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Seven years after Chicago, Jerry Rubin turned up on the second episode of Saturday Night Live, pitching a product called Up Against the Wallpaper. Hoffman attacked the sketch as "a major sellout....He was a caricature of Jerry Rubin making fun of the '60s, but he was not pushing a point, an alternative." If you're plotting Rubin's political trajectory, you can mark 1975 as the year he moved to the right of Tommy Smothers.
Trajectories
To fully comprehend the yippies, you have to look at what they did in the '70s and '80s as much as the '60s. Hoffman got arrested on cocaine charges and subsequently spent six years underground. Rubin plunged into the New Age movement and sampled a series of self-improvement techniques. In his 1976 book Growing (Up) At 37, Rubin wrote about his experiences with everything from primal scream therapy to est; in one bizarre section, the man who once preached the life-changing virtues of LSD now waxed poetic about carrot juice.
Meanwhile, out on the lam, Hoffman wrote this in a letter to his wife:
Drugs have no intrinsic value. All communist countries have correctly outlawed them. There are loads of other exhilarating ways to get high. Communist governments have a cultural revolution to achieve that is national in scope. Our task in the U.S. is to build countercultural institutions that make the raising of children breeding grounds for revolution and rebellion against the wishes of the dominant, decadent culture.
His real views revealed at last? A temporary affectation by a man whose underground life had unleashed an identity crisis? Or maybe just a spasm of guilt in the wake of the coke bust? Who knows for sure? When he surfaced in the '80s, Hoffman crusaded against Reagan's drug war, and his passion for the issue certainly seemed sincere then.
By that time, Rubin had come up from the broader cultural underground, getting a job on Wall Street and later arranging networking parties for young professionals at the Palladium. I saw him debate Hoffman in the mid-'80s, when he and his sparring partner toured together as the Yippie vs. Yuppie show. Hoffman was high on the Sandinistas; Rubin preferred Gary Hart. The majority of the audience seemed to think Rubin was a right-wing sellout. Most of the rest thought Hoffman was a dinosaur who hadn't changed with the times.
Neither view was entirely accurate. Rubin insisted that his new self wasn't so distant from his old self, declaring in 1982 that his networking salons came "out of my 1960s organizing experience." He added, "I really don't think that I've become the person or symbol that I preached against in the '60s. I'm not a warmonger or munitions seller or corporate pig." Hoffman, in his own way, was intensely aware of the differences between the decades. In the last book he published before his death, 1987's Steal This Urine Test, he described a 1983 environmental fight in which "our protest song (as it should be in all environmental battles) was 'America the Beautiful.'...[I]t was very hard to sing it during the sixties as we were being shot, clubbed, jailed, and illegally wiretapped by the government. Especially hard while the mob sang all the patriotic songs. Today it seems appropriate." When Hoffman committed suicide in 1989, the Fifth Estate, an anarchist newspaper in Detroit, complained in an otherwise warm obit that his rhetoric had grown suspiciously patriotic in the last decade of his life.
This is what happens when the counterculture spills out of the '60s and sloshes all over society. It takes new forms, from Rubin's New Age capitalism to Hoffman's all-American socialism. I doubt the yuppie networkers at Rubin's Manhattan salons—young professionals hunting for business partners, bedmates, coke connections—thought of themselves as children of the '60s. But they were, just as surely as Hoffman's Springsteenian patriots were creatures of the Reagan era.
Yippies and CREEPs
The official yippie organization, the Youth International Party, kept chugging away in the '70s and afterwards, putting out a paper filled with conspiracy theories and paeans to pot. More recently, its surviving members have opened an archive and performance space in Greenwich Village, dubbed the Yippie Museum and Cafe. Jerry Rubin's favorite uncle was a vaudeville star; now the movement he helped to start has its very own vaudeville venue.
And that, in a roundabout way, leads us to one more parallel between the yippies and the Nixonites. Both were masters of the media-savvy political prank.
In 1967, for example, Hoffman called a press conference to announce the invention of LACE, a drug that made people have sex. Three couples in his apartment demonstrated the imaginary chemical's alleged effects for the onlooking press corps, who went on to report that the protesters were planning to spray their new weapon at cops and National Guardsmen at a demonstration outside the Pentagon. "The function of this was to manipulate the media," says Krassner. "We said we were going to spray them at the Pentagon. Of course this made the local papers, the newsmagazines, and the wire services—and a lot of people became aware of a demonstration that they hadn't heard of before." The possibility of seeing some cops and hippies getting it on, or perhaps getting sprayed themselves, surely swelled the crowds as well.
There are obvious differences between such antics and the dirty tricks deployed by Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President, but there are structural similarities as well, a common interest in cracking open the media and playing with the narratives being projected. In 1972, when Pete McCloskey challenged Nixon in the Republican primaries, a young conservative named Roger Stone made a donation to the insurgent's campaign in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance. (The original plan was to use the Gay Liberation Front, but Stone felt that would be an affront to his masculinity.) According to the Senate Watergate Report, Stone and his confederate Herbert Porter then "drafted an anonymous letter to the Manchester Union Leader and enclosed a photocopy of the receipt."
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