Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

“Hey,” Abbie shouted, “this is pretty fuckin’ powerful acid!”

  We watched Lyndon Johnson on the news. The TV set was black-and-white, but LBJ on LSD was purple and orange. His huge head was sculpted into Mount Rushmore. “I am not going to be so pudding-headed as to stop our half of the war,” he was saying. And the heads of the other presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—were all snickering to themselves and covering their mouths with their hands so they wouldn’t laugh out loud.

  That dolphin was right.The political system could evolve into a compassionate governing body; the economic system could evolve into a humane process; and progress itself could evolve into a balance of decentralization and the global village. But for now, all we knew was that we would have to go to the Democratic convention in Chicago the next summer to protest the war in Vietnam and help speed up the process of evolution just a little.

  That evening I followed a neighborhood crow down the road, then continued walking to town by myself to use the telephone. First I called Dick Gregory, since it was his city we were planning to invade. He told me he had decided to run for president, and he wanted to know if I thought Bob Dylan would make a good vice president.

  “Oh, sure, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think Dylan would ever get involved in electoral politics.”

  Gregory would end up with assassination researcher Mark Lane as his running mate. Next, I called Jerry Rubin in New York to arrange for a meeting when we returned. The conspiracy was beginning.

  On the afternoon of December 31, 1967, several activist friends were gathered at Abbie and Anita’s apartment, smoking Columbian marijuana and planning the Chicago action. Our fantasy was to counter the convention of death with a festival of life. While the Democrats would present politicians giving speeches at the convention center, we would present rock bands playing in the park. There would be booths with information about drugs and alternatives to the draft. Our mere presence would be our statement.

  We needed a name, so that reporters could have a who for their journalistic who-what-when-where-and-why lead paragraphs. A couple of months earlier, the Diggers had organized a parade in San Francisco to declare “The Death of Hippie.” Instead, they wanted to be called “free Americans.” It never quite caught on. Nobody was out there yelling, “Get a haircut, you filthy free American!”

  But, whereas the Diggers wanted to avoid all the attention brought about by the media, we sought to utilize the media as an organizing tool. I felt a brainstorm coming on. I went into the bedroom so that I could concentrate. I paced back and forth, juggling titles to see if I could come up with words that would make a good acronym. I tried Youth International Festival. YIF. Sounds like KIF. Kids International Festival? No, too contrived. Back to YIF. But what could make YIP? Now that would be ideal, because then the word Yippie could be derived organically from YIP. “Yippie” was a traditional shout of spontaneous joy. We could be the Yippies! It had just the right attitude.

  “The Yippies” seemed like the most appropriate name to signify the radicalization of hippies. What a perfect media myth that would be. And then, working backward, it hit me. Youth—this was essentially a movement of young people involved in a generational struggle. International—it was happening all over the world, from Mexico to France, from Germany to Japan. And Party— in both senses of the word. We would be a party and we would have a party.

  So that became our immediate consensus. We would be the Youth International Party and we would be called the Yippies! The name provided its own power of persuasion. The Yippie logo was designed by Judy Lampe, using a particular style of Japanese lithography she had studied. Yippie was simply a label to describe a phenomenon that already existed—an organic coalition of psychedelic dropouts and political activists.

  There was no separation between our culture and our politics. In the process of cross-pollination, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking marijuana in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the globe. It was the ultimate extension of dehumanization.

  That evening we watched The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on TV. Judy Collins sang Randy Newman’s song “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today,” and I started weeping at a line in the lyric, “human kindness overflowing.” Then we all went to a New Year’s Eve party. On the way, I rubbed some fresh snow into Jerry Rubin’s bushy hair, singing the commercial jingle, “Get Wildroot Cream Oil, Charlie.” It was a Yippie baptismal rite.

  I paid the rent for an office in Union Square, run by Nancy Kurshan and Walli Leff, and we held open meetings every week at the nearby Free University. In February 1968, a few of us Yippies attended a college newspaper editors’ conference in Washington, D.C. Senator Robert Kennedy happened to get off the same train that we were on. He had both come out against the bombing in Vietnam and voted for Johnson’s supplementary budget to subsidize the war. Then he announced that he would not run against Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination.

  Now, here was Kennedy, talking to an aide in the train station. Abbie, Jerry, and I stood there, looking like the psychedelic Three Stooges. This particular encounter crystallized the difference in personality of the Yippie leaders. Jerry was the left brain of the Yippies, and Abbie was the right brain. Jerry was ogling Robert Kennedy. “Look how tan he is,” Jerry said. “What an opportunity. We’ve gotta do something.” Abbie, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate a second to devise any tactic. He simply followed his impulse.

  “Bobby,” he roared, from six yards away—“you got no guts!”

  The senator flinched ever so slightly.

  As for me, two years previously I had sent reprints of an article from Dave Dellinger’s Liberation magazine—“American Atrocities in Vietnam” by Eric Norden—to the president and every senator and member of Congress. Bobby Kennedy was the only one who at least had responded. Now I was tempted to thank him, but I didn’t feel comfortable approaching him, especially on the heels of Abbie’s outburst.

  This was not Cuba. We were not a dozen bearded revolutionists hiding out in the Sierra Maestra. This was America, obsessed with the media, and that would be the Yippies’ battleground. We started with the underground press. Liberation News Service, an alternative equivalent to the establishment wire services, sent out the Yippies’ first press release, a manifesto signed by a variety of countercultural artists, writers, and musicians.

  Then, early in March, publicist Michael Goldstein secured a plush conference room at the Americana Hotel in New York City, ostensibly for the purpose of announcing Judy Collins’s new album, but the event had also been arranged to serve as a setting for the Yippies to officially proclaim their existence at an overground press conference. On this occasion, in order to emphasize the cultural over the political, Abbie and Jerry decided not to speak.

  Judy Collins declared, “We will be going to Chicago for the children.”

  I said, “Bobby Kennedy announced he wasn’t going to oppose Lyndon Johnson by seeking the nomination for president because he doesn’t want to split the Democratic Party, but human life is more important than the Republican and Democratic parties put together.”

  A reporter asked me why the Yippies weren’t supporting Eugene McCarthy. I explained that although there was no Yippie party line, it was our policy not to support any candidate. Then I criticized the McCarthy Clean-for-Gene campaign.

  I said, “Allen Ginsberg wouldn’t even be allowed to ring anybody’s doorbell unless he agreed to shave off his beard.”

  The reporter asked, “Would you cut off your hair if it would end the war?”

  Before I could answer, Ginsberg popped up and asked the reporter, “Would you let your hair grow if it would end the war?”

  Later, in the thickly carpeted corridor of the Americana, several Yippies held an impromptu contest to follow up that line of questioning, concerned with exactly how open to self-sacrifice one might
become in the pursuit of peace. Ed Sanders won, with this criterion: “Would you suck off a terminal leper if it would end the war?”

  Meanwhile, the reporters had a who for their lead paragraphs. A headline in the Chicago Daily News summed it up: “Yipes! The Yippies are Coming!” The myth was already becoming a reality. Yippie chapters were forming on campuses, and Yippies across the country were beginning to find out what to call themselves.

  After the assassination of John Kennedy, impersonator Vaughn Meader dropped out of comedy. He moved to San Francisco and become a late-blooming flower child. He returned to New York in 1968, and attended a few Yippie meetings. We invited him to play Bobby Kennedy at our counter-convention. But then, in mid-March, Kennedy announced that he was going to run for president after all.

  Furthermore, Kennedy said that he would have “great reservations” about supporting LBJ if he won the nomination and the Republicans nominated a candidate who wanted to reduce the American military in Vietnam. As a by-product of Bobby Kennedy entering the race, the enthusiasm of Yippie leaders became replaced by doubt, and there was serious talk about calling off Chicago. Were the Yippies being co-opted by Kennedy?

  On March 31, Meader asked me for a tab of LSD. That evening, President Johnson went on TV and announced that he would not seek reelection. My phone rang immediately. I answered, “I accept the nomination.” It was Vaughn Meader calling. In the middle of tripping, he had just seen Johnson’s announcement, and he couldn’t tell whether it was an acid hallucination or an April Fool’s Eve joke. But it was true—LBJ was out of the race. This was a further setback, but not only for the Yippies.

  Lenny Bruce whistled from the grave, “Whew! David Frye is screwed.”

  In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated. As attorney general, Bobby Kennedy had approved the FBI’s wiretapping of King’s phone. Now, as senator, he provided an airplane for King’s widow. In June, on the night that Kennedy won the Democratic nomination in the California primary, he was assassinated. Kennedy had been on The Tonight Show, telling Johnny Carson that cigarettes kill more people than marijuana, and I was ready to believe that Sirhan Sirhan was a hired gun for the tobacco lobby.

  On Tom Hayden’s bedroom wall, there was now a pair of framed telegrams, one inviting him to Martin Luther King’s funeral, the other inviting him to Robert Kennedy’s funeral. Kennedy’s death served to re-energize the Yippies’ plans for going to the Democratic convention. The new front-runner, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, would never disavow Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam the way Kennedy had. Humphrey would hang himself with his own umbilical cord. I assigned artist Richard Guindon to create such an illustration.

  Meanwhile, Life magazine was preparing to publish a profile of me. I had posed for photos parodying their style—playing basketball in the midst of my incredibly sloppy loft—and now their photographer was capturing my image as I lay on the floor of the airport writing a check for my ticket. The Yippies were flying to Chicago to try and get a permit for the revolution. Since I had no identification, the airline wouldn’t accept my check, so the Life photographer bought my ticket with his credit card.

  In Chicago, we were in the office of Mayor Richard Daley’s assistant, Deputy Mayor David Stahl, in a futile attempt to obtain permits to sleep in the park, set up a sound system, and march to the convention center.

  Stahl asked me, “What are you guys really planning to do at the convention?”

  I said, “Didn’t you see Wild in the Streets?”

  In that movie, based on a short story in Esquire, teenagers put LSD into the water supply and took over the government, reducing the voting age to fourteen. This may have been one reason the Daley administration thought that the Yippies were actually planning to put LSD into the water supply.

  “Wild in the Streets?” Stahl repeated. “We’ve seen Battle of Algiers.”

  In that black-and-white documentary-style movie, a guerrilla woman wearing a burka walks freely through a security checkpoint and plants a bomb in a café. The camera pans around to show the innocent face of a child eating an ice-cream cone who is among those innocent citizens about to be blown up.

  (In a Black Panther trial, the prosecution showed the jury Battle of Algiers to indicate the Panthers’ state of mind, and the defense showed them Z, about a police state, to indicate the prosecution’s state of mind.)

  What was to happen on the summer of ’68, then, would be a clash between our mythology and their mythology. Abbie remained in Chicago to organize for the event. Jerry said, “I feel like Fidel Castro when he left Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia.” I continued to be a media spokesperson for the Yippies. If you gave a good quote, they would give you free publicity.

  “Do you plan to live in tents?”

  “Well, some of us will live intense, and other will live frivolously.”

  “Why don’t you go to the Republican convention in Miami?”

  “What, during the off-season?”

  “Do the Yippies have a party line?”

  “Yeah, we’re gonna roll a ball of string all the way from New York to Chicago, and that’ll be our party line.”

  “Suppose the war in Vietnam ends—then what will happen to the Yippies?”

  “We’ll do what the March of Dimes did when the polio vaccine was discovered—we’ll switch to birth defects.”

  I objected when Abbie came up with “Kill your parents!”—but Jerry eagerly latched on to it. I knew it was only a metaphorical slogan, not supposed to be taken literally. Still, Abbie had two children by his first marriage—he didn’t want them to kill him—and Jerry was already an orphan. A photo of Jerry made the cover of the National Enquirer with this headline: “Yippie Leader Tells Children to Kill Their Parents!”

  A reporter for the CBS Evening News interviewed Abbie and me. Abbie said, “I’m prepared to win or die.” That never got on the air. The reporter asked me, “What do the Yippies actually plan to do in Chicago?” I smiled. “You think I’m gonna tell you?” That portion of my answer was used to end Walter Cronkite’s segment on the Yippies, but my follow-up sentence—“The first thing we’re gonna do is put truth serum in the reporters’ drinks”—was omitted. They had beaten me at my own game.

  Before the birth of Yippie, Abbie had been using the Diggers’ name to describe himself and other local community organizers. Emmett Grogan demanded that he stop. This was symbolic of the fierce rivalry between them. Even though Grogan had lent Abbie a pile of Digger leaflets in a spirit of cooperation, he resented Abbie for imitating the Diggers, from opening a Free Store on the Lower East Side to burning a dollar bill at a rally.

  Grogan snarled, “You’re a fuckin’ copycat. The Diggers were burning money a couple of fuckin’ years ago!”

  I had told the Diggers of a conference at a campground in Denton, Michigan, sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society. They arrived in the middle of Tom Hayden’s speech and were so disruptive that SDS accused them of being CIA. Grogan climbed onto a table and delivered a loud, mean-spirited, more-radical-than-thou rap. Then he jumped off the table and shoved it toward the audience—just a prop in his theater of cruelty.

  I didn’t expect to see this kind of hostility. Originally I was charmed by the gentleness of Digger pranks. Peter Berg had conned two reporters—one from Time and one from The Saturday Evening Post, both wearing hippie garb—into interviewing each other as manager of the Free Store.

  When Abbie re-enacted Grogan’s gesture on another occasion, overthrowing a table during his own speech, that only made Grogan cling more adamantly to his proprietary attitude. When he learned that Abbie had compiled a booklet, Fuck the System, he assumed it was based on the Digger leaflets, and he exploded with rage. At 3 am he took a cab to Abbie and Anita’s apartment. Grogan knew that Abbie was in Boston and spoke with him on the phone. He then proceeded to rape Anita in order to get even with Abbie. To compound the despicable nature of that act of revenge, he later boasted about it in his autobiography, Ringole
vio, written in third person:Emmett got himself a can of something from the refrigerator and watched the movie [on TV] and talked with Anita for a while, before he took what he had to take, to show Abbot Hoffman how something “free” could be stolen and how it felt to have it taken.

  When Anita told Abbie what happened, he got into an old-fashioned fistfight with Grogan, like a couple of street kids in a time warp. Nobody won. I asked Anita if she would prefer that I not write about the incident.

  “Naturally, no one likes to be identified as a victim,” she said, “so I’m not fond of discussing this, but I certainly see no reason to protect Grogan.”

  The Mad Scientist was neither mad nor scientific. Actually, he had been active in theater. However, when he took LSD for the first time in a lighting booth where he watched a production of Cyrano he had directed, he decided to leave the theater for the streets. In May 1968, he was in Paris with a suitcase full of hashish. He had been tangentially political before, but now he found himself in the middle of a citizens’ revolt.

  Barricades were being erected with the same cobblestones that had been dug up in the original French Revolution. The physical experience of being there served to radicalize him. None of his friends was a chemist, but somehow they had learned to make hash oil. Meanwhile, he was feeling a cultural force from America—the Yippie myth had crossed the Atlantic—and he decided to go to Chicago.

  On the weekend before the convention, the Mad Scientist went strolling through Lincoln Park, asking, “Do you know Abbie Hoffman?” Eventually, he asked Abbie himself, and before you could say “hidden laboratory,” there was one. The lab consisted of long tables, spread out with hundreds of packages of Bugler tobacco. The hash oil was cut with pure grain alcohol, put in atomizers, and sprayed on the tobacco, which was then rolled into joints, placed back in the packages, and given away as Yippie cigarettes.