Elders of Protest

Eighty-five-year-old David Dellinger is apologizing because age-related health concerns prevented his being in Los Angeles this week to participate in organized protests during the Democratic National Convention.

The 10-day trip he and his wife made to Okinawa City last month to join tens of thousands of peaceful protesters against American military presence on Okinawa island left the couple feeling somewhat exhausted.

Still, in a recent telephone conversation from his Vermont home, Dellinger showed the same youthful spirit of rebellion that fueled him 32 years ago--as a member of the Chicago 8.

The high-profile trial of eight antiwar activists, charged with conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, took contempt of court to new heights. This free-for-all of outrageous theatrics and flying expletives remains a symbol of a generation’s battle for freedom of political expression.

The group included Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, both antiwar activists and founders of the yippie movement; Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, co-founders of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society; Dellinger, an evangelical Christian socialist and editor of Liberation magazine; young community organizers Lee Weiner and John Froines; and Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale.

Now, 1969’s Chicago 8 trial is being revisited in a docudrama about Hoffman’s life, “Steal This Movie!” (its title is a takeoff on Hoffman’s manual for radicals, “Steal This Book”), directed by Robert Greenwald, a longtime friend of Hoffman’s.

In the last few months, the movie, presented by Lions Gate Films, has been shown in a series of benefit screenings across the country, and opens in limited release Friday.

“They call the O.J. Simpson murder trial the ‘trial of the century,’ but this was the true trial of the century,” says Seale, 60, who was bound and gagged in the courtroom for his defiant outbursts. “That daily six or seven weeks of being in the courtroom--I remember getting a report one time that they had put up 10,000 posters all over Paris, all over Europe: ‘Free Bobby Seale.’ This was about social change, and dealt with the seriousness of many more people’s lives.”

Froines and Weiner were acquitted, but guilty verdicts were returned for Hoffman, Rubin, Hayden, Dellinger and Davis, all of whose convictions and five-year sentences were overturned on appeal.

Seale’s case was later severed from the others and he was never tried, leading the press to dub the group the Chicago 7. But, says Hoffman’s longtime attorney Jerry Lefcourt, “to those of us involved, it was always the ‘8’--because Bobby was one of us.”

The Chicago 8 are now the Chicago 6. Hoffman, diagnosed with a bipolar disorder later in life, died in 1989 at age 54 in what was ruled a suicide. Rubin, who shocked the counterculture by reinventing himself as a stockbroker and businessman in the mid-1970s, died in Los Angeles in 1994 after a car struck him during a moment of minor rebellion: jaywalking.

The two acquitted members of the group could not be reached for comment. Froines, currently in Europe, has been active in defending the environment as a professor of toxicology at UCLA’s Center for Public Health, where he was involved in a recent six-year study of the effects of diesel exhaust.

Looking Back at ‘Conspiracy’

The others are reachable--and still have plenty to say. Looking back, the other four living members say that while the Chicago 8 were linked under the umbrella of the New Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (nicknamed “the Mobe”), this group charged with “conspiracy” could not have been more different from one another.

Dellinger was introduced to Hoffman by poet Allen Ginsburg. A longtime pacifist, Dellinger takes modest credit for keeping Hoffman from responding in kind to the now-legendary violence of the Chicago police toward the demonstrators during the convention.

“During the convention, or maybe just before it, there was a demonstration, and Rennie [Davis] and I were to be the speakers,” Dellinger says. “And Abbie came running up to me and he said: ‘You know, they’re beating the [expletive] out of us, and we’ve got to resist by fighting back.’

“I said to Rennie, who was at the microphone: ‘You go on talking as long as you can because I need to talk to Abbie.’ I took him around the back of the building, so we wouldn’t be seen.

“Our conversation lasted maybe 15 or 20 minutes--I argued that if we beat up the cops, they would have reasons to beat us up, and that would just hurt our cause.” Hoffman agreed, and when it came his turn to speak, preached nonviolence.

Hoffman also came to Dellinger’s defense when Dellinger, 25-odd years older than the rest of the Chicago 8, resisted dropping acid in the social tradition of many in the antiwar crowd. “At a big dinner after we got out [of jail], people were saying to me: ‘If you’ve never taken LSD, you’d better do it now!’ But Abbie, who was sitting at my table, said: ‘Don’t tease David--he went on hunger strikes in prison that got him the same benefits that LSD did for you and me, so leave him alone.”’

Hayden, now a California state senator (D-Santa Monica), found himself even more at odds than Dellinger was with some aspects of Hoffman’s wild persona. “In all honesty, it was a tense relationship, a frictional relationship,” says Hayden, whose son, Troy Garity, portrays his father in the film.

“I think it’s safe to say I was less enamored of drugs; I understood why people were dropping out, but . . . my weakness was alcohol,” continues Hayden, 60. “I was not a promoter of artificial substances, I just didn’t think they were revolutionary. I think he would have accused me, correctly, of being linear, and political.

“A lot of it was just ego clashes; when people are stoned and you are under a lot of pressure, it’s difficult. But I have to say [drugs] seemed to be integral to his creativity.”

Hayden also is not willing to credit Hoffman for launching the counterculture movement. That distinction, he says, belongs to the Vietnam War itself.

“Bohemians and beatniks had always been in the picture, but the phenomenon on a mass scale accelerated because of the politics between 1960 and 1965,” Hayden says. “I think Abbie’s instinct was to try to organize the revolution; that’s why they invented the yippies, to try to politicize the dropouts.

“He saw himself as a fighter, and an oppositional figure, and without saying whether or not this was an ego trip, I think he wanted to make a myth of himself--Abbie was a political person trying to create a star myth, because he thought kids related to mythic personalities. That’s what [rock] musicians do; it’s what symbols of the counterculture always did.”

Hayden also believes the trial itself has taken on a mythical glow after 30-odd years. “It gets remembered for its action moments, but my memory was that it was a very grueling struggle to survive the slow-moving wheels of justice,” he recalls.

“During the trial, two Black Panthers who worked with us were shot and murdered by the police; there were 500 riots the day of our verdict. The air was just choked with tension; there seemed to be no relief, no crystal ball as to where it was all going.”

Rennie Davis is now living in Boulder, Colo., where his company, the Humanity Fund, provides support for inventors seeking to improve the world through new technologies. He is particularly excited by a new process through which he says any category of waste can be transformed into a useful consumer product. Soon to be unveiled, Davis says, is an inexpensive material for building homes using recycled human waste.

Like Hayden, Davis notes that Hoffman’s ebullience sometimes worked against the cause. “He was great, he had a sense of humor that was just electric, he really did,” Davis says. ‘But I had a sort of boy-next-door image, I was trying to hold 150 national [antiwar] organizations together through some very trying times, and Abbie didn’t always make my job too easy.

“But underneath, he was really committed to the same position we all were. If ever there was a person in history that showed the power of humor in dealing with oppression, repression or just plain authority, it was Abbie. . . . He could go into situations that were very adversarial, and even get the FBI guys laughing.”

Seale, who never met Hoffman until their joint courtroom appearance in 1969, now lives in Philadelphia, where he is trying to produce a film about the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party. He also plans to raise money for community youth programs by relaunching cookbook he wrote in 1988 (“If Jane Fonda could do a videotape on exercise, Bobby Seale could do a cookbook to raise funds for social change”), this time via the Internet, DVD and CD-ROM.

Even this new-technology project has its roots in the Chicago 8 trial--when an excited Jerry Rubin insisted that Seale should not remain a rebel without a cookbook.

“We were both in jail, and they gave us these dry bologna sandwiches and a cup of tea, and we got to talking recipes,” Seale reminisces. “I’m saying, ‘Aw, man, I could sure smother down some pork chops and some collard greens. . . .’

“And then Jerry--as they were bringing us out of lockup to take us to the Cook County courtroom the next morning, Jerry says: ‘I’ve got a great idea, you should do a cookbook!’ I said: ‘I don’t have time to do a damn cookbook, Jerry, this is a revolution!’ ”

In 2000, Dellinger, Hayden, Davis and Seale all see the same social consciousness that swelled in the ‘60s on the rise again--though this generation is as likely to take it to the Internet as to the streets.

“Things are changing very rapidly--it’s not an exaggeration to say that there is a new generation of activists,” Hayden says. “I’m not saying they speak for their whole generation, but they are definitely on the scene . . . not in 30 years have I seen anything like this.”

Offers Davis: “There was a big event in the 1960s where many millions of people came together--but for me, the big event is still in front of us, not behind us. The largest coming together in human history, I see it coming. Something that is youthful and positive and hopeful, I really do see that occurring within the next 12 to 15 years. That’s my prophecy, and I’m sticking to it.”

Seale expressed his own feelings of hope in a July 30 op-ed article for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We did it then with our lives on the line,” he wrote. “Today’s protesters can do it on a higher, more profound global level today--all in the name of a future world of collaboration and humanism, where decent relationships between peoples, nations, men and women and individuals and lifestyles, including all earth’s essentialities, ultimately prevail.

“And be ready for arrests, charges, indictments and trials. They come with the territory.”

No Generation Gap

* Wednesday night’s Santa Monica premiere drew families together. E2