Because of their actions in Chicago, Yippie founders and anti-war activists Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, Tom Hayden, and Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale were all arrested for conspiracy and inciting to riot and were ordered to trial in Chicago. The media referred to them as the Chicago Eight until Seale’s trial was removed from the others; then they acquired the name they are remembered by today: the Chicago Seven.
In court, the Yippies did what they did best: they turned the trial into a media circus, in which they were the clowns. They made Judge Julius Hoffman the butt of their jokes, insulting him, toying with him, and denigrating him in every way possible. According to Rubin, their treatment of Judge Hoffman was deliberate and planned: “Our strategy was to give Judge Hoffman a heart attack. We gave the court system a heart attack, which is even better.”1 Hoffman and Rubin’s antics were increasingly juvenile. When he was sworn in, for example, Abbie Hoffman’s raised hand would have his middle finger extended. As a protest against the proceedings he dropped the use of his last name. He called Judge Hoffman a disgrace, saying he would have served Hitler better than he did the defendants, and claimed that Hoffman’s “idea of justice is the only obscenity in this room.”2
William Kuntzler, the attorney for the defense, tried to portray his clients as idealistic victims of police violence, His witness list was frontloaded with celebrities; in a two-week period he called the folk singers Judy Collins and Arlo Guthrie, novelist Norman Mailer, poet Allen Ginsberg, LSD guru Timothy Leary, and, of course, Phil Ochs.3 Phil Ochs appeared as a “cultural witness.” Defense attorney William Kuntzler was anxious to have Ochs testify, feeling his testimony would nail down his defense, which was that people had a right to congregate together, to sing and dance in the streets. At the time of the trial, Ochs’ biographer Marc Eliot reports, Ochs was not in great shape; he’d been eating Valium pills like M&Ms, having prescriptions from many doctors that he filled in many different drug stores. He thought he was fighting off anxiety attacks but in reality his bipolar illness was getting more pronounced. As his day to testify inched closer, his attacks became more frequent and more severe.
When Ochs was sworn in, Kuntzler asked questions designed to establish that he was a singer. When he asked if Ochs had ever written a song with President Kennedy in it, the prosecutor objected and Judge Hoffman sustained it. Trying another tack, Kuntzler asked if he’d ever appeared on television. Again the prosecutor objected and the judge sustained it. Since Judge Hoffman had not wanted Phil Ochs to participate in the trial at all, he did everything he could to limit the role the singer would play. Ochs did manage to get into the trial record the fact that he had been involved in the formation of the Youth International Party, saying “the idea of Yippie was to be a form of theater politics, a form of theatrically dealing with what seemed to be an increasingly absurd world and trying to deal with it in other than just a straight moral level. They wanted to be able to set out fantasies in the streets to communicate their feeling to the public.4 Judge Hoffman sustained an objection to that testimony also.
Ochs and Kuntzler had to fight like MMA heavyweights to get any of Ochs’ testimony into the record. Finally, Kuntzler turned the topic to Phil’s music, wanting Ochs to sing for the court. Handing Ochs his guitar case, Kuntzler established to Judge Hoffman’s satisfaction that Phil’s guitar was in it. After eliciting testimony that this was the guitar on which Phil had written and sung “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore,” Kuntzler asked him sing the song. Judge Hoffman responded as though the defense attorney had asked Ochs to strip naked, absolutely refusing to let Ochs sing. If he had a recording of the song, Hoffman said, then maybe—if they could also prove it was the song that was sung in the park on that occasion—then maybe it would be admissible, but he did not intend to allow any live singing. The witness was prepared to sing it exactly as he sang it that day, Kuntzler claimed. “I am not prepared to listen, Mr. Kuntzler,” Judge Hoffman said. Kuntzler did not go down easily. He asked Phil to recite the lyrics, which Ochs did.5
Outside the courtroom Ochs found a receptive audience for his song: the gathered media reporters. He was interviewed, sang the song for them, and then rushed back to hotel room to watch himself on the evening news. He was thrilled as he saw himself on CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Cronkite was the most popular anchorman in the country and had recently been named as the most trusted man in America. To be on his newscast, Ochs felt, was to reach the pinnacle. His song also made it onto the ABC and NBC newscasts. There he was, singing an anti-war song on the evening news on all three of the network broadcast channels. Ochs could not have been happier.6
On February 18, 1970, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger, and Rennie Davis were found guilty of intent to cross state lines in order to incite a riot. All seven were acquitted on the conspiracy charges. At the sentencing, Abbie Hoffman suggested Judge Hoffman try LSD and offered to hook him up with a dealer. Never a fan of Hoffman’s humor, the judge sentenced him and his codefendants to five years and fined them $5,000 each.7
Since Judge Hoffman, in his zeal to convict the defendants, had made dozens of legal errors, the court of appeals overturned the convictions. The Chicago Seven walked. All the trial had accomplished was what they had wanted it to: make celebrities of them.