A Flower in a Clenched Fist

By Richard Lacayo

In the tumultuous days of the late 1960s, Abbie Hoffman led the antic wing of the revolution, where the anarchist politics came from Mikhail Bakunin, the media savvy from Marshall McLuhan and the spirit from Peter Pan. He liked to think of himself as a bridge between the New Left and the hippie counterculture, between "Off the pigs!" and "If it feels good, do it." He was never more himself than when he taunted the capitalists by showering dollar bills from the visitor's gallery onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Hoffman was 52 when he was found dead last week in his small apartment in New Hope, Pa. He was fully dressed under the bedcovers. An autopsy was inconclusive. In recent years, however, he battled depression. An activist to the end, fighting over the environment and Nicaragua, he found the complacent hum of the present no match for the percussive past.

Born in Worcester, Mass., Hoffman studied psychology at Brandeis University in the placid 1950s, then went on to graduate work in the headier atmosphere of the University of California, Berkeley. By the mid-1960s, after a stint as a traveling pharmaceutical salesman, he was living among the hippies in New York City and devoting himself to opposing the Viet Nam War. "Personally I always held my flower in a clenched fist," he once wrote.

Hoffman was already 31 when he and Jerry Rubin formed an amalgam of political pranksters into the Youth International Party. "Yippies believe in the violation of every law," he once told a crowd, "including the law of gravity." In 1968 they ran a pig for President. As a lead-up to that year's Democratic Convention in Chicago, they vowed to spike the local water supply with LSD. The schemes were mostly put-ons and fodder for the press, Hoffman's most faithful co-conspirator. It was revolution as street shtick.

Hoffman practiced it more dexterously than anyone else, even as one of the Chicago Eight, the group of radical activists, including Tom Hayden and Black Panther Bobby Seale, who were tried for plotting to disrupt the convention. Hoffman and four others were found guilty of crossing state lines with intent to riot, a conviction later overturned.

In 1974, facing a long sentence on cocaine-sale charges, Hoffman jumped bail. Eventually he settled in a small town in upstate New York, where he took the name Barry Freed and busied himself with environmental issues. When Hoffman came out of hiding in 1980, on the cusp of the Reagan era, he seemed a bit like Rip Van Winkle, waking up in a new world that was moving not forward but backward into the somnolent 1950s.

Hoffman pleaded guilty and served time on lesser charges. Though dismayed by the apolitical younger generation -- "Never trust anyone under 30," he declared -- he never stopped protesting. It was Timothy Leary, the advance scout of the LSD generation, who eulogized Hoffman most deftly last week. "An American legend," Leary called him. "Right up there in the hall of fame with rebel Huck Finn, rowdy Babe Ruth and crazy Lenny Bruce."