According to his FOIA files which Edward Abbey requested from the FBI, and which the Moab Canyon County Zephyr is releasing serially, Abbey first came to the agency’s attention as editor of the University of New Mexico’s campus literary magazine The Thunderbird, when fellow students could not dissuade him from printing on its March 1951 cover:
“Man Will Never Be Free Until the Last King Is Strangled
With the Entrails of the Last Priest. –LOUISA MAY ALCOTT”
Wrote friend and colleague Jack Loeffler in Adventures with ED: “The campus went wild. Ed wouldn’t rescind the issue or apologize, and his tenure as editor was terminated.” According to an unnamed informant at UNM, Abbey showed “less sense than his fellow students.”
Actually, Abbey’s FBI file opens with his 1947 public letter calling for students to burn their draft cards. Most of the rest of his fed investigation attempts to separate fact from his fictional MONKEYWRENCH GANG, which inspired Earth First! When Edward Abbey died in 1989, there followed a rapid disintegration of Earth First, and the attempted car-bomb assassination and frame-up of organizer Judi Bari.
