Aging Firebrand Abbie Hoffman Trying to Carry ‘Revolution’ in the ‘80s

The hall was nearly empty, but it didn’t seem to bother Abbie Hoffman, the war-painted revolutionary of the frenzied ‘60s. For the aging radical, the fight continues no matter who is watching or listening.

“The activists are still there, but there’s a mythology that we’ve all been big-chilled,” Hoffman said just before delivering a well-advertised speech to a disappointing student turnout at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion.

“We’re still there. We haven’t sold out,” he continued, citing his violent opposition to American involvement in Central America and Libya and “moral outrage” at apartheid in South Africa.

“There’s Gloria Steinem, Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg, Jesse Jackson, the Berrigans. There’s a lot of us over 35 still fighting,” Hoffman said.

“By and large, everyone I come into contact with says they can’t fight the Establishment, that they can’t fight City Hall,” Hoffman added angrily. “I don’t accept it. Perhaps, because I’m the last romantic.”

But Hoffman, his wiry black hair and beard splotched with gray, sadly conceded, “Sometimes I get the feeling I’m the last Japanese soldier in the mountain”--a warrior unaware that the war has ended.

Hoffman, author of “Steal This Book” who plans to do a radio show in New York City soon called “Radio Free America,” will be 50 in November.

For more than six years he was a fugitive, hopscotching across the nation under the alias Barry Freed, eluding authorities who sought to arrest him in connection with a 1974 charge of selling undercover agents $36,000 worth of cocaine.

He then turned himself in and was sentenced to community service work.

Since then, the rowdy rebel has lived with his third wife, former model Johanna Lawrenson, in a modest white farmhouse in tiny Fineview, N.Y., on an island in the St. Lawrence River.

Occasionally, he still sees David Dellinger and Bobby Seale--fellow big-name activists of the turbulent ‘60s--but most leftist radicals of that era now espouse centrist attitudes that Hoffman rejects.

Hoffman has made four visits to Nicaragua over recent years, including an appearance at President Daniel Ortega’s inauguration in 1985.

He spends his time writing, organizing environmental action groups and giving about 40 lectures a year, mostly to students who were infants when he was the irrepressible symbol of the American underground as leader of the yippies, or politicized hippies, as Hoffman defined them.

Hoffman, who is writing a book titled “Doing Democracy,” a Saul Alinksy-like primer for community organizing, said he has no regrets about any of the things that made him famous--the money-burning at the New York Stock Exchange, the drugs, the charges of inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic convention that led to the celebrated “Chicago 7” trial.

“No, there are no regrets,” Hoffman said, smoothing his Navy blue T-shirt, which bore the exhortation “Save the River” across the pocket. “I would not use the same tactics today. Times are different. They wouldn’t work now.”

Later, he told about 125 students inside the 12,500-seat arena that the 1960s will not rise again.

“Dope will never be that cheap again. Sex will never be that free again, and rock ‘n’ roll is never going to be that good again,” Hoffman said, his words reverberating through the gymnasium.

Hoffman then turned serious, trying to rouse his young audience into “a sense of engagement, a feeling of making history.”

“What we’ve seen (on the college campuses) are hotbeds of social rest and yuppie training camps. . . . It’s very hard to find anyone under 35 working for social change.”

To Hoffman, the trouble with the young is that they “are not trained to question authority. It was moral outrage that triggered the ‘60s. That needs to rise up again.” In his 1980 book, “Abbie Hoffman--Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture,” he wrote, “There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning. . . . No government, no FBI, no judge, no jailer is ever gonna make me say, ‘Uncle.’ ”

Leave a mark on history, Hoffman told the students. “There might not be any money in it, but it’s more exciting than studying accounting.”

So Hoffman proudly remains “a dissident. And to dissent and to stand on the corner and say the emperor has no clothes, that’s lonely sometimes.”