dear abbie

Remembering Abbie Hoffman
March 29, 2009 By Howard Lisnoff


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It seems difficult to believe and comprehend that the twentieth anniversary of the death of Abbie Hoffman will arrive in just a few, short weeks (April 12). Abbie was one of the great heroes of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Smart, and fast with what seemed to be an unending supply of wit, he was perhaps the first peace activist who knew how to use the media. Eventually, I believe, that that proclivity would lead to his demise as he became a marginal figure in the 1980s despite having chalked up one the greatest records of left organizing in the environmental movement during that era. To date, Jonah Raskin's biography of Abbie, Revolution For the Hell Of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (1996), remains the definitive and most comprehensive commentary of Abbie's life.

I knew Abbie in only fleeting moments when our path's collided. We used the same legal practice on Broadway in New York, The Law Commune. I greeted him as he passed me while I waited for appointments in that office. In 1971, a friend and I from New York University sat at the same table at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., along with Abbie and Jerry Rubin, during a time out of the famous May Day actions against the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. Abbie was in the middle of one of his infamous verbal tirades against a writer from The Daily News. Abbie demanded that the writer publish the truth about the Vietnam War. The last time I saw Abbie was during a talk he gave at the University of Rhode Island at the beginning of the decade of the 1980s. He had already launched his career as a full-blown environmental activist and was working to stop a government water project in upstate New York. The organization Abbie spearheaded in New York was known as Save the River. Though wanted by the FBI, he was successful in that environmental effort, and later moved on to Pennsylvania where he labored with similar environmental issues.

Abbie's attempts to galvanize a new generation of activists later in his life did not succeed. He could count on occasional issues such as getting CIA recruiters off of the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but those were small victories compared to his epic accomplishments during the antiwar movement in the 1960s.

Raskin observed in his biography of Abbie that Abbie's memorial service in Worcester, Massachusetts, a few days after his death, was the last mass gathering of the 60's generation. I attended, along with my daughter, and am unashamed to say that I cried often during the ceremony. Here was a great soul, warts and all, who was gone forever and who had motivated so many of the 60's generation. On the way from Abbie's childhood home, to the synagogue where the memorial service was held, the large crowd of marchers scattered the yellow-gold blossoms of the ubiquitous forsythia, one of the symbols of spring and regeneration of New England. I thought of Whitman's poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

Has it really been twenty years? And, has the world not moved one inch closer to sanity? The fight against war, inequality, and environmental destruction continues!

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer and remains an activist. He can be reached at howielisnoff@gmail.com.