For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman

By Jonah Raskin

As cultural revolutionary, media celebrity, Yippie, lost soul, and tragic suicide, Abbie Hoffman embodied the contradictions of his era. In this riveting new biography, Jonah Raskin draws on his own twenty-year relationship with Hoffman; hundreds of interviews with friends, family members, and former comrades; and careful scrutiny of FBI files, court records, and public documents. For the Hell of It is a must-read not only for those interested in this ultimate iconoclast, but also for all who seek a fuller understanding of Abbie Hoffman's America.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
As cultural revolutionary, media celebrity, Yippie, lost soul, and tragic suicide, Abbie Hoffman embodied the contradictions of his era. In this riveting new biography, Jonah Raskin draws on his own twenty-year relationship with Hoffman; hundreds of inter

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520921047

Jonah Raskin

Jonah Raskin is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Sonoma State University and author of My Search for B. Traven (1980), among other books.

Book preview

FOR THE HELL OF IT

Jonah Raskin

FOR THE HELL OF IT

The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman

University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

First Paperback Printing 1998

© 1996 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raskin, Jonah, 1942-

For the hell of it: the life and times of Abbie Hoffman / Jonah Raskin; with a foreword by Eric Foner.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographic references and index

ISBN 978-520-21379-1 (pbk: alk. paper)

i. Hoffman, Abbie. 2. Radicals—United States— Biography. 3. Radicalism—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. HN9o.R3R37 1996

303.48'4—de 20

[B] 95-52181

Printed in the United States of America

13 12 u 10 09

10 9 8 7 6 5

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). @

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PERSONS INTERVIEWED

FOREWORD by ERIC FONER

I’M ABBIE HOFFMAN

chapter one BAD BEHAVIOR

chapter two A THOUSAND FACES

chapter three CIVIL RIGHTS AND WRONGS

chapter four WHITE MISCHIEF, BLACK POWER

chapter five DEATH OF A SALESMAN, BIRTH OF A HIPPIE

chapter six THE MYTHIC REVOLUTIONARY

chapter seven THE APOTHEOSIS OF ABBIE HOFFMAN

chapter eight BUSY BEING BORN, BUSY DYING

chapter nine FIRE IN A CROWDED COURTROOM

chapter ten AMERICAN ARMAGEDDON

chapter eleven THE LONGEST GOOD-BYE

EPILOGUE A CAUTIONARY NOTE

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

(followingp. 32)

1. Abbie Hoffman, age five or six

2. With his family, 1946

3. On the basketball court at Brandeis, late 1950s

4. At his wedding to Sheila Karklin, July 1960

5. With Sheila and their two children, Andrew and Amy, 1965

6. In Lincoln Park, Chicago, 1968

7. Under arrest in Chicago, September 1968

8. At a press conference in Chicago, September 1968

9. Under arrest in Washington, D.C., October 1968

10. Giving the finger to the Federal Courthouse, March 1969

11. At the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., October 1969

12. With Grace Slick, April 1970

13. With wife Anita at Madison Square Garden, July 1970

14. The Chicago Seven and their lawyers, Chicago, 1973

15. With son america, October 1973

16. With Senator Daniel Moynihan, August 1978

17. Surrendering in New York, 1980

18. In court, April 1981

19. Being searched by an officer of the court, April 1981

20. With Carly Simon and Karen Black, January 1982

vìi

21. At a peace rally in Central Park, June 1982

22. At an antinuclear sit-in, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, January 1983

23. In front of the U.S. Embassy, Managua, January 1985

24. With Carly Simon and Amy Carter, New York, March 1987

25. On the set of the movie Born on the Fourth of July, playing himself

PERSONS

INTERVIEWED

Joe Aboody

Judy Clavir Albert

Stewart Albert

Dorothy Altman

Nelson Ambush

John B. Anderson

David Aronson

William Ayers

D’Army Bailey

Robert Baker

Stu Ball

Frank Bardacke

Dana Beal

Lincoln Bergman

Jesse Berman

Paul Berman

Sharon Berman

Anne Boster

Richard Bovenzi

Donald Brennick

Bob Bloom

Dean Blowbaum

Dr. Donald Broverman

Anna Bullard

Kathleen Bursley

Lisa Callamaro

Marty Carey

Susan Carey

Peter Carroll

Clay Carson

Ron Carver

Joe Casdin

Chris Cerf

Henry Chaiklin

Kathy Chaiklin

Paul Chevigny

Charlotte Cohen

Joyce Cole

Lewis Cole

Peter Coyote

Walter Crockett

Coca Crystal

Patsy Cummings

Dennis Dalrymple

Bruce Dancis

Linda Davidoff R. G. Davis

David Dellinger Daniel Dick Marjory Dick Bernardine Dohrn Angela Dorenkamp John Dorenkamp Doug Dowd Claudia Dreifus Don Epstein Jason Epstein Catherine Fallon Bob Fass David Fenton Greta Finger Joseph Fink Jim Fitzgerald James Forman Jim Fouratt Bart Friedman Robert Friedman Marshall Ganz Ann Gefell

Father Bernard Gilgun Allen Ginsberg Al Giordano Todd Gitlin Art Goldberg James Goldman Sherman Goldstein Donald Gonynor Arlene Gordon Hal Gordon Jeanne Gough Wavy Gravy

Donald Gropman Barbara Haber Anne Halliwell Steve Halliwell Chester Hartman Casey Hayden Tom Hayden Irene Heinstein Mark Hertsgaard america Hoffman Andrew Hoffman Anita Hoffman Jack Hoffman John Holmstrom Len Holt Freeman House Gerry Howard H. Stuart Hughes Steve Ben Israel Dr. Oscar Janiger Joyce Johnson Jeff Jones Fred Jordan Pauline Kael Paul Kantner George Katsiaficas Aaron Kay John Kifner Jeff Kisseloff Bill Kunstler Ken Kelley Michael Kennedy Marty Kenner Lanny Kentfield Jim Klee

Rabbi Joseph Klein Ron Kovic

Larry Kramer Janet Kranzberg Paul Krassner Janet Kraybill Ron Kuby Tuli Kupferberg Bernice Salomon Kurchin Nancy Kurshan Greg Lago Karen Lago Ira Landess

Tim Leary Gerald Lefcourt Aryay Lensky Tom Lesser Julius Lester Jay Levin Bernard Levine John Lewis Joe Lo Guidice David Lubell Jonathan Lubell Lynn Luria-Sukenick Dickie Magidof Elaine Markson Elizabeth Martinez Ellen Maslow Angela Massimo Doug McAdam Paul McIsaac Daphne Merkin Ellen Meyers Mike Miller Sara Miller

Herb Mills Cynthia Morin Bob Moses

Paul Mullaney Ray Mungo Jack Newfield JefFNightbyrd Carl Oglesby Gloria Orenstein Robbie Osman Roz Payne Abe Peck Martin Peretz Diane Peterson Terri Priest Ann Forer Pyne Harold G. (Dutch) Rader Carol Ramer Gail Randall Gus Reichbach Bonnie Jean Romney Alan Rosenberg Mark Rosenberg Bob Rosenthal Bob Ross

Gabrielle Schang-McCusker Rabbi Alexander Schindler Eli Schleifer

Emanuel Schreiber Bobby Seale Allen Secher

Jill Seiden Franklin Siegel Ronald Siff Jonathan Silvers Daniel Simon John Simon Jan Simonds David Sinclair Larry Sloman

Camilla Smith

Albert Southwick

Rick Spencer

Eleanor Stein-Jones

Don Stotler

Olga Talamante

Steve Tappis

Elizabeth Tomlinson

Michael True

Jack Tubert

Kwame Ture

Mayer Vishner

Viva

Nicholas von Hoffman

Jerome Washington

Harvey Wasserman

A. J. Weberman Rex

Weiner Len Weinglass

Paula Weinstein

Sue Williamson

Louise Yellin

Allen Young

Quentin Young

Art Zellman

Bob Zellner

Dottie Zellner

Howard Zinn

Note to Readers: Whenever I use information or quote from someone I have interviewed, I use the word remembered or recalled.

FOREWORD

by ERIC FONER

Jonah Raskins biography of Abbie Hoffman is a major contribution to our knowledge of the 1960s—one of the most pivotal, controversial, and misunderstood decades in all of American history. Few figures of that remarkable era exemplify its qualities, for better and worse, more fully than Hoffman. Few, indeed, were present at so many of the decades defining moments, from the 1960 demonstrations in California against the House Un-American Activities Committee to the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968 and the conspiracy trial that followed. Among Raskins more impressive accomplishments is to place Hoffman firmly within the context of his times, thus illuminating not only his remarkable and, in the end, tragic life, but also the turbulent years in which he lived.

Too often, the literature on the 1960s—much of which was written by participants in the Students for a Democratic Society—privileges the history of SDS over other manifestations of New Left radicalism. In Raskin’s account, Hoffmans career offers a different way of viewing the rebellion of the young, one centered not on SDS politics and campus radicalism during the first half of the decade, but on the far broader generational revolt of the mid- and late 1960s. After all, the peak of New Left protest did not come until 1970, after SDS had self-destructed, when half a million people rallied in Washington against the war in Vietnam and a strike paralyzed scores of college campuses throughout the nation, including institutions far removed from the elite centers of earlier student activism. (The most violent assaults on student protest came not at Columbia or Berkeley but at the mainstream state universities located at Orangeburg, South Carolina, and Kent, Ohio.)

Unlike the authors of SDS s Port Huron Statement, Abbie Hoffman had little interest in offering a blueprint for a new society or developing a carefully worked out critique of American life. His was a radicalism of deed, not word. Yet, as Raskin makes clear, Hoffman read widely and struggled to formulate a new approach for radicals, one that would take into account the ways in which American life had been transformed since World War II. He grasped that the young represented a far more distinct and powerful segment of society than ever before and that their discontents were not the economic deprivations that had catalyzed the Old Left but an alienation born of a lack of social purpose and of individual happiness despite material abundance. Generational conflict, Hoffman recognized, had the same potential to disrupt society as class conflict had possessed in the 1930s. A self-proclaimed cultural revolutionary, he was ready to act when established liberal leaders abdicated their responsibility by supporting the Vietnam War and the torch of radicalism passed for the first time in American history into the hands of students and the young.

Hoffman challenged the way the Left had traditionally communicated with a mass constituency, introducing humor, theatricality, and studied irreverence into the repertoire of protest. Better than any other figure of the period except Dr. Martin Luther Fung, Jr., Hoffman understood how the mass media had transformed political communication, offering radical movements the opportunity to reach a mass audience through carefully staged (though apparently spontaneous) events that dramatized the injustice, pretensions, and hypocrisy of American society. Like King’s Selma march and Birmingham demonstrations, Hoffmans actions—such as flinging dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, nominating a pig for president, and wearing an American flag to a Congressional committee hearing—were calculated to attract media attention and galvanize public sentiment.

Hoffman saw styles of dress, music, and drugs as elements of rebellion, while at the same time believing that they must be given a political focus. He also recognized that personal liberation had become a mass movement rather than the privilege of small cadres of bohemians like those in Greenwich Village before World War I. Many called him an egomaniac—with some justice—yet Hoffman did not even put his name on his first book, Revolution for the Hell of it. The author was listed simply as Free—the motto of the countercultural rebellion and its quest for personal authenticity. Yet, as Raskin makes clear, Hoffman also exemplified the pitfalls of substituting theatricality for careful political analyses and elevating personal liberation to the end-all and beall of politics. His penchant for self-destructive behavior, his thoughtless use of drugs, and the machismo that governed his relationships with women reveal larger failures of sixties radical culture. Raskin does not romanticize Hoffman; he insists, however, that without coming to terms with him, one can understand neither the 1960s nor our own time, when people feel free to conduct their personal lives in ways far more diverse than before the countercultural rebellion.

Like the movement itself, Hoffman lost his sense of direction after 1970. Raskin makes a real contribution in exploring Hoffmans life in the seventies and eighties. He does not gloss over Hoffmans excesses or dishonesty, but at the same time shows how his participation in the environmental movement and the struggle against American intervention in Nicaragua exemplify the many channels into which sixties radicalism eventually flowed. Toward the end of his life, Hoffman reemerged on college campuses, this time as a commodified version of his former self, a living icon of the sixties (commanding high appearance fees, to boot). But the man and the times no longer fit as perfectly as they had two decades earlier, and Hoffmans suicide reflected not only the denouement of a troubled life, but also the exhaustion of a movement he had done so much to shape.

I’M ABBIE HOFFMAN

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

Abbie Hoffman, 1963

Cultural Revolutionary

I knew Abbie Hoffman—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 nineties, it seems to me that he was the first American 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 reality 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 postmodern. Nowadays, postmodernism is a cliche that has lost most of its clout. But long before it entered the academic world, Abbie was a walking, 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, Revolution 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 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 Motion Picture, are false documents in Doctorows sense of the term. All of them blend fiction and history, news and entertainment.

Moreover, Abbies dramatic life itself is a false document: a fabulous story that blurs the line between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, 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, the New Yorker 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 Prometheus, 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 transformation 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 themselves, 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

Socialist Scholars Conference in New York. 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 socialism or direct action. 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 Jerry Rubin, 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 anarchist 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 Sheriff s 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 Chicago 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 hippie in Manhattan. As he talked, he changed his clothes to emphasize the pos- sibilitiessfor change. By the end of the performance he was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and boots; his long curly hair, 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 the Pentagon in October 1967 to protest the war in Vietnam, and we were arrested during the student takeover of Columbia University in April 1968, but we never met. Then, in 1969,1 reviewed Hoffmans second book, Woodstock Nation, 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 Commune, an office of radical attorneys who were defending the Black Panthers, Yippies, and Columbia 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 New York City policemen after a demonstration to protest the murders of two Chicago Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and the Village Voice 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 Weather Underground, who envisioned themselves as armed revolutionaries, and their aboveground contacts, including organizers, journalists, 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 circumstances was I to engage in conversation with the individual who answered 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 apartment, introduced me to his wife, Anita, who was making stuffed mushrooms, and gave me a tour of his clean, cozy rooms. This bourgeois 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 undergrounds rules. Matter-of-factly, Abbie explained 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 Bernardine Dohrn, a graduate of the University of Chicago who had been a key organizer for both the National Lawyers Guild and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading radical organization on college campuses in the mid and late sixties. Now Bernie, as Abbie liked to call her, was the leader of the Weather Underground, 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 necessary to conduct a discussion or hold an election by the general membership? 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 empire was reviewed in the press, I was described solemnly in the Times Literary Supplement as the Minister of Education for the Youth International Party.

For years I had defined myself as a Marxist intellectual. I had assumed that there was a real world, that it was governed by certain immutable, historical laws, and that it could only be changed by a revolution engineered by a disciplined party, a working class, and its allies.

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 class conflict 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 leftwing intellectual. There were games to play on the basketball court and at peace movement 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 middleaged 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 situation 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 Dohrns younger sister Jennifer conferred with Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver and tried to create a new, all encompassing international organization that would harbor Yippies, hippies, 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, conviction, 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 getaway, where he’d live, and how he’d survive. He was wearing slacks and Harris tweed jackets now, and he’d exchanged his trademark Massachusetts 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 Los Angeles. I was on my way to Mexico City to write a book about B. Traven, the German anarchist 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 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 Playboy, interviewed 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 fugitives, a Black Panther and a Yippie, who travel incognito down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and from there to Havana and Fidel Castro’s protection. The story sounded a lot like Mark Twains 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 Stadium. 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 Worcester; if he had gone, he’d have been arrested. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had swarmed all over the synagogue, expecting 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 time. Even worse, his fathers brothers were blaming him for John’s 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 identified with the workers of the world. Her mother, Helen, whom Abbie had met under his alias, wrote for Esquire and Vanity Fair 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 difficult 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 Johanna 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 all-American kid in an all-American family, playing sports and collecting trophies. But now; 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 flashyAbbie came alive again. At the Hilton Hotel he registered under a pseudonym, and after settling in our suite, we took a sauna in the 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 recognized 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 figment 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 leaving her with Abbie, but I had my own life to save. I grabbed my suitcase, 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 Cuernavaca. 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 Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and Rennie Davis—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 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 unraveled. 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 recognized, 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 undramatic 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 invisible, remain anonymous. Years later he appeared on the TV show 20 ho with Barbara Walters 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 California in the mid- and late seventies. In Mexico we visited landmarks of the revolution 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 constant stream of visitors from the United States, most of them sixties people, and more often than not it was the sixties that we talked about.

Abbie was also writing about the sixties in