Timothy Leary

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Timothy Francis Leary was arrested 36 times between the 1960s and 1970s, a record that tells you something about how seriously the American establishment took him. President Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America". Poet Allen Ginsberg called him "a hero of American consciousness". Writer Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". These are not the usual descriptors for a clinical psychologist from Springfield, Massachusetts.

  Leary was born on the 22nd of October 1920, into an Irish Catholic household. He would go on to earn a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, publish scholarly work that the Annual Review of Psychology called the most important book on psychotherapy of its year, get fired by Harvard, escape from prison with the help of the Weathermen, flee to Algeria, Switzerland, and Afghanistan, become an FBI informant, and die in California on the 31st of May 1996, with his last word reportedly being "beautiful".

  How does a man move from a Jesuit education in Worcester, Massachusetts, to solitary confinement in Folsom Prison next to Charles Manson? That is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Difficult Education

  ›

  Classical High School in Springfield sent Leary to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he studied from 1938 to 1940 under a rigorous Jesuit curriculum that required Latin, rhetoric, and Greek. His father, a dentist known as "Tote" Leary who had abandoned the family when Timothy was 14, pressured him to leave Holy Cross for the United States Military Academy at West Point.

  West Point did not go well. Leary accumulated demerits for minor rule infractions, got into serious trouble for failing to report violations by cadets he supervised, and was accused by the Honor Committee of going on a drinking binge and lying about it. They asked him to resign. He refused. The cadets shunned him entirely. He was acquitted by a court-martial, but the silence continued and the demerits kept coming. His mother eventually appealed to United States Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who personally investigated the matter. The Honor Committee quietly backed down, announced it would abide by the court-martial verdict, and Leary resigned and was honorably discharged.

  Leary would say, about 50 years later, that West Point provided "the only fair trial I've had in a court of law".

  He transferred to the University of Alabama in late 1941, where he enrolled in ROTC, earned top grades, and began studying psychology under Donald Ramsdell, who had trained at both Middlebury and Harvard. A year later, Alabama expelled him for spending a night in the female dormitory. That expulsion cost him his student deferment during World War II, and he was drafted into the Army.

  Army service brought him back to Ramsdell by chance. Leary was briefly assigned to a unit at Syracuse Army Air Base that he later described as "a suicide command" bound for the Pacific, before a reunion with Ramsdell in Buffalo, New York, led to a reassignment as a staff psychometrician at Deshon General Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania. He spent the remainder of the war working in a deaf rehabilitation clinic there, was discharged in January 1946 at the rank of sergeant, and completed his undergraduate degree by correspondence, graduating in August 1945. By 1950, he held a PhD in clinical psychology from Berkeley.

• 3. The Scholar Before the Prophet

  ›

  Leary's 1950 doctoral dissertation, "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Process and Structure", treated group therapy as a kind of behavioral particle accelerator. He imagined that human behavioral characteristics could be derived and quantified the way elements are arranged on the periodic table. The metaphor was ambitious, and it pointed toward the interpersonal circumplex model he would develop and publish in 1957 as The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality.

  That book, which drew on the research of Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney, showed how psychologists could use Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory scores to predict how patients might respond to various interpersonal situations. The Annual Review of Psychology named it the most important book on psychotherapy published that year. Critics such as H. J. Eysenck of The British Medical Journal took a dimmer view, arguing that Leary's diagnostic rubric was confusing, overly broad, and offered no proof of its own validity.

  Those scholarly years were also marked by private grief. After the family spent a year in Spain in 1952 on a research grant, Leary's marriage to his first wife, Marianne Busch, deteriorated under the weight of infidelity and alcohol. She died by suicide in 1955, leaving him to raise their two children, Susan and Jack, alone. He described himself during this period as "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots".

  The National Institute of Mental Health terminated his research grant in 1958 after he failed to appear before an NIMH investigator. Leary moved his children to Europe, where an unproductive and financially difficult stay in Florence drove him back toward academia. His research had already laid a foundation for what would become transactional analysis, directly anticipating the popular work of Eric Berne. That intellectual credibility was about to be tested in ways nobody in the psychology profession could have predicted.

• 4. Mexico and the Mushrooms

  ›

  On the 13th of May 1957, Life magazine published an article by R. Gordon Wasson titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom", describing the use of psilocybin mushrooms in religious rites of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico. A colleague of Leary's named Anthony Russo had already experimented with Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms on a trip to Mexico and told Leary about the experience.

  In August 1960, Leary traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico, with Russo and consumed psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. He later said that he had "learned more about... his brain and its possibilities... and more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than... in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research".

  Back at Harvard, where he had started as a lecturer in late 1959 at the invitation of colleagues Frank Barron and David McClelland, Leary and Richard Alpert launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Their subjects included prisoners at Concord and theology students at Andover Newton Theological Seminary. The psilocybin itself was synthesized by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, the same chemist famous for first synthesizing LSD. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg heard about the project and asked to join. Leary and Ginsberg shared the hope that psychedelics could elevate human consciousness, and they began introducing the drugs to artists and intellectuals including Jack Kerouac, Charles Mingus, and Maynard Ferguson.

  In the Concord Prison Experiment, 36 prisoners reportedly repented and renounced criminality after guided psilocybin sessions. The overall American recidivism rate at the time was around 60 percent; Leary and his team reported that their participants' rate dropped to 20 percent. A later follow-up study challenged those figures on methodological grounds, arguing that only a slight improvement could fairly be attributed to psilocybin. Rick Doblin accused Leary of falling prey to the halo effect. Ralph Metzner defended Leary, arguing there was "no proof" that he had unethically manipulated data.

• 5. Harvard's Dismissal and Millbrook

  ›

  Harvard President Nathan Pusey released a statement on the 27th of May 1963, reporting that Leary had "left campus without authorization" and "failed to keep his classroom appointments". His salary had been terminated on the 30th of April 1963. Richard Alpert was dismissed separately for allegedly providing psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off-campus apartment. Many people, the source notes, learned of psychedelics specifically because of the Harvard scandal.

  The Hitchcock family offered what came next. Three heirs to the Mellon fortune, siblings Peggy, Billy, and Tommy Hitchcock, gave Leary and his associates access to a 64-room mansion on an estate in Millbrook, New York. Lucy Sante of The New York Times later described it as the headquarters of Leary's circle for nearly five years, "a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy".

  At Millbrook, the group organized under the name the Castalia Foundation, named after the intellectual colony in Hermann Hesse's 1943 novel The Glass Bead Game. Leary married German model Nena von Schlebrügge in 1964 at Millbrook; documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker captured the event. The marriage lasted one year. After separating, von Schlebrügge married Indo-Tibetan Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman in 1967 and later gave birth to actress Uma Thurman in 1970.

  In 1964, Leary, Alpert, and Ralph Metzner coauthored The Psychedelic Experience, a guide to LSD use based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It described psychedelic drugs as "a chemical key" that "opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures". That book later provided the direct inspiration for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" on The Beatles' 1966 album Revolver.

  On the 14th of January 1967, Leary addressed a gathering of 30,000 hippies at the Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, where he coined the phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out". In a 1988 interview, he credited the slogan to a lunch with media theorist Marshall McLuhan in New York City.

• 6. Arrests, Escape, and Exile

  ›

  Leary's first arrest came on the 23rd of December 1965, after a US Customs officer searching his daughter Susan found a silver snuffbox containing marijuana during a border crossing from Mexico into Texas. Leary took responsibility. He was convicted under the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 on the 11th of March 1966, sentenced to 30 years in prison and fined $30,000. He appealed, arguing the Act required unconstitutional self-incrimination. On the 19th of May 1969, the Supreme Court agreed in Leary v. United States and overturned the conviction.

  On the same day that ruling came down, Leary announced his candidacy for governor of California against Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan, with the slogan "Come together, join the party." On the 1st of June 1969, he joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Montreal bed-in. Lennon wrote Leary a campaign song that became "Come Together". Leary was also present and sang backing vocals when Lennon and Ono recorded "Give Peace a Chance" during that same bed-in.

  A second marijuana arrest in Laguna Beach in December 1968, for possession of two marijuana cigarette butts he claimed were planted, earned him a 10-year sentence, with another 10 years added for a prior arrest, totaling 20 years to be served consecutively.

  On his arrival in prison, Leary was given psychological tests that he had partly designed himself. He answered them strategically to appear conventional and interested in gardening, which resulted in assignment to a lower-security facility. He escaped in September 1970, climbing a telephone wire over the prison wall. The Weathermen smuggled him out of the country for a fee of $25,000 paid by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, transporting him in a pickup truck driven by Clayton Van Lydegraf.

  Leary fled first to Algeria, where he sought the patronage of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party's government in exile, before Cleaver placed him and his wife Rosemary under what Leary called house arrest. The couple fled to Switzerland in 1971, where arms dealer Michel Hauchard sheltered and effectively imprisoned them. In 1972, John Mitchell, Nixon's attorney general, persuaded Switzerland to imprison Leary for a month, though the Swiss refused extradition. Leary and Rosemary separated later that year; she lived as a fugitive in the US until the 1990s.

  Leary was eventually seized in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1972. His bail was set at $5 million. The presiding judge at his remand hearing stated that if Leary "is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his ideas". Facing 95 years in prison, Leary was convicted after the jury deliberated for less than two hours. He received five additional years for his prison escape. In 1973, he was sent to Folsom Prison and placed in solitary confinement, in a cell next to Charles Manson's. The two could not see each other but could talk. Manson told Leary, "They took you off the streets so that I could continue with your work."

• 7. Consciousness, Technology, and Final Years

  ›

  Leary developed his eight-circuit model of consciousness in collaboration with writer Brian Barritt in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The model was not fully published until 1977, when it appeared in Leary's book Exo-Psychology and in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger. Wilson had befriended Leary in the early 1970s and later expanded on the model in his book Prometheus Rising.

  The model divided consciousness into eight circuits, the first four of which Leary called the Larval or Terrestrial Circuits, naturally accessed at life transitions such as puberty. The upper four, which he called the Stellar or Extra-Terrestrial Circuits, were described as evolutionary adaptations that would equip humans for life in space. He cited the floating sensation sometimes associated with marijuana as evidence of the fifth circuit's purpose, which he said was to prepare humans for zero-gravity environments. He did not anchor the circuits to any specific brain structures or chemical pathways, writing instead that a higher intelligence "located in interstellar nuclear-gravitational-quantum structures" had endowed humans with them.

  Governor Jerry Brown released Leary from prison on the 21st of April 1976. Leary had become an FBI informant to shorten his sentence, earning the code name "Charlie Thrush". In a 1974 news conference, Allen Ginsberg, Ram Dass, and Leary's son Jack publicly denounced him as a "cop informant". Leary maintained he had only provided the FBI with information they already possessed. No prosecutions resulted from his cooperation. A 1999 letter signed by writers including Douglas Rushkoff, Ken Kesey, and Robert Anton Wilson, as well as Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder, argued that Leary had smuggled a message to the Weather Underground asking for their approval before cooperating and received the reply "We understand".

  In the 1980s, Leary declared that "the PC is the LSD of the 1990s" and served as a consultant to Billy Idol during production of the 1993 album Cyberpunk. He also befriended virtual reality pioneers Jaron Lanier and Brenda Laurel. He invented the acronym "SMI2LE" as shorthand for his agenda: Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension.

  In January 1995, Leary was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. He embraced what he called "designer dying", allowing his website team, led by Chris Graves, to document his daily chemical intake as a kind of proto-blog. His California home filled with thousands of visitors in his final months. He had signed up with the cryonics organization Alcor in September 1988, and a cryonic tank was delivered to his home before his death, but three weeks before he died he changed his mind and refused preservation. He asked instead to be cremated, with his ashes scattered in space.

  Leary died on the 31st of May 1996, at age 75. His son Zachary reported that his final moments produced the repeated question "Why?", followed by the unclenching of his fist and the answer "Why not?", and that his last word was "beautiful". On the 21st of April 1997, a Pegasus rocket carried seven grams of his ashes into orbit alongside the remains of Gene Roddenberry, Gerard O'Neill, and Krafft Ehricke. The rocket remained in orbit for six years before burning up in the atmosphere.