For readers interesting in learning more about individuals mentioned in the interview, here are some links:

The Hoffman Family Papers, a collection at the University of Connecticut at Storrs

Jerry Rubin

Anita Hoffman

Florence Hoffman, Abbie's mother

Abbie Hoffman short biography and obituary

For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, a biography by Jonah Raskin

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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.

Wallach: Are you going to do it?

Hoffman: I turned it down, no.

Wallach: 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.

Wallach: 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.

Wallach: 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.

Wallach: 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.

Wallach: 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 Internacional Barricada, which comes straight out of Nicaragua.

Wallach: Did you meet 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.

Wallach: 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.