hometown newspaper. Abbie invited me in. But I demurred, walked around for an hour, then returned as quietly as I could and went to sleep.
Abbie’s Wednesday-morning power breakfast included Abbie, Jerry Rubin, me, Warren Beatty, and Julie Christie (Beatty’s current costar), and to my surprise the talk was about presidential politics! Not a word on the subject of movies. Beatty was asking questions. The two Yippies! were answering them with revolutionary zeal, and occasionally Abbie would toss the ball my way when the question called for something less outrageous.
On Wednesday, long after midnight, McGovern got the nomination. Like a bad omen for the whole upcoming race, the timing was all off. They missed the national news broadcasts. They even missed the late local news.
All I remember is that around 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. I found myself back inside the main hall of the convention, and suddenly—at first I thought it might have something to do with the hash oil, which had kept us powerfully stoned for most of the past three days—there was pandemonium all around me. People on all sides were jumping up and down, laughing and shouting. I felt once again with a sudden awareness how perfectly in tune with this convention madness Abbie was. Whereas I, as if naked in a dream, was again standing awkwardly in the middle of things, holding my damned briefcase, out of step.
It was now after 1:00 a.m. McGovern had gotten the nomination by beating out the conservative, pro-war candidate, Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Tom Eagleton was the vice-presidential nominee. Eagleton would later be replaced by Sargent Shriver. And for the next few months, the McGovern campaign would powerhouse its way toward Election Day, hugely optimistic yet doomed, beginning with this late-night nomination, too late for the evening news, even too late for the morning papers.
In August, after both the conventions were over, Abbie, Jerry, and Ed set about putting their notes together to produce Vote!, which was completed in August. The basic message of Vote! was: Vote, but don’t give up the streets. Don’t trust McGovern, trust yourselves, because if he loses, you’ll need to continue on in the struggle. Consider your vote a vote for the Vietnamese people, who don’t get to vote on what is being done to their country. “This is the first time since 1776 that America has been up for grabs. . . . Vote and it can be yours.”9 There isn’t a sentence in Vote!’s 240 pages to rival either the wit or the ebullience that had characterized the Yippies! four years earlier. It isn’t a bad book, just an honestly heartbroken one written during a heartbreaking time.
Abbie should have known that he wasn’t any longer a player in 1972. But since he was still famous, he felt he was still an important leader. At the beginning of convention week, when I’d mentioned I was preparing to join a delegation to McGovern’s handlers to lobby again for Shirley as vice president, Abbie advised me: “You’ve got to tell them how many votes I can deliver,” just as, sixteen years later, he would ask me to meet with the Dukakis people on his behalf, sending me off with almost the same exact words: “Tell ’em I can deliver the votes.”
Of course it was true that one of the reasons there was no sizable Yippie! presence at the 1972 convention was that this time the Yippie! “leadership” had asked people not to come down, in an effort to save McGovern from any potential embarrassment. But this, too, the notion of a subdued, more reasonable and cooperative Yippie! party, was not, in fact, the sign of a newfound maturity but of a hollowness at the core, and a weariness. And yet, if the Yippies! didn’t have clout in 1972, they still had respect. They were among the founding fathers of the new Democratic Party. The characterization of it in Vote! is eccentric but not inaccurate:
History works in strange ways. In 1968 the party bosses in their arrogant isolation controlled the Democratic Convention and had their cops physically assault the protesters in the streets.
Guilt-ridden, the Democrats changed the rules to make this year’s Convention more representative, and the outsiders of ’68 fought for and won places under the new reforms.
Then they expelled the party bosses. The Democratic Convention of 1972 was the closest we’ll ever get to a Lincoln Park Alumni Reunion.10
The Democratic Party had become more inclusive. But in giving up the streets, Abbie and his fellow activists had given up their power base and their hold on the national imagination including, particularly, the media. In 1968, Abbie had prided himself on being able to manipulate the television cameras to serve his purpose. In 1972, he saw the media as completely outside his control.
Here is Abbie, manic and euphoric, but also wise, writing about Chicago a few weeks after the 1968 convention ended, as published in Revolution for the Hell of It:
Our actions in Chicago established a brilliant figure-ground relationship. The rhetoric of the Convention was allotted fifty minutes of the hour, we were given the ten or less usually reserved for the commercials. We were an advertisement for revolution. We were a high degree of involvement played out against the dull field of establishment rhetoric. Watching the Convention play out its boring drama, one could not help but be conscious of the revolution being played out in the streets.
Even if the media had decided on a total blackout of our activities, our message would have gotten through and perhaps with even more power. All people had to know was that America’s children were getting slaughtered in the streets of Chicago and the networks were refusing to show it. We Can Never Be Shut Out. . . . We have often been accused of being media-oriented. . . . The impression that we are media freaks is created by our ability to make news.11
And here is a very different characterization, from Vote!, written with Rubin and Sanders only four years later, that significantly appropriates a Native-American image of the fatal clashing of civilizations:
Photographers battled each other for the right angles. They kept reminding you of your other self, your media image. Each time a picture is taken of you, you die a little.12
In a long, boldfaced passage in Vote!, vice-presidential candidate Tom Eagleton, after being hounded mercilessly by the media for weeks on the subject of his personal history of treatments for mental illness, describes his withdrawal from the race:
When I came out of the meeting with George on Monday night and made the announcement about withdrawing from the ticket, I had to be extra careful. The angle of my head was the most important thing. If I had dropped my head, that would have been the photo on the front page of every newspaper in the country. It was the way I was supposed to feel. My real feelings didn’t matter much.13
As described by the Yippie! authors in 1972, the awesome power of the media is no longer the power to communicate, but the power to humiliate. The Yippies!’ arrogance, buffoonery and fearlessness are gone. Of course, it isn’t just the Yippies! that have changed. Equally important, journalists and executives in media have become more savvy and more aware of their power. They have learned from the events of the last four years, and much of what they learned they learned from Abbie.
On the plane ride back to Boston on Friday afternoon I sat next to Dave Dellinger, and we talked. We discussed the future of the Democratic Party under McGovern. We were very up, very optimistic. The outside agitators of 1968, like Dave, were on the inside now. In the weeks that followed, as McGovern already began his precipitous dive in the polls—to where he was something like 26 percent below Nixon by mid-August—we in the Democratic Party continued putting our optimism into action. In Framingham, and all over the country, the Democratic party bosses continued to be shoved aside, replaced with new blood. Our enthusiasm knew no bounds.
In September on my thirty-third birthday, I happened to be in New York and visited Abbie. He always liked to give me a surprise if he saw me on my birthday. This time he waited until we were over at Joe LoGiudice’s loft in Soho that evening. Out of the blue, Abbie pulled out a torn brown paper bag that must have weighed several pounds and gave it to me. “Don’t open it until you get to Connecticut,” he said. On my way home that night, I pulled off the highway at a rest stop and opened the bag. Inside was a cardboard box, and inside the box was a .22 caliber pistol, used but serviceable. It scared me. I didn’t understand why he had given it to me. When I asked him over the phone the next day, he just said to forget it, that it was a birthday present.
In October, Vote! was published in a mass-market paperback edition priced to sell at $1.50, and dedicated to “The Vietnamese People,” but it made hardly a ripple. On November 1, our daughter Jaime was born, a sign of hope in troubled times.
Our beautiful dream wasn’t shattered until Election Day. On the afternoon of November 7, the first Tuesday in November, I called Sammie my bookmaker to see what odds he was offering on the election. He gave me 5 to 1 odds that McGovern was going to “get beat.” I called Abbie in New York right away and tried to persuade him to go in with me on the bet. “We can still hope,” I said, “All we need is a dozen good states,” and I named them: “New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, Oregon, and Washington, and we can win.” We were already somewhat disillusioned with McGovern, but, emotionally, we badly needed Nixon to lose. He was like Attila the Hun to us, an incarnation of utter evil. Abbie came in on the bet. Together we laid down a hundred to make five hundred.
At 7:35 in the evening, I was sitting in the family room of my home with hors d’oeuvres and Budweiser on the sideboard as evidence of our slim hope of having something to celebrate that night. Two friends from the Framingham Peace Committee were on their way over, and I feared I would really need their company.
Then all of a sudden it was over. With the first results in from Kentucky, where the polls had closed at 7:30 p.m., the TV networks were predicting a landslide for Nixon. At 7:45, my friends arrived with tears in their eyes. One of them said, “We’re losing everywhere.”14 I understood that to mean that we were losing more than the election, more than the presidency—actually losing the whole fight to define America as some part of ourselves that was salvageable, renewable, and still filled with love and beauty. We, all of us, felt that what we were experiencing was the death of politics as we’d known it.
Abbie called a few minutes later.
“What happened?” he demanded, knowing I would have nothing to say in response, wanting to take out his anger on somebody, even me. We felt ashamed. We felt out of touch with the country and frightened. What majority was this that could stay unmoved by our Movement, that could reinstate a man like Nixon in the White House? To me, this was the day the ’60s ended.
On January 8, 1973, even before the beginning of Nixon’s second term, the five men arrested in the Watergate break-in would plead guilty. Seven weeks later, on March 19, James W. McCord, Jr., one of the five, would tell Judge John J. Sirica in a letter that their guilty plea had come under pressure and that others were involved in the conspiracy. McCord’s letter would be made public, implicating members of Nixon’s administration and making Watergate a bona fide Republican scandal. But by then it would be too late to turn our defeat into victory. Nobody seemed to notice that we’d been the good guys all along.
Throughout that fall and winter, Nixon—impervious to cries from within the political establishment that he was acting against the will of the people and exceeding his constitutional authority—relentlessly increased the level of saturation bombing of North Vietnam, including a “Christmas bombing” spree during the second half of December that reportedly killed 2,200 civilians in Hanoi and Haiphong alone. Then on January 23, 1973, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for the North Vietnamese announced an agreement to effectively end American military engagement in Vietnam. The announcement had come so late in the war that leading activists responded with expressions more of pain than relief. And even with this agreement in place—essentially the same one that the North Vietnamese had proposed months earlier—the fighting in Vietnam would grind on horrifically for another two and a half years.
Abbie knew as well as anyone that the Movement, as he’d known it, was in its death throes. In conversations with me in later years, he would use almost those exact words to describe the Movement of the early ’70s. Isolating himself became the expression of his desire not to die with it, something he did out of necessity, by survival instinct. But he couldn’t conceive of a life for himself apart from the Movement with which he identified so strongly, and which he loved. So he was caught, unable to do much else except wait for life—meaning political life, life within the Movement—to begin again.
On December 1, 1972, the New York Times News Service did a follow-up story on the activities of those who had been involved in the Chicago conspiracy trial. Abbie made himself unavailable for comment, and the only information on him included in the long article was that he had complained to friends that “the New York City police were paying too much attention to him,” and that he had “now moved to Long Island.”15