American radical and author who was an activist from his UC Berkeley days in the 1960s when he opposed the Vietnam war. In 1968, along with Jerry Rubin, he formed an amalgam of political pranksters into the Youth International Party, the Yuppies. In 1968, they ran a pig as a candidate for the President of the United States.
He went underground in 1974 to avoid trial on cocaine possession charges, and stayed incognito for nearly seven years, working with environmental issues. He was arrested for the 42nd time in 1987 while protesting CIA recruitment at the University of Massachusetts.
A middle-class Jewish kid from the suburbs who thought of himself as a misfit, Hoffman grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. He studied psychology at Brandeis and UC Berkeley and got a job as a salesman for a pharmaceutical company. He was always the master pitchman with a million ideas a minute.
Radical politics turned out to be his drug-of-choice from the time he got hooked as a demonstrator at Berkeley, moving on to civil rights in the south and food bank organizer in New York City. By 1968, when the counterculture reached its high-water mark, he was one of its self-created superstars. Though he may not have succeeded in making a revolution out of his pranks, he did hot-wire all the cultural and political strands of the ’60s into one label, the “counterculture.”
In 1960 he married Sheila when they were just out of college. With their two small kids, she left him in 1966. His second wife, Anita Kushner, whom he married in 1967, said “I spent my days bailing him out of jail, seeing my role as a helpmate to his cause.” He and former model Johanna Lawrenson, whom he met while laying low in Mexico, were together for 14 years but never married. All of his families loved him dearly though he drew them into a vortex of which he remained the center, and could think up endless amounts of work for other people to do. Money was always a problem.
With bipolar disorder combined with a keen moral sense and a passion for justice, he was the clown prince of the left wing, the antiwar movement’s mad genius of media. He disrupted business on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange by tossing dollar bills from the balcony. He rallied 50,000 anti-Vietnam War demonstrators to levitate the Pentagon. He nominated Pegasus for President when thousands of protesters converged on Chicago to demonstrate at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The violence in the streets there led to the most famous political trial of the decade, as Hoffman and his Chicago-Eight co-defendants were charged in 1969 with conspiracy to incite riot. He was the author of “Revolution For the Hell of It,” and “Steal This Book,” 1971.
Eventually he learned that nostalgia is another form of depression. The consummate showman, he found in middle age that the curtain had closed on his act. It no longer mattered.
He was found dead in his home on 12 April 1989, laying in bed fully dressed; he had recently been fighting with a bout of depression. He had ingested a lethal mix of alcohol and the equivalent of 150 Phenobarbital pills. Though he’d been taking lithium and other prescribed drugs, he really had just given up.
Link to Wikipedia biography