Abbie's lawyer at the HUAC hearing, William Kuntsler, had him out of jail and back by noon, as I recall, where he continued to work his comedy on those Kafkaesque interrogators, causing their power to disintegrate right before our eyes. How in the world could they deal with this Yankee Doodle clown, who inhabited a no-man's land between crime and comedy? Who had, not long before “the levitation of the Pentagon,” rained down money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, causing another pandemonium. What kind of crime was throwing money at stockbrokers? It seems no one was ever sure how much money Abbie and company had thrown, or even if their money had been US Federal Reserve Notes or Monopoly Game money. It didn't matter. The act was worth a zillion words.
        Abbie was an amazing genius, able to transform volumes of debate into a single act that sunk pretentions in a burst of laughter.
        Kennedy: He was one of the Chicago 8, too, wasn't he?
        Gover: Yes, Abbie was one of the Chicago 8, or 7, after the judge muzzled Bobby Seale, the single African American in the group, then threw him in prison for 4 years for contempt. It's getting arrested for the flag shirt and then Vietnamese flag painted on his back, the police van sabotage, that I remember best. I caught that sequence with my trusty 8 mm movie camera.  A sign of these times is that it's now very difficult to find online any account of his appearance before HUAC.  Seems that's been censored Soviet-style out of existence except for a piece written as a thesis by an Louisiana State University student of the performing arts.  The censors missed that one. 
            I also caught with my movie camera live televised images of tanks rolling through the streets of Chicago summer of '68 pushing a wall of barbed wire, mowing down demonstrators.  Those images have also been destroyed or hidden, for they are not shown in contemporary documentaries about that event.  Which is another reason I mourn the loss of that little documentary I made. (I made two copies; one was stolen from my Santa Barbara house, the other disappeared from an apartment I had briefly in Penns Grove, New Jersey.)  

        As Jim and The Doors were leaving for Europe, I learned that Michael Korda was the editor of Simon and Schuster, and that he had handed Herb Alexander his head, dethroned him as editor in chief of Pocket Books. I tried to call Herb again, couldn't reach him, and nobody would tell me where or when I could reach him. “He's no longer here,” was the word. Well, where is he? They did not give out personal information, I was told. Six months previous, people at Pocket Books were reading the manuscript of Poorboy at the Party and smiling at me. Suddenly I had become someone they didn't want to talk to.

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