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Teeny Judge. Von Hoffman is many things. He is the only really radical reporter working regularly for a major American newspaper. His writing is compelling, and although he often gets carried away by his own black sense of humor, his thinking is lucid. He is attuned to what is going on among the young, the black and the poor today. Almost by definition (and certainly by self-admission), he is biased about everything. His pieces slash away at Viet Nam, complacent politicians, the medical profession, radio journalism, big companies, the pretensions of the "Now People...
...chasing S.D.S. across America in an 1890 Pullman car." Judge Julius Hoffman of the Chicago conspiracy trial is "the teeny judge, who bounces up and down on his bench so that he looks like a small girl in an oversized dress playing in her father's chair." Says Von Hoffman: "I don't want people to think I'm an affable eccentric, so from time to time I get vicious...
Sometimes he gets so vicious that even the gamely liberal management of the Post has to wince. "They're very admirable about it," Von Hoffman says. "They just grit their teeth and look a little doe-eyed when I take on their friends, like John Gardner." Gardner, head of the Urban Coalition and something of a saint to the liberal press, became a Hoffman target after he wrote an article criticizing young demonstrators. Von Hoffman called the Gardner article a "lawnorder pep talk...
Fustian Soirees. The answer to the most commonly asked question about Von Hoffman is that he is 40. Only his writing has faded bell-bottoms and beads. His faint-striped suits are from Brooks Brothers (with cuffs). With his almost white hair combed straight back and struggling to edge down over his shirt collar and his delicately pale skin, he more resembles an aristocratic Prussian officer than a commune leader. Something of a bon vivant, he swings with more of an old-fashioned zest for good wine, women, song and conversation than with any new lifestyle. He used...
...Von Hoffman was a late arrival in the swagger set, and though amused by his new milieu, he was unshakably radicalized before he got there. Born and raised in the U.S., he finished high school in Manhattan, then drifted to Chicago. He married at 19 (three children, divorced) and worked for nine years as a low-paid assistant to Sociologist Saul Alinsky, organizing community action groups in poor neighborhoods. "In a sense, Saul brought me up," he says, "and I finally had to leave home." Starting at the Chicago Daily News, he earned a reputation as a first-class...