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Enter Bobby. YIP seemed doomed. New York cops broke up the yippie invasion of Grand Central Station; kids who valued their skulls began to stay away in droves. Bobby Kennedy's entry into the 1968 presidential race, followed by Lyndon Johnson's dropout, sent yippie stock tumbling. As Abbie notes: "Come on, Bobby said, join the mystery battle against the television machine. Participation mystique. Theater-in-the-streets. He played it to the hilt. And what was worse, Bobby had the money and power to build the stage. We had to steal ours. It was no contest." Worse still, many yippies really liked Bobby. A planned YIP "festival of love" in Chicago, intended as the young party's high point, suddenly seemed impossible. If Bob Kennedy were nominated at the Democratic Convention, which the lovefest was meant to attack, many yippies who admired Kennedy would probably have dropped out of the movement. The party was on the verge of disbanding.
The assassination removed the only leader capable of capturing the allegiance of the far-out. "We postponed calling off Chicago," Hoffman explains, "and tried to make some sense out of what the hell had just happened. The United States was proving more insane than Yippie! Reality and unreality had in six months switched sides. It was America that was on a trip: we were just standing still."
Levity and Levitation. Not for long. Yippie goings-on during the Democratic Convention in Chicago brought the movement prominence far beyond its numbers ("From four to 200,000, depending on the weather," according to Hoffman); the clubs of Dick Daley's cops, used indiscriminately on yippies, newsmen and bystanders, even won it some measure of sympathy. Essentially, the movement remains devoted to what Hoffman calls a "free America," by which he means an America in which no body has to pay for anything. In the upcoming Nixon Administration, the YIP will doubtless find ample targets for further demonstrations—perhaps an attempt to levitate the Treasury Building. Nothing violent, though. Alone among all the anti-Establishment revolutionary forces in the U.S., YIP doesn't believe in it. "Although I admire the revolutionary art of the Black Panthers," says Abbie, "I feel guns alone will never change this System. You don't use a gun on an IBM computer. You pull the plug out."