Conversations with a Ghost: The Abbie Hoffman Interview, Part 1

In 1986 I interviewed 60s radical Abbie Hoffman for a New York publication. The edited transcript, taken from five hours of conversation, never was published. Thanks to the Internet, Hoffman's wit and energy can now be read by a new generation. The introduction to this piece can be found here.

Hoffman: I was just surprised last month to get a call from Walt Disney to use me in a commercial to plug their latest movie, Ruthless People. It’s funny to get a call like that.

Mission2Moscow: Are you going to do it?

Hoffman: I turned it down, no.

Mission2Moscow: Why did you turn it down?

Hoffman: They wouldn’t let me see the movie, for one thing. But there is a big difference. These things, like being called by Walt Disney, or being on the Phil Donahue Show or talk shows, speaking to large numbers of people. I am used by the U.S. Information Agency as propaganda around that world that this is how much free speech we have. Probably 90 percent of the readers of Whole Life believe – believe the fact that I’m giving this interview here – that you are interviewing me, I’m on the cover, that I am a self-proclaimed dissident, that I am anti-state, that I have a point of view that may be in the minority of the people who are thinking out there in the world, but certainly a minority view here, that the fact that I’m allowed is free speech.

I’m not one of those people. I don’t believe that at all. You’re asking me the questions, you’re framing it, I’m stuck between the ads. We have the best information money can by, and that’s it. Period. We don’t have the best information.

Mission2Moscow: You once said you thought Walter Cronkite was the best newsman or the most . . .

Hoffman: The most trustworthy. That’s just a general image he’s concocted in America. I would never give the system that much credit. When I say the best, I mean it in this context. I would say Ted Koppel of Nightline has the best talk show on TV – news talk show, but I’m describing something in a narrow context – which is pro-corporation, which is anti-Russian, which accepts certain premises like the fundamental principle of our thinking is the key to keeping the Western alliance together, which is to maintain national security through strength of weaponry. Which, with, that God exists, is alive, is a Christian, that drugs are the devil, that Communism is the devil, that history is irrelevant, that anecdote is important, that accepts the system that will say the strongest critic that is allowed out there is somebody who will say, “Well, there are some things wrong with America, but it’s 90 percent OK.” That’s what you’re allowed as a critic. That’s not a dissident. I am a self-invention. This is not an invention of the media. You cannot be an American dissident. It is simply not allowed. It is like being an American refugee. You cannot renounce this system. It’s just now allowed. You are just like an ungrateful, spoiled brat who wasn’t breast-fed, or who doesn’t really mean it.

Mission2Moscow: You mentioned avoiding free speech. The issue of pornography has come up a lot these days, the Meese Commission and all that. Are you afraid that political stuff is going to be the next target?

Hoffman: Obviously, it always is, it is already happening. It’s no secret to me that the Dead Kennedys are one of the most political groups in the country. That’s why Jello Biafra (its leader) is on trial for his genital poster (included in an album). It’s avant-garde and the radical politics generally – not always – tend to go together with that. That’s why the left is split. When you have Women Against Pornography saying, “I don’t find anything wrong with being in camp with Edwin Meese,” a guy who says his goal is to dismantle the Miranda decision. You have this contradiction of looking in an adult porn store and everyone behind that grimy window looks like Edwin Meese (laughs). I mean, who are they talking about anyway?

If the left was left to sell left-wing politics to the United States, it’s like sell deep-freeze units to Eskimos. There is no market for those kinds of ideas. There hasn’t been since maybe the 1930s, when the unions had their day. In the 1960s what happened was that a kind of generalized leftist politics occurred at the same time as the sexual revolution as the breaking away from the puritan ethic – the puritanical anal restrictive attitudes towards sex, drugs, rock and roll, general kind of thinking about life. Some other kind of thinking that there were other ways out there. So if that’s taken away, you are left with a movement that is not particularly well versed on selling anything because it comes out of an academic tradition and you really have nothing much to sell.

Mission2Moscow: For the past five or six years you have been involved in Central American and environmental activities. How so?

Hoffman: I’ve taken four trips to Nicaragua and I’ve brought more than 100 people there. I also speak at workshops and conferences and in my regular campus lecturing. I probably speak more on this issue than anyone else in the U.S. and to larger numbers of people.

Mission2Moscow: When was the last time you were there?

Hoffman: Last August, September (1985). I’m on the phone once every two weeks to Nicaragua talking to friends there. I belong to a service, Agenda International, through which I get a week’s summary of everything printed in every major American newspaper on Nicaragua. I get International Barricada, which comes straight out of Nicaragua.

Mission2Moscow: Did you met with Daniel Ortega when he was here in New York?

Hoffman: I was away, actually. I’ve worked on visits. I stayed at their house once. I feel like I know these people well (Nicaraguan leaders), in a very close way. These are 60s people. These people were there in their way, the way we were in the streets of the USA. And they were influenced by many of the same cultural experiences: they wore long hair, they smoked dope, they wore bell bottoms, they listened to rock and roll, their thinking is anti-ideology, as was ours in the 60s. But this has to be put into the context of what anti-ideology means given a Latin American education. It’s a different experience.

Mission2Moscow: Had you been in Nicaragua before the revolution, when you were a fugitive?

Hoffman: No, but I had been in Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and since then in El Salvador. I lived in Mexico two and a half years and speak the language. Also, when I was a fugitive I met many Chilean refugees because they all had headed there. I have a sister who has lived 27 years in Mexico, and I am in love with Latin America. I was recently in Peru, Ecuador and the Amazon. I love to be in Latin America. It is the developing world.

Mission2Moscow: You’ve said that you still see yourself as a community organizer. Is that still the self-image?

Hoffman: Yes, absolutely.

Mission2Moscow: is there a living to be made these days as a community organizer?

Hoffman: Only very very, small numbers of people can do what I do in this society and support themselves even in the middle . . . well, this is not a palace [referring to his apartment on E. 34th Street in New York). My total worth is easily under $50,000. I’m sure I’m worth much more dead than alive. Younger organizers have a much harder time economically. The economics of the 60s – I was getting $40 – movement wages were $40 a week and you were OK. You had a good time and didn’t worry about money or anything, or careers or rent. People could volunteer themselves to a movement and scratch around at the surface and figure out how to get by. Today, that’s extremely difficult.

Mission2Moscow: You mentioned the Walt Disney ad. Do you find yourself turning down an awful lot of offers? Do you feel conflict sometimes between something that might make you commercially more comfortable and principles? You talked about how people will say, “Abbie, we’re going to make you a star, endorse this album.” Does that still happen?

Hoffman: Yes, it happens. When you fight against the system and give it as much thought and fight as hard on a pragmatic, practical level as someone like myself or any of the anti-war leaders, if you want to turn around and cash in – I’m not even talking about the fame, I’m talking about how the system works, you know how the system works! If you understand the system well enough to challenge it so effectively, it’s pretty easy for you to turn the switch.

The advertising moguls on Madison Avenue – if I went, that’s where I would go. Obviously, it’s Madison Avenue. I have a certain way with words and you can make unpopular things popular. It’s nothing to then turn around and use that ability to market things and to use your basic knowledge about human motivation and what moves small and large groups. My fantasies about being a millionaire are only in terms of winning a lottery or something like that.

Mission2Moscow: You’re comfortable then, and that’s enough for you?

Hoffman: No, I wouldn’t say that. No, because I am middle-aged and you’re not comfortable when you’re middle-aged. You have your middle-life crises. But there were a lot of points in my life over the last 10 or 12 years when I did not have to become engaged in the social battle and I chose to be engaged. It is in my nature. On two occasions I became physically ill when I did not choose to interact.

Mission2Moscow: You’ve said that generally the lifespan of an activist is about two years and after that the pressures become too much. And you’ve been doing it for 25 years! Where did the longevity come from?

Hoffman: Aside from the fact that I’m the son of God, or that I come from the planet Krypton . . . Human beings on occasions tend to get depressed. On the left you have a romantic vision of human nature. That is, it doesn’t have to be rich and poor; there doesn’t always have to be injustice and inequality; that human beings can enter a situation like the existentialist warriors they are and they can alter history with their own being. So that’s a rather romantic view.

Now, when you are depressed and you have this view, there is a strong tendency to translate that depression into your politics and so you become disillusioned. On the right they don’t have to have that because individual greed . . . there is a certain fatalism that there is always going to be rich and poor, you know there are certain things built in where the world doesn’t have to be just. So they can deal with emotions like depression a lot easier, politically. On the left it becomes a complicated problem.

Mission2Moscow: So you think it’s because you have been able to deal with depression over the years?

Hoffman: Not necessarily just that I have been able to deal with those things, but that I’ve been able to understand what is politics and what is human nature. And that you have to have a certain distance, a certain sense of humor that you develop a certain sense of spacing over the years. I don’t expect enormous social change right now in the US. In fact, I expect change for the worst. The difference between my optimism in the 80s and my optimism in the 60s is that in the 60s it was more generalized than it is now. Now it is more refined, much more specific. You have to be more specific about our questions about where there is hope and where there is not much hope.

Mission2Moscow: You talked once about how long hair has lost its social bite.

Hoffman: Doesn’t have any bite? My kid who’s a punk, america, is 15 years old, and says the hippies are the ones you’ve got to run from, man.

Mission2Moscow: What does have social bite these days?

Hoffman: If the choice is between punk and yuppie, I’ll take punk. In terms of culture for white people, that’s the choice. I sense another choice, but it may be a cop-out. I sense that the counterculture of the 80s is Latin culture, so if people want to learn the counterculture language, or the alternative culture or the hippie language, you learn Spanish. You travel to Latin America, you go to Nicaragua, you check it all out, you eat Latin food, you listen to the music. When you ask me what has bite, I have to go to the developing world to get my answers. I can’t get them in the United States.

It’s not that activism is not on the rise in the U.S. It is. I see people doing good work, they do it in a different context. They are hedging their bets with their careers. I meet somebody like Mitch Snyder (Washington, D.C., activist for the homeless) and I say, “Oh, this is great,” and he tells me he is 42, and I say “Uh-oh.” Maybe we’re two years away from national organizations and leadership in our next generation. I can’t wait. This is lonely what I do, this is lonely work. It is lonely. [2006 note: Mitch Snyder committed suicide in 1990, a year after Hoffman.]