Drawing 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, Raskin provides the best account we have of this mercurial figure. He takes us from Hoffman's childhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, through his civil rights and antiwar activities - in particular his roles in the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the notorious Chicago Conspiracy trial the next year. Raskin chronicles Hoffman's cocaine bust, his years underground during the seventies, and his alternating fits of manic hyperactivity and paralyzing depression. When he took his own life in 1989, Hoffman was both larger than life and a deeply troubled soul.
Excerpt
Before the end of November he was already planning "a big event" for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the following August. In his madcap scenario, disorder would be the order of the day. Little by little Abbie's ideas took shape: there would be a counterconvention, a pop festival, and an all-encompassing week of protest. "Chicago" itself would become synonymous with the megaevent. Long before their plans became finalized, Abbie and Jerry - now an inseparable movement duo - were publicizing Chicago as well as promoting themselves. Folksinger Phil Ochs interrupted a Carnegie Hall performance to invite them on stage to announce the demonstration. "Fuck Lyndon Johnson, fuck Robert Kennedy, and fuck you if you don't like it." Abbie shouted. The Carnegie Hall management cut the power, leaving the hall in darkness.
Abbie, Jerry, and their friends also took part in Phil Ochs's "War Is Over" demonstration in New York on November 25. Allen Ginsberg, America's poet-legislator, had urged that peace activists should "simply declare the war over." He inspired Phil Ochs, who'd been singing protest songs for the most of the decade, to write the song "The War Is Over," with its refrain: "I declare the war is over / It's over." On November 25 Ochs met with demonstrators in Washington Square Park, sang his song, and then led a march up Fifth Avenue to Times Square. The war in Vietnam, he explained, was "only a figment of our propagandized imagination, a psychodrama out of 1984." George Orwell's fantasy had become a reality. If enough people saw the war as an illusion and refused to believe it, then the war would really end, Ochs suggested.