Leary, Timothy Francis

(b. 22 October 1920 in Springfield, Massachusetts; d. 31 May 1996 in Beverly Hills, California), psychologist, writer, advocate of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and other hallucinogenic drugs as a means of expanding consciousness, and author of the phrase “tune in, turn on, drop out,” which captured the spirit of the hippie movement in America during the 1960s.

Leary was the only child of Timothy Leary, Sr., a U.S. Army captain and sometime dentist, and Abigail Ferris, a teacher. Leary grew up Irish Catholic in the medium-sized industrial city of Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was exposed to the fiercely religious, family-oriented, traditional moralistic attitudes of the Ferris clan and the “sexy, fun-loving, and self-oriented” inclinations of the Leary line. Timothy, Sr., nicknamed “Tote,” was a colorful alcoholic who often recited Shakespeare, Poe, Keats, and other great poets while intoxicated and was “a disdainer of the conventional way.” Leary’s greatest influence came from his father’s side of the family, from whom he learned how to “be happy” by asserting his individuality. By the age often, Leary was reading eight to ten books a week and adopting the advice of his grandfather (a wealthy retired doctor also named Timothy): “Never do anything like anyone else. Be one of a kind!” Leary’s grandfather died when Leary was thirteen. Shortly thereafter, when a large inheritance never materialized, Leary’s father got drunk and abandoned the family to make a new life for himself performing dentistry in Boston, working construction in South America, then traveling as a steward on transatlantic ships. It was twenty-three years before Leary saw his father again.

Leary was already rebelling against authority by the time he attended Classical High School in Springfield, so much that no one would write him a recommendation for college. His mother pulled strings to get him accepted into the Jesuit College of Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, which he attended from 1938 to 1940. Leary considered these first years of education “unfortunate.” In 1940 Leary was accepted into West Point, based on his excellent test scores, but a drinking incident involving upperclassmen prompted the Cadet Honor Committee to punish Leary by demanding that no one speak to him. Leary was quickly acquitted of the charges, but the resentful committee maintained the punishment for nine months. Leary agreed to leave West Point in his sophomore year (1941), on the condition that the honor committee publicly proclaim his innocence. A prepared statement was read to cheering crowds in the dining hall, and Leary left West Point. He was accepted into the University of Alabama in 1942, where he majored in psychology. Shortly after beginning studies there, he was expelled for spending the night in the girl’s dormitory. Losing his deferment over the incident, he was called up just after Christmas in 1942 and was sent to Fort Eustis, Virginia, for basic training. Because the military needed psychologists, they offered anyone with a psychology background the opportunity to return to school. While in the army he returned to the University of Alabama, where he completed his undergraduate degree in psychology (1943). He was transferred to the Army Medical Corps hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he continued training in clinical psychology. It was there he met his first wife, Marianne Busch; they were married on 12 December 1944. In 1946 he earned an M.S. degree in psychology from Washington State University. The Learys moved to Berkeley, California, in 1946, and had two children, Susan and Jack. Leary received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 and taught there as an assistant professor from 1950 to 1955, when he was appointed as director of psychological research at Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California. Although Leary’s professional career was doing well, his home life was turbulent. He and Marianne both drank heavily and frequently argued. In October 1955 Marianne, who suffered from postpartum depression after the birth of Susan, committed suicide by closing herself in the garage with the car running. Leary found her body on the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday.

In 1957 Leary published his first book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, which was well received. The work questioned the efficacy of traditional psychotherapeutic methods. Disillusioned with a profession that “didn’t seem to work,” Leary quit his position at Berkeley and spent some time in Europe living on a small research grant. In Europe he received a visit from Frank Barron, a previous Berkeley colleague, who told Leary about his religious experience after eating “sacred mushrooms” in Mexico. Ironically, Leary warned Barron that he would lose credibility if he continued experimenting with the hallucinogenic fungus. During 1959, while living in Florence, Leary interviewed with David McClelland, then director of the Harvard Center for Personality Research. McClelland was impressed with Leary, and in 1960 Leary became a lecturer at Harvard. In the summer of that same year, while vacationing in Cuernavaca, Mexico, an anthropologist from the University of Mexico offered Leary some of the mushrooms described by Barron. Leary tried them and had a life-altering experience, during which he concluded that reality was merely “social fabrication.” Leary received permission from Harvard to perform research into the psychological effects of psilocybin. Leary experimented with psychedelics, using graduate students, divinity students, and select prisoners at Concord State Prison as subjects. Leary also began working with Richard Alpert, an assistant professor at Harvard who also experimented with the mind-expanding properties of hallucinogenic drugs. Alpert later achieved recognition as Baba Ram Dass, an advocate of Eastern philosophy and religion.

When Michael Hollingshead, a British philosophy student, exposed Leary to LSD, Leary said he had “the most shattering experience of… [his] life,” and the focus of his research shifted to LSD. Leary “turned on” many notable literary figures, antiwar protestors, musicians, and artists to psychedelics, such as Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Thelonious Monk, and Abbie Hoffman. By 1962 Leary and Alpert’s LSD experiments had gained international attention. But many parents and conservative colleagues, who were upset that Leary was giving drugs to students, put pressure on Harvard, and the university sought to gain tighter supervision over the experiments. The Narcotics Bureau became involved, and the Central Intelligence Agency began tracking Leary’s activities. Leary objected to the loss of control, and in 1963 he and Alpert were dismissed from their positions at Harvard. Both continued their experimentation with psychedelic drugs on a 4,000-acre, sixty-four-room estate owned by William Mellon Hitchcock in Millbrook, New York. In 1964 Leary married his second wife, Nena Von Schle-brugge, a model. Shortly thereafter, Leary and Alpert fell into discord over how Millbrook was being run and went separate ways. In 1967 Leary and Nena divorced, and on 11 November of that year Leary married Rosemary Woodruff, an actress.

As the government developed new antidrug policies, it became more difficult for Leary to continue his experimentation unhindered. When he took Rosemary Woodruff and his two children to Mexico for a vacation, they were denied entrance into the country. On their way back home, the police in Laredo, Texas, found ten dollars worth of marijuana on his daughter, Susan. Leary took the blame for the drug and was sentenced to thirty years. Susan was sentenced to five. Leary’s popularity among young antiestablishment types soared, while President Richard Nixon dubbed him the “most dangerous man in America.” Meanwhile, in 1965, after a trip to India, Leary formed the League of Spiritual Discovery and sought constitutional protection for the use of LSD as a religious sacrament. In 1966 G. Gordon Liddy, then assistant prosecutor for the State of New York, led a raid on Millbrook. Shortly after the raid, the Millbrook era ended.

Under the guidance of Marshall McLuhan, Leary sought to counter the increasingly militant antidrug movement and garner public support for LSD. Leary constructed a smiling on-camera image that associated LSD with positive qualities, such as intelligence, creativity, and religious revelation. It was around this time that Leary coined his most famous phrase, “tune in, turn on, drop out.” According to Leary, “tune in” meant to “activate your neural and genetic equipment,” “turn on” meant to “interact harmoniously with the world around you,” and “drop out” meant to engage in “an active selective and graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments.” The more general understanding of the phrase, particularly by the establishment and the media was that the phrase meant drop out of school and get high.

The family moved to Laguna Beach, California. While his Texas conviction was still on appeal, Leary got involved in the antiwar movement and recorded music with Jimi Hendrix, Stephen Stills, and Buddy Miles. Leary sang along when John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang “Give Peace a Chance” to the media from their honeymoon bed. In 1969 Leary made a failed bid for governor of California. The Beatles song “Come Together” was written by John Lennon for the occasion.

Leary’s Texas conviction was finally overturned by the Supreme Court, but his legal problems were not over. He was arrested in California for possession of two roaches (the stubs of marijuana joints) and sentenced to ten years. The crime usually warranted six months probation. Leary was sent to a minimum security prison in San Luis Obispo, California, while he sought an appeal to the conviction. At the age of forty-nine, feeling persecuted by Nixon and the government, Leary escaped prison and sought asylum with the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers. But Cleaver considered Leary a security risk and put him and Rosemary under house arrest, so the couple fled to Switzerland. When the Swiss government refused him asylum, he fled to Afghanistan, where he was arrested at the Kabul airport.

Leary and Rosemary separated in October 1971. From 1972 to 1976 Leary spent time in many prisons. After his release Leary went to Hollywood, California. On 18 December 1978 Leary married his fourth wife, Barbara Chase, and he helped raise Zachary, her son from a previous marriage. Leary spent the 1980s lecturing at colleges. For one series of lectures in 1982, he shared the stage with his former nemesis, G. Gordon Liddy. In 1983 Leary formed Futique, a software company, and exhibited strong interest in the Internet and virtual reality. Leary believed technology would take up where the psychedelic movement of the 1960s had left off.

In 1990 Leary’s daughter, Susan Leary Martino, hanged herself in a Los Angeles jail, which hit Leary hard. Barbara left Leary in 1992. Three years later Leary learned he had inoperable prostate cancer. He remarried Rosemary Woodruff on 21 March 1995 and embraced the act of dying with the same enthusiasm that had fueled many of his previous endeavors. Leary passed away quietly in his sleep a little after midnight on 31 May 1996. He died a twentieth-century icon surrounded by loved ones. His ashes were shot into space on a Spanish satellite in 1997. His final words were, “Why not?”

Leary’s autobiography, Flashbacks (1983), covers his life from birth to 1983. Several of his early essays are collected in Politics of Ecstasy (1968), and High Priest (1968) includes details about his days at Millbrook. Robert Forte’s Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In (1999) collects the views of those close to Leary. Valuable coverage also appears in Laura Mansnerus, “At Death’s Door, the Message Is Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out,” New York Times (26 Nov. 1995), and “Terminal Man,” Los Angeles Times (28 Aug. 1995). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 1 June 1996) and Rolling Stone (11 July 1996).

Kevin Alexander Boon