we gathered in the Manhattan courtroom at the end of the first week of April 1981, looking forward to good news. Abbie had previously been persuaded to accept a plea bargain—a guilty plea on a reduced charge—hoping and expecting leniency in return. Instead, after a brief and impassioned speech by Abbie, the judge sentenced my brother to one to three years hard time. We sat in our seats, stunned and frightened.
In late April, Abbie made one last cross-country trip to do The Phil Donahue Show, then started serving his time at the Downstate Facility in Fishkill, at that time reputed to be the toughest prison in New York State—worse than Attica, where there had been some improvements after the famous uprising and Governor Rockefeller’s murderous crackdown. Abbie told me he was the only prisoner doing time in Fishkill for a nonviolent crime.
Abbie allowed only three people to visit him at Fishkill—Johanna, his attorney Jerry Lefcourt, and me. But he discouraged even us. He wanted to spare us the humiliation of the strip search and the way they looked at you as you walked through the maze of corridors. “Don’t come,” he would say.
Johanna wasn’t put off. It didn’t matter what Abbie said. She came as often as she could—usually several times a week. One day Abbie told her he had a craving for fresh cherries. On her next visit, Johanna had woven them into her hair as decoration and walked through the prison gates that way. And during the visit, Abbie was able to eat the cherries out of her hair.
I visited Abbie only once that summer. And when I got there I understood his warning. The guards somehow made you feel that you too were a prisoner. And I think the intimidation was purposeful.
In a large hall that reminded me of study hall at Worcester Academy, I waited for them to bring Abbie in. At a desk on a raised platform in front, the sergeant sat facing the rows of numbered tables. The nearest row was for the worst offenders and the fifteenth row in the back was for the least “offensive” prisoners. They had seated me in the second row. Johanna came in and sat next to me. There were guards everywhere. Neither of us said anything. We just waited for Abbie, lost in our own private thoughts.
We were told to keep our hands on the table at all times. After a while, it’s hard to keep your hands resting on a tabletop. You start to feel an almost desperate need to scratch behind your ear or under your foot. What were they going to do, shoot me? So I scratched. Nobody seemed to notice.
Finally Abbie came walking toward us, smiling his old smile, but with something about the smile I didn’t recognize. It took me a few seconds before I realized that his head was completely shaved, giving his smile a ghoulish effect. He looked ghastly. Under his prison uniform he wore heavy black boots, standard prison issue. He settled in as near to me and Johanna as he could get and then leaned forward and started talking.
Keeping his hands on the table close to his body, he pointed around the room by raising just his index finger, and told us what different prisoners were in for—“That one butchered his wife and put the pieces in garbage bags,” he’d say with a twinkle in his eye, waiting for my reaction. Now he was pointing out to me the prisoners in the hall who were Jewish. “The good thing about doing time in New York is that there are a lot of the brethren in here with you,” and then for the first time that day I heard him laugh out loud. Abbie knew his own survival in prison depended pretty much on himself. We couldn’t really help him here. His humor was intended to ease our sense of helplessness rather than his own.
I stayed at Fishkill almost the whole day, leaving the room only for short trips to the men’s room or the candy machine in the corridor. Much of the day, the three of us just sat there in silence, sharing the confinement and isolation that on most days he had to submit to alone. And when I left, some of Abbie’s strength had seeped into me. “In just a few months when this is over,” Abbie’s easy laughter, story-telling, and relaxed manner told me, “the worst will be behind us.” The image of his shaven head made me instinctively raise my hand to my own to make sure it wasn’t shaved as well.
Abbie told me he got along all right at Fishkill largely on account of his being a strong softball player. He was able to win the respect of other inmates on the softball field right off. And he was smart enough to know who to stay away from, so he had no major problems with other inmates. The only trouble he had was with some of the guards, but he was able to stay away from the ones that would have liked to give him problems. Once prison time had become a certainty, I think Abbie took pride in getting through it with his head high. He thought of himself as a political prisoner, and that with pride. Although the original alleged offense may not have been political, the sentence he had received certainly was.
On August 4, 1981, after a little more than three months of hard time, Abbie was transferred to Edgecombe, a minimum-security facility in New York City. He worked days as a counselor at Veritas, a drug rehabilitation center in Manhattan, returning to the prison to sleep. Sometimes I’d come down from Framingham and meet Abbie for lunch. His mood was down. He’d weathered the worst of the storm, but he was left with nothing. His “troops”—Johanna, me, his friends—were still loyal, but at the group’s center he didn’t feel like a general anymore. He said he didn’t feel like he had anything left to give.
One day I got a call from Abbie, perplexed by something that had happened. Hilario, Phyllis’s husband, had visited him at Veritas and said, “I want you to take your sister back.”
“What was he talking about?” Abbie asked me.
“Don’t you understand,” I said. “It’s the old way. He doesn’t want her anymore. You’re the patriarch of the family now. He wants you to take her back.”
“But I’m in prison,” Abbie yelled. “What was I supposed to say to him?”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said, call my brother.” But Hilario never called me. Within a few weeks, the Mexican government seized my newly opened factory, without ever giving me a receipt or a reason. Hilario filed for divorce in Mexico and obtained it within a year. And for the rest of his life, I used to rib Abbie for having cost me my livelihood by not having the right answer to Hilario’s request.
They say you always know you’re going to get out of jail; in prison, you never know. That leaves a mark, and it left a mark on my brother. The prison experience had taken something away from Abbie.
That fall of 1981, with my Mexican factory seized, I visited New York frequently, overseeing the demise of my old business and trying to set up a new one, buying and reselling closeout merchandise. I saw Abbie a lot. We talked about what he would do after he got out the following April. Requests for speaking engagements were coming in. He said he wanted me to manage him. He was beginning to feel connected to politics again. He felt that Reagan was dangerous because he too saw himself as a kind of revolutionary, from the radical Right. He feared that Ronald Reagan could destroy a lot of what had been accomplished culturally and politically, and that gave him a new sense of purpose. With his experience in Save the River, Abbie also saw all the battles to be fought for environmental causes. You could feel Abbie preparing himself, like a pitcher warming up in the bullpen. He felt that he’d paid his debt to society—and more—and that too helped him refocus. The guilt he felt may not have disappeared, but it receded, and was no longer the debilitating curse he’d once had to run from.
In November 1981, Abbie began planning a massive fund-raiser for Veritas, to take place in January. He secured the ideal venue, Studio 54, then the hottest nightclub in the city, and got them to donate its use free of charge. On the night of January 18, 1982, celebrities turned out in force, from Carly Simon and Cher, to actors Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro. Abbie made sure he got to be master of ceremonies and assigned me to deal with New Line. New Line had expressed interest in being Abbie’s booking agent, and we’d been negotiating for several weeks. You’d think Abbie’s popularity would have declined while he was in prison. But, inexplicably, the opposite seemed to have happened. He now commanded up to $5,000 per speaking engagement. At the same time, copies of Steal This Book, when you could find them, sold for $25.00—twelve times the cover price!1 The enormous media attention he’d received when he surfaced, especially the Barbara Walters half-hour interview on 20/20, had had a dramatic effect. Having been through so much and survived, outsmarted the FBI, transformed himself clandestinely from a Yippie! into a leader of the environmental movement in the ’70s, Abbie was now seen as our preeminent outlaw hero.
By 2:00 a.m. that night, I had an agreement written on a cocktail napkin, signed and countersigned by New Line, and their check for $10,000 as an advance for the right to represent Abbie on tour, made out to “Jack Hoffman Presents,” our company, which we later renamed “Abbie Yo-Yo.” I gave Abbs the thumbs-up sign, he came over with another bottle of champagne, and we popped the cork. He was back. With only three months left to serve, we both saw better times ahead.
Oui magazine asked him for an interview, but he rejected the idea with the argument that the press never asks him the right questions. When they said he could interview himself and they would print it unedited, he accepted. In the interview, Abbie asks himself what the underground years taught him. “Well, I think that life is basically a contradiction. . . . At the core, humans are good and decent. That’s one [thing] I’ve always felt. The other is that life’s absurd. The tension between goodness and absurdity allows for progress. . . . You have only the first and you take yourself too seriously, only the second, and you don’t take anything seriously. Balance.”2
He started wearing his olive-green prison jacket with a “Save the River” button sewn onto it as a memento of recent hardships and past glories. That he would wear the prison coat in public in itself showed new strength. He wasn’t hiding anything, had nothing to be ashamed of, and was moving forward. On March 26, 1982, Abbie was paroled from Edgecombe. His eight-and-a-half-year trip through the looking glass was over.
A new collection of his underground and prison writings, Square Dancing in the Ice Age, had just come out from Putnam. It was arguably his best book to date, filled with self-assured, careful, analytical, and inspired writing from 1975 through 1981. Included were his intimate eulogy to Dad, “I Remember Papa”; a long essay written while Abbie was in prison, about fellow prisoner/writer Jack Abbott called “The Crime of Punishment”; and tales of his underground experences all over the world that show how he proudly defied the frequent hardship and mania of his fugitive life and his prison life. The book has little of the frenzy and confusion that characterized his autobiography, published only two years earlier. It stood as convincing proof that, in 1982, Abbie was able yet again to begin life afresh, with his old beliefs, without cynicism, with fresh enthusiasm and energy.
Don Epstein at Greater Talent, one of the agencies representing Abbie at the time, arranged a speaking engagement in which Abbie would debate Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy. And on the last day of April 1982, the two heavyweight ’60s celebrities went into the ring at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque before a crowd of 1,600. Abbie was witty, energetic, and gracious—to the point of telling Liddy he had admired his unwillingness to cooperate with the prosecution in the Watergate trial, which had resulted in Liddy’s receiving the heaviest sentence. Liddy, in return, was moody, taciturn, and hostile.
At one point, Abbie asked Liddy why he hadn’t put Abbie on his kill list. Liddy’s response, with a slight smile, was that Abbie hadn’t risen high enough.
The next day’s Albuquerque Journal referred to Abbie as an “aging activist” but nonetheless acknowledged that he had trounced Liddy.3 Abbie felt the debate had been such a success that he decided debates were going to be the future of his lecture circuit business. A few days later we discussed the following ad he wanted me to place:
JACK HOFFMAN PRESENTS
ABBIE HOFFMAN
My brother has the biggest mouth in America. Recently, at the University of New Mexico, he demolished G. Gordon Liddy in debate, scoring 75% on the applause meter to Liddy’s 25%. Even conservative newspapers declared “Liddy Fizzles,” “Abbie Wins Hands Down.” He’s through with Liddy and interested in bigger game. Therefore we make the following challenge:
Abbie will debate the following people, winner take all.
Purse $10,000: John Phillips on drugs, Phyllis Schlafly on nuclear disarmament, Tom Hayden and/or Jane Fonda on grassroots democracy, Jerry Falwell on morality, Jesse Helms on abortion, George Will on E.T.
Purse $20,000:* James Watt on the new Federalism, James Edwards on nuclear power, Alexander Haig on deterrence, David Stockman on Reaganomics.
Purse $50,000:* Menachem Begin on Zionism, Henry Kissinger on Vietnam.
Purse $100,000:* Richard Nixon on anything.
* Rules, place, and other particulars to be arranged by seconds. All is negotiable. Interested parties call me immediately at . . .
Purses could go higher with ancillary rights. By the way, Abbie has outdrawn Liddy at every campus two or three to one. He has drawn crowds of 5,000 on three occasions.
Abbie also had me issue written challenges to likely opponents by letter, including General Westmoreland, Robert McNamara, and Phyllis Schlafly. But there weren’t any takers.
On September 27, 1982, the New York Times printed an op-ed piece by Abbie on the subject of interstate trucking of nuclear waste. Shipments originating in Ontario, Canada, and destined for reprocessing in South Carolina were passing through New York State after being banned in Vermont and Michigan. The environmental risks in the event of a vehicular accident were enormous. Abbie’s article was hard-driving, factual, and intent on the specific problem at hand—without a breath of identifiably left-wing ideology. Even the accompanying four-line biography of Abbie makes no mention of his long history as an activist. He is identified only as “founder of Save the River, a citizens’ environmental group based in Clayton, N.Y.” who “lives two miles up river from the Thousand Islands Bridge.”
Abbie was back in politics, but his politics were clearer now than they had ever been. Some of the ideas and methods that he’d adopted as Barry Freed out of necessity now became part of his program by choice. He no longer felt an obligation to toe a party line or fit into anyone else’s agenda as he once had—particularly in 1972—and the new freedom was exhilarating and strengthening. Around this time, activist/historian Harvey Wasserman began interviewing Abbie for an article that would eventually appear in New Age magazine. Wasserman, author of the popular Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States among other books, was the perfect sounding board for Abbie’s new thinking.
“I think ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ are meaningless terms,” Abbie told Wasserman early in the interview, “and so I don’t use them.” Later when Wasserman asked, “What can we do to further the cause of justice in this country?” Abbie’s response was a brilliant deconstruction of the question from a grassroots organizing perspective:
First of all, [justice] is not a cause. If you say “cause” to the average American, the first word they’ll say is “lost.” All causes are lost. I don’t believe in causes. So I’m not bummed out by nuclear war happening tomorrow; I’m not bummed out by the poisoning of the planet; I don’t want to combat world hunger—those are too big! . . . If you stop to contemplate them, [they will] immobilize you.
Instead, you have to break it down in terms of issues. . . . What is the issue in my community that is going to mobilize people—move them from inertia to action, and get them participating in the whole process of decision-making?
Are they going to win? This is very important: you want people to win. Is this going to broaden their consciousness about the way the whole process is put together? Is this going to make our community a better community? There are a thousand issues, wherever you live. You could walk down the street and find a hundred issues.4
For the first time since the early ’60s, the full force of Abbie’s intellect and experience was going into hands-on organizing, rather than mythmaking and media manipulation.
In the Save the River office Abbie had initiated a problem-solving policy whereby the prerequisite for bringing a new problem before the board was that you’d taken the first step to solve it. As Abbie explained it to Wasserman, “You can’t come in and say, ‘We don’t have money to do anything,’ unless you’ve come in with a hundred dollars. You can’t come in and say, ‘Memberships are falling,’ unless you’ve gone out and got some new members. . . . The idea is to switch people from being problem-presenters to problem-solvers.” And when Wasserman asked Abbie, “What are you looking for?” Abbie’s immediate response was: “Typical, average Americans who will just try to narrow the gap between what they profess and what’s going on—to close the gap between our vision of America and the reality of America.”5
Abbie even reversed his most famous piece of advice. When Abbie had first said, “Never trust anyone over thirty” in 1968, he was thirty-two! Now, at the ripe age of forty-six, Abbie grew fond of saying, with a little lightning flash of mischief in his eyes: “I tend not to trust anyone under thirty, actually,” in recognition of his newfound maturity.6
In the fall of 1982, Abbie and Johanna were back living in her cramped apartment. Since I was now in the closeout business, I’d go down to New York about once a week to buy merchandise, and I saw them pretty regularly. At the end of the day, my van filled with assorted items that I would resell, I’d ring their bell and usually end up staying the night. The three of us were quite close, serving almost as bridges to one another. Abbie was in a subdued, low-key mood during this period and seemed to take comfort in my visits. We would often talk into the night, and in the morning he’d make me a huge plate of huevos rancheros.
Johanna liked having me around too. Since I was less political than Abbie, I was someone she could talk to about other things. As for me, maybe with my business in the underground economy going so well, I didn’t feel as hopelessly middle class as I had sometimes in the past. I was in my own groove, and that made it easier for me to be around them.
But it still wasn’t easy. They were arguing a lot, about marriage among other things. Abbie and Anita had been divorced for some time, and he wanted to get married. Johanna didn’t. Abbie was trying to take his lithium regularly, but Johanna felt it wasn’t working, or that he wasn’t taking it as often as he should. In her opinion, he was on his way to becoming dangerously unstable again, and she wanted him to get on medication that would control the manic depression. I felt torn. I loved them both, and each of them wanted me to take sides against the other, which I wouldn’t do.
In mid-November, Abbie entered another manic phase. He started sleeping less, working harder, and getting more intense, more crazy. On November 17, he had a speaking date at the Morgantown campus of the University of West Virginia. He was very sick with an upper respiratory infection, was running a 103-degree temperature, and mildly delirious. But he insisted that the show must go on. I called the organizers and arranged for them to have a van with a cot and a nurse or doctor in it meet him at the airport—a kind of people’s ambulance. And that’s how he got to the date. The funny thing was several people told me he gave one of his best speeches that night. Physically, it would seem almost impossible. But that’s the way Abbie was: He loved to let his work take him away from his physical and emotional pain; he slipped easily into the work; he was a reverse-escapist.
One day in December 1982, about a month into Abbie’s manic period, I was in New York when I got an urgent message from Johanna on my answering machine asking me to meet her at a coffee shop near her apartment. When I got there, she was already waiting for me. She had obviously been crying, seemed more mad and bewildered than hurt. But her face was swollen and the thought crossed my mind that Abbie might have hit her. In her eyes was a look that told me she was trusting me not to ask. So I didn’t, and she didn’t tell me. We let it be something unspoken between us. And I think that as much as she wouldn’t have let me talk about it, she wanted me to see what my brother had done to her.7
When I went back upstairs, Abbie was in the midst of packing his things in a manic frenzy. When he saw me, his eyes opened wider and he seemed to get another surge of rage. I thought he was going to hit me too, but then he seemed to just turn off the switch, ignoring me completely instead. I looked over his shoulder as he thumbed through the yellow pages for the name of a mover until he came across one called “A Nice Jewish Boy,” and called them. Then, surrounded by boxes and crates stuffed with his belongings, we sat and waited.
His psychiatrist, Nate Kline, whom Abbie had grown to like and depend on, was incapacitated with a heart condition. Without Kline’s supervision, Abbie had begun to ignore his medication needs completely. I was scared. I saw Abbie in front of me, but I didn’t recognize him. There was a wildness in his eyes, a furious and unappeasable rage. His speech was rapid and slurred. I couldn’t see any recognition of me in his look. I felt I wouldn’t have been able to stop him from hurting himself or me if he’d wanted to. And it seemed like he wanted to. So I just helped him move out; there was nothing else I felt I could do. I was so frightened and confused, it did not even occur to me to seek psychiatric care for Abbie. I just wanted to help him. Abbie had somehow found a studio apartment about a block away. There his manic state lasted, almost continually, for another three months.
The months Abbie spent working out of his studio apartment in what was largely a manic rush were extremely productive. He started spending time in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he’d been invited by some environmental activists. Sometimes he’d be accompanied by his young activist friend Al Giordano. A new pump had been proposed by the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO) to divert water from the Delaware River to the Limerick nuclear power reactor. The grassroots effort against PECO’s plans was named “Dump the Pump.” Abbie signed on with the group “Del-AWARE” as a dollar-a-year paid consultant, and began organizing demonstrations at Point Pleasant to block the construction of the pump. In January 1983, two days of demonstrations brought out nearly 2,000 protesters, hundreds of whom were arrested in acts of civil disobedience. A frustrated PECO spokesman complained, “No one had ever heard of the damn place before Abbie Hoffman arrived.”
Despite the grassroots opposition, conservative Bucks County commissioners granted PECO the right to pump 95 million gallons of Delaware River water to cool the nuclear power plant. Construction began on the pump. Del-AWARE demanded a referendum. The Bucks County commissioners denied its request. Del-AWARE occupied the courthouse until the early spring, and in May 1983 got its referendum and won it with an overwhelming majority. In the fall of 1983, Del-AWARE was able to help elect new anti-Pump commissioners and an anti-Pump congressman named Peter Kostmayer. Del-AWARE had won, for the moment, and Abbie was elated.
Meanwhile, on February 11, 1983, Nate Kline died during heart surgery. It was a tremendous blow to Abbie. But at first he seemed to stride right through it. February saw the National Association of College Activities (NACA) convention in Baltimore. Abbie had been invited to be the showcase speaker, and had prepared a speech on student activism in the ’80s that was filled with optimism.
I drove down in advance to set up the booth we’d rented to capitalize on his position as showcase speaker. Stacked inside the booth were copies of Steal This Book, and since Abbie’s speech was booked in advance to standing-room-only capacity, I had a large banner hanging overhead proclaiming: “ABBIE SOLD OUT.” Abbie flew down the morning the convention began, loved the banner, and began signing copies of Steal This Book. Student Activities organizers lined up to meet him. By the end of the third day, we had booked fifty or so college speaking engagements, and would later confirm as many as half of them, mostly for the high season, which ran from mid-September until just before Thanksgiving. At $3,000 a pop, this assured Abbie of a decent income that year and gave him a much-needed ego boost. He wanted to feel that after everything that had happened he was as popular as ever. He told himself that his star was rising.8
But with Kline’s death, Abbie’s confidence in being able to control his moods through medication lagged. He had become utterly careless about his lithium regimen, and after three months of frenzied activity he suddenly crashed hard. In March 1983, in the middle of the night, Johanna called me at home in Framingham. Abbie had been found in his apartment, having turned on the gas and then swallowed approximately 40 tablets of Ativan, a powerful tranquilizer. Johanna said she didn’t know what to do.
I urged her to get him to the nearest hospital. We agreed, at Johanna’s suggestion, that we’d register Abbie as Barry Freed. I got on the early-morning shuttle out of Boston and met her at Bellevue Hospital a few hours later. Abbie was still in the emergency ward, laid out on a stretcher vomiting into a bag which hospital staff periodically removed for analysis, so that the doctors could reconstruct what he’d ingested. He was weeping, and looking up at me as soon as he saw me he said, “Don’t let me ever do it again.” I think it may have been the only time I’ve seen my brother cry, among all the discarded, the gunshot-wounded, and cut-up people, in that hellish place.
That day Johanna and I took turns so that one of us was always by Abbie’s side. New cases kept coming into the ward. I don’t think there was a moment where there wasn’t at least one other suicide attempt a few yards away, each a different version of the same pain, dreadful reminders of what my brother had done to himself. It was a god-awful day. Before nightfall, they moved him to the mental ward, where they kept him under observation for several weeks. By the end, he was calling me on Fridays and Saturdays from the pay phone in the hall to analyze the performance of the Celtics. And then he’d call his bookmaker to place his bets.
Abbie gradually seemed to recover. And his life began to take on its natural shape again. Six months after his suicide attempt, his calendar of speaking engagements was so busy that it constituted the backbone of his existence, as well as his only steady source of income. He liked the mania of life on the road and used to compare it to being on a rock concert tour.
With me as his exclusive manager, working on a nonexclusive basis through several different speakers’ bureaus, we had drafted standard contracts. Both we and each host university or college had to sign these contracts. One clause specified that Abbie required a thirty-minute interval of complete privacy before the lecture so that he could listen to his favorite Creedence Clearwater Revival cassette before going onstage. Another asked that Abbie be given copies of local newspapers so he could incorporate the local political climate and any news-breaking local issues into his speech. For transportation we specified, “Please, no fancy limos!” Abbie abhorred them.
Abbie’s March breakdown seemed to have given him, at least temporarily, a healthy fear of death. He was taking his lithium regularly again. His relationship with Johanna was going well. And the star of his celebrity did seem to be rising. There were even repeated requests to appear on television shows like Miami Vice in fictional roles, usually as villains, which were fun to get even though Abbie turned them all down. Life seemed better than it had been in quite some time.
Joan and I had by this time gotten to know Johanna quite well, and since we were among the few people who had had to put up with Abbie as she had through the years, she could talk to us about him openly. Sometimes Johanna and Joan would get into serious conversations, and, when the subject turned to sex, Johanna would remark that Abbie was sexually prolific. And once, when Joan asked her if Abbie was a good lover, Johanna answered: “Did you ever see him eat?”
In June 1984, Abbie’s old friend attorney Leonard Weinglass talked to him about traveling to Nicaragua. Abbie and Johanna ended up organizing a citizen’s tour of the country for the fifth anniversary of the 1979 revolution, taking sixty-nine people with them. And during the next few years they would keep returning, until, by 1987, he had been there five times. Central America became the subject of one of his stock speeches. Abbie saw the relationship of the United States to Nicaragua and El Salvador in the ’80s as having striking similarities to the relationship between the United States and North and South Vietnam in the ’60s:
The notion that somehow a country of three million people, suffering from dire poverty and astronomical inflation, having just survived a devastating earthquake, and not ten years young after its own revolution, is a threat to the national security of the United States, well, it’s absurd, but it’s also awfully similar to what they were saying about Vietnam once upon a time. . . . We’ve invaded Nicaragua at least 11 times already, before the Sandinistas were even around. But we aren’t given the history here in America. In Nicaragua they say, “You are taught to forget the history between our two countries, we are forced to remember it. . . .”9
During one of Abbie’s trips, I got an angry call from one of our bookmakers in Worcester. Abbie had just called him from Nicaragua saying he was in Daniel Ortega’s home and that Danny and a bunch of other people wanted to place bets on the upcoming game. “What is he trying to do to me?” the bookie complained, fearing, not unreasonably, that Abbie’s call could bring down the full force of the FBI on his illegal operation.
And the FBI was coming down hard on people visiting Nicaragua during this period, as we know from its later-publicized illegal campaign of surveillance and harassment against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). On Abbie’s return from one visit to Managua, his briefcase, with his address book in it, was stolen in the airport in Miami, and he suspected government dirty tricks.
In late summer 1984, Abbie began a long series of debates with Jerry Rubin. In recent years, Jerry had done an about-face and become a Wall Street entrepreneur. Abbie agreed to the tour initially because he saw it as an opportunity to show how far superior his point of view was to Jerry’s newfound conformism. He imagined himself saving untold thousands of college students across the country from becoming yuppies—“Young Urban Professionals”—a term coined by Jerry. But I don’t think he fully considered how disturbing it might be for him personally to debate Jerry as an opponent in much the same way he had debated G. Gordon Liddy two years earlier. After all, Jerry had once been a friend. However disdainful Abbie might feel toward what Jerry had become, he tried to show respect for Jerry’s having put himself on the line over and over again in the ’60s. No matter how many sarcastic remarks he might be willing to make about it onstage, Jerry’s conversion caused him spiritual pain. He felt it mocked Jerry’s prior political commitments and those they had shared. For Abbie, Jerry’s switch from the side of justice to the side of greed was the worst betrayal of Abbie’s life.
The first booking was a two-night stand at a San Francisco night-club called the Stone. The event was publicized as “The Yippies! versus the Yuppies” and was sold out. Abbie wore his well-worn tweed jacket over rolled-up sleeves, Jerry sported a dark suit and tie. Both had plenty of prepared gimmicks. Jerry began with a parody of the American Express television ads: “You may remember me from the sixties. I led thousands of youths into the streets, and presidents fighting wars quivered at the sound of my name. . . . Now . . . no one recognizes me anymore, so I carry my American Express card wherever I go. You can have one. But first you’ve got to become a yuppie.” Abbie countered by filling a Cuisinart food processor with yuppie ingredients: vitamins, stock certificates, tofu, credit cards, brie cheese, keys to a Porsche, etc.10
At first, Abbie considered the debates a success because they were popular, and he was convinced that he was winning hands down. But as the tour continued, he became increasingly defensive. One problem for Abbie was that it looked to a lot of people like the only reason he was doing the debates was for the money—$5,000 per show—to be divided among the two performers after subtracting expenses and brokers’ fees, with Abbie getting slightly more than Jerry.11 That didn’t present any problem for Jerry with his new come-and-take-it philosophy of greed, but it made Abbie look like a hypocrite. “I’m doing these debates in order to attack the mythology that those who were politically active and idealistic inevitably become disillusioned, cynical, and self-centered, insulated from the social problems around us and isolated by the blinding drive for money and power,” he said during one debate.12 What he said was true, but it was hard to believe, and he knew it. He began to feel used. His was the name drawing in the crowds, he rightly felt, but the game he’d consented to play was Jerry’s game, the money game.
In all, Abbie and Jerry did fifty or sixty debates in an eighteen-month period. Onstage, it was Abbie’s show, with Jerry playing the straight man. And very often the same local reporters who clamored for time with Abbie after the show only gave Jerry an obligatory minute or two. Free-market ideas might sound convincing when expressed by someone who truly believed them, but when a recent convert like Jerry Rubin got up there and told you to get into the system, make money, and then change it from within, it had a hollow ring to it.
Abbie began to realize just how much he didn’t like Jerry. He was careful not to put Jerry down in public, out of respect for the past. But offstage, Abbie wanted nothing to do with him. I remember one night during the tour when we were watching the World Series at a bar. Jerry walked in and made his way to our table. Without a word, Abbie got up and walked to the far end of the bar by himself, so as not to have to be anywhere near Jerry. Sometimes, Abbie would joke that Jerry was the cause of his depression. It was only a joke, but after all they had been through together, Abbie just couldn’t accept that Jerry had gone over to the other side.
And after Abbie’s death I remember being interviewed by a reporter who refused to believe that Abbie and Jerry weren’t still best friends. As proof, I let her look through Abbie’s address book, which contained all the names of people Abbie considered to be in his universe—people he might pick up the phone and call. Jerry wasn’t there.