The Most Dangerous Man in America

WE THROW AWAY THE KEY

Morning, May 13, 1970

Inmate 26358 is behind a wire cage, swaying with the movement of a California prison bus curling along the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s Wednesday, Dr. Timothy Leary’s eighty-fourth day of captivity, and he is being reassigned to a new prison home. He’s carrying all his possessions in a small cardboard box—two packs of Bugler roll-your-own cigarette tobacco, two ballpoint pens, and rubber shower shoes that are a good-bye present from a murderer he met in another state facility.

He is turning fifty in a few months and he’s hard of hearing but with a full head of wavy, silver-threaded hair. Lean and tan, he has the rakish good looks of an aging tennis pro at a country club, albeit one with a genius IQ, who can quote Socrates and the Bhagavad Gita while lecturing on the seven levels of consciousness or the physiological nature of a woman’s orgasm. The other prisoners on the bus—killers, thieves, and rapists on their way to Folsom or San Quentin—know his reputation. He is the godfather of the psychedelic 1960s, the High Priest of LSD who advised young people to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

The black-and-white prison bus rattles past Ventura, and Leary tries to glimpse the whitecaps of the Pacific Ocean from behind the grimy windows. He sees a group of wetsuit-clad surfers paddling out to catch some waves. At a stoplight in Santa Barbara, he glances over and sees a man in a convertible with a beautiful woman riding shotgun, her long hair blowing in the breeze. Leary sighs and looks away.

A few hours earlier, at 3 a.m., he had been immersed in a sultry dream: I’m in an exquisite house in Santa Monica, the ocean lapping outside. There is a naked woman lowering herself onto a fur rug in front of a fireplace. Some bluesy Janis Joplin music is oozing from a stereo. The reclining woman whispers to me in a velvety, druggy voice: “All I want is to feel good… just keep me high.” It was getting good, much better, until the guards suddenly barked at him in midslumber and told him to gather his shit for the trip to his new prison.

At Pismo Beach the bus chugs through the mountains and when the road opens again, Leary can see the city of San Luis Obispo ahead, surrounded by soft green hills. Soon they are passing the sprawling Cal Poly university campus, just reopening after California governor Ronald Reagan shut it down for four days following nationwide student protests.

Suddenly, another prisoner on the bus is shouting and pointing. Leary and the others turn to look. The con is gesturing toward Poly Mountain, with its fifty-foot-tall concrete P overlooking the university. Next to the giant P, some renegade students have added two new letters. Now the hillside spells out POT. The prisoners laugh and cheer.

Two miles past the campus, the California Men’s Colony–West comes into view. Clusters of simple white wooden barracks are spread out against the foothills, dotted with blooming trees. As they draw closer, Leary sees a group of old inmates playing shuffleboard while others waddle across cracked tennis courts. In the distance, out on the stark prison golf course, another prisoner is taking a practice swing before launching a drive.

CMC-West is a minimum-security facility, designed for older men who pose little threat of violence. The perimeter is patrolled at night by gun trucks with sharpshooters inside, but the only physical barrier to the outside world is a twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence, topped by three looping strands of barbed wire. Leary has been trying to get himself transferred here ever since he got sentenced. When he took the standard prison personality test that would help authorities determine where to assign him, Leary knew exactly how to reply in order to seem as docile as possible. He had designed many of the test questions himself in his earlier incarnation as a nationally respected psychologist.

As the bus lurches to the drop-off zone, one of the prisoners suddenly shouts at Leary:

“Hey, man, this is the end of the line. The Department of Correction sent you here to die.”

Leary lets the words wash over him.

He is already studying the prison layout.

In Washington, Richard Nixon’s White House is anxious for any new FBI leads about the wave of extraordinary bombings splintering the nation. Even as Leary’s bus ferried him up the California coast, a massive dynamite attack rocked the police station in Des Moines, Iowa, shattering windows and setting nearby cars on fire. In Salt Lake City, Utah, a homemade bomb blew apart the entrance to the local National Guard building.

Meanwhile, agents are still pursuing suspects from a bloody tragedy in New York City. Revolutionaries calling themselves “the Weathermen” had been working on a nail bomb, plotting to detonate it during a military dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Instead, the bomb exploded in their hands, reducing a four-story townhouse in Greenwich Village to rubble. Three of the radicals were killed. Two women emerged from the smoking ruin, bloody and dazed. Taken in by unsuspecting neighbors, they showered and were given clothes—and then they vanished.

Just last week, at Kent State University, National Guard troops fired sixty-seven shots at students protesting President Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War. Four underclassmen were gunned to death, including two young women. Two of the slain students had simply been walking to class. Nine others were wounded by gunfire. Nixon, who’d denounced student demonstrators as “bums,” defended the National Guard and blamed the victims: “When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy,” he lectured. California governor Ronald Reagan had already demanded a crackdown on campus protesters: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,” Reagan warned. “No more appeasement.”

Since Kent State, millions of college students across the country have gone on strike, taking to the streets. At the University of Wisconsin, Molotov cocktails ignited buildings and bonfires blazed as students hurled bricks, stones, and bottles at six hundred riot police and guardsmen. At the University of South Carolina, a thousand students smashed into the administration building, ransacking offices and destroying files. At the University of New Mexico, eleven students were bayoneted by National Guardsmen after taking over the Student Union Building. At the University of California, Berkeley, protesters torched an ROTC truck and tore down an American flag, setting it on fire and chanting: “Burn, Nixon, burn.”

In the White House, and sometimes in public, Nixon is increasingly brooding, even scaring his aides when his ire toward his enemies explodes into rage. “We live in an age of anarchy… We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years,” he thunders in a speech to the nation. Who is turning these kids, the most affluent and entitled generation in history, against America?

In Nixon’s Oval Office and Ronald Reagan’s governor’s mansion, it is becoming easier and easier to connect the unrest to one man, to link Dr. Timothy Leary with the violence, to see him as a Robespierre on acid, a kingpin hell-bent on unraveling the normal order. He is a subversive, a hippie rebel leader summoning his army, a sociocultural terrorist whose real master plan is to blow up the nation’s moral compass in the name of free love and drugs.

Leary is becoming, in the words of Richard Nixon, “the most dangerous man in America.”

A decade ago, as a prominent Harvard psychologist, Leary had achieved a comfortable life. He was the son of an Irish Catholic dentist from a quiet town in Massachusetts. He had attended the College of the Holy Cross and then became a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He had been court-martialed for a variety of minor infractions, honorably discharged, and then had begun his march through the academic ranks. At Harvard, he easily nestled into an Ivy League cocoon of faculty parties, scholarly articles in scientific journals, and blowing off steam with a round of martinis. But he knew something was missing: “I was a middle-aged man involved in the middle-aged process of dying.”

On the cusp of his fortieth birthday, he ingested psychoactive mushrooms considered sacred by the Aztecs. “I came back a changed man,” he said. “I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than in all my years as a psychologist.”

He cofounded the Harvard Psilocybin Project and began researching the curative powers of hallucinogenic drugs, experimenting on himself, his friends, and even his children. Soon, he found his way to a little-known chemical, lysergic acid diethylamide, a drug so powerful that a microscopic dose could rocket him into the same transcendent realm sought by shamans and mystics.

LSD’s creator, Albert Hofmann, viewed the drug as “medicine for the soul.” Leary concurred—and went even further. If nuclear weapons represented man’s grip on the universe’s destructive power, LSD was the opposite: “The exact antidote to atomic energy. People take LSD and FLASH! They get the message and start putting things back in harmony with the great design. Stop war. Wear flowers. Conservation. Turning on people to LSD is the precise and only way to keep war from blowing up the whole system.”

Leary’s experiments brought disagreeable publicity, and Harvard finally dismissed him for his psychedelic zeal. But he no longer cared about advancing his Ivy League career. Instead, he wanted to share his realizations with the world.

He envisioned leading a mass conversion, a planetary spiritual awakening guided by LSD. And he turned out to be a natural showman, very good in front of crowds. He flashed a knowing smile as he promoted LSD’s mind-expanding capabilities, suggesting it could cure many of society’s ills. To prison authorities he claimed it would reduce recidivism. To politicians he whispered that the Kennedys had already turned on. To religious leaders he vowed they would see God. To the readers of Playboy he said, “There is no question that LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man… In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms.”

He shelved the tweed jackets and began wearing American Indian headbands, Tibetan meditation beads, and dashikis. Soon his beaming face was everywhere, from magazine covers to television talk shows. His easily memorized mantra—Turn on, tune in, drop out—appeared on bumper stickers and was splashed across T-shirts, quoted by millions of kids around the world.

Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and other famous new friends sought him out, hoping to glean some knowledge. John Lennon absorbed Leary’s advice on tripping and composed some lyrics for the Beatles: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream / It is not dying, it is not dying.” And when Lennon and Yoko Ono decided to stage a famous “Bed-In”—curling up for days in a hotel room and hoping that world peace would break out—they invited Timothy Leary to join them. The grinning ex-professor was there, shirtless and at the foot of John Lennon’s bed. He joined in, clapping and happily singing “Give Peace a Chance.” In midtune Lennon shouted a joyous salute: “Timmy Leary!”

In Washington, Nixon and his aides were watching. They were stunned at how Leary garnered so much attention, how he dominated the airwaves and headlines, how huge crowds came to see him. He was not just an LSD Lothario rolling in drugs and orgies, not just another Pied Piper sybarite luring hippie girls. He was talking about leading a mind revolution: Congress shall make no law abridging the individual’s right to seek an expanded consciousness.

When Nixon tried to stanch the flow of marijuana across the Mexican border with Operation Intercept, Leary promptly announced his countermove: Operation Turn-On. “They’ve lost the war in Vietnam, and now they are using the same techniques in the war on pot,” Leary proclaimed, urging kids to grow their own marijuana and turn it into a national industry.

The government convicted him for failing to pay the federal marijuana tax, sentencing him to thirty years in prison. But Leary remained free on bond while he appealed, fighting all the way to the Supreme Court. In Leary v. United States, he won unanimously, defeating the Nixon Administration’s lawyers and striking down key marijuana laws.

He celebrated his victory by declaring he would challenge Ronald Reagan in the California gubernatorial election. “Don’t you think I’ve had more experience than Ronnie?” Leary joked to reporters. He promised to legalize pot, selling it through officially sanctioned stores with the tax revenues going into state coffers. He said he would never live in the governor’s mansion—instead he would pitch a teepee on the front lawn and conduct the state’s business from there. His campaign slogan, Come Together, Join the Party, inspired John Lennon to write a song for him that the Beatles recorded as “Come Together.”

But even as he was joyously leading his cultural revolution, Leary could see that things were spinning beyond his control. He had always been careful to portray LSD as a religious experience, emphasizing the need for trained guides to lead people to enlightenment. But too many kids were swallowing LSD like Halloween candy, for kicks. And not everyone was seeing LSD as a manifestation of the inner God. For the unready, the unfit, it had summoned inner demons. Dark stories were spreading about wickedly bad trips, people flying out of windows, and the CIA using LSD for mind control.

And then the nation recoiled in horror in 1969 when a Medusa-haired drifter named Charles Manson—who had dropped acid and divined messianic prophecies in the lyrics of the Beatles—unleashed a bloodbath in California. Manson sent his handpicked cult members to murder five people in a mansion north of Beverly Hills, and then out the next night to stab two more people to death with… forks and knives. Millions of Americans assumed that LSD, Timothy Leary’s sacrament, was driving people insane.

“I’m terribly frightened by LSD,” Governor Ronald Reagan announced. “I think there’s been a great deal of misinformation by those who seem to see no harm in it.”

And now, Nixon, Reagan, and other unnerved leaders are convinced that Timothy Leary has been waging chemical warfare. That he has been brainwashing a generation of young Americans.

To them, there is no real difference between Timothy Leary and Charles Manson.

Even before the White House zeroed in on him, prosecutors and police had been hunting Leary for years. Among the first was G. Gordon Liddy, who invaded Leary’s spiritual retreat in upstate New York. Liddy found nothing but a kilo of peat moss on the first bust. But he kept coming back, finally driving Leary and his family out of the state. At a border crossing at Laredo, Texas, cops unearthed a tiny stash of pot in a snuff box hurriedly tucked inside his teenage daughter’s panties.

There was one more big bust: The day after Christmas in 1968, Leary parked his family station wagon on a dead-end street in Laguna Beach, California. A police cruiser pulled up. The cop insisted he could smell marijuana and began searching the car. With a grunt of pleasure, he finally extracted two charred joints from the ashtray and held them up, victorious. Leary, who had hurtled the cosmos on hundreds of acid trips, saw the officer’s paltry prize and scoffed: “Big deal!”

But the two roaches were a felony in California. They were enough to disqualify Leary from running against Reagan for governor—and to finally send him to prison. The Reagan-appointed judge who imposed the maximum sentence, up to ten years, called Leary an “insidious and detrimental influence on society… A pleasure-seeking, irresponsible Madison Avenue advocate of the free use of LSD and marijuana.”

When Leary was first put behind bars, the jailer slammed the cell door shut and sneered: “For you we throw away the key.”

On the very day that Leary enters the bowels of his new prison, Richard Nixon’s aides are arriving at the Oval Office to brief him on the latest spasms of violence. All week, there has been one explosion after another. When one hundred thousand anti-war activists converged on Washington, a bomb roared inside the headquarters of the National Guard Association. There have been attacks at the Selective Service offices in Hollywood, Oakland, and Detroit. Detonations at military buildings in Longview, Washington; Kent, Ohio; Reading, Pennsylvania; Mankato, Minnesota. Government offices were blown up in Portland, Oregon. There had been an eruption at the Atomic Energy Commission office in Rocky Flats, Colorado. Explosions and fires at Ohio University, Illinois Wesleyan University, the University of Alabama, Valparaiso University, the University of Virginia, Case Western Reserve University, Colorado State University, University of Nevada, DePauw University, the University of Missouri at Columbia, Loyola University in Chicago, and John Carroll University in Ohio.

The FBI is sending reports to Nixon’s aides suggesting that homegrown revolutionaries are holding enough dynamite to bomb a building in the United States every day for thirty straight years—and that they would surely love to blow President Nixon to hell.

THE GREAT FEAR

Afternoon, May 13, 1970

Inside CMC-West, a burly guard hands Tim his new gear: a small padlock and key for his metal locker. A blue denim jacket. Three pairs of denim pants. Three denim shirts with his prison number stenciled on them.

A trustee leads him past a shaded patio where a bridge tournament is in progress. Inmates look up and shout his name. He walks past garden beds where elderly prisoners are on their hands and knees as they turn over the soil. The trustee points at the tomato plants and brags that the prison grows much of its own food.

Tim walks inside building 324, identical to the other wooden barracks. There are no bars on the windows and the front door remains unlocked. We don’t call them cells here, the trustee says. This is your dormitory. Inside, there’s that sour tang of stale cigarette smoke mixed with the odor of ancient men. Several lifers are gathered like gray seals clumped on the rocks, hunchbacks with parchment-paper faces and homemade tattoos. They begin to move toward him, faces flickering with recognition.