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.