Following the events staged at the Stock Exchange, Rubin, captivated by Hoffman’s media savvy, invited him to aid in the organization of an upcoming demonstration sponsored by the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe). David Dellinger, the head of the Mobe, had enlisted Rubin’s help that summer, after Rubin’s bid to be elected mayor of Berkeley, California, had failed. Although he lost the mayoral race, Rubin’s knack for publicity and his ability to appeal to young people seemed, to Dellinger, just what the Mobe needed. Dellinger was seeking to bring vast numbers of protestors to Washington, DC, in October for a national antiwar demonstration. He asked Rubin to take charge of the project, hoping that Rubin would be able to deploy the creative political tactics for which he had become known in Berkeley on a national stage. By appealing to those youths who might otherwise have been reticent to take part in one of the Mobe’s more conventional actions, Dellinger hoped to assemble the largest antiwar demonstration to date. With Hoffman and Rubin composing the script, however, what was initially conceived quite literally as the antiwar movement’s March on Washington became instead another work of monkey theater.
The event, as they saw it, might begin with a march, but that march would end south of the Potomac in a massive act of civil disobedience on the grounds of the Pentagon. Dellinger protested, explaining that authorities would simply have to block the bridge leading out of Washington and their plans would be ruined, but Rubin and Hoffman were undeterred. It was essential that the demonstration engage the Pentagon, Rubin explained, for it was “a symbol so evil that we can do anything we want and still get away with it.” Thus, “Our scenario: We threaten to close the motherfucker down. This triggers the paranoia of the Amerikan government: The Man then organizes our troops for us by denying us a place to rally and march. Thus just-another-demonstration becomes a dramatic confrontation between Freedom and Repression, and the stage is the world.”33 To announce the event, Rubin and Hoffman called an official press conference on August 28. As Rubin explained, their performance was to “grab the imagination of the world and play on appropriate paranoias,” ensuring that no one would be able to ignore or forget their threats and promises in the weeks leading up to the protest.34
They assembled an appropriate cast of characters. David Dellinger and Bob Greenblatt were there as official representatives of the Mobe. Comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory was also invited, as were, Rubin recounted, “a Vietnam veteran, a priest, a housewife from Women Strike for Peace, a professor, an SDS leader,” and “Amerika’s baddest, meanest, most violent nigger—then H. Rap Brown,” who, “whether or not he even showed up at the Pentagon, would create visions of FIRE.”35 As menacing as Brown may have seemed, however, it was Hoffman who stole the show. He wore an old, unbuttoned army shirt and introduced himself as Col. Jerome Z. Wilson of the Strategic Air Command, telling reporters that he had recently deserted because of “bad vibrations.” On the day of the protest, he said, Washington’s famed cherry trees would be defoliated, the Potomac River would be dyed purple, and marijuana, which had already been surreptitiously planted on the lawn of the Pentagon, would be harvested. Moreover, he explained, as a grand finale, demonstrators would stand side by side, holding hands and chanting in a circle around the Pentagon. The importance of the circle, he explained, was that a ring of humans joining hands would cause the Pentagon to rise from the ground, and would force the evil spirits inhabiting the building to fall out. The warmongers were to be vanquished by a demonstration of countercultural “love” and “spirituality.”
Of course, Hoffman never believed that protestors would be able to levitate the Pentagon. On one hand, the claim was about numbers: the idea of the number of bodies necessary to form a circle around the Pentagon would in itself make the upcoming demonstration seem enormous. On the other hand, the exaggerated and farcical reference to a kind of mystical spirituality emblematized a number of stereotypes regarding hippies and the counterculture. Describing his motives for the claim, Hoffman wrote, “The peace movement has gone crazy and it’s about time. Our alternative fantasy will match the zaniness in Vietnam.”36 The outlandishness of this alternative fantasy would allow neither reporters nor viewers to ignore it. It would be so incredible, in fact, that it would stand in relief against the background of daily news footage from Vietnam, which, though often horrific, had become commonplace. Against this ground, Hoffman would attempt to broadcast a figure of “revolution.”
In the days following the press conference, the story of the Pentagon’s potential capture by hippies practicing a type of angrily joyful mysticism took on a life of its own. The Washington, DC, police department issued a formal statement saying that they were prepared, should the demonstration get out of hand, to use Mace to temporarily blind protestors. In response, Hoffman issued a statement of his own, claiming that hippie scientists had developed a new sex drug called Lace. “Lace is LSD combined with DMSO, a skin-penetrating agent,” he announced to the press. “When squirted on the skin or clothes, it penetrates quickly to the bloodstream, causing the subject to get sexually aroused.”37 For those who doubted his claims, Hoffman and friends staged an orgy. Reporters were told to meet at his apartment for proof of the drug’s existence. Upon their arrival, Hoffman delivered an introductory speech “full of mumbo-jumbo,” and then asked a number of “test subjects” to proceed with a “demonstration.” “The subjects shot themselves with water pistols full of purple Lace, took off their clothes, and fucked. Then they put their clothes back on, and the reporters interviewed them.”38 Within days the media was abuzz with rumors and questions about the new sex drug. As Hoffman later said, “People suspected the Lace demonstration was a put-on, but then again. . . . Hippies, drugs, orgies: it was perfectly believable.”39 Hoffman knew that in some sense the viewing public saw the counterculture as little more than a hypersexualized form of youthful rebelliousness. But rather than attempting to correct that impression, he seemed to delight in reinforcing it.
Not surprisingly, his willingness to enact these negative stereotypes for the mainstream press drew the ire of more than one critic. In his 1968 text The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodor Roszak lambasted Hoffman for promoting a debased version of “cultural revolution.” For Roszak, Hoffman’s association with the counterculture was nothing more than the result of a series of misunderstandings. The “true” counterculture, he believed, would never have “performed” for the media. To the contrary, for those who understood and shared the counterculture’s dissatisfaction, the media merely offered proof of the soullessness of contemporary society.
For Roszak—and, he argues, for members of the true counterculture—the media were ultimately symptomatic of the larger problem facing America in the mid-twentieth century, the problem of “technocratic” thought. The flood of information that confronted people in their daily lives had qualitatively transformed experience. Individuals had been subordinated to technology, categorized as sets of facts subject to specialized knowledge, and thus alienated from themselves: “In the technocracy everything aspires to become purely technical, the subject of expert attention.”40 Individual desires had been commodified and subsumed within the technocratic social order. Life, as a result, had come to seem like a parody of itself. For the first time in history it had become possible for people to believe that “real sex . . . is something that goes with the best scotch, twenty-seven-dollar sunglasses, and platinum-tipped shoelaces.”41 At the same time, though, this technocratic society carried within it the means of its own dissolution. The advanced education necessary to produce specialists in various technical fields had also equipped students with the ability to think critically about the sociohistorical conditions that necessitated such specialized knowledge. Recognizing the relationship between this highly specific knowledge, on one hand, and their own intense psychic and social alienation on the other, many of those who were to become the technocracy’s future leaders began to rebel. According to Roszak, therefore, if one hoped to understand the counterculture