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Home , Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Timothy Leary, Tom Hayden

preface

"I'M A B B I E HOFFMAN"

Myths are the only news, and the only thing that stays true all the time is a lie.

Abbie Hoffman, 1968

Cultural Revolutionary I knew —whom I think of as the quintessential spirit of the sixties—for almost twenty years, and for much of that time I wasn't sure when he was acting, when he was for real, and when he was acting for real. I suppose that's why I have such contradictory feelings about him. Looking back at Abbie from the vantage point of the nine- ties, it seems to me that he was the firstAmerica n cultural revolutionary in the age of television. He was a very funny and a very sad character who saw his life and times as a story that he could tell and retell again and again as he went along. The point, of course, was to inflate himself and deflate the established order. What most of us think of as "objective " didn't exist for him; while he managed to outwit it time and again, it finally caught up with him. In the end, Abbie the comedian became a tragic figure. He also embodied the sensibility called post- modern. Nowadays, postmodernism is a cliche that has lost most of its clout. But long before it entered the academic world, Abbie was a walk- ing, talking postmodernist. A great many critics have tried to define the term, but no one, it seems to me, has done it as well as the writer E. L. Doctorow, who published Abbie s first book, for the Hell of It, when he was an editor at Dial Press, and who created an Abbie Hoffman-like character named Artie Sternlicht in his radical novel The

xvii xviit / Preface

Book of Daniel. "There is no fiction and no nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative," Doctorow asserts in his essay "False Documents." Moreover, he explains, "history is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history." Abbie would have agreed. Almost all of Abbie's books, including his unreliable autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Mo- tion Picture, are "false documents" in Doctorow's sense of the term. All of them blend fiction and history, news and entertainment. Moreover, Abbie's dramatic life itself is a "false document": a fabu- lous story that blurs the line between fact and fiction, reality and fan- tasy, autobiography and mythology. While it makes for fascinating reading, it also creates nightmares for fact-hungry biographers. After his suicide in April 1989, at the age of 52, observed that "Abbie Hoffman led three lives. . . social activist, yippie anarchist and white-collar impostor." By my count he led more than half a dozen lives. Abbie was orphan, imp, outlaw, martyr, patriarch, prodigal son, lost soul, and tragic hero. Moreover, he consciously tried to be Prome- theus, Dionysus, Wandering Jew, Ulysses, Faust, Robin Hood, Pied Piper, and Road Warrior. He was like a contemporary incarnation of Proteus, the god who was continually changing his form—who ought to have served as the deity of the sixties, an era of unprecedented trans- formation and metamorphosis. "The thing about movements is that they move," Abbie explained in an interview with the East Village Other in May of 1969, near the apex of the political and cultural movement of the sixties. "That's what a movement does—it moves and if you are a part of a movement, you have to recognize that . . . you and your tactics have to change and at that very rapidly." Like the sixties them- selves, Abbie was constantly moving and always in motion, which is why I see him as the quintessential spirit of the era. Elusive, mercurial, and ambiguous, he was and still is hard to pin down, hard to define. He believed his lack of definition meant he couldn't be co-opted by the "square" culture he wanted to transform. While he was still young and energetic, he seemed capable of changing forever. As he aged, however, he became increasingly locked in habitual gestures, and his inability to give rebirth to himself depressed him. The manic boy wonder turned into a cranky old man. The first time I saw him, I was on a panel with Susan Sontag at the Preface / xix

Socialist Scholars Conference in . It was 1967 and the topic was the moral and political responsibility of intellectuals vis-à-vis the war in Vietnam. Abbie showed up in the audience as a cowboy, firing off a toy cap gun and complaining that in the movement there was too much analysis and too much intellectualizing, and not enough social- ism or . The next time I saw him was on the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I was an assistant professor of English and American literature. He was again in costume, but this time he was accompanied by , his on-again, off- again sidekick during the cultural revolution of the late sixties and early seventies. Abbie and Jerry and a few friends had just created the Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies, a kind of roving anar- chist theater group whose antics were designed to make the powers- that-be sit up and pay attention. Driving cars they had made to look like police vehicles, and wearing the uniforms of Keystone cops, Abbie, Jerry, and the Yippies descended on the campus and announced they were looking for drugs. The loony performance was in protest of a drug raid by the Suffolk County Sheriffs Department that had been staged for television to make students look like drug-crazed freaks. Over the next year or so I saw Abbie several times on the stage of the Fillmore East on the Lower East Side. On one occasion he described how he'd been arrested by the police, shortly after the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, for carrying a concealed weapon: a penknife. Pacing across the stage, and talking nonstop, he casually tossed the weapon in the air—with blade open—and caught it in his bare hand. On another occasion he appeared onstage wearing a white shirt, tie, and jacket, and explained how he'd evolved from his existence as a mundane salesman for a pharmaceutical supply company in Massachusetts into a bona fide long-haired, pot-smoking in . As he talked, he changed his clothes to emphasize the pos- sibilities >for change. By the end of the performance he was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and boots; his long curly , which had been carefully held down, was now unruly. For years we were at the same places at the same times, but so were thousands of others. We were at the March on in to protest the war in Vietnam, and we were arrested during the student takeover of Columbia University in April 1968, but we never xx / Preface met. Then, in 1969,1 reviewed Hoffman's second book, Na- tion, for Liberation News Service, the movement's self-styled answer to the Associated Press. Soon thereafter, Abbie called to say he appreciated my favorable comments. We finally met face-to-face at the Law , an office of radical attorneys who were defending the Black Panthers, Yippies, and Colum- bia students who had been arrested for occupying campus buildings to protest the university's discriminatory policies. From time to time we saw one another at political events and parties on the Lower East Side, and at "hip" restaurants like Max's Kansas City in Union Square. "We didn't become friends, however, until the winter of 1970, when he was 34 and I was 28. By then the Chicago Conspiracy trial was over, and Abbie was a media celebrity and the movement s male sex symbol, an icon of the revolution. For countless young men who wanted to defy the system and at the same time become famous, Abbie was a flesh- and-blood role model. By then, too, I was no longer a straight-and- narrow academic. I had been arrested and pummeled by a dozen or so policemen after a demonstration to protest the murders of two Chicago Black Panthers, and Mark Clark, and had splashed my picture on the front page with the caption "Moratorium Man Beaten." I'd taken a leave of absence from teaching to write a book about the British empire and British literature, and when I wasn't in the library I was a reporter and activist in the movement. Among other tasks, I carried messages between members of the , who envisioned themselves as armed revo- lutionaries, and their aboveground contacts, including organizers, jour- nalists, lawyers, family members, and friends. One afternoon at Macy's I received an envelope and was asked to deliver it to 114 East Thirteenth Street in Manhattan. Under no circum- stances was I to engage in conversation with the individual who an- swered the door. The document was, of course, for Abbie, and I soon learned that it outlined how he might help the underground. It also inadvertently served as a letter of recommendation for me and proof of my radical credentials. As a professor I didn't carry much weight in Abbie's scale of nonconformist values, but as a courier who had access to the underground I was a force to be reckoned with, at least in his eyes. Without a moment's hesitation he invited me into his rooftop Preface / xxi apartment, introduced me to his wife, Anita, who was making stuffed mushrooms, and gave me a tour of his clean, cozy rooms. This bour- geois scene was hardly what I would have imagined for the King of the Yippies, but it made me feel more comfortable. Abbie opened the letter and read it, laughing as he did. Then he handed it to me, knowing that he was breaking the underground's rules. Matter-of-factly, Abbie ex- plained that he was the Howard in "Dear Howard." Howard was his alias as well as his real middle name: Abbott Howard Hoffman was his full, legal name. The "Molly" who signed the letter, he told me, was none other than , a graduate of the University of Chicago who had been a key organizer for both the National Lawyers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading radical organization on college campuses in the mid and late sixties. Now Ber- nie, as Abbie liked to call her, was the leader of the Weather Under- ground, and her "Wanted" poster appeared in post offices from coast to coast. Soon after I delivered the letter to Abbie, I not only converted to the irreverent Yippies, but even became the Yippie minister of education. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and I were driving together in the Bronx one day when I suggested that the Youth International Party, as the Yippies were now calling themselves, needed a minister of education and a series of provocative manifestos for students on the subject of schooling. Jerry and Abbie agreed and immediately conferred upon me the title Youth International Party Minister of Education. Wasn't it nec- essary to conduct a discussion or hold an election by the general mem- bership? I asked. Not at all, they insisted. If I said I was the minister of education, that was good enough—not only for them but for all the Yippies. Soon thereafter I began to define myself as the Yippie minister of education, a title that I took to be part put-on, part real. The straight world took it at face value, and when my book about culture and em- pire was reviewed in the press, I was described solemnly in the Times Literary Supplement as the Minister of Education for the Youth Inter- national Party. For years I had defined myself as a Marxist intellectual. I had as- sumed that there was a real world, that it was governed by certain im- mutable, historical laws, and that it could only be changed by a revo- lution engineered by a disciplined party, a working class, and its allies. xxii / Preface

Now, slowly but surely I began to shed my Marxist skin, and to accept the notion that "reality is made up," as Abbie put it: that everything is a fiction. I came to accept the idea that generational rather than was crucial for historical change, and that cultural rather than political or economic revolution was the key to the transformation of society. Moreover, I accepted the idea that radicals could use the mass media to transform consciousness and change institutions and values. Though these ideas weren't original with Abbie, he popularized and exploited them more effectively than anyone else. For a while in the late sixties and early seventies, his movie—his version of reality—seemed more compelling than anyone else's, not only to me but to an entire generation of young, white men. Life proved to be a lot more of a lark for me as a Yippie than as a left- wing intellectual. There were games to play on the basketball court and at meetings. Abbie and I were pals. We watched TV together, made the rounds of law and magazine offices, and schmoozed in bookstores and restaurants. On Saturday mornings we made our weekly pilgrimage to the Luxor Baths and kibitzed with the middle- aged businessmen who were sweating it out in the sauna and the steam room, and who approached Abbie as though he was a Mafia don who could solve their problems. "They ask me for advice about their kids," he chortled. "They want me to tell them how to keep them in school and off drugs." The irony of the delighted him immensely: he was being asked to conspire with the fathers and to bridge the very generation gap that he wanted to widen. It was the seventies now, but the sixties hadn't ended. We organized antiwar protests, demonstrated in the streets, and marched outside courthouses to demand freedom for the Black Panthers, including Bobby G. Seale, their chairman and cofounder (with Huey P. Newton), who was on trial in New Haven, Connecticut. Abbie and I traveled to Europe together; we met with the French Yippies and with Parisian editors and publishers who were looking for hot American literary properties like Abbie's Revolution for the Hell of It and Jerry Rubin's Do It! In Algeria a Yippie delegation that included myself, Abbie's wife Anita, and Bernardine Dohrn's younger sister Jennifer conferred with and and tried to create a new, all- Preface / xxiii encompassing international organization that would harbor Yippies, , Weathermen, and Black Panthers. But there were too many conflicting egos, too many political disagreements, and, much to Abbie s dismay, the megaorganization never got off the ground.

Underground Fiction For a while we lost track of one another. Then, in the summer of 1973, Abbie was arrested for selling three pounds of cocaine to undercover narcotics agents in Manhattan, and once again we were in cahoots. He had never even hinted that he'd been involved with the cocaine trade, but now that he'd been caught, he wanted me to know that he was guilty and that he needed help. He was desperate to go underground and avoid what he felt would be an embarrassing media trial, convic- tion, and long prison term. There was nothing for him in prison, he felt, no way to create a new identity for himself. The underground, he insisted, offered the possibility to generate another persona. The Weather people had provided Abbie with fake identification papers, and I helped him rehearse what he thought was going to be his new role: a college professor, an expert on Walt Whitman's erotic poetry. We met in out-of-the-way restaurants in the Village and planned his get- away, where he'd live, and how he'd survive. He was wearing slacks and Harris tweed jackets now, and he'd exchanged his trademark Massachu- setts accent for the generic voice of academia. One day at the Bronx Zoo he asked me to contact a lawyer in midtown Manhattan and pick up an envelope containing ten thousand dollars in cash. I remember being impressed that he'd managed to stash away that much money, and when I handed it over, I said good-bye, thinking I'd never see him again. Then one day in April 1975, he was on the telephone with me again as though he'd never been away. He was in . I was on my way to Mexico City to write a book about B. Traven, the German an- archist who settled in Mexico in the 1920s, where he wrote a number of books, the best known of which is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. We met at a hotel near the L.A. airport, and the first thing Abbie did was to lift his T-shirt and urge me to hit him in the stomach as hard as I could, an offer I easily declined. He was Barry now: he was physically xxiv / Preface fit and working as a Hollywood screenwriter and producer about to make his first blockbuster movie. That afternoon, Ken Kelley, a former underground newspaper editor who was now working for , in- terviewed Abbie about his underground adventures. We watched on television as helicopters lifted frantic survivors from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon and drank champagne to celebrate the end of the war in Vietnam, which had seemed so endless that it had come to define our lives. Abbie explained that he'd had an operation for hemorrhoids and was in a great deal of physical pain. Indeed, he was unable to sit down, even on a toilet, and much to my alarm he was popping pills and snorting cocaine. He claimed to have sold the idea for a movie about two fugi- tives, a Black Panther and a Yippie, who travel incognito down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and from there to and Fidel Castro's protection. The story sounded a lot like Mark Twain's classic American novel with Abbie as Huck Finn and Huey Newton as Jim, but Abbie had added his own upbeat ending: his fugitives would join a Cuban baseball team and defeat the New York Yankees in Yankee Sta- dium. In the film's last scene, the governor would pardon them. It was the kind of resolution he hoped to write for his own problems with the law. It was hard to tell how much he was acting and how much he was for real, but he seemed to be in much psychic pain brought on by the death of his father, John. His grief took me by surprise. For as long as I'd known him, he'd spoken of his father as though he was the enemy: the epitome of blind authority and the stereotype of the raging bull. Now he was expressing a sense of loss for his dearly beloved "Papa." He was angry that he'd been unable to attend his father's funeral in Worces- ter; if he had gone, he'd have been arrested. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had swarmed all over the synagogue, ex- pecting him to put in an appearance and hoping to arrest him. He had known his father was going to die, so he'd packed a "funeral suit," as he called it, and schlepped it across the underground. As though to prove the depths of his devotion, he flung open the doors to the closet, and pointed to the rather ordinary-looking suit he would have worn. When the news of his father's death finally arrived, it was too late to go home, he explained. No one in his family had bothered to tell him in Preface / xxv time. Even worse, his father s brothers were blaming him for Johns fatal heart attack. If only he hadn't been busted for cocaine, they were saying. If only he hadn't gone underground and broken his poor father's heart. The underground had become a prison for Abbie, but it was also a playground. He explained that he had recently remarried and showed me photos of what looked like a wedding ceremony. He said that since he hadn't divorced Anita he was now a "monogamous bigamist." I could see that the idea tickled him tremendously, and he liked the idea, too, that his new wife had met him and fallen in love with him as "Barry," the pauper of the underground, rather than with Abbie, the prince of the sixties. Once again he was telling tall tales. His wife's code name was "Jane," but her real name was Johanna Lawrenson, and not only was she was a shiksa, he said, but a world-class model whom he'd spotted and fallen in love with on a fashion runway in Mexico City. Abbie often made Johanna out to be apolitical and anti-intellectual, but that wasn't the case. She had been raised in a highly intellectual and very political family, and much of that background and breeding showed. Her father, Jack Lawrenson, had been a Communist and a leading trade union organizer in the thirties and forties, and she iden- tified with the workers of the world. Her mother, Helen, whom Abbie had met under his alias, wrote for Esquire and Vanity Fair and had made a reputation for herself on the basis of two articles, "Latins Make Lousy Lovers" and "In Defense of the American Gigolo." It had been a diffi- cult act for Johanna to follow, but by living on the lam with Abbie, she was doing her best to emulate her legendary mother. When I met Jo- hanna on the way to Las Vegas, I felt that I had as much in common with her as with Abbie since, like me, she'd grown up in the culture of the Old Left during the heyday of McCarthyism in the fifties. She had grown up feeling un-American, while Abbie had been an ail-American kid in an ail-American family, playing sports and collecting trophies. But nowj in the underground, Abbie had adopted a new family and embraced a new set of parents. He wasn't a Hoffman anymore but a Lawrenson, and he was thrilled to belong to a family of communists and bohemians, literary and political celebrities. In the neon world of Las Vegas, mild-mannered Barry vanished and flashyiAbbie came alive again. At the Hilton Hotel he registered under a pseudonym, and after settling in our suite, we took a sauna in the xxvi / Preface basement, "just like old times at the Luxor Hotel," he said. But before we could work up a sweat, Abbie vanished, and by the time I caught up with him, he was back in the room, fully dressed. He was standing as though paralyzed, holding suitcases in both hands. He had been rec- ognized in the sauna, he insisted, and it would only be a matter of time before the police arrived to arrest him. It didn't do any good to tell him that we had been alone in the sauna. His mind was made up: he had to get out. When Johanna returned from her own sauna, we made plans to escape from the police, whether they were coming or simply a fig- ment of Abbie's paranoid imagination. The situation might have been hilariously funny, but instead it was terribly frightening. I used a pay phone in the lobby (since the phone in the room was undoubtedly tapped) and spoke to one of Abbie's lawyers, who promised to send reinforcements. Then I went back to the room and began to load the luggage into the van. Abbie was talking nonstop now, but I didn't understand what he was saying or what he meant to say. It was all hieroglyphics. The last night in the hotel he became violent and menacing. He slapped me across the face, and my glasses flew across the room. Then he whacked Johanna across her face and pulled her hair so hard that she screamed. We held him down in the bed, and Johanna tried to soothe him, but he tossed us off his back, then dashed out of the room in his underwear and a T-shirt, screaming "I'm Abbie Hoffman! I'm Abbie Hoffman!" A few guests in the hall heard him, but no one seemed to care. It didn't matter to me whether he was for real or acting, crazy or sane. I wanted out. I don't think that Johanna ever forgave me for leav- ing her with Abbie, but I had my own life to save. I grabbed my suit- case, took a cab to the airport, and flew to Mexico City, pausing only long enough to leave my address and to have Johanna write down their address and phone number in Teopotzlan, a small village not far from . I remember thinking that Abbie had taken an immense fall from his triumphant days. His behavior was aberrant and deranged. It was also reminiscent of other sixties figures—such as , Jerry Rubin, and —who had lost their way now that the revolution was over. Three weeks later, I met up with Abbie again. Only this time he was a different person: apologetic, polite, and anxious to be my friend. He Preface / xxvii was speaking Spanish as much as English. He'd turned into just another North American tourist who had fallen in love with Mexico. What he wanted to tell me most of all was that the incident in Las Vegas would never, could never, happen again. He had it all under control now. He had it all figured out: he had cracked up at the very moment that the American Empire was falling apart in Vietnam. It didn't make sense to me, but it did to him. For years, he said, he'd been preoccupied with the war, and now that it had ended, his own identity had come unrav- eled. He had allowed himself to go crazy, and in going crazy he had regained his sanity, or so he insisted. Shouting out his real name was self-destructive, he admitted. It was as though he wanted to be recog- nized, apprehended, and incarcerated so that he could escape from his fugitive life. I could see his argument, of course, but to me what seemed apparent was his inability to adapt to the underground and to the un- dramatic life of the seventies. He wanted to be Abbie Hoffman, the media personality and the star of the sixties, all over again. Though he'd changed his name and his appearance, he'd been unable to make more fundamental changes in his personality, and that was sad. It also seemed to me that crying out his name had been an existential act of defiance and rebellion, a refusal to play by the rules of the fugitive game, even if it meant that he'd be captured. He was Abbie Hoffman. He wasn't going to deny his name or his identity. He wasn't going to shut up, be invis- ible, remain . Years later he appeared on the TV show 20I20 with and described the crack-up in Las Vegas as "the most painful thing in my life." He persuaded me to go on TV, too, and describe the incident. Soon Las Vegas became an archetypal place in the odyssey of Abbie Hoffman: a place of ultimate pain, but also a place where he'd made a crazy declaration of his own independence. Abbie and I spent time together in Mexico and in in the mid- and late seventies. In Mexico we visited landmarks of the revo- lution and milestones in the life of Emiliano Zapata. We wandered through the labyrinth of Mexico City, visited museums to see the work of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, explored ancient ruins, and drove to small towns in the countryside. We played at being exiles and gringos, hungry for new food, new landscapes, a new culture. There was a con- stant stream of visitors from the , most of them sixties people, and more often than not it was the sixties that we talked about. xxviii / Preface

Abbie was also writing about the sixties in his autobiography, which had the working title "Kiss and Tell." I watched him as he created a "false document" about his own life, and I was fascinated. I listened to him talk about himself, then read chapters in which he exaggerated, aggrandized, and embellished on his activities—for example, in the in the South. Anxious to get to the truth of the matter, I interviewed him. When he was growing up, were his par- ents middle-class? I wanted to know. "Ruling-class," he said, smirking. "How many cars did your parents have?" I asked. "Too many," he said, without missing a beat. His answers to my questions about his back- ground and his past were almost always ambiguous and playful. When he insisted that he was now living a working-class life, I pointed out that he had an apartment in Mexico City and a large house with a swimming pool and horses in the countryside. Wasn't that rather aris- tocratic? I asked, only to learn that I'd hurt his feelings. It was a transitional time for Abbie. Little by little, he began to see how he could use the underground to break into new territory. Inspired by B. Traven, whom he called "the world's greatest fugitive" and "the best working-class writer that ever lived," he created his own fugitive personae. Traven had taken other names and other identities, including T. Torsvan, the Norwegian anthropologist, and Hal Croves, the Ameri- can literary agent. Abbie took the names and identities of Barry Freed and Howard Samuels, among others, and began to develop a career for himself as a political activist. He also began to write articles about his adventures in the under- ground—such as his trip to Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb—that were part fiction, part nonfiction, though he no longer seemed able to tell the difference. In 1976 I moved to California and kept in touch with Abbie by mail. Later he and Johanna stayed briefly in San Francisco at the home of of the Jefferson Starship, then, in the winter of 1979-80, moved into my house in Sonoma County. Abbie was finishing his autobiography and preparing to turn himself in to the authorities. I learned that a psychiatrist had diagnosed him as suffering from manic-depressive illness and that he was taking lithium for his mood swings, but I'd long observed that he could be down as well as up, so the medical terms didn't mean much to me. I remember a conversation about the eighties that suggested the distance Preface ¡ xxix

between us. Abbie thought that the decade ahead was going to be a replay of the sixties, but I foresaw years of conservatism. Soon he was accusing me of cynicism, and I was accusing him of hiding from his own despair. He was happy, he said, and showed me a treatment for a movie about himself and Johanna, which he insisted was "completely true to life," though almost none of it was. He was Billy. She was Sally. They were ecowarriors in love and on the run from the FBI. In the proverbial nick of time they would elude the dragnet and escape to Hollywood, where they would sign a contract for a blockbuster roman- tic comedy about themselves, then literally walk into the sunset and live happily ever after. As it turned out, the eighties weren't very funny or romantic for Abbie, though he put up a good front and insisted in public that they were better than the sixties. His story definitely didn't have the conven- tional happy ending. In April 1989, when I heard the news that he had committed suicide, I had the strange feeling that he had cried out one last time, "I'm Abbie Hoffman!" and that his cry exuded not only the optimism and joy of the sixties but also its darkness and despair. His suicide by a drug overdose surprised me but also seemed a fitting way for him to die, much as Huey Newton's death by an assassins bullet in the streets of Oakland later that year seemed also appropriate, given the violence of his life. For years Abbie had talked about committing "revo- lutionary suicide"—consciously borrowing the phrase from Newton— of dying on the barricades in battle against the system. But he was never a violent revolutionary, and most of his political and cultural confron- tations with the system were symbolic. I remembered that in Mexico in 1975, Abbie had borrowed The March to the Montería, one of B. Travens proletarian novels, and when he finished it had explained that he wanted to exercise the ultimate power, which to him meant choosing "the moment to die." I was disappointed that his family members denied the clear evidence of his suicide. "They found no drugs around him," his 83-year-old mother, , told reporters from the home in Worcester, Massa- chusetts, where Abbie had been raised. "I think suicide may be ruled out," she added. Florence's youngest son, Jack, explained to the media that Abbie had merely been "careless with pills." His death was an ac- cident, not a deliberate, willful act, Jack insisted. Many radicals from xxx / Preface the sixties were also in denial about Abbie's death, reflecting the move- ment's failure to confront grief, acknowledge personal tragedy, and ac- cept loss. Dave Dellinger, a pacifist and one of Abbie's codefendants at the Chicago Conspiracy trial, told , "I don't believe for one moment the suicide thing." No suicide note had been found, Dellinger pointed out. But to Jerry Rubin the absence of a note was entirely in character. It was, Rubin suggested, a way of "making a state- ment and stirring discussion through the mystery." Many people were determined to create a murder mystery about Abbie's death. Others found the notion that he might have been murdered enticing. "Who or what killed Abbie?" Bruce McCabe asked in an article entitled "Why did Abbie Hoffman die?" that appeared in the Boston Globe and gave rise to far-fetched speculations about his death. From my perspective there was little if anything that was mysterious about Abbie's suicide. The big question wasn't why he died, but why he had lived. Who, in fact, was the man who cried "I'm Abbie Hoffman!"? What did his life have to say about the life of the sixties and sixties people? Were we really self-destructive and suicidal? This book is an attempt to answer those questions. I have drawn on my own memories, recollections, and interviews with Abbie, but this book is also based on over 250 interviews with Abbie's friends, comrades, and family mem- bers as well as on FBI files, public documents, newspaper accounts, court records, letters, and TV and radio broadcasts. For the Hell of It is Abbie's biography, but I have also viewed it as a historical interpretation of the times. In that sense it is a contribution to what Tom Hayden described in his memoir, Reunion, as "an ongoing struggle today to define the sixties," an enterprise that has now been highly contested for three decades. While Abbie appears in documentary films about the era, and while Abbie and Abbie-like characters have appeared in Hollywood films (such as The Big Fix [1978], in which F. Murray Abraham plays "Ab- bie"), Abbie the historical figure has been largely omitted from books about the sixties. For example, Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, unfairly lumps Abbie together with Jerry Rubin and does both of them a disservice by describing them as "public nuisances." The neglect of Abbie is unfortunate but understandable. As the American historian and civil rights activist observed in an inter- Preface / xxxi view with me, "sixties history tends to get written as the history of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and since Abbie was never a mover or a shaker in SDS or SNCC, that made him prima facie left out." By focusing on organizations like SDS and SNCC, the historians of the sixties often make the of the era seem much better organized and more carefully directed by political leaders than it really was. Fo- cusing on Abbie reveals the sixties as a rough-and-tumble era that was messy, unpredictable, wildly imaginative, and more than a little bit crazy. Focusing on Abbie also shows that certain individuals really did alter the course of history. In his biography of Hoffman, Martin ("Marty") Jezer, a long-time sixties pacifist, observes that "Abbie played the youth revolt like a mae- stro, pitting the hip against the straight mainstream cul- ture with spectacular effect." He goes on, however, to note that "cul- tural issues ... are always explosive" and that "Abbie s Yippie years are a warning against fighting political battles on cultural turf." But criticiz- ing Abbie Hoffman for waging cultural warfare when he should have engaged in political campaigning is like criticizing a leopard for having spots, or a fish for swimming in water. Cultural revolution is what Abbie Hoffman did best, and cultural rather than political or economic revolution was what the sixties were largely about. Granted, sixties pro- test resulted in profound social change. It ended legal segregation in the South, gave birth to contemporary , and together with an in- ternational protest movement helped end the war in Vietnam. But the sixties did not bring about the fundamental redistribution of power or wealth achieved in other , whether in France, China, Russia, or eighteenth-century America. The sixties did usher in revolutionary changes in the ways we think about the world and about ourselves: black and white, male and female, gay and straight, Anglo and Latino, working-class and ruling-class. Abbie was a major figure in that revolution in consciousness. As John Simon, one of his editors at Random House, observed, "Abbie knew that once you got into peoples' heads, you could change their minds." The sixties were mind-blowing, as we used to say. They made revolu- tion i' popular idea again in a society that had come to think of revo- lution as something to be feared and destroyed—something un- xxxii / Preface

American. Abbie helped to recapture the word and the concept of revolution. Why not have a revolution that was not for peace, bread, and land or for and equality, but was a revolution that Americans could understand and take part in, a revolution of the sixties, by the sixties, and for the sixties: a revolution just for the hell of it.