On January 12, 1970, sixteen weeks into their trial for "conspiracy to incite a riot" at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the "Chicago 8" minus one sat down around a square table for a roundtable discussion. It was fitting: they were all square pegs in a round hole and it was for this as much as anything that they were on trial. Amid all the humorous banter (Hoffman, as ever, being at once hyperbolic yet entirely cogent in his analysis), a picture emerges of Judge Julius J. Hoffman's courtroom that is straight out of 1984: this is a trial for a "criminal state of mind" in which "intent" is the key word; a trial for a decade of unnamed and unspecified political activities; a mistrial. Hoffman, Hayden, Rubin, Dellinger and others (Bobby Seale, jailed for contempt of court, being conspicuous in his absence), interviewed by R. G. Davis, paint a verbal picture of the times, with its undercover agents, its mock courts and its high points, like the image of Allen Ginsberg reciting his poem "Howl" in the courtroom. Conspiracy 8 is nothing if not rough-the munching of sandwiches and the asides are all there, but perhaps it's just as well: in this casual setting, everyone seems very much himself, revealing a cannily banal Jerry Rubin and an insightful (not incite-ful) Dave Dellinger. Abbie Hoffman's "off-camera" remark (on camera), "Fuck the Movement, I hate the Movement," captures the mixture of good-humored wickedness and utter cynicism that informed his politics.