on wellesley island, Abbie would at last plant roots and rid himself of the homelessness in his heart. Using the name Barry Freed and describing himself as a freelance scriptwriter, Abbie settled in and healed. The Lawrensons’ house had been built by Johanna’s great-grandmother in the center of the town of Fineview (pop. 87). Since Johanna’s family had been a part of the Fineview community for so long, she was easily accepted by it now, and her friend Barry with her. At first, he and Johanna would be there only during the short summer season, but over time the summers started earlier and lasted right through November. And anyway, it wasn’t the number of months he stayed there each year that mattered so much as the feeling he had for the place and the healing effect it had on him. The great natural beauty of his new surroundings overwhelmed and soothed him, quieting the cacophony of voices in his head and helping him gain some perspective on the craziness he saw around him.
I know of only one piece on nature among Abbie’s writing. It’s the opening passage to a long essay he called “The Great St. Lawrence River War,” and I think it’s important. In it he uses a wholly different voice and a wholly different vocabulary from all his others articles and books. And yet it’s very much him, very much Abbie, not a fake voice at all. It begins:
I was introduced to the St. Lawrence River in the summer of ’76, approaching via the Thousand Island Bridge from the Canadian mainland twenty miles north of Kingston, Ontario. It is the best approach, for rising to the crest of the bridge a passenger’s vision is completely filled by hundreds of pine-covered islands. Scattered as nature’s stepping stones across the northward rush of the river’s swirling waters. Here and there you can pick out a summer camp hidden among the trees. Its location betrayed by a jutting dock and shiny boat. A few islands even boasted “Rhineland” castles and mansions, rising in testimony to an opulence that existed a century ago. But for the most part the islands remain wild, inhabited only by rabbits, foxes, badgers, skunks, and deer who had crossed the frozen river some winter before. In the wetlands feed ducks, geese, loons, and the great blue heron. While nesting on land are scores of whippoorwills, woodpeckers, blue jays, martins, swallows, robins, cardinals, orioles, hawks, and hummingbirds. . . . 1
The article goes on to describe in great detail the flora, fauna, geography, and geology of the Thousand Island region, and counterpoises it against the environmental destruction wreaked by the Army Corps of Engineers’ St. Lawrence Seaway, and then relates Abbie’s own odyssey waging war against the corps while still a fugitive. What is extraordinary about “The Great St. Lawrence River War,” written in 1981, is that, as never before in Abbie’s writings, there is a sense of balance displayed between the good and the evil in the world. As he approached the end of his fugitive years, as he began to consider as a real possibility a return to life as Abbie Hoffman, it was with a different outlook than he’d ever had before. It was as if, after all the terrifying crises, he’d passed on to a plateau where he was beginning to experience a different perspective, one that embodied a newfound wisdom.
“It’s a strange thing about madness,” Abbie would write a year later. “It can be, as R. D. Laing suggests, breakthrough as well as breakdown.”2
Journalism was the only profession Abbie could practice while underground, and his writing improved steadily throughout the fugitive years. With its September 1976 issue, Crawdaddy magazine made Abbie a travel editor, under his own name, and using a complicated method of delivering his writing so that it couldn’t be traced to him, thereby protecting both Abbie and the magazine. Oui, a men’s magazine, also published his travel articles frequently. Subtly, his priorities began to change again. Before, his main purpose had been staying one step ahead of whoever might be trying to capture him, and any writing opportunities that might come along were secondary and incidental. But now this scheme of priorities was reversed. He was on the lookout for writing opportunities, and security considerations began to be an afterthought.
The beginning of the third week of January 1977 found Barry and Johanna en route to Washington, D.C., to attend Jimmy Carter’s inauguration on assignment for Oui, and for a fleeting reunion arranged by old friends Sam and Walli Leff. It was a typical and foolhardy dare on Abbie’s part, but now with his new occupation, it was primarily a good pretext for a story.
The morning of the inauguration, Abbie put special care into his disguise, reminding himself of the scene in The Day of the Jackal in which the political assassin disguises himself before making the hit. Then he hid the motel room key in the parking lot before driving with Johanna near the parade route. Strange to consider that, since the FBI considered Abbie capable of taking the life of a U.S. president, if Abbie had been caught that day, there might have been talk of a foiled Yippie! assassination plan. It just shows how little Abbie’s enemies understood him after all.
During the ceremonies, Abbie found himself standing next to satirist and fellow Yippie! Paul Krassner. Afraid to embrace in public, they stood side by side, “trading stories as if they were passing atomic secrets.” They then met up with Jerry Rubin and together again in this fleeting way the small group celebrated the changing of the guard as Jimmy Carter eschewed his limousine, choosing instead to walk back to the White House.
“For a moment,” Abbie wrote, “the country looked the way [my] third-grade teacher had described it. . . . Carter seemed smaller than on t.v. Inevitably famous people [do]. And frailer. The frailty of the human experience made [me] shudder, and [I] felt nothing but good will toward the man.” Actually Carter is quite tall and looks taller in person than he appears on television. Abbie’s sudden recognition of the human frailty of those we lionize may have had more to do with himself—who, at five foot seven inches really did look smaller in person than he did on TV.
As Carter passed in front of where he was standing, Abbie mouthed the words, “Good luck, Cracker!” He fantasized falling to his knees before Carter and kissing his shoe in the middle of the parade down Constitution Avenue as he begged for a presidential pardon: “Sets me free, massa Carter, sets me free,” Abbie imagined himself pleading.3
After Carter passed, Jerry asked Abbie if he’d prayed for anything special, and Abbie shot back, “Yeah, I asked him not to flush the toilet while we were taking a shower.” Two tough-skinned veterans reminding each other not to let their guard down.
The next morning, before leaving, Abbie and Johanna went through their established protocol of fugitive leave-taking, as they rubbed out their fingerprints in the hotel room and flushed the contents of their traceable garbage down the toilet.
Before leaving Washington, Abbie claimed he took the guided tour of the spanking new J. Edgar Hoover Building, the national headquarters of the FBI. He even wrote a long and quite good article about visiting his enemy’s lair. But years later he confessed to me that he’d made the whole thing up. Abbie was a hard worker and liked to take risks, but he also liked putting people on. “I got in line,” he told me, “but after a few minutes I chickened out. But don’t tell anybody.”
In early 1977, I moved my factory from Mexico to St. Petersburg, Florida, and that year I was spending about half my time down there, living in an apartment in Clearwater. Business was booming. But Ma, still bitter over the sale of Worcester Medical, wasn’t talking to me. I had offered her the Clearwater apartment for the winter, and she had not only refused but also, with her characteristic flair, had taken it upon herself to winter that year in Phoenix, just to goad me. Abbie and Johanna were living in the Miami area, and I didn’t understand why we weren’t seeing more of each other. The fact was that Abbie’s three years underground had left us feeling a little like we didn’t know each other anymore, and my rift with Ma had just made the alienation between Abbie and me seem that much worse.
Abbie always had a sixth sense about these things. Just when I’d begun to worry about where we stood with each other, I got a call from him asking me to come and visit. Without leaving any room for me to play hard to get, he told me he was cooking and I’d be staying the night.
I arrived to find Abbie in fine form—in love with Johanna, happily planning an end-of-year European tour for the two of them. And he had a lot to tell me. Partly, he wanted to bring me up to date about Ma—knowing I’d be wanting to have news of her. And Abbie was at his most diplomatic: He didn’t blame me, but at the same time he wanted me to know that I had to be some kind of jerk to have let my differences with Ma get so out of hand. And then there was something else he wanted to talk to me about: He was thinking, somewhere down the line, of surfacing, and he wanted to know my opinion. It was the beginning of what would become a three-year conversation, his way of welcoming me back into his inner circle. I felt glad, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling a chill for the period just past, during which I had been excluded.
As usual I tried to slip him a few hundred dollars the next day before I left, and as usual he didn’t want to take my money. I almost felt insulted, especially now that I could afford it. I asked him how he was doing financially, and, as always, he said, “We’re getting along.” And the conversation didn’t advance any further in that direction. I don’t think he was trying to insult me, but I do think he was making a point: that I couldn’t make my money in one world and spend it in the other, that the part of me that was a successful businessman wasn’t his brother, and vice versa. It was his way of exerting pressure subtly to bring me over into his world and away from the status quo.
Then, just before I left, he asked me about his inheritance. It wasn’t much money. I could have just loaned him the amount much more simply. But he wanted only what was due him: one-third of the residual sum left in Dad’s estate after the taxes and the lawyers—around $3,000, not counting his share of a small commercial property Dad had also left us. For Abbie to withdraw even a small part of his share of the estate seemed like an unnecessary risk. But I told Abbie that “as a good soldier” I’d look into it, and then I headed back to Clearwater and a few days later was back in Framingham, feeling reconnected to Abbie and glad for it.
After three years underground, a new and strange suspicion had begun to haunt Abbie: maybe the FBI didn’t want him. No thought was more unsettling to him. Even when Abbie had suffered false accusations and criticism within the Movement, he had always been able to count on the attention of his enemies. Among those who hated Abbie, many had misunderstood him, but they had never dismissed him. The FBI in particular had always been, in its own way, an ardent admirer. But now Abbie began to look over his shoulder with a new terror that maybe no one was following him.
I had a lawyer friend, Mort Glazer, see about Abbie’s inheritance check. A clerk at the courthouse gave Mort a form for Abbie to fill out, stating that he was alive and well and ready to receive his share of the money. We forwarded it to Abbie, who signed it, had it notarized, and returned it to me. Mort presented the signed affidavit from Abbie at the Worcester County Courthouse. The clerks accepted the affidavit, and a check in Abbie’s name was requested. That was all, no different from what would have been done for any other upstanding citizen. The only indication I had left that my brother really was a fugitive was the sophistication and intricacy of his own precautions.
Was the FBI just not really trying? Were they pretending they didn’t want Abbie anymore? Was the FBI seeking to avoid a trial in which their wiretapping activities, which they had denied, might be revealed and along with them the fact that the drug bust was a setup? I find it hard to picture the FBI being so clever. It doesn’t sound right. They were still looking for Abbie. A fugitive who doesn’t get caught makes the FBI look bad, and the FBI hates to look bad. But at the same time, they were well aware that by pushing Abbie underground they had neutralized him completely, and without making a martyr out of him, which killing him would have done. In other words, their main aim had already been accomplished. Bringing him in was secondary. It didn’t have the urgency it might have had otherwise.
Morty came over to the house in Framingham a few weeks after I’d returned from Florida. He had the certified check made out to Abbie in his hand. We both laughed about it. Morty credited the soulless bureaucracy: my opinion was that one or two of those people Abbie used to call his “35,000 close personal friends” worked in the Worcester courthouse. Before he left, I asked Mort something that hadn’t occurred to me once in three years but had crossed my mind several times in the last week: “What could they do to me for helping my brother—just the way any brother would?”
“In some states you could get a ten- to twenty-year sentence,” Morty shot right back at me, almost as if he’d been waiting a long time to say that but hadn’t considered it right to do so until I asked. “But in other states they are very lenient on family members,” he added.
“Is Massachusetts one of the good states?” I asked, a little I squeamishly.
“I couldn’t tell you,” Mort answered. You could see he was still reading from some kind of script he’d worked out in his mind. He wanted to warn me but without getting more involved than he already was. He wasn’t a criminal attorney. He probably guessed that I had been helping Abbie since the beginning and wasn’t going to stop now.
“I’ll bet you Massachusetts is one of the lenient ones,” I said. Morty shrugged. Then I added that I’d been in touch with my brother all along, and that if anything happened I’d need a lawyer I could trust. Mort said I knew where to find him. And that was it. Nothing had changed. There was no way for me to figure in my own potential vulnerability under the law when Abbie’s exposure seemed so much greater.
As spring warmed into summer, Abbie had Anita send their son america down to him for a visit, so he could show “the kid” Disney World. It was one of those rare instances of bizarre equilibrium for Abbie, passing through the heart of establishment culture—Disney World—from the far reaches of fugitive fantasyland, just like any other normal parent.
Then Abbie and Johanna got ready to leave Florida and return north to the Thousand Islands, with a short stop in Framingham to pick up Abbie’s inheritance money. They arrived a few days later, tanned and content—hardly fugitive-like at all—in a Plymouth station wagon, suburban impostors with large smiles. I’d somehow managed to get the check cashed. I felt like Monty Hall as I handed them the $3,000 in twenties.
Abbie and I went to a Red Sox–Yankees game at Fenway Park, sitting in my usual seats surrounded by acquaintances who could not have failed to know that the bearded fellow to my left might just be my brother. But the FBI didn’t find us. And sitting there watching the game, I suddenly realized something about Abbie’s relationship with the FBI. It may have been deadly serious, but it was also a game of chicken. Abbie wanted me to help him claim his three grand from Dad’s estate because he needed the money, but it was also part of the game, a tip-off. He wanted to stay beyond their reach, but he wanted to keep it interesting. Abbie and the FBI were kind of like playmates, I thought. And the next day, when Abbie and Johanna were back in their station wagon and I stood waving good-bye in front of the house while they drove off, I tried to establish in my own mind the figure-ground relationship between what was serious and what was fun to Abbie—and couldn’t.
In the fall of 1977, Abbie and Johanna started on a six-month tour of Europe. It was another case of doing something thoroughly enjoyable with a view to writing about it. His “passport” this time consisted of a forged letter on Playboy stationery introducing him and Johanna as “Mr. and Mrs. Mark Samuels, who have been assigned by our magazine to do a survey on the new French cuisine.”
Letter in hand, Abbie and Johanna toured the great restaurants of France, Belgium, and Switzerland, including Le Duc and L’Olympe in Paris, Paul Bocuse’s restaurant in Lyon, Comme Chez Soi in Brussels, and Girardet in Crissier, just outside of Lausanne. Abbie became a born-again gourmand, writing that some of the meals “produced such joy that . . . [we] were literally moved to tears.” He came to appreciate the expertise of these master chefs as “the ultimate pop artists who carve and cook with total commitment, creating a work of exuberance only to [see it] instantly consumed by strangers.” “So while I began the tour with my tongue-in-cheek,” he claimed, “I soon developed an appreciation, which eventually grew to obsession. I could, for the first time, comprehend gluttony as a passion.”4
On March 17, 1978, Abbie wrote to me from France, listing his recent accomplishments. He and Johanna were having a great time. By posing as Playboy’s gourmet editor they had consumed, without cost to them, almost $4,000 worth of haute cuisine. He added: “I’m going whacko over food!!”
He really did sound obsessed. I think that’s what happens when a man used to being driven by the great issues of history turns his undivided attention to food. I wondered if he was getting fat too. A few weeks later a package came for Joan containing another letter from Abbie and an autographed copy of Paul Bocuse’s cookbook.
By the summer of 1978, Wellesley Island had been home base for Abbie and Johanna for two years, ever since Johanna had first brought Abbie there from Canada. They had settled into a familiar routine in the cottage on the riverbank. Abbie was constantly rebuilding and repairing with a hammer and saw and was proud of how good a carpenter he’d become. The Fineview community was by and large conservative but also down to earth and friendly, and Abbie, alias “Barry,” got along with them just fine. They trusted him based on what they saw: his hard work in the garden, on the roof, and on the dock he’d helped build for Johanna (most travel in the area was conducted by boat); that was enough for him to begin to gain respect around Fineview.
Abbie and Johanna weren’t year-round natives. But only about thirty of Fineview’s residents were, given the extremities of rain, wind, waves, and snow that sometimes caused the community to be cut off from all forms of transportation other than airlifts in winter. So Abbie and Johanna weren’t considered outsiders, either. Johanna’s family had roots in the region that extended back seven generations.
There was a framed DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) certificate on the wall of the cottage. That helped, too.
One afternoon that summer of 1978, Abbie was putting some finishing touches on the dock he’d built, adjustments to compensate for the winter ice shift, when a neighbor boated by to tell him he needn’t bother, since the Army Corps of Engineers, the same cool heads that had built the St. Lawrence Seaway over two decades earlier, were now planning to institute a program they called winter navigation—a combination ice-breaking and flooding operation that was going to finish the job of destroying the river’s ecology that the Seaway had begun. A demonstration test had been proposed for that winter that would involve maintaining an ice-free, fifteen-mile long corridor. And local scientists from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation had drawn up an estimate of the environmental impact of the test. It was this study that the neighbor waved in my brother’s face as proof that he needn’t bother putting the finishing touches on the dock.
Abbie borrowed the report, stopped work, and locked himself in the cottage to read through the study that afternoon. As he read, he became convinced that the demonstration test alone would destroy the watering pools for the endangered bald eagle, ruin aquatic life chains and wetlands, and that waves from passing ships would rip apart shorelines, causing substantial erosion. The test also required that the river’s fast current be deliberately slowed, and this, he believed, would cause flooding and the release of large quantities of chemical wastes into the river—which was the source of drinking water for most of the river communities. A 15 percent loss of hydropower was predicted. Quoting from the Army Corps of Engineers’ own figures, the plan called for ninety-four million cubic yards of riverbed to be drained or dynamited from the U.S. side alone. The more Abbie read, the more clear it was to him that the basic idea was to change this rushing river into a “year round barge canal. A disaster.”5
Abbie had stumbled on a cause he couldn’t resist joining. But he needed to be sure that Johanna saw it that way too. Any political decision Abbie made now—he was living on Wellesley Island as “Barry Freed” and would undoubtedly attract publicity—was going to implicate Johanna, so it had to make sense to them both.
I called Johanna upstairs. “Unless we act, the river is doomed,” I said. “The Army Corps of Engineers will bully their way in here. The people are not ready to fight the system. . . .” I was convinced joining this battle would mean I would be caught. Yet . . . how could I stand on the shore and watch corps engineers wire up the small islands across the way for demolition? I had listened to old-timers in the bars talk of how they had heard the explosions and watched whole islands float down river during the fifties. They had watched and cried; now they were alcoholics. “A six-thousand-year-old river,” I thought, “and the last twenty-five years have been its worst.” My fate was fixed. The rest of the night we spent shaping our identity.6
Barry had found a cause that Abbie applauded. The two identities were moving perilously close to one another, yet it was happening smoothly, inevitably, like a trembling tuning fork coming to rest. Abbie’s “six distinct personalities” were becoming one again. An issue in need of leadership and direction had fallen in his lap, and the various private issues that had dictated his life during the past five years—questions of personal guilt, happiness, responsibility, pleasure, and survival—all dimmed and were forgotten. It was the beginning of what would become an amazing resurrection: Under a new name and still a fugitive, with no outside help whatsoever, Abbie set about launching a new political movement. And since it still meant continuing their secret, fugitive life together—since in Abbie’s mind it seemed to serve as a substitute for surfacing—Johanna agreed to the change with grace and enthusiasm.
As soon as Abbie was able to put his fugitive status at risk in this way, then he could, for the first time in four years, completely forget about that risk. Suddenly his priorities had become clear again, and just like in the old days, survival wasn’t at the top of the list; effective political action was. Once he’d made the decision to jump in, saving the river became his obsession. That summer, all his enormous energy went into planning the strategy that would gradually involve his local community as fully as possible and end up beating the Army Corps of Engineers. And in the back of his mind, I think he also imagined this work as something that might, in the hands of a sympathetic judge, be considered in his favor at a future hearing—a public service to balance the public disservice of the drug bust. Suddenly Abbie’s recent years out of service seemed like a kind of four-year-long spiritual retreat, so clearheaded and directed was he now that he was back in action.
That August the corps (as Abbie liked to call the Army Corps of Engineers, perhaps since it sounded like corpse, something dead, the exact opposite of river, a word so full of life) had scheduled a public hearing at nearby Alexandria Bay. Abbie’s first decision was to use that hearing as an occasion to announce the creation of a new organization to protect the St. Lawrence River from the Army Corps of Engineers. But that gave him less than one month to make such an organization a reality. And Abbie knew that the people he wanted in, people from the community, couldn’t be rushed.
First came small meetings on Abbie and Johanna’s front lawn, with snacks and cold drinks. Discussion eventually moved to finding a name for the group, with Abbie, as Barry Freed, indisputably in charge:
Names were very important. Best verb first. What you want people to do. “Shouldn’t we have the word committee?” Committee is a bore. People want excitement, charisma. “What about St. Lawrence?” No, keep it simple. Everyone knows the river. Better for a name to raise a question than give an answer. Questions encourage involvement and involvement is what makes a citizens action group.7
They settled on Save the River, and it was the perfect name. During long phone calls throughout that summer of 1978, Abbie described to me the birth of this new environmental movement, and I couldn’t help but be shocked by the boldness—I almost want to say the madness—of this new effort, just when things seemed to have calmed down a bit for both of us.
As he prepared for the August hearing, Abbie had to work on two fronts simultaneously: He had to counter the skepticism and apathy of those he hoped would eventually become his core group of fellow activists, and at the same time he had to create a public forum so that a large number of Thousand Island residents would begin to hear about Save the River and start to consider the issues it was fighting for. He placed an ad in the local newspaper, The Thousand Island Sun, a first step toward what would eventually develop into weekly articles he would write for the paper. Johanna designed a beautiful “Save the River” blue heron T-shirt. Soon, boats appeared on the river hoisting huge “No to Winter Navigation” sails. There were also signs that said “Ice Is Nice” and “Army Go Home.” Telephone trees were formed in which each committed member of the group had to place calls to a certain number of prospective members or possible sympathizers.8
The August public hearing turned out to be a huge success. Instead of the usual thirty to forty curious onlookers, there were hundreds of concerned citizens. The corps had planned to use the occasion to softsell their plans. People listened quietly as the corps presented a comprehensive-sounding slide show that portrayed winter navigation as easy and constructive. Then it was the people’s turn. Inhabitants of the small community of Grindstone Island asked how they were going to get their pickup trucks across the open river channel in winter. The answer made clear that winter navigation threatened their very existence. One citizen had found out that the corps’ predictions of water-level changes during the last hundred years had been wrong most of the time, and stood up now to inform the audience of that fact in the presence of the corps spokespersons.9
Then a man stood up who happened to have appeared in one of the corps’ own slides standing near a channel in the ice as a ship passed. When presenting the slide, the corps spokesperson had noted how calm the man was. Now he told the crowd how terrified he had been, describing the ship’s passing as feeling like an earthquake, hurling masses of vegetation, dead fish, and debris on the riverbank in its wake. The corps representatives couldn’t have been more surprised by what the people were saying, and it just kept on coming.10
Probably the worst fear people had about winter navigation was oil spills, since no technology existed to clean up oil spillage locked under ice. Moreover, a major oil spill had already occurred in the area in 1976. People remembered clearly the dead fish and birds; much of the physical damage of that spill still had not been repaired, and it had happened during the summer. The corps representatives’ assurances that this couldn’t happen in winter only spurred people’s distrust of the corps.11
The hearing had been a complete success for Abbie; he had routed the enemy forces. Save the River began to have the status of a local ball team on a winning streak. People all over the Thousand Islands region started saying “Save the River” as a greeting, instead of “Good morning” or “Nice day.” More and more stores carried Johanna’s T-shirts, which helped bring in money for the phone bills.
Now Abbie entered phase two: Without letting up on the public relations work, Save the River had to make sure that the enemy weren’t the only ones who understood how it all worked. That meant doing a lot of reading about things like water-resource economics, cost-benefit analysis, water-level prediction, and aquatic life cycles so that they could hold work-study sessions in which they searched for corps errors in its own literature. It also meant finding sympathetic individuals within the scientific community. They found an economist at Syracuse University named Steve Long, who was able to explain to them how the corps misapplied its own figures in order to falsely demonstrate feasibility. Eventually, the group was able to print up an eight-page booklet translating material about winter navigation into layperson’s terms. The booklet was discussed, as Abbie was proud to say, “in classrooms, at Bible study groups, in bars and pharmacies, everywhere.”12
Abbie knew that he was winning, but he also knew that early on much of his advantage derived from the fact that Save the River did not look like a political group. Thus he fought against the environmentalist label, since people seemed to consider environmentalists political too. During these early months, it seemed like the greatest obstacle that had to be overcome was “convincing people it wasn’t rude to protest.”13
“Barry Freed” had built an organization from the ground up, and Abbie was loving it. More and more, his leadership of Save the River required him to go public. Where his leadership of the Yippies! had consisted almost entirely of creating an illusion for the television cameras, now his identity itself was the only illusion—everything else was real. He found himself giving speeches at local “fishermen’s banquets, church suppers, high schools, universities,”14 and he was interviewed on local television stations. It was a model political campaign. Soon the grassroots effort was succeeding to the point where local politicians began falling in line: Expressions of support started coming in from chamber of commerce members, town council members, and the St. Lawrence County Board. Save the River started sending delegations to parts of the country as far south as Baltimore.
Now Save the River launched a mini-campaign to get the attention of New York governor Hugh Carey, and succeeded, to everyone’s surprise, within only a few days. Carey’s office sent a supportive telegram, and during the next two years Carey himself would become a stalwart friend of Save the River. A Save the River delegation visited Albany and came away with a pledge of $25,000 to hire John Carroll, one of the few experts on water resource economics willing, in Abbie’s words, to “bite the hand” of the powerful Army Corps. Eventually, Barry would receive a personal letter from Carey, which stated in part, “I want to thank you for your leadership in this important issue, and for your sense of public spirit.”15 Incredibly, Save the River was outflanking and outgunning the corps on all sides.
Ironically, Barry Freed—an alias—became the vindication of both the democratic beliefs and the organizing skills of the identity Abbie had abandoned when he went underground. Barry was Abbie’s appointment in Samarra. Abbie had run for four years only to find not his own mortality but himself, as irrevocably as if four years earlier he’d made an appointment for the very place, date, and hour of the meeting. And Abbie drew strength from the phenomenon of Barry Freed, since he knew that Barry was just Abbie minus the drug bust. In the end, Abbie’s identification with Barry helped him come to terms with the truth underneath his various “false” identities. It presented itself to Abbie as incontrovertible proof that he really existed. And increasingly during the late summer of 1978 and after, it aggravated his deep longing to surface.
It was also during that summer of 1978 that some of Abbie’s old ’60s crew, including Bob Fass, Joe LoGiudice, William Kunstler, and others, decided to get together and organize a “Bring Abbie Home” night at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum for the tenth anniversary of the Chicago Democratic Convention. Abbie thought it was a great idea. And as the August date approached, Abbie started hinting that he was planning on showing up. The truth was he was dying to be there. It was only through all our combined efforts that we were able to convince him that keeping his presence or absence a mystery would work just as well, and that if he came and got busted it would be a bummer for us all.
We rented three buses for the Worcester contingent, each with huge “Free Abbie” banners in pink lettering on the side. Ma came down on one of them, along with enough club sandwiches on Syrian bread, provided by Joe Aboody at the El Morocco, to feed an army. Phyllis also came, along with Worcester organizers Betty Price and Bob Solari, who could remember when they and Abbie had been among just a handful of civil rights activists in Worcester, walking down Main Street to catcalls from people standing in the doorways of local bars. These friends of Abbie were joined by more recent comrades, many of whom spoke that night to the large crowd—Jon Voight (“I consider Abbie a political artist”), Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, Paul Krassner, Bill Kunstler, actors Ossie Davis (“Abbie Hoffman is a treasured national resource”) and Rip Torn, and writer William Burroughs.
The revue-style show at the Felt Forum had been written by Terry Southern (of Candy fame) and Joe LoGiudice, and staged by artist Larry Rivers. It was designed as a mock trial, with Rip Torn playing Richard Nixon as a court reporter, Kunstler as counsel for the defense, and Taylor Mead as Judge Julius Hoffman. The music was by Kinky Friedman, who opened with a subdued rendition of “Ride ’Em Jewboy.” Later in the evening, Odetta sang a slow and beautiful version of “This Land Is Your Land,” Paul Kantner of Jefferson Starship joined in a sing-along of “Jam for Abbie,” and Eric Andersen performed an electric version of his classic “Thirsty Boots.”16
Many of us wore plastic, Halloween-style masks with Abbie’s face on them. The subject on everyone’s tongue was where, when, and how—not if—Abbie would surface. Abbie sent a tape thanking everybody. And you could feel in the air that night how badly people missed him.
Ma came up to me at some point during the festivities, and I could tell from the look in her eyes that she had finally forgiven me. Somehow she had understood how hard I was working on my brother’s behalf. She began to see that maybe she’d made too much of the sale of Worcester Medical, and she decided she could be my mother again, two years after our argument!
In the end, however hard all Abbie’s friends and family tried, we just couldn’t conjure forth his spirit without his presence. The evening at Madison Square Garden was a great success, but it had a hole in it where Abbie should have been.
In September 1978, Abbie and Johanna began traveling more frequently to New York City. I noticed that he was getting bolder. Instead of moving around between safe locations, they would just stay in her rent-stabilized apartment in midtown, an easily traceable location. We’ve learned recently from the FBI files that the FBI still hadn’t identified Johanna. In fact, in all Abbie’s years underground they never identified his running mate. But Abbie and Johanna had no way of knowing this at the time. From their point of view, staying in her apartment was risking capture, and showed an attitude far different from the one that had resulted in their months-long separation in 1976.
At the beginning of November, Abbie and I both happened to be in New York City, and Abbie took me to see the Broadway show The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Its producer, Pete Masterson, had expressed interest in taking out a movie option on Abbie’s life. That night Abbie wore no disguise of any kind. Out in the street, in the theater and at dinner afterwards, he could easily have been recognized and captured.
A few weeks later, Abbie came to Worcester to visit Ma, and the two of us went to a Patriots football game at nearby Foxboro Stadium, where I had season tickets. Around us were mostly other season ticket holders who knew me and knew who my brother was. That day, with winks and nods coming at us from half the crowd around us, I was so terrified I had trouble concentrating on the game. Surrounded by more than 50,000 football fans, I figured we’d have no place to hide if they came after Abbie. Maybe Abbie, thinking seven moves ahead, realized that a football game or a Broadway play would be the last place the FBI would be looking, and being in the midst of a crowd of 50,000 sports fans was probably a pretty good place to hide. Maybe he was still playing chicken. But I began to sense that something else was going on. It was as if, having evaded the FBI for nearly five years now, the game was over. Abbie had won on time. By the winter of 1978–1979 it just didn’t matter anymore, as it had a few years earlier, when he came in. What still mattered, though, was how.
Back on the river, the first much-deserved triumph came when the corps postponed that winter’s tests. But Abbie wasn’t confusing the corps’ tactical retreat for a Save the River victory, not yet anyway, since at the same time the corps’ work on the upper Great Lakes had intensified. With Abbie at its helm as “publicity director,” Save the River began planning for a flurry of new lobbying and consciousness-raising actions for the late winter and spring. And again, Barry’s successes acted as both a spur and a temptation to Abbie’s wanting to be Abbie again. After nearly five years, he felt he’d paid his dues and done his community service as well. His anonymity felt like an old skin. He wanted to come home.
That winter, Abbie and Johanna visited Chicago, where she took a snapshot of him mugging for the camera in front of the statue of General Logan, a rallying point during the 1968 Democratic Convention, and where he did an interview with Abe Peck for the 1978–1979 New Year’s Eve edition of the Sunday Chicago Sun-Times. “I’m not a genius or a media master,” Abbie told Peck. “I am a good storyteller. I am an outlaw. And I’m a survivor.”17
In early 1979—it may have been February—Abbie came to visit us in Framingham, and he seemed to be in an intensely manic state. Completely ignoring our kids, he talked at Joan and me nonstop; I might have fallen off my chair and he wouldn’t even have noticed. Sitting in our kitchen he rattled off an increasingly loud and heartfelt litany of complaint after complaint, mostly about Johanna: “She’s trying to run my fucking life. She and her old lady don’t want me to surface because she doesn’t want the people there to know who I am. She wants to put everything, including me, in a trunk up on the river.” Then he turned his wrath on me: “You never help me,” he said, glaring at me. “You didn’t do shit for me as a fugitive. You haven’t done enough for me. You and your sister.” I thought that the next thing that was going to happen was that he was going to hit me. He seemed to be so agitated that it even occurred to me that it might be a good thing if he did, might help him to let off steam. I put my hand on his shoulder and only half jokingly told him to go rest before I hit him over the head with a frying pan. He let me steer him upstairs and into the bedroom. I returned to the kitchen, but Abbie must have turned around as soon as I’d left him, walked back down the stairs and out the front door, because when I checked on him a few minutes later he was gone.
For the next hour I panicked, fearing the worst. Then the phone rang. It was Ma.
“Abbie’s cleaning out the attic,” she said. Abbie had gone to Worcester, walked into the house, gone straight up to the attic and started discarding every cardboard box and every milk crate, the old clothes, the comic books, the school books, the uniforms, the baseballs, footballs, and tennis balls, all the evidence of his—and our—early life, except for the trophies, which were the only things he considered worth keeping. He’d even managed to have two trucks parked out front. And in an amazingly short time, he was loading them up.
“Well, what’s he cleaning out?” I asked.
“Well . . . everything,” she said. And then she added, a little timidly, “Do you think it’s a good idea?”
Ma wasn’t calling from her house. She’d left and gone to our aunt Rose’s a few blocks away.
“Well, I didn’t want to agitate him,” she said to me over the phone, to explain why she’d left the house. But there was another reason she didn’t want to mention. Seeing Abbie in the middle of a manic phase was scary, and she didn’t like to feel frightened of her own son.
“He thought it was time to clean up the attic,” she added. Again, it was the things she wasn’t saying that struck me. She’d seen her own sister lose her mind and she must have been afraid Abbie had lost his—so afraid she couldn’t say the words.
It took him only two or three hours before every term paper, love letter, and photograph from the attic was in the Dumpster. Besides his trophies, he’d also spared Ma’s college diploma. Then, as abruptly as he’d started, he left, carrying one last item under his arm: Ma’s old violin.
Two months later Abbie signed a contract with Universal Pictures giving them the film rights to his life story, including, but not limited to, his autobiography, scheduled for publication the following year. The price paid was $250,000. Almost immediately, he got rid of the money, giving most of it, as he liked to say, to “three of the most important women in my life”—Sheila, Anita, and Johanna.18 That was pretty much the truth too. Abbie gave $100,000 to Johanna, around $38,000 each to Anita and Sheila, and $5,000 to me. After taxes and various professional fees, that left him with around $25,000 or less. In other words, with his curious way of looking at things, he’d made sure to cut himself in for ten percent of his own deal—just as if it were someone else’s deal and he’d only been the broker. It was as if, in order to sign that kind of big-money contract, Abbie had to disassociate himself from his own actions.
In the spring of 1979, Save the River sent a delegation to Washington to testify before Congress, where Abbie was introduced as Barry Freed by Congressman Robert McEwen. Meanwhile, the water resource economics expert, John Carroll, who had been hired by Save the River with the help of state funding, completed his report. It was damning, showing that winter navigation would cost the State of New York upward of $100 million annually in lost revenues. In April, the first River Day kept the home fires burning, with thousands of participants joining in marathons and hot-air balloon races during the day and a candlelight vigil that night. Now Abbie felt that Save the River was in a position to lobby Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, to hold field hearings.
On the day of the field hearings, Save the River organized a flotilla of antique boats to give committee members a tour of the beautiful islands. Moynihan himself was outfitted with a turn-of-the-century paddleboat. The night before, Abbie spent hours putting the final touches on his speech, knowing that with each word he might be signing his arrest warrant. But it didn’t matter. The next day “Barry” gave his speech and was met with a standing ovation.
After the speech, Abbie had this recollection:
Moynihan, sitting directly opposite, not more than twenty feet away, looked at me and said, “Now I know where the sixties have gone.” Way, way inside, where Abbie lived, I fainted. Then he said, “Everyone in New York State owes Barry Freed a debt of gratitude for his organizing ability.”19
On May 6, 1979, Abbie went to Washington for a huge antinuclear rally, wearing a suit and tie. Not even FBI agents wore suits and ties to Washington demonstrations. When he bumped into his old friend, television and radio producer Danny Schechter, and introduced himself, Schechter did a double take, and then invited Abbie to appear on a talk show he was producing. Abbie dismissed the idea—a breach of security. But by October, Abbie’s security concerns had evaporated, and he was back in touch with Schechter to negotiate the conditions of the interview. Shortly before midnight on November 2, Abbie strode through the back door of the Boston studio, accompanied by a woman wearing a Kabuki mask, his children Andrew and Ilya (Amy), and a bodyguard carrying a metal detector. Schechter’s impression was that Abbie was still his “old dazzling self”—but that he was “in trouble right now, head trouble,” alternately “witty, even wise,” and “near-hysterical.”
Abbie had the completed manuscript of his autobiography with him in Boston, and he ended the televised interview by quoting its last lines:
I’ve had some good times, had some bad. Took some lumps. Scored some points. Halfway through life, at 43, I still say, “Go for broke.” No government, no F.B.I., no judge, no jailer is ever gonna make me say “uncle.” Now, as then, let the game continue. I bet my stake on freedom’s call; I’ll play these cards with no regrets.
But during the interview he had, by contrast, expressed several regrets. When asked if he’d rethought the ’60s, he answered, “I used to think of [the ’60s] as the second American revolution, but now I think of it as the second Civil War, because it turned brother against brother, and family against family.” And when asked what he might have done differently, he unhesitatingly said, “I would have been a little neater, and had a few more manners, and more respect for the elders . . . things like that. And I would have known when to talk soft, and that it all doesn’t have to happen in one day.”20
Earlier in the day, in the Channel 56 parking lot, under ludicrously heavy, walkie-talkie orchestrated security precautions—“Breaker, breaker, this is Red Runner (Abbie) to Band-Aid (Jack)”—Abbie had granted an interview to Worcester Magazine in which he’d insisted, “I’m getting out of politics, ’cause I don’t want to lie anymore.”21
A few nights after the Schechter interview, Abbie and Johanna came to spend the night with us in Framingham, and then sometime during the night, still in his manic state, Abbie disappeared on us. He had scheduled a birthday party for himself and all his close friends for the next evening in a chic New York City restaurant called David K’s. So when the next day Abbie was still nowhere to be found, Joan, Johanna, and I drove down to New York anyway, hoping he’d show up there. We were the first to arrive, and there was Abbie in the private room he’d reserved, placing name cards in front of the place settings for the twenty-five or so guests he’d invited. As the room filled up, there were some familiar faces—publicist David Fenton, Sam and Walli Leff, the actors Carol Kane and Michael O’Donoghue of Saturday Night Live, Jerry Rubin, Jerry Lefcourt, Noah Kimmerling—and others we didn’t know. The meal was a sumptuous feast of Peking duck washed down with a variety of good wines. After a couple of hours, Abbie stood up and thanked everyone for their support over the years, then added that he didn’t want to break with tradition, so those with the credit cards could pick up the check. And then, followed by Johanna, he left. No one seemed to mind the $2,900 tab. People vied to be among those paying.
Sometime in December 1979 Abbie and Johanna were in Los Angeles and there was a war council of sorts at the home of Abbie’s friend, the film producer Burt Schneider. Present in addition to Abbie, Johanna, and Burt, were Johanna’s mother, attorney Michael Kennedy, and Dave Dellinger. The reason for the meeting was Abbie’s ever-stronger desire to surface. The goal was to help him make the right decision and then help him stick to it. In a sense, these were Abbie’s most valued advisers, each with a different sphere of knowledge and all of them utterly trustworthy. Schneider, Kennedy, and Dellinger felt that the benefits of surfacing at that time outweighed the risks. Johanna was adamantly against surfacing and may have included her mother in the group partly so that together they would form a more substantial bloc defending her position.
Johanna’s fear was that if he surfaced, Abbie would do substantial time in prison and that he would not be able to endure it. Abbie himself had said repeatedly over the years that he would not be able to endure doing hard time. Moreover, he felt sure that in prison he would be assassinated and had repeatedly stated that if he ended up in Attica he’d be killed just like Sam Melville, an outspoken Weather Underground member who’d been killed by guards during the suppression of the Attica uprising on September 13, 1971. But Johanna may have had more personal concerns as well. As long as Abbie was Barry he was all hers; once he became Abbie again, he would have to be shared with countless others, and she would lose him, or at the very least, she would become a smaller part of his life.
The meeting broke up somewhat inconclusively, with Abbie siding with Johanna against his will, to form a tie: three against three. Abbie would try and wait a little longer, for Johanna’s sake, but waiting was getting harder and harder.
While in L.A., Abbie had begun seeing a distinguished psychiatrist named Oscar Janiger, who confirmed the diagnosis of manic depression and put Abbie on lithium. Janiger was the psychiatrist of many creative and famous people, was himself a writer, and it was agreed that Abbie would see as much of him as possible while in L.A., and by phone afterward.
Abbie responded well to the lithium, and Janiger was optimistic about the prognosis. During the dozen or so office visits and an even larger number of phone sessions, Janiger came to see Abbie as plagued by feelings of inadequacy and self-condemnation on account of his uncontrolled behavior. At the same time, Abbie was exceptional in his insight, and it was this that made him overly aware of his own failings, according to Dr. Janiger. Abbie saw himself as a man of intelligence, good judgment, wisdom, and understanding—and thus he could neither rationalize nor forgive himself for his behavior during his manic episodes. Nor could he “correct” his behavior, since it was a manifestation of the illness. But in combination with other medications lithium seemed to ease his sense of hopelessness when he was depressed, and to moderate the mania as well.22
Joan and I had dinner with Abbie and Johanna in New York in early 1980, and when the subject of surfacing came up, Johanna broke in with “Abbie, you’re gonna go to jail, you’re going to jail,” as if repeating words she’d spoken a hundred times already. And Abbie sat there uncharacteristically silent and docile. He was ready to leave Barry’s life behind, but he hadn’t created him alone. Johanna was integral to every part of his life as Barry Freed, and he still had to overcome her fear of his surfacing.
Joan and I knew all that, but we were still surprised by Abbie’s willingness to accept his running mate as copilot. In the past we’d always seen Abbie do whatever the hell he wanted, regardless of who got hurt or how badly. Johanna had intimate knowledge of every facet of his new life. He was taking the lithium for his manic-depressive illness, and she would remind him whenever it was time to take his medication, almost as if she were his nurse. And the lithium itself, when he actually took it, had side effects: It brought on sudden diarrhea attacks, hair loss, and stomach bloat. His vulnerability only increased his dependency on Johanna. They had been through too much together. Abbie had shared all the contradictions of his soul with her, as he had with no other woman, not even Anita. The bond that had been forged between them was so strong that Abbie felt he could not surface, until they were both ready for him to do so.
In the spring of 1980 the Army Corps of Engineers, under pressure from Congress, withdrew all its requests for authorization and funds for work on the St. Lawrence River. Abbie told me that immediately afterward calls came in from elated environmental groups all over the country: This was the first time the corps had been beaten without a protracted court battle.
Meanwhile, Abbie started to come and visit us, without secrecy, at our home in Framingham. And on one visit he said to us, a little out of the blue, that we didn’t have to hide the fact that we were in touch with him. He said something like, “That would be too hard, keeping it secret all this time.”
Our bubbe Anna, Dad’s mother, had always represented to us the gentlest part of the Hoffman family. Warm, loving, expressive, forgiving to the point where you knew you could do nothing wrong in her eyes. Now, with Dad dead, she had become the last living reminder of a part of our past. She was ninety-six years old. She could remember pogroms and Cossacks. We respected her for having survived. And we listened to what she said. It wasn’t necessarily that she would tell you what to do, or even that her advice would be the right advice, but she made you want to tell her things. We all told her things. And we felt that what she said to us was the fruit of her experiences combined with the truths we had entrusted to her and others had entrusted to her during this long century of her life.
Bubbe’s health had been poor for much of the last five or six years. But now, in April 1980, her doctors were of the opinion that she was days or at most weeks away from death. The whole extended family gathered together in Worcester for their last visits with her. Phyllis came up from Mexico, our cousin Joan came up from Putnam County in New York, cousin Cynthia flew up from Nashville, and as soon as I passed along the news to Abbie, he and Johanna said they would come. Bubbe asked that we come to see her one at a time.
I stood by her bedside, unsure what to ask or what to say. But I shouldn’t have worried. She knew exactly what she wanted to tell me. It had to do with making pickles. She wanted to be sure I had her pickle recipe. I couldn’t write it down, because she didn’t want me to give away the secret, but she had to make sure I would continue to make them her way. She had me repeat it to her now, as I stood alone by her bedside.
First you have to carefully select the cucumbers, handpick them to make sure they’re fresh and that none are bruised or scratched. They should all be roughly the same size because the larger the pickle the longer the pickling process. You need the right balance of kosher salt and water to produce the brine, and the salt water should sit for a day or two before adding the freshest available dill, garlic, red pepper, and pickling spices. Then there’s the “little bit,” as she would say, of vinegar. And finally there’s a secret ingredient that I can’t repeat to anyone besides Abbie and Phyllis, since that’s what I promised Bubbe.
You stuff the jar or barrel with the cucumbers and add the brine and, depending on how you like your pickles, you leave it there for three to five days, or longer. Three days for a gentile pickle, seven days for something nice and sour. Bubbe would keep her pickles pickling for seven to ten days.
As I repeated her recipe back to her on her deathbed she nodded her head, the sign that it was good.
Six years earlier, just after Abbie had gone underground, Bubbe had been in hospital and, fearing she might not live, had decided to tell me a story of her youth in Russia that, perhaps because of a connection she saw in it to Abbie’s troubles, seemed to weigh heavily on her now. It seemed that her brother had been a Bolshevik and village leader. She told me how before the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks would meet in wells—the safest places in the village—and how they carried messages in their rings. She spoke to me in a combination of Yiddish and broken English, so I missed words and had to piece together the meaning of her story afterward. But the gist was that everytime she saw Abbie’s picture in the paper or on television, she became afraid because he reminded her of her brother the Bolshevik. One day a troop of Cossacks had come to the door and dragged him away, she told me. She was frightened that the same thing would happen to Abbie. She wanted me to tell him to be very careful.
Now, six years later, no longer as fearful as she had been that last time, since now she knew with certainty that death was near and she could face it quietly, Bubbe called for Abbie, whom she had not seen since before he went underground. He was there waiting and went to her bedside. The thing she had to say to him was like a weight on her chest. Of course, Bubbe hadn’t understood the drug bust. She only knew that Abbie was a fugitive, wanted by the police as a rebel leader. She must have taken him to be the very spirit of her brother the Bolshevik. Her message to Abbie, as he related it to me later—after twenty minutes or so of hand-holding and reminiscences—was: “Keep running. When they say ‘Come back, everything is okay,’ keep going, stay underground. Jews were meant to be underground. It’s the history of our family.”23
The way Abbie described it to me, her words were a kind of blessing, a funny, obtuse, and mysterious expression of approval. And the funny thing was that although she had advised him not to surface, Abbie left her room feeling that hers were the words that may have helped him, finally, to put the fugitive years behind him. He felt grateful to have been able to visit her, unlike his notable absence at the time of Dad’s death. That absence had started Abbie’s years of flight, and this last meeting on the brink of death helped bring him back into the light. Hearing the voice of his own fear issue from the mouth of his loving ninety-six-year-old Bubbe had the effect of breaking the spell. It made him feel that running away was somehow connected to the old way of doing things, to the way of our fathers, whereas he wanted to stand for a new freedom, the freedom not to run. Surfacing no longer seemed so fearful. That was the great gift that Bubbe was able to give Abbie before dying: letting him go against the grain of her instruction. After visiting Bubbe, Abbie left Worcester dead set on surfacing, and the only thing left for us to talk about was the time and the place. Bubbe died a few days later, on April 20, 1980.
The next call I got from Abbie began, “I’m doing it. Showtime.”
“Doing what, Abbie?” I asked.
“I’m coming in.”
I think he’d convinced himself that he wouldn’t have to do any time. He wanted to make his move soon, before that year’s election might put Ronald Reagan in the White House. Also, reviews of his autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, were beginning to appear. And since that book effectively signaled Abbie’s return, it increased the urgency of surfacing.
Then, just as Abbie was beginning to make preparations for his return, things started happening up on the river that put pressure on him to speed things up before they sped up on their own. More than once, after they’d overheard some chance remark suggesting that someone might know Barry’s real identity, Johanna had driven Abbie to the nearest highway with a suitcase and plans to hitchhike to Syracuse and then fly to New York City. Each time he’d returned to Fineview, assured it had been a false alarm.
One afternoon, at the end of a town council meeting in Fineview at which Barry had given a speech, an off-duty border guard from the nearby Canadian line came up to him and said, “I agree with you, Barry, but what are we going to do when everyone finds out you’re Abbie Hoffman?” And the guy didn’t seem to be kidding. The way Abbie used to tell it, the guard happened to be a dead ringer for the English actor Michael Caine, so Abbie was able to shoot back, “Yeah, well, what are we going to do when everyone finds out you’re Michael Caine?”24 That night Abbie decided that the time had come and that it was far better to take the initiative than just wait until he was arrested. He knew that if he was apprehended, the judicial system was going to be much harder on him than if he surfaced voluntarily. And in the back of his mind, maybe Abbie had begun to fear that Johanna loved Clark Kent but not Superschmuck. Part of him wanted to test whether she could really love all of him.
So part of the problem he was trying to solve had to do with Johanna, but another part had to do just with himself. He was beginning to be so secure in his identity as Barry Freed that he needed to resolve what had now become the Abbie question. If he had waited any longer, he feared Abbie as Abbie would have ceased to exist in any real way. He said, “I feel as though the name Abbie refers to somebody else. It’s like Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton playing Archie Bunker and Edith. I have empathy for them when they walk down the street and somebody says, ‘Hi, Archie,’ or ‘Hi, Edith.’” He had already begun to look on Abbie as another person. And even I could see that the life he had up on the river was the best life he’d ever had—with love, friendship, nature, and meaningful political work as well. “Barry. That’s what the woman I love calls me and what my friends call me,” he said. “Just my mother calls me the other name.”25
That summer of 1980, Abbie and I were having detailed conversations about where and when he should surface. At the same time he would have been having similar conversations with other close confidants. He wanted to give himself up so as to get maximum publicity which—wrongly as it turned out—Abbie believed would help him in court. And he was determined to avoid negative publicity. He wanted to make sure we were allowed to put our spin on it, emphasizing Abbie’s environmental work during the last several years. The primary goal was to keep him out of prison.
Abbie knew he would probably have to surface in Manhattan, since that was where his lawyer Jerry Lefcourt was trying to make arrangements with the prosecutor. But he also wanted people to see some part of the life he’d made for himself up in Fineview. As for when to surface, Abbie’s approach was a little more casual than I would have expected: “Why should I give up my summer vacation?” he said to me. So we fixed a tentative date in the month of September, so Abbie could enjoy the best weather up on the river and still come in well before the election.
Once made, the decision to surface affected Abbie in an entirely positive way. And I was ecstatic too. Over the years, whenever he had asked me if I thought he should come in, I’d said, “Yeah, give it a shot,” or something like that. I always had the feeling that as soon as he turned and faced the music, things would start going his way. I thought there was a strong possibility that Abbie had been set up, and it seemed worthwhile to try to prove it. The problem was this was just too big a decision on which to press him. In the end, it had to be his decision. After all, if my hunch were wrong, the person who would be doing time, and doing it alone, was Abbie, so how could you tell him to come in before he was ready?
But now that he was coming in, I felt excited. We all did. It was like seeing the soldiers come home after a war.
Jerry Lefcourt and others were working feverishly to finalize arrangements with the prosecutors. That’s the way it usually is when a fugitive gives himself up. A judge was agreed upon whom both sides considered impartial. Bail amount recommendations were also part of the understanding.26
Abbie brought in former Rolling Stone publicity director and friend David Fenton to manage the media. 60 Minutes had offered $10,000 for an interview—despite their claim to not pay for news, it’s common knowledge that they do. But both Abbie and David preferred 20/20 and Barbara Walters’s promise of thirty minutes, uninterrupted, to allow Abbie to tell his story without distortion. The plan was to bring Walters and her 20/20 crew up to Fineview and do the piece while Abbie was still underground.27
In the days before Walters was due to arrive, Abbie and Johanna sent america, who had been visiting, back to Anita, and called a meeting of their local friends to tell them who Barry Freed really was. Abbie was more than a little surprised by the responses of his friends. They weren’t amused. Barry was really important to them, and they weren’t going to accept that he had been little more than a prank. Abbie found himself feeling that he’d hurt them somehow, and in a way he had: “One guy cried. Karen, the office manager, just kept saying, ‘Nope, nope, nope.’ She had once quoted Abbie Hoffman to me.”28
On Tuesday, September 2, the day of Barbara Walters’s scheduled arrival in Fineview, Abbie had thirty-five people working security in New York City and upstate. There were lookouts posted at key locations communicating by walkie-talkie. Elaborate escape routes had been planned in case something went wrong. Timetables had been worked out; weather maps had been consulted. David Fenton escorted Barbara Walters and her two producers, Stan Gould and Katherine Harrington, to a chartered Learjet first thing in the morning. They weren’t informed where they were going until takeoff. Then Fenton told them the whole story of Barry Freed, illustrating his description with photographs and news clippings of him testifying before Congress, of his speech in front of Senator Moynihan, and the letter of praise from Governor Carey. Up to that point, Walters and 20/20 were taking a dangerous chance, and possibly breaking the law, trusting total strangers who had contacted them on Abbie’s behalf for a story whose details they were not permitted to know. But now, as Fenton would later write, “They relaxed. They had a scoop.”29
Meanwhile, in a second chartered plane, other security people working for Abbie were bringing in Walters’s camera crew. Once both planes had landed, local escorts drove the 20/20 group in a caravan to a motel along back roads, communicating only by marine radio. There the ABC crew was kept under constant surveillance to prevent any of them from trying to get to a phone. Then they were loaded into waiting boats and piloted on the St. Lawrence River toward the Canadian border. Abbie and Johanna were waiting in their own boat on the Canadian side until they could be notified by their security people that it was safe. Then they took Walters alone into their boat, and let the current pull them back into U.S. waters, and on toward Fineview. Abbie was pleased when Walters told him his security was better than that of Yasir Arafat, whom she had also interviewed.
What Abbie and Dave Fenton didn’t know was that when Walters arrived in the area she was recognized and word began to spread that she might be on her way to interview Abbie Hoffman. Around the same time, someone in the prosecutor’s office had leaked to the Daily News that Abbie would be turning himself in on Thursday. So now Abbie was racing against the clock and didn’t even know it. Moreover, the stakes were high: If he were caught, he could expect a much longer sentence than if he turned himself in, and there would be no half-hour interview on national television, something he considered crucial to his strategy of presenting himself to the American public in the best possible light.30
Not knowing that the story had leaked, Abbie had the camera crew film him giving a walking tour of Fineview. Then they returned to the house, where Walters began the interview that would last for the next three hours, with Johanna sitting next to Abbie, and Walters talking to them both.
Meanwhile, the FBI now knew that Walters was in Fineview interviewing Barry, and that Barry was in fact Abbie, A flurry of teletypes were sent between FBI offices in New York City and Albany, and then to the New York State Police and local police in the Thousand Island area, and in Canada. But before they could swoop in, they learned of the arrangements that had been made with the New York prosecutor’s office for Abbie to turn himself in on Thursday. And they were fearful of the kind of publicity they might invite by breaking in on Walters and her camera crew in mid-interview.
After six and a half years of looking for him, instructions were now circulated by the FBI requesting that “No Investigation or Attempt Be Made to Locate and Apprehend Hoffman in View of [Abbie’s plans to turn himself in, and] Particularly in View of News Media on Scene.”31
The taping went off without a hitch, and shortly after it was over, Abbie and Johanna disappeared into a speedboat and then to a plane that would take them to Manhattan. There they would spend their last day together before Abbie’s surfacing, and the 20/20 air date, both scheduled for September 4.
Walters and her crew were asked to wait until Abbie and Johanna were safe. The next morning, September 3, they were driven back to the airport. Only when media manager Fenton saw local reporters gathered at the airport waiting for Walters that morning did he realize that the story had leaked. Abbie was on page one of that morning’s Daily News. In a panic, he called Abbie in Manhattan and got him to change hotels. Reporters were pouring into Fineview to interview Abbie and Johanna’s neighbors. The New York Times was angry, since they had been promised the first exclusive for the Thursday-morning edition.
Abbie had asked me to drive down to New York City on Wednesday, September 3, and to bring with me someone from the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Regardless of what David Fenton was promising the New York Times, Abbie told me I could promise the first exclusive interview to the Worcester paper. The reporter, Teresa Hanafin, and I arrived at the hotel Abbie had designated, the Gramercy Park, by late morning. Almost as soon as we arrived, Abbie called, asking me to come immediately over to the Ramada Inn on Eighth Avenue, and to pass the phone to Teresa so she could get her interview while I made my away across town.
When I entered their room at the Ramada, Johanna seemed pensive, while Abbie looked happy and excited, but even he seemed self-contained and momentarily at peace. Things were going extremely well. The media were responding on cue and more positively than he would have dared hope. ABC was promoting the Barbara Walters interview with Abbie almost hourly. Abbie was calling various reporters at different newspapers and offering each one “an exclusive on this,” and saying pretty much the same thing to all of them. The New York papers were already beginning to print articles that referred to Abbie’s rumored surfacing. Fenton was doing a masterful job. We were all convinced that Abbie would beat the coke charges and not have to do any time.
Physically, Abbie looked tan and slender. He had a closely trimmed full beard and his hair was beginning to thin. He looked like a middle-aged college professor, complete with plaid shirt open at the collar. But this time it was no disguise. He was feeling his age, wanting to be respectable without pretending to be any different than he really was. It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever seen him plan a major media event without some sort of prepared schtick or angle he was working. He wasn’t looking over his shoulder, as he had for the last six and a half years. He was just looking forward. He wanted to surface without an act, just himself playing it straight. He suspected, rightly, that the media were going to play it very big, and he felt somehow that people were on his side. They hadn’t forgotten him. They wanted to know where he’d been and how he was.
That night, the 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters aired nationally as scheduled—a full, uninterrupted, and extremely sympathetic half hour of Abbie at his best. When it was over we felt that in that half hour the infamy had been pretty much washed away from Abbie’s name. The awesome power of television had acted like magical, purifying waters.
At 9:30 a.m. on September 4, 1980, Abbie surrendered, according to painstakingly prepared arrangements, to New York State Special Narcotics Prosecutor Sterling Johnson in New York City.32 By the time he left the prosecutor’s office in handcuffs, the media were waiting for him in force. There were over two hundred reporters and innumerable camera crews. When they caught sight of Abbie, they charged, at first ignoring Abbie’s police escort. Then it was the cops’ turn. They pulled out their nightsticks and pressed reporters against the walls. One fallen cameraman was injured badly enough to be sent to the hospital. Media manager David Fenton yelled out, “Take it easy, there’ll be plenty of time to talk to Abbie later.” But the crushing crowd ignored him. In the end, almost no one got a quote from Abbie or a photograph of him. And that night’s evening news featured crowd shots of the media circus photographing one another. It had been the craziest scene since the arrival of the pope.33
Abbie was released later in the day without bail, since he’d turned himself in. He felt wonderful. The publicity strategy had worked brilliantly, and being released without bail seemed like the final triumph of a tremendously successful media campaign.
There followed a solid week of media distortions. The New York Post and Daily News seemed to vie with one another in the vilification of Abbie. “Laughing at the Law” read one Post headline. Abbie was the “first fugitive to turn himself in with a business agent,” wrote the News. The Post complained that Abbie got released without bail, comparing him to a Puerto Rican grocer who had been denied bail after he’d been apprehended on cocaine charges. The News claimed that Abbie had never had a job, and had surfaced in order to counter bad reviews of his latest book.34
As in a fairy tale, when all the clocks in the village start working again to signify the return to normalcy, things suddenly reverted to the usual routine. Everything was different than it had been when Abbie walked the streets of New York seven years earlier. But his own role, now that he was back, carried on as if he’d never left. Abbie was vilified by some and lionized by others, as he always had been. It had taken no time at all for his emergence on the scene to be taken for granted.
On September 21, The Sunday New York Times Book Review printed an enthusiastic review of Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture: “[Hoffman always had] an infinite capacity to surprise us, and he does so again with this unexpectedly good book, easily one of the best autobiographies to come out of the ’60s. . . . [The] life of an exile, hard on the man, did good things for his writing.”35 Nowhere in the review is there any mention of the incredible story of his resurrection, as if, for better or worse, the general opinion was that Abbie’s presence was simply a part of life. You could say that this was the highest praise of all.
And in any case Abbie liked it that way. Free on bail, he was speaking again on college campuses and very much in demand. He and Johanna were living again in her Manhattan apartment. And, as so often in the past, he was preparing for his next court date. The trial was set for April 1981, and Abbie was concentrating most of his energies on developing a strategy with his lawyers to ensure that when he walked into court, he would be treated with respect and released.
Shortly after surfacing, Abbie met the psychiatrist Nathan S. Kline, who had been referred to him by Dr. Janiger, and became one of his patients. Kline, who coincidentally had once served as director of research at Worcester State, where Abbie had worked as a psychologist, was one of the true pioneers in the biochemical treatment of depression. As early as 1953, Kline had introduced psychotropic medications into the United States. In 1956, he had been an early advocate of antidepressants, and he had coauthored the first paper on the management of alcoholism with lithium carbonate. Kline was a true optimist, who believed—long before this opinion became popular within the psychiatric community—that depression and manic depression were the result of a chemical imbalance and could be treated successfully with drugs, particularly lithium.
Abbie’s sessions with Kline were revelations akin to his discovery of Abraham Maslow’s teachings a quarter of a century earlier. Kline was a powerhouse who had little patience with psychoanalysis in the treatment of depression. Under Kline’s supervision, Abbie began to take his lithium medication with unprecedented discipline. Kline’s faith in the drug helped Abbie overcome his distaste for its unpleasant side effects. He trusted Kline. He felt confident that with Kline’s help he could keep his manic depression under control. And according to Kline, patients like Abbie, who might have seriously considered attempting suicide in the absence of proper care, were precisely the patients who could be treated with the greatest chance of success.36