OT: Jerry Rubin: Activist changed his rap
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Jerry Rubin: Activist changed his rap
By Barry M. Horstman, Post staff reporter
The man famous for saying ''Don't trust anyone over 30'' became - to use
another phrase he popularized in his youth - a capitalist pig in his 40s.
He went from being a hippie to a yippie and finally a yuppie, trading his
Che beret and anti-establishment tirades for short hair, a suit and Wall
Street.
But Jerry Rubin insisted he hadn't sold out to the Man, man.
''I would be copping out if I stayed in the myth of the '60s,'' Rubin said
two decades later. So, when he changed his rap from ''Money is violence'' to
''Money is power,'' he said this radical transformation reflected growth,
not inconsistency.
''Some of the greatest social reformers of our time,'' he added, ''were
wealthy.''
A clean-cut, bow-tied Walnut Hills High graduate of the '50s, Rubin was one
of the New Left's most audacious figures during the tumultuous '60s - when
his wild-haired, shirt-less protests, counterculture rhetoric and starring
role in the 4 1/2-month national soap opera known as the Chicago Seven kept
him at the core of the decade's social and political maelstrom.
The son of a bakery truck driver and union organizer, Rubin was born in
Cincinnati in 1938 and grew up in Avondale. While still at Walnut Hills,
where he co-edited the school newspaper, Rubin began working at The Post,
compiling high-school sports statistics. Later, while at the University of
Cincinnati, he became The Post's youth-page editor.
Twice-defeated Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson had become
Rubin's hero after the young man interviewed him in the late 1950s.
''The system crushed those hopes,'' Rubin would say later.
But it was the death of his parents within 10 months of each other in
1960-61 that more profoundly changed the young man whose childhood ambition
was to play second base for the Cincinnati Reds.
Left with a 13-year-old brother to bring up, Rubin discarded his
journalistic ambitions - having concluded reporters are ''too much the
observer'' - and took his sibling to Israel, where he studied sociology.
By 1962, he was back in the States, turning up at Berkeley to join the
embryonic Free Speech Movement, the wellspring of much of the activism of
the '60s.
A rousing orator who once took a Dale Carnegie public-speaking course, Rubin
emerged as a leader of the Bay Area's fledgling hippie and anti-war
movements. He led protesters onto rail tracks in failed attempts to block
trains carrying troops to Oakland en route to Vietnam, prodded college
students to shut down their ''voluntary prisons'' and even ran for mayor of
Berkeley - finishing second.
Masterfully manipulating the media, Rubin used ever more outrageous rhetoric
and pranks to become a national poster boy for the often surrealistic '60s.
To disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Rubin and
fellow radicals Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner formed the Youth
International Party - Yippies. With the help of the viciously aggressive
Chicago police, they succeeded beyond all expectations.
The next year, the Nixon administration brought federal conspiracy charges
against Rubin, Hoffman and six others. After U.S. District Judge Julius
Hoffman severed Black Panther leader Bobby Seale's case - and ordered him
bound and gagged in court - the Chicago Seven took center stage in September
1969.
Rubin and his co-defendants were cited for contempt nearly 200 times,
capitalizing on the media spotlight to ridicule the proceedings. Five of the
seven, including Rubin, were acquitted of conspiracy but found guilty of
intent to riot and sentenced to prison; the convictions were overturned on
appeal.
As the Vietnam War wound down, Rubin found himself a has-been at 34. Younger
members of the political/cultural movement he had helped create treated him
as passe, pointing out that, by his own ''don't-trust-anyone-over-30''
edict, he was obsolete. Newspapers increasingly used adjectives such as
''erstwhile'' and ''aging'' to describe him in ''Where is he now?'' stories.
Where Rubin was was once again reinventing himself. In the late 1970s, he
indulged in most of the Me Decade's nostrums, turning to yoga, rolfing, est,
meditation and massage to get in touch with his inner feelings.
By the '80s, he had decided that what he really wanted to get in touch with
was money. He became a Wall Street marketing analyst and venture capitalist,
using one of his specialities - hosting weekly ''networking salons'' at New
York City's famed disco, Studio 54 - to earn nearly $600,000 one year from
people who paid $8 a head to swap business cards.
It was quite a change for someone who once tossed dollar bills from the
visitors gallery at the New York Stock Exchange to display contempt for
America's economic system. Now, as Rubin chased after dollars as
unapologetically as the stock market floor traders had that day, his former
ally Hoffman engaged him in a series of ''yippie-versus-yuppie'' debates.
''The individual who signs the check has the ultimate power,'' Rubin said in
deflecting criticism that he had abandoned his '60s ideals. ''It's still all
about doing your own thing.''
In the early 1990s, Rubin - in his 50s, married and with a young daughter -
moved to Los Angeles as an independent marketer for a company that sold a
nutritional drink called Wow. There, in November 1994, he was struck by a
car while jaywalking near his Brentwood home. He died two weeks later - 26
years past the age-trust threshold that he forever implanted in a
generation's mind.
Whatever other contradictions there had been in Rubin's life, at its end,
one thing remained as true as it had been in the '60s:
In his days of manning the barricades, when asked what he did for a living,
Rubin would invariably respond: ''I'm famous. That's my job.'' For Rubin,
that didn't change when he joined the system he once had visions of
supplanting.
Publication date: 05-04-99