Leary, Timothy (1920-1996)

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Leary, Timothy (1920-1996)

Who was Timothy Leary? Prophet? Charlatan? Mystic? Mephisto? Years after his death his legacy is still contested, with advocates and detractors both passionately debating his worth. The Pied Piper of LSD, the man who coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out," eulogized in song, his image disseminated on posters, Leary was perhaps the most famous academic of the 1960s, ranking with Marshall McLuhan as prophet of the post-industrial age. He began the decade as a Harvard professor and ended it in prison. During his life he was a clinical psychologist doing groundbreaking work in behavioral change, but he became a rebel, a guru, a fugitive, and a prisoner. Leary's life never lacked for adventure, nor his work for controversy, but to this day it remains unclear whether drugs were his salvation or his ruin.

Born to an alcoholic Army dentist and a prim New England aristocrat, in his autobiography, Flashbacks, Leary claimed he was conceived the day after prohibition took affect, implying a predestined—or ironic—connection to drug prohibition. His upbringing displayed a classic Irish schizophrenia. His father came from an upper-crust Boston-Irish family—rebellious, irreverent, and idiosyncratic—while his mother was a member of a devoutly religious family of conservative gentleman farmers. As a youth, Leary was more inclined towards his paternal side; he was kicked out of several colleges before being drafted in 1943. He spent the war stateside working as a clinical psychologist at an Army hospital in Virginia where he met his first wife, Marianne. With a family to support, Leary forswore rebellion, attaining a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. With two small children, a house, and a post at the Kaiser Research Facility in Oakland, Leary appeared to have settled into the sedate life of an academic. He might have continued along this path had his wife not committed suicide the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday. Her death threw Leary's entire world into tumult—in four months his hair turned completely gray—but it also liberated him. Resigning his position, Leary fled with his children to Europe with the vague notion of working up the data he had amassed from his years at Kaiser.

While at Kaiser Leary had made a crucial discovery. With a waiting list of patients at the clinic, Leary and his colleague, Frank Barron, devised a simple way to test the efficacy of therapy: those who received therapy and those on the waiting list were tracked and then compared. "To say they were horrified by what they found is a little strong—amazed, worried amused, disturbed—you could use any of those," writes Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven. "Because what they found was that there was no difference. Roughly a third of each group had stayed the same, a third had improved, and a third had deteriorated." Behavioral change became Leary's obsession; in Florence, where he had settled, it was his intention to work on his findings, but he was unmotivated and at loose ends. Frank Barron, now teaching at Harvard, visited Leary, bringing with him tales of the wondrous drug, Psilocybe mexicana, he had recently taken in Mexico. Leary was skeptical. He was more enthusiastic, however, when Barron mentioned that his boss, David McLelland, director of the Harvard Personality Clinic, was vacationing in Florence. Leary paid him a visit, carrying along a backpack full of manuscripts, and walked away with a lectureship.

Leary's career was back on track, but Harvard would eventually prove his downfall as an academic. When he arrived in the fall of 1959, he was nearing 40 and was at the bottom rung of the academic ladder, but he proved to be a popular lecturer, charming his students and faculty members alike. He had forgotten all about Barron's glowing praise of magic mushrooms, but while vacationing with Barron in Mexico that winter, Leary tried Psilocybe mexicana; he returned to Harvard a changed man. With the blessing of McLelland, Leary inaugurated what became the infamous Harvard Psilocybin Project, using a synthesized version of the mushroom manufactured by Sandoz Laboratory of Switzerland.

Far from being quixotic, Leary knew exactly what he was after with the Harvard project. He was still searching for that elusive vitalizing transaction—that key to lasting behavioral change—and he had a suspicion that hallucinogens held the key to sloughing off conditioning. The rumors of strange goings-on at Leary's Cambridge house were soon alarming the Harvard authorities, but Leary staved them off for the time being. He had come up with an inspired study to test psilocybin's efficacy in effecting behavioral change: he would give the drug to inmates at Concord State Prison, and monitor the change in values and recidivism rate of the test group. The change was miraculous, but it underscored a point of contention between Leary and his superiors. "The prisoners were changing true enough," writes Stevens, "but they were changing in a way that made science uncomfortable: they were getting religion. And if psilocybin could do that to hard-core cons, imagine what it was doing to the members of the psilocybin project." After the Harvard Crimson (the school newspaper) published a series of articles in which Leary was taken to task for his sloppy science, the long-brewing conflict came to a head. Before he was asked to leave, Leary resigned.

Psychedelics had accessed a utopian strain in Leary's character, and he became obsessed with forming a psychedelic community to continue his research and train psychedelic guides and disciples. Leary and his co-conspirators returned to Mexico where they hoped to establish a research facility; they were expelled within two weeks. They then set up shop in the Dominican Republic with similar results. Antigua also evicted them, but upon returning to Cambridge, heiress Peggy Hitchcock volunteered her family's estate in upstate New York. Millbrook was a five mile square estate with an enormous mansion and several buildings dotting the property. It was the ideal locale for their project, situated close enough to New York to attract New York's intelligentsia, whose paid attendance offset expenses. Millbrook evolved into part retreat, part research project, and part conference center. It proved to be the quiet before the storm, for Leary had not yet been dismissed as a menace to society. Participants remember it as an idyllic place. The interior and exterior of the big house, as the main mansion was called, were covered with psychedelic murals, and visitors were frequently treated to the sight of jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson puttering in the garden or society matrons high on one of a variety of controlled substances.

Tumult had become Leary's operating paradigm. He already had the rebel's instinct for jumping into the fray, and his experience at Harvard had reaffirmed his conviction that to buck the authorities was his destiny. Thus, after being busted for marijuana possession while en route to Mexico with his new wife, Rosemary, and his two children, he returned to Millbrook full of plans to further expand the consciousness revolution. He met with Marshall McLuhan, who told him to keep a positive profile and use the tools of Madison Avenue to make his case, singing "Lysergic Acid hits the spot, 40 billion neurons, that's a lot." Not long afterwards, Leary coined his famous phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," which was taken up as a standard in the burgeoning hippie movement. Psychedelic usage was spreading like wild fire, and like the officials at Harvard, it was not so much the danger to life and limb that state authorities objected to as the moral changes LSD usage seemed to inspire.

Leary's metamorphosis from drug researcher to counterculture guru was not a pleasant one. By year's end, LSD was illegal, with no visible effect on the drug's availability. LSD's illegality only heightened its allure, and incidence of adverse reactions grew to epidemic proportion. The new breed of psychedelic aficionados knew no more about Leary and his theories then that one singular phrase; he was put in the uncomfortable position of being blamed for the hippies while having little authority among them. He continued to lobby for sensible drug policies, but the situation was far beyond his control. For the remainder of the decade, Leary would be more or less sidelined in the debate, although as an icon, he was omnipresent. He became a familiar figure in books, posters, and on the radio. The Moody Blues eulogized him in a song whose opening lines went: "Timothy Leary is dead /no nana no /he's on the outside looking inside"—they had little way of knowing how prescient their lyrics were. Leary continued appearing at various events from the first human Be-In to Altamont, even running for governor of California in 1968, but with the myriad drug cases hanging over his head, he was a man preoccupied. He knew his time was running short.

With the close of the decade, Leary's role as a guru ended, and a new role, as fugitive, began. In January of 1970, he was imprisoned, looking at 20 years to life, and with Nixon in the White House, he had little doubt he would do the time. Nine months later, he was a fugitive, escaping from jail with the aid of the Weathermen Underground, fleeing the country to uneasy sanctuary in Algeria where members of the Black Panther Party had set up a United States Government-in-Exile. Tim and Rosemary were eventually placed under house arrest by the Panthers before escaping to a temporary asylum in Switzerland. In 1972, Leary was finally apprehended in Afghanistan and remanded to United States custody, where he served time in several federal and state prisons before being released in the winter of 1975. Leary remarried and spent the rest of his life developing interactive software; he was also interested in the Internet and space travel. He continued to lecture, appearing for a time in debates with his ex-nemesis, Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, and aside from a midnight raid of his Laurel Canyon home, his last years of his life were free of controversy. He died of cancer in May of 1996. Fittingly, his final resting place is in orbit; his ashes were shot into space from an island off the coast of Morocco.

Leary holds a paradoxical position in the history of American culture. His confederates blamed him for the abrupt cessation of LSD research funding, and it is possible that his reckless behavior was the reason for the abrupt cessation of the research engine. But for Leary, it was a matter of losing the battle and winning the war. In becoming an advocate for hallucinogens on a grand scale, he thought he was goading America's psychological evolution, as opposed to staying in the sterile environment of the laboratory. If ultimately he misjudged the efficacy of his tactics, that, too, is part and parcel of the man himself. Leary was the first to confess his naivete. By addressing himself directly to the baby boomers, he lost the support of the scientific establishment, and a great deal of his credibility, but for a brief time he was the spiritual leader to a generation. In a way, Leary played out the ancient role of the prophet, and he paid the price. History alone will decide whether he was a savant or addled by the very drugs he advocated.

—Michael Baers