His father and mother, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, called him ever-so-formally Abbott Hoffman. To the otherwise staid publisher of his 1969 manifesto, Revolution for the Hell of It, his nom de plume was simply "Free"—a euphonic gesture that made its author an archetypal American. For giving one's self a new name tagged a new identity, a white man's monosyllable that was the equivalent of the X that Malcolm Little bestowed upon himself. Environmentalists in New York knew him as Barry Freed, a community organizer who was prominent enough to meet with Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. In E.L. Doctorow's searing novel of intergenerational radical politics among American Jews, The Book of Daniel (1971), he is the inspiration for the antic "Artie Sternlicht," who is introduced in the presence of assorted street people, plus an interviewer from Cosmopolitan magazine: "He talks fast in a gravel voice that breaks appealingly on punch lines. He jumps around as he raps, gesturing, acting out his words," as though personifying Tocqueville's image of the American who cannot converse; he orates.

In Roger Simon's Los Angeles detective novel, The Big Fix (1973), Hoffman is the prototype for Howard Eppis, a radical demagogue who has disappeared in the wake of publishing Rip It Off, a volume studded (according to a private eye named Moses Wine) "with the clichés of the late and middle sixties set in an archaic psychedelic type. His prose sounded like a bad underground disc jockey on uppers. . . ." In the 1978 film version of The Big Fix, F. Murray Abraham plays Eppis, who has assumed a new life as a highly successful advertising executive. (Lexicographer Leo Rosten has called eppes—a polysemous Yiddish term for "something," "somebody," "maybe," and "a little"—a "delightful, resilient word [that] has chameleqn properties of a high order.") Yet despite the nimbus of aliases and appellations that swirled over Hoffman, almost everyone who ever encountered this eternally boyish, brash, and effervescent political activist just called him Abbie. And to those who realize that, overall, America is a slightly more open, robust, and even healthy society because of his efforts and his example, he was maybe even dear Abbie.

Among radicals, for whom solemnity of temperament and sobriety of purpose come with the territory, he was an oddity—a sport. Such oppositionists are usually born under the sign of Saturn, and tend to bring at least a touch of self-righteousness to the struggle against injustice. But Hoffman embodied the possibility of being at once engagé and engaging, and became, quite simply, the wittiest radical that the United States ever put into orbit. Unlike Students for a Democratic Society, whose contribution to Western political thought included the slogan, "Screw the ass of the ruling class," he enjoyed goosing it and thus displayed the most nimble and inventive mind of any New Leftist. Hoffman was also probably the first American radical to be heavily indebted to a comedian—in this case, Lenny Bruce, to whose memory Woodstock Nation (1969) was dedicated. Bruce seems to have taught Hoffman (or reinforced for him) the notion that everyone has a hustle—including political and religious authorities. (If this generalization was true, Hoffman's own hustle was radicalism itself.) For Lenny Bruce show business was not marginal to society but was its microcosm. For Hoffman show business was not the antithesis of leftism but something that could change and radicalize politics. No one who was funnier was ever more estranged from the orthodoxies of American democracy; no one who was radical was ever more comical in his perceptions. Nevertheless, for a comedian, Hoffman was not funny—and failed at that demanding profession, at the age of 51, doing a stand-up act in New York in 1988 that led one local critic to complain: "Comedy without laughs is just too obscure a concept for us." But for a political person, Hoffman was highly unusual in concocting an identity as homo ludens, the stunt man.

As the Carnot of the Cultural Revolution, he bounced through the late 1960's with kinetic energy—but still holding "my flower in a clenched fist," he wrote in his 1980 autobiography. Inside that fist, he should have mentioned, was a joy buzzer, ready to be pressed against the body politic. The Youth International Party (Yippies) that, at the age of 31, he co-founded with Jerry Rubin, was as puckish as its high-falutin' name. "Yippies believe in the violation of every law, including the law of gravity," he proclaimed. And while Hoffman was referring to the wacky effort to "levitate" the Pentagon in October, 1967, during a march against military intervention in Vietnam, the Yippies also violated the law of political gravity. Their frivolity became legendary, a throwback to the charivari who ritually upended the hierarchic order of the late Middle Ages. No other "revolutionary" ever exuded so much charm, which is why Dustin Hoffman (who had portrayed Bruce in the 1974 film Lenny) should have been encouraged to play him. Though the actor did show up at the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial, learning to mimic his namesake, Cliff Gorman was cast instead as Abbie Hoffman in the CBS television reenactment of the trial. The movie rights to Hoffman's autobiography were sold to Universal Studios for $200,000; but Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture was never adapted into even a minor motion picture.

He first drew attention in April 1967 by sprinkling paper money from the visitors' gallery onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange—only about a decade before Rubin ended up working near there as a market analyst. The dollars from heaven posed no harm, though the traders' frenzy for the cash led to pandemonium. "The sacred electronic ticker tape, the heartbeat of the Western world, stopped cold," Hoffman recalled. "Stock brokers scrambled over the floor like worried mice." The mischievous visitors from the East Village thus made ridiculous as well as contemptible the psychological propellant of capitalism. They not only exposed one of the seven deadly sins—greed, but also highlighted what James Madison had warned against in the tenth of The Federalist Papers: "a rage for paper money" that was among the most feverish causes of faction, making of democracies "spectacles of turbulence and contention." Two weeks later $20,000 was spent on bullet-proof glass for the gallery.

In October 1968 Hoffman was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, those once-grand inquisitors who had intimidated and throttled assorted Communists, "progressives," and liberals in the 1950's. Hoffman was "Free," however, and showed up in a red, white, and blue shirt. Such zealous adherence to a patriotic dress code so infuriated a contingent of Capitol police that he was arrested for desecration of Old Glory. The star-spangled witness and his (second) wife resisted arrest with such ferocity that his shirt was ripped off, revealing a provocative Cuban flag that she had painted on her husband's back. Both Hoffmans were jailed before the witness could get a chance to desecrate the rites of HUAC itself. The next day, stripped to the waist, he stood before a judge and demanded $14.95 for the shirt, marked Exhibit A. Instead the judge set bail at $3,000 and instructed the defendant to "get out of here with that Viet Cong flag. How dare you?" Hoffman corrected him: "Cuban, your honor." At the trial itself the defense invoked the First Amendment to no avail. Just before hearing the announcement of a 30-day jail sentence for "defacing and defiling" the Stars and Stripes, Hoffman arose to proclaim: "Your honor, I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country." The conviction was later overturned on appeal, despite the claim by the Department of Justice that "the importance of a flag in developing a sense of loyalty to a national entity has been the subject of numerous essays." The first work cited, Hoffman noticed, was a passage from Hitler's Mein Kampf.

In 1968 the Yippies also vowed to disrupt the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, ensuring that "the whole world is watching." They mock-threatened to put LSD in the Chicago city reservoirs, which were thereupon guarded. Yippies warned of painting their automobiles yellow to resemble taxis, to kidnap delegates and then dump them in Wisconsin. They promised to dress up like Viet Cong and work the streets like ordinary politicos, shaking hands and pressing the flesh. Such anarchic efforts in making "outrage contagious" helped dissuade incumbent Lyndon Johnson from attending the convention itself. Meanwhile the Yippies nominated for President one "Pigasus," a pig—which was also "the Carnival animal par excellence," according to Peter Burke, a leading historian of the popular culture of early modern Europe.

In March 1969 Hoffman, Rubin, and six others were indicted, charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot—even though an official commission under future Governor Daniel Walker later categorized the violence outside the convention hall as a "police riot." For 20 weeks of testimony, a Chicago courtroom was converted into guerrilla theater, as virtually every rule of legal decorum was shattered. Making dissidence dramaturgic, Hoffman and Rubin once showed up in court black and blue—wearing judicial robes over uniforms of the Chicago Police Department. By assuming the morally tattered vestments of authority, the defendants asserted that the emperor had no clothes. They also refused to rise when Judge Julius Hoffman entered the courtroom. Abbie dropped his own surname to protest the judge's ("I am an orphan of America"), and at one point yelled at him: "You schtunk. Schande vor de goyim, huh?", which he freely translated for the press as "front man for the WASP power elite." When Mayor Richard Daley himself arrived, flanked by Federal marshals as well as his own bodyguards, and sat down in the witness chair, "Abbie rose with a big grin," codefendant Tom Hayden recalled, "and challenged him to fight it out with fists; everyone in the room, including the marshals and the mayor, burst into laughter." Not only did the jury acquit the defendants of conspiracy, but a federal appellate court unanimously reversed Hoffman's convictions for riot and contempt, because Judge Hoffman's serious errors—all biased for the prosecution—were so frequent. Though Abbie Hoffman was later retried on reduced contempt charges and was convicted, he was released without having to serve any additional time in prison.

Four years after the tumult of the Chicago convention, he and Rubin showed up at the next Democratic Party nominating convention, posing as journalists. Wearing press badges that got them on the convention floor, Hoffman claimed to be covering the event for The Reader's Digest, Rubin for Popular Mechanics.

The fun should have ended two years after that convention, when Hoffman skipped bail after getting convicted of a 1973 attempt to sell three pounds of cocaine to undercover policemen. He went underground for six years, but no fugitive from justice was ever more flamboyant or less able to cure a sweet tooth for publicity. He went on a gastronomic tour of Europe, even posing for a celebrity photograph with Chef Paul Bocuse. (As the Wobblies' leader, Big Bill Haywood, is supposed to have remarked, when challenged about his proclivity for expensive cigars and luxurious hotels: "Nothing is too good for the working class.") The stunt man personally showed up at a precinct of the New York police department to report himself missing, and was later arrested—elsewhere—on minor drug charges without getting recognized. (A friend of Hoffman's secured his release by paying off the police chief, whom the arrestee asked: "Do you want to be rich or famous?" The chief's preference was the answer Hoffman had hoped for.) In disguise Hoffman de-legitimated the FBI by taking the visitors' tour of its Washington office building even as the bureau was committing itself to a manhunt to finding him: "I played all authority as if it were a deranged lumbering bull and I the daring matador."

At a Manhattan restaurant, while still on the lam, Hoffman threw a book-publishing gala for himself. No recluse, he also appeared on television, after a production company and a magazine, New Times, paid him $3,000 for the interview. In the fall of 1979, he was again interviewed (on tape) in a Boston television studio. As the pseudonymous Barry Freed ("Free" with—or from—a past), he spoke before Rotary Clubs and gave frequent interviews to local newspapers. He also testified before a Senate subcommittee, after which he posed for photographs with Senator Moynihan. Governor Hugh Carey commended him in a letter for his "keen public spirit." In 1979, Time magazine later reported, "Freed was appointed to a Federal advisory commission on the Great Lakes." Asked on television in 1979 if he could "foresee turning yourself in," Hoffman retorted: "Turning myself into what?" He was so gifted a clown that he ended up worthy of being taken seriously.

II

It should nevertheless be admitted that the case for his political significance and effectiveness has long been problematic. Three social scientists, all by happenstance teaching in California universities, were especially alert to the limitations of his antics. In The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), a book which boldly discerned a seismic shift in modern history, historian Theodore Roszak dismissed Revolution for the Hell of It because it "conveys the foul-mouthed whimsy of hip a-politics." Sociologist Todd Gitlin charged that "Abbie and Jerry [Rubin] had to perform according to the media's standards for newsworthy stunts. . . . They had to outrage according to the censors' definition of outrage. They were trapped in a media loop, dependent on media standards, media sufferance, and goodwill. These apostles of freedom couldn't grasp that they were destined to become clichés." Historian Peter Clecak's analysis of the predicament of the American left, Radical Paradoxes (1973), dismissed Hoffman as "a hollow man with a thousand faces. . . . All the confident pronouncements become tentative by virtue of his self-conscious comic pose. By disclaiming accountability for his fantasies, his thoughts, and his actions, he ultimately denies any responsibility for himself. . . . Protesting that he's "only in it for kicks and stuff," he nevertheless emerges as the sad butt of his own elaborate gag. . . . [His various roles] are so many unconvincing media images that fail to provide satisfying forms for the amorphous flow of energy. And so the endless cycle of expending himself continuously exposes his own emptiness."

Was he then a sham? A shaman? Merely a showman? I propose that he be classified as the kid brother of Barnum, not Babeuf, and be acknowledged as the first to make anachronistic the traditional notions of revolutionary purity and integrity. "The Communists disdain to conceal their objectives," Marx and Engels had written in their Manifesto. Hoffman disdained to conceal his interest in fame and was less fascinated by power than by publicity. One distinction between his autobiography and the recollections of, say, Leon Trotsky or Emma Goldman is that Hoffman devotes four pages to his guest appearance on The Merv Griffin Show. He was invariably good copy. Even his ascent from almost seven years in the underground was timed, with the precision of an atomic clock, to coincide with the publication of his memoirs. In fact he did a slot on Barbara Walters' show the day before (Sept. 3, 1980) he surrendered to the police, getting to ABC before the FBI got to him. Hoffman specialized not in the putsch but in the put-on. He was far less interested in the coup d'état than the coup de théâtre. Though Norman Mailer hailed him as a "bona fide American revolutionary," James Madison was less his model than Madison Avenue. After the Yippies had helped sabotage the Democrats' hopes of retaining the White House in 1968, three advertising agencies offered Hoffman and Rubin jobs even before the Nixon Administration tried to make a Federal case out of what was on their minds.

At first, in the late 1960's, Abbie seemed to be just another self-aggrandizing citizen, clamoring to be noticed, showing his plumage. Call him a publicity hound—and he would not have been troubled, or found it a shameful accusation. Call him just another American exhibitionist, playing to the crowd—and he would have seen nothing wrong with self-advertisements as a way of attracting attention for unpopular causes, however amorphously stated. The tradition of "the confidence man," the designer of the hoax, is a powerful one in a nation where social status is insecure, where identity is in flux; and that is the tradition to which Hoffman belonged. But he was so much of a fake that he ended up an original.

Compared to other radicals who claimed to speak for the dispossessed, he operated without a real constituency—or even a make-believe constituency. His connections to "the people" or to the proletariat or any other stigmatized class were thin, though the actuarial tables briefly granted him a certain rapport with the young. He deployed images because he had no troops. Abbie "had a wonderful ability to attract a crowd," journalist Nicholas von Hoffman observed, "but how big the crowd would be and what it might do was as much a surprise to him as to all the different kinds of policemen spying on him. But considering he never had any cards in his hand he could count on, he was a marvelous tactician. Bluff or theatricality, call it what you will, his best strokes won recruits and spurred his opponents to stupid acts of retaliatory spite. . . ."

Hoffman seemed not to care who wrote the nation's laws so long as he was free to subvert its icons. "Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburgers," he proclaimed; and no one was more cleverly carnivorous. (The carnivals of early modern Europe, as the name suggests, pivoted around the consumption of meat.) But he also gave the impression of liking hamburgers—and of liking American life generally enough to believe it was worthy not only of appreciation but of some improvement. A son was named "america." No major transfer of wealth or of power occurred in the 1960's, and the systematic struggle to rearrange their distribution gained little traction. But beginning with the "underground" poster of Allen Ginsberg in his Uncle Sam outfit, values were transvalued and symbols were transformed; and Abbie in his flag shirt was a walking, talking travesty of patriotic swagger. He accelerated the erosion of an earlier respect for privacy and dignity and helped to blur further the distinction between politics as policy and politics as perception. As statecraft became stagecraft, the texture of a mass-mediated "reality" saturated with stereotypes and images became even thinner; and the news was presented as another form of entertainment. As in imperial Rome, the masses could be appeased with bread and circuses; and though Hoffman showed little interest in problems of bread, he invented the role of radical ringmaster, performing under the big top with the greatest show on earth.

The culture that formed him and energized him was pop, primarily in the 1950's version that seemed so immutable at the time. He wrote nostalgically in Esquire about yo-yos; and even after he had reinvented himself as a full-time harpooner of authority, he cherished the aborted coup d'état that a southern California chapter of Yippies staged in Disneyland, in which a Viet Cong flag was planted atop the facsimile Mount Matterhorn. (And though the Yippies' writ never ran past Fantasyland, one consolation was that Khrushchev, visiting the United States in 1959, had been prohibited from reaching even the amusement park's Main Street U.S.A.) When Lenin had realized that chess was absorbing too much of his time, diverting him from organizing for the Revolution, he stopped playing the Russian national game. But Hoffman continued to love shooting pool, playing cards, watching sports on television, avidly following the Red Sox. Was there ever another radical's funeral, like Hoffman's in 1989, in which the mourners included a professional basketball player? On that occasion the Boston Celtics' Bill Walton insisted that "Abbie was not a fugitive from justice. Justice was a fugitive from him."

III

To be an American is usually to make up one's culture as one goes along anyway; and, deeply influenced by Mailer's 1957 essay on "The White Negro," Hoffman yearned to be unpredictable and spontaneous and loose. Mailer may have helped him to validate a refusal to be rational and temperate—which is a way of measuring his distance from his more ideologically coherent contemporaries abroad, the famous ones like Danny "the Red" Cohn-Bendit, "Red" Rudi Dutschke, Tariq Ali, or Bernard-Henri Levy. For all his smarts, Hoffman was relentlessly anti-intellectual. He carefully avoided the ear-popping altitudes of high theory, which at least deflated the historic danger of a cognitive elite imagining itself to be a revolutionary vanguard. Instead Hoffman invoked the sovereignty of desire, implicitly assuring the young inhabitants of Woodstock Nation that if they would unite, they would have nothing to lose but their brains. He refused to believe (as has classical Marxism) in the integration of theory and practice, that praxis makes perfect. He took his cues not from study but by osmosis, believing— like the German Marxist revisionist Eduard Bernstein—that movement was more important than any final goal. At one Socialist Scholars Conference in the late 1960's, he complained of seeing thousands of Socialist scholars, and not one Socialist; but the phenomenon—the dream of a cooperative commonwealth—had even by then become a subject without an object. An orphan of America had no viable radical tradition to inherit.

On the witness stand in Chicago, Hoffman identified himself neither by ideology nor by party, neither by class nor by any particular moral heritage. His self-definition was generational: "My age is 33, I am a child of the sixties." Asked when he was born, he replied: "Psychologically, 1960." The prosecutor objected, moving to strike the answer. After some sparring, Hoffman was quizzed about what, between his actual birth in 1936 and 1960, "if anything occurred in your life?" The witness responded: "Nothing. I believe it is called an American education." He mellowed by the time that he composed his autobiography, proudly recording the intellectual influence exerted on him by the 3Ms on the Brandeis faculty: philosopher Herbert Marcuse, psychologist Abraham Maslow, historian of ideas Frank Manuel. Yet Hoffman joined that line of resisters seeking to wriggle out of the shackles of the nicejewishboy. Mailer, Bruce, Ginsberg, Rubin, Philip Roth, Leslie Fiedler, Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Heller, Julian Beck, perhaps even William Kunstler and Saul Alinsky as well, were among those in the forward trenches of the Kulturkampf of the 1960's. Their reckless, provocative, swing-for-the-fences opposition to gentility, authority, and orthodoxy can be largely understood as a reclamation project, to restore the primitive life.

Though Hoffman converted himself into a politicized white Negro, he refused to bleach himself into a "non-Jewish Jew." He liked to flaunt the insignia of the Jewish subculture that he flouted and had a knack for kidding its cherished conventions. Though he became a Jewish parent's nightmare, repudiating the norms of middle-class mobility and success, no radical was more eager to assert a sense of peoplehood, relishing his ethnicity in his own peculiar way, recognizing that he "came into this world acutely aware of being Jewish, and [I] am sure I'll go out that way." His autobiography returns to the topic of his Jewishness in an almost compulsive manner, with wry and bittersweet irony, without defensiveness or vindictiveness. He took pride in his ancestry and in the Jewish reputation for cleverness, for an intelligence that is at once subversive and sensible. "Roots, baby," he exulted to one interviewer while on the lam. "Five thousand eight hundred years. What makes the Jews so [expletive deleted] smart, man? . . . We know when to start New Year's. It's in the fall, that's when the movie business starts, that's when school starts. What the [expletive deleted] starts January 1?"

With many other Jews, he shared a feeling of marginality, a spirit of dissidence and even alienation that was experienced, in the phrase of sociologist John Murray Cuddihy, as "the ordeal of civility." Hoffman rejected "the notion of "modesty" as something invented by WASPs to keep the Jews out of the banking industry," and he "always thought the idea of postponing pleasure was something WASPs dreamed up to keep Jews out of country clubs and fancier restaurants." Yet Hoffman was radicalized early in the 1960's not by discrimination against Jews but by the segregation of Negroes; and he worked courageously for civil rights in the Deep South, where (in Bob Dylan's phrase) "black is the color and none is the number." Such activism was hardly discredited in an American Jewish community which has often sanctioned a certain sentimental leftism. Mailer's own bar mitzvah speech in Brooklyn had acknowledged the ambition to follow in the footsteps of "great Jews like Moses Maimonides and Karl Marx"; and the eulogy that Rabbi Norman Mendell delivered at Temple Emanuel in Worcester in 1989 implanted Hoffman's career "in[to] the Jewish prophetic tradition, which is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Because the Youth International Party was largely the creation of Hoffman, Rubin, and Paul Krassner, who edited a satirical magazine called The Realist, Hoffman claimed that the term Yippies was really a contraction of "Yiddish hippies," the cold-sweat horror of every right-winger fantasizing about the tentacles of an international Jewish conspiracy.

IV

Family matters: Florence Hoffman, whose own mother had worked in a sweatshop in Clinton, Massachusetts, sent her son the underground man toothbrushes and dental floss via clandestine couriers. In The Jewish Mothers' Hall of Fame (1986), Hoffman himself was quoted as remembering that his mother always advised him, when he announced the next destination on his escape route, to "dress warmly." Hoffman used a scrambling device to phone home, and met his mother four or five times, including in Cuernavaca, Mexico and even in Disneyland. "I was more scared than he was," she recalled. For the Republican National Convention, held in Miami Beach in 1972, Hoffman had addressed the city council for a permit for the Yippies to sleep in the park. He mock-threatened that if the permit were not granted, his father would no longer come down there for the winter. One councilman called the protester's bluff, exclaiming that Hoffman's father wouldn't dare inflict a boycott: "He loves the beach!" John Hoffman, who died a few weeks after his son jumped bail in 1974, once told an interviewer: "He could have been somebody, a doctor or a professor. Now we have to read the papers to see which jail he's in." Nevertheless the son notes that John Hoffman "never (to use a gentile expression) disowned me."

Hoffman called himself "a Jewish road warrior," a category that is unlisted among the enumerated occupations of the U.S. Census. On the witness stand in 1969 for conspiracy to foment riots, he answered the question about his vocation by defining himself as "a cultural revolutionary. Well, I am really a defendant. . .full time." He was eventually arrested about two dozen times. (His second wife complained after their 1967 wedding: "I spent my time bailing him out of jail. I'm not saying that was the greatest thrill." Such arrests were echoed in the next generation. Hoffman's daughter Ilya, from his first marriage, once phoned Hoffman to announce: "Dad, I got arrested!" "Great! What for?" Ilya had been caught camping in a graveyard. "Well, that's a good start," but Ilya thought to herself: "Dad, you're not supposed to say that to me!") And with all due respect to E.L. Doctorow, who admired the activist's "fearless" willingness to "put his body on the line" and compared him to a Biblical prophet, Hoffman wrote from the underground that "the person who could tell my story better than anyone was Isaac Bashevis Singer." Hoffman claimed to have "always been fascinated by Yiddish as the language of survival," with "its subtleties, its built-in irony . . .the historical road it has travelled." Abbie road forked off from there, too.

Like the ancient Hebrews, whose own Bible describes them as "stiff-necked" (Exodus 32:9), Hoffman's radicalism showed surprising tenacity and durability, which is anomalous in a land where faddishness and amnesia seem inevitably yoked to one another. He did not abandon his leftism, though aging radicals are supposed to join the Democratic Party (like Tom Hayden or civil rights organizers like John Lewis and Julian Bond). In Europe they can continue to participate in radical political parties (like Daniel Cohn-Bendit with the Greens in Frankfurt). But in the United States they are supposed to grow into "maturity" (like Rubin or Rennie Davis). In that sense Abbie never grew up; he was a political Peter Pan. But his irony and self-mockery saved him from freezing into a character who had outlived his historical moment, pathetically trapped in a time capsule.

Yet Hoffman operated in a country that made co-option rather than repression the most striking characteristic of its culture. At Woodstock, for example, Hoffman tried to politicize the rock concert and failed, as entrepreneurs "were able to turn a historic civil clash in our society into a fad, then the fad could be sold." He was cut from the film documentary of the concert, he claimed, because "rock promoters and the rock record industry . . .always, always tried to separate the politics from culture as, of course, the movie Woodstock bragged about doing." On native grounds "it is possible . . .to be wanted equally badly by the FBI and Universal Pictures." His books sold three million copies; and even Steal This Book, which had to be self-published (the Russian word is samizdat) after 30 publishers turned it down, sold over a quarter of a million copies in 1971. "It's embarrassing," he remarked. "You try to overthrow the government, and you end up on the best-seller list."

But fewer and fewer of his readers were enlisted from the ranks of the young in the 1980's. He and Rubin, who were once as close as handcuffs, debated one another on the college circuit. The campus gigs were billed as yippie versus yuppie, as Hoffman accused his former co-conspirator of subscribing to ideas that were as thin as his ties. But on the evidence of how the graduates put their values into practice in that decade, Hoffman badly lost the debate. Refusing to "mature" by surrendering to the materialism of the Zeitgeist, he noted that policemen "still bust me and beat me up from time to time, but they call me mister." Saddened by the apolitical complacency of the young, he declared: "Never trust anyone under thirty." Hoffman thus jettisoned the cult of youthfulness that had so ruptured the radical legacy and had put him closer to Ponce de Leon than to Daniel De Leon. The 1980's were depressing for a Woodstock nationalist: "It's like the Middle Ages. We're willing ourselves dumber." Had he become irrelevant? After his death an editorial cartoon by Dan Wasserman showed a child at the breakfast table, asking her newspaper-reading father, "Who was Abbie Hoffman?" He casually explains, "A radical has-been. He protested the war, pollution, White House crimes"—as the headlines in the final panel refer to the Ollie North trial, the Contras, and the Alaska oil spill—"issues of the '60's."

V

Such continuities suggest the difficulty of recounting the story of American public culture from the 1960's—that is, the immediate antecedents of our own time—without including Abbie Hoffman. Many of the 18 "revolutionary" demands listed in Woodstock Nation have been fulfilled, from the end of military intervention in Vietnam to the elimination of severe penalties for using marijuana, from the end of conscription to the passage of pro-choice laws on abortion, from the continued eclipse of censorship to the greater sensitivity to environmental destruction. Of course no single individual is responsible for any of these changes. But not all consequences are unintended, and von Hoffman speculated that "the baiting, spoofing, jeering, joking, laughing five or six years of Abbie's public ministry contributed materially to the closing down of the war and to the missteps that led to the Nixon people putting themselves out of office. The traps Abbie dared and devil danced them into setting for him, they tripped and snapped shut on themselves." Hoffman's causes were a kind of sneak preview of the future. Newsweek reported in the summer of 1989 that, though the biggest cash crop in California is milk and cream (over $2 billion annually), about $3 billion is derived from the sale of marijuana. In economic terms the bear depicted on the official flag of the Golden State might well be replaced by the marijuana leaf on the official Yippie banner. Even Nancy Reagan, so closely associated with the antidrug campaign, hired an early champion of marijuana use as the coauthor of her 1989 memoir, My Turn.

The richest joke that Hoffman played, even as his influence waned, is that so seemingly frivolous a spirit, so artificial a concoction, turned out to be the least corrupted, the most resilient and dedicated radical of all. Mailer, himself an expert on advertisements for one's self, praised Hoffman as "probably one of the bravest" "people I've ever met." For so "empty" a clown was unselfishly committed to political action. Living in Fineview, New York, Barry Freed led the Save the River Committee that halted a dredging project on the St. Lawrence River by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which intended to destroy several islands to enhance navigation. His work was so effective that, after he surfaced in 1980 to face cocaine charges, even William F. Buckley, Jr., joined other luminaries to petition for a reduction of Hoffman's sentence. (Plea bargaining reduced the time in jail to 11 months.) The last six years of Hoffman's life were spent in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, after an environmental group, New Hope River Savers, invited his help in a battle to stop the diversion of the Delaware River. The waters were to cool a nuclear reactor at Point Pleasant. In 1987 Hoffman told an interviewer that he was happy to "live and die here fighting the Philadelphia Electric Company—it's just like the '60's for me." Such activism should resolve the question of whether he was serious, as though frisky theatricality might be incompatible with steadfast political dedication. "Though easily the zaniest of the rebels of the 1960's," Milton Viorst wrote a decade ago, "Hoffman was by no means the least serious. . . . Behind Hoffman's endless capers was a sense of purpose." Any doubts should have been settled by what this self-proclaimed "child of the sixties" did during two subsequent decades.

Abbie was guilty of saying lots of silly things (maybe more than most) and can be reproached for an incorrigible failure to realize that, as historian Marvin Meyers once asserted, "with talk begins responsibility." His literary legacy is now mostly unreadable—with the major exception of his largely unread but very lively autobiography, which is written (to quote Doctorow) with "the precision of insight of a great political cartoonist." The drugs that Hoffman consumed were more than just mischievous; they were dangerous. "Better living through chemistry," he had quipped in defense of such self-destructiveness. The claim was false, the indebtedness typical in ripping off an advertising slogan—as befit the former pharmaceuticals salesman, which was the last "respectable" job he ever held before making pharmacology an extension of politics. By the end Hoffman had learned enough to serve on the board of directors of Veritas, an organization engaged in drug and rehabilitation therapy. Nevertheless, by taking an overdose of phenobarbital in April 1989, he chose to satisfy deliberately the morbid hope expressed in his favorite piece of hate mail: "Dear Abbie— Wait till Jesus gets his hands on you—you little bastard.— Anonymous." Sometimes accused of seeking martyrdom, he yielded instead to a despair that contradicted the joie de vivre of his politics, an ebullience that he made as individually distinctive as an autograph.

Sometimes he got trapped in his own anarchic amoralism, as when the author of Steal This Book accused a collaborator of plagiarism. (Aficionados of literary lore will doubtless be reminded of Edgar Allan Poe's charge that Lewis Gaylord Clark had stolen one of Poe's own ideas for a hoax—in other words, that Clark had been untruthful in revealing the source of his own lie.) But Hoffman lived more or less according to his own code of honor. For example, he was not significantly associated with violence, which falsifies one journalist's analogy (in The New Republic) to the Black Panthers' Huey Newton (Ph. D., University of California-Santa Cruz), who was found dead of gunshot wounds in the summer of 1989 outside an Oakland crack house.

Renunciation of capitalism was also central to Hoffman's code. The introduction to a collection of his essays announces that "I own no property, stocks, bonds or anything of substantial material value." Murray Kempton recalled that Hoffman was once asked to supply bail money for a prisoner, whom he had never met. Hoffman "had just received $25,000 for a book and, without a moment of thought, he handed it over to the bail fund of a stranger. Later the prisoner, for reasons of despair, fled the jurisdiction. Abbie had lost the only comfortable stake he ever owned and all he did was laugh and say that he was glad the man had his freedom." While reviewing The Big Fix, he claimed to be "the only living American . . .for whom fame does not equal riches." Hoffman did not cash in on his celebrity (or notoriety).

Political organizing was "hard, lonely work," he conceded in 1987. "If I wanted to convince people that I could faith-heal them, I'd have me a jet plane by now. But I want to convince them that they have the power as people to come together and fight city hall. And this is very hard." He staked his political life—that is, his life—on the proposition that freedom is not only something to be protected; it is something to be used. It is not only something to be praised; it is something to be enlarged. What he has bequeathed has little to do with the political views and policies that he championed, but rather an ethos of liberation from the uncritical complacency and the benign, civics-text assumptions that pervaded the United States before the 1960's. That soothing mentalité he awarded himself a license to kill, and that sort of patriotism has not yet recovered. Having hot-wired the system, he extended its contours and made it safer for diversity.