The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the army in Europe, posts a type-written notice on the bulletin board at the State Teacher’s College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at this point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing. They will note when he heads west and when, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, he decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor of the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which every day shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens.” He then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.”
The files contain interviews with fellow students and teachers at the University of New Mexico, who talk of Abbey’s “instability and poor judgment,” with one interviewee saying that, as an editor, Abbey showed “a stubborn ego, a taste for shocking the reader, a lack of maturity.” Abbey, according to other colleagues, was “indiscreet in his individualism” and “demonstrated a somewhat radical rebellious quality . . .” Though the interviews are mildly damning, no one questioned the subject’s loyalty to his country.