In a letter home from West Point, a young cadet named Tim Leary told his mother she had him wrong. He was not out to reform the world or hand it some great metaphysical truth. "To be frank," he wrote, "what I really long for is fame."
He got it. Timothy Leary, born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 22, 1920, became a Harvard psychologist, the best known salesman for LSD, a winning litigant before the Supreme Court, a prison escapee, an exile, a government informant and, at the end, a booster for personal computers. Along the way he collected the label he is still known by. Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America," a line The New Yorker, repeating it in 2011, said came "with some hyperbole."
From Berkeley to Cuernavaca
Before the mushrooms, Leary had a fairly distinguished career. He left West Point in 1941 after a scandal over contraband liquor, and in 1950 took a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. The Annual Review of Psychology called his 1957 book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, the "most important book on psychotherapy of the year."
The same decade held a private disaster. His first wife, Marianne, died by suicide in 1955, leaving him to raise their daughter Susan and son Jack. In late 1959 he arrived at Harvard as a lecturer in clinical psychology.
In August 1960, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Leary ate psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. The arithmetic of what he said afterward drifts. In one telling he had "learned more about the mind in four hours than in 16 years" as a psychologist. In a 1965 version it was five hours against the preceding fifteen years. The boast kept its shape while the numbers moved.
Back in Cambridge he and Richard Alpert, an assistant professor who had come to Harvard in 1953, launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The plan, as Harvard's psychology department describes it, was to give the drug to volunteers and record their descriptions in real time. Neither psilocybin nor LSD was illegal in the United States then. Allen Ginsberg began steering artists their way, writing to ask, "Do you want I should take on Monk or Franz Kline or De Kooning?"
The most ambitious study, the Concord Prison Experiment, paired the drug with group therapy for inmates. Leary's team reported a dramatic fall in reoffending. A later follow-up, correcting for differences in how long each group had been tracked, found only a slight improvement that could be credited to psilocybin.
How Harvard actually let him go
By 1962 colleagues were uneasy. The researchers took the drug alongside their subjects, the subjects were not randomly selected, and critics said graduate students were being pressured to take part. Editorials in The Harvard Crimson accused the pair of promoting recreational use. They replied in a letter framing the matter as civil liberty: "Who controls your cortex?" They also agreed to keep undergraduates out.
The popular version says Harvard fired Leary for drugs. The record is more mundane. In the spring of 1963 Alpert was dismissed after giving psilocybin to an undergraduate off campus. Leary, who was not tenured, went on different grounds. A statement from Harvard president Nathan Pusey dated May 27, 1963, said he had left campus without authorization and "failed to keep his classroom appointments." His salary had already ended on April 30. Leary insisted he had met his teaching duties, and the drug controversy surely colored the decision, but the paper trail is about attendance.
Millbrook, the Senate and the slogan
Leary and Alpert moved their circle to Millbrook, a 2,500-acre estate in upstate New York owned by a wealthy patron, and ran it as a commune built around LSD sessions. With Ralph Metzner they wrote The Psychedelic Experience, a manual modeled on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, published in 1964 and a bestseller by 1966. The local prosecutor behind raids on the estate was G. Gordon Liddy, later of Watergate.
In 1966 Leary told a Senate subcommittee that trained adults should be licensed rather than the drug banned. When Ted Kennedy pressed him on the dangers, he answered, "Sir, the motorcar is dangerous if used improperly." On October 6, 1966, California banned LSD anyway. On January 14, 1967, at the Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, he gave the crowd "turn on, tune in, drop out." Harvard's own department page still prints it in a different order.
The case that beat a federal law
In December 1965 Leary drove to the border at Laredo, Texas, with his son, his daughter and two others, was apparently refused entry to Mexico, and turned back. A customs inspector found marijuana in the car and on his daughter. Leary was convicted under the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, sentenced to 30 years and fined $30,000.
His appeal was clever. The act demanded a transfer tax paid on a form whose contents were shared with law enforcement, while possession was a crime in every state. Paying meant confessing. On May 19, 1969, in Leary v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination was a full defense, and that presuming a marijuana holder knew it had been smuggled denied him due process.
Escape, exile and the deal
The victory did not keep him free. A 1968 arrest in Laguna Beach brought a ten-year sentence in 1970. Inmates were sorted by psychological tests, some of which Leary himself had designed. He answered as a conventional man keen on gardening, was sent to a lower-security prison, and in September 1970 escaped over the wall along a telephone wire. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love paid the Weathermen $25,000 to spirit him away. He lived in Algeria among exiled Black Panthers, then in Switzerland, and was seized in Kabul in 1972. In Folsom he was housed next to Charles Manson, who told him, "I've been waiting to talk to you for years."
Then came the chapter admirers tend to skip. Leary cooperated with federal agents to win early release, informing, The New Yorker reports, on former lawyers and associates. In 1974 his son Jack, Ginsberg and Alpert, by then Ram Dass, publicly denounced him. In April 1976 an essay of his ran in William Buckley's National Review, and he was paroled soon after.
After the sixties
The rest of his life ran on lectures and futurism. He toured as a "stand-up philosopher," debated his old adversary Liddy on stage in 1982, and declared that "the PC is the LSD of the 1990s." His biographer Robert Greenfield judged much of his memoir, Flashbacks, "pure fantasy." His daughter Susan died by suicide in a Los Angeles jail in 1990. Leary died of prostate cancer on May 31, 1996, at 75, and seven grams of his ashes went into orbit the next year.
Was he dangerous? The evidence points somewhere narrower than Nixon's phrase. Researchers' own drug use in the 1950s and 1960s was later cited as a concern that helped halt psychedelic research for some 20 years, and The New Yorker judged that his advocacy helped ensure the substances were criminalized. His papers, some 350 boxes, now sit in the New York Public Library, in a collection that also holds a copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson's hand.