Abbie Hoffman: Playboy Interview

He grew up a smart-assed pool shark in Worcester, Massachusetts, an industrial town famous for being only six miles from the birthplace of the pill. Most townfolk wish the pill had come first. After a checkered scholastic career that included spells at Brandeis and Berkeley, he returned to Massachusetts, where he tried to combine political activism with careers as a psychologist and a pharmaceuticals salesman; by then he had a wife, Sheila, and two young children to support. It was at the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival that Hoffman first found himself on the wrong side of a policeman's truncheon—a position he would assume many times over the next decade. He joined the civil-rights movement and spent three years in Mississippi and Georgia alternately fighting off the Ku Klux Klan and trying to register blacks to vote. After experimenting with LSD and divorcing his wife, Hoffman moved to New York City, where a new culture was breeding on the Lower East Side led by a gang of crazy long-hairs who called themselves Diggers and who believed in giving away everything they could lay their hands on, which, given their nimble fingers, was a lot. These, Hoffman knew, were his people and he emerged as the spokesman for this new class.

Another middle-class refugee, Jerry Rubin, was hanging out on the Lower East Side about then. When Rubin met Hoffman, the Sixties' most famous radical partnership was formed. The pair formalized their association into the Youth International Party—the Yippies—and made plans to invade the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago for a "Festival of Life." Thanks to Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago's finest, something quite different was in store for the demonstrators. Seven months after the convention and its disorders, Hoffman, Rubin and five other white radicals (plus black activist Bobby Seale, whose case was later severed) found themselves indicted under a new law—conspiracy to cross state lines to commit riot—by a new U.S. Attorney General, John N. Mitchell.

The trial of the Chicago Seven, as the group came to be known, symbolized the violent climax to the decade that spawned the generation gap. When, after one of the most controversial trials of the century, five of the seven were convicted--not for conspiracy but for individual "overt acts"—thousands of young people took to the campuses and the streets to burn R.O.T.C. buildings and trash business districts throughout America.

In 1971, Hoffman found himself once more arrested, this time for his participation in the May Day demonstrations in Washington. New trends were rocking the antiwar movement. One declared that leadership was inherently evil. Another, backed by the emerging women's movement, hurled charges of elitism and male chauvinism at virtually every white male movement personality. Exiled from his constituency, Hoffman wrote an open letter "resigning" from the movement. He turned to other things. In 1970, he had helped spirit LSD prophet Timothy Leary out of the country to take refuge with Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria. Cleaver, Leary and companions fell out, but Hoffman decided to collect in written form what he had learned from that experience and add to it other forms of outlaw how-to know-how. Although he had achieved commercial success with two previous books, Revolution for the Hell of It and Woodstock Nation, he could find no publisher willing to produce Steal This Book—not under that title, anyway. So Hoffman published it himself and Steal This Book became an underground classic.

The pressures of police harassment, media overexposure and constant needling from the left had driven Hoffman and his new wife, Anita, to seek a life of seclusion. So with the arrival of his son, america, Hoffman decided to cool his heels, play family man—and write a sequel to Steal This Book that would take everything one step further. In August 1973, during the preparation of the book, he arranged a cocaine sale through contacts he says he made for research purposes. With three others, he was arrested in New York's Hotel Diplomat and charged with the sale of cocaine, conviction for which would mean a mandatory life sentence. After spending six weeks in the infamous Tombs prison, Hoffman was released on bail—and resolved he never would spend another minute in jail. In October of that year, he appeared in court in Chicago; although the court of appeals had struck down the Chicago Seven's conviction for incitement to riot, it ordered another trial on charges of contempt of court. Hoffman and his codefendants had never hesitated to express their outrage against septuagenarian Judge Julius Hoffman, who had presided over the original trial. Once more Hoffman was convicted but was not sentenced to a jail term. That, however, was to be one of the last public appearances for Abbie Hoffman. In March of 1974, he vanished and shortly thereafter sent word that he intended to remain a fugitive, dedicated to building an underground network of armed subversion against the Government of the United States. He has since undergone plastic surgery to alter his appearance and, except for a video taping done a year ago for public television that resulted in an article in New Times, this is the first major interview he has granted since that time. Ken Kelley, a free-lance writer with underground connections, contacted us with the possibility of conducting an interview with the man who, since the capture of Patricia Hearst, has become the FBI's most wanted radical fugitive.