[Marxism] Timothy Leary

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

New Yorker Magazine, Issue of 2006-06-26
ACID REDUX
The life and high times of Timothy Leary.
by LOUIS MENAND

(clip)

But the seeds of destruction were already planted. Leary had been arrested 
in 1965, in Laredo, Texas, on federal marijuana charges. At the trial, he 
asserted his First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion, an 
argument that the judge, Ben Connally, the brother of John Connally, the 
governor of Texas, undoubtedly took into account in handing down a 
thirty-year sentence. Still, the trial was good for publicity. Greenfield 
says that in the hundred and eight days after the verdict the Times ran 
eighty-one articles about LSD.

Leary remained free on appeal, but, meanwhile, the activities at Millbrook 
had attracted the attention of local law enforcement. Leary?s chief nemesis 
there was the assistant district attorney for Dutchess County, G. Gordon 
Liddy, who staged a raid on the house, and had Leary arrested on 
marijuana-possession charges. Then, in 1968, Leary was pulled over while 
driving through Laguna Beach and, along with his wife and children, 
arrested again after drugs were found in the car. Leary?s son, Jack, was so 
stoned that he took off his clothes in the booking room and started 
masturbating. When he was shown what his son was doing, Leary laughed. 
Rosemary was sentenced to six months, Jack was ordered to undergo 
psychiatric observation, and Leary got one to ten for possession of marijuana.

He was sent to the California Men?s Colony Prison in San Luis Obispo, and 
this is where the story turns completely Alice in Wonderland. Assisted by 
the Weathermen, Leary escapes from prison and is taken to a safe house, 
where he meets with the kingpins of the radical underground?Bernardine 
Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd. With their help, he and Rosemary (in 
violation of her probation) are smuggled out of the country and flown to 
Algiers, where Leary is the house guest of Eldridge Cleaver, the Black 
Panthers? minister of defense. Cleaver would seem to be Leary?s type, since 
his book ?Soul on Ice? contains such sentences as ?The quest for the 
Apocalyptic Fusion will find optimal conditions only in a Classless 
Society, the absence of classes being the sine qua non for the existence of 
a Unitary Society in which the Unitary Sexual Image can be achieved? and 
(to explain why white women want black men) ?What wets the Ultrafeminine?s 
juice is that she is allured and tortured by the secret, intuitive 
knowledge that he, her psychic bridegroom, can blaze through the wall of 
her ice, plumb her psychic depths, test of the oil of her soul, melt the 
iceberg of her brain, touch her inner sanctum, detonate the bomb of her 
orgasm, and bring her sweet release.? But, alas, the visionaries do not get 
along.

Though the Panthers hold a press conference in New York to announce that 
Leary, formerly contemptuous of politics, has joined the revolution?Leary?s 
new slogan: ?Shoot to Live / Aim for Life??Cleaver is eager to get him out 
of Algeria, an Islamic country not exactly soft on drugs. He begins to 
harass Leary and his wife, and they manage to get to Switzerland. There 
Leary meets a high-flying international arms dealer named Michel Hauchard, 
who agrees to protect him in exchange for thirty per cent of the royalties 
from books that Leary agrees to write, and then has Leary arrested, on the 
theory that he is more likely to produce the books in jail, where there is 
less to distract him. Thanks to his wife?s exertions, Leary is released 
after a month in solitary, but she leaves him. He takes up with a Swiss 
girl, and begins using heroin, then meets a jet-setter named Joanna 
Harcourt-Smith Tamabacopoulos D?Amecourt, who becomes his new consort.

Leary?s visa is expiring, so he and Joanna seek refuge in Austria, where 
Leary issues a statement that Austria ?for us personally and I think for 
the world at large exists as a beacon of compassion and freedom.? (Half of 
all Nazi concentration-camp guards were from Austria.) It is not clear that 
Austria feels equally warmly about Leary, and, after Leary?s son-in-law 
shows up, a plan is hatched to go to Afghanistan, where there are friends 
among the hashish suppliers. Leary flies to Kabul?it is now January, 
1973?and is immediately busted. The son-in-law, it turns out, had set him 
up. Leary is flown to Los Angeles in the custody of an agent of the Federal 
Bureau of Narcotics and remanded to Folsom Prison, where he is put in the 
cell next to Charles Manson?s. King Kong meets Godzilla.

The rest is bathos. The United States Supreme Court had thrown out the 
Laredo conviction, but Leary clearly faced major jail time. He met the 
problem head on: he coöperated fully with the authorities and informed on 
all his old associates, including his lawyers and his former wife Rosemary, 
who had gone underground. Leary also wrote articles for National Review, 
William F. Buckley?s magazine, in which he attacked John Lennon and Bob 
Dylan (?plastic protest songs to a barbiturate beat?), in order to 
demonstrate that he was rehabilitated. When he was released, in 1976, he 
was placed in the Witness Protection Program. He eventually made his way to 
Los Angeles, where he thrived in a B-list Hollywood social scene. Larry 
Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, was a friend, and Leary became a regular 
contributor to the magazine. He was also a welcome guest at the Playboy 
Mansion, and he went on the road ?debating? his former adversary Gordon 
Liddy. His new promotion was space migration. He fell out of touch with his 
son; his daughter committed suicide, in 1990. He died, of prostate cancer, 
in 1996.

The best that can be said about Greenfield?s biography of Leary is that it 
will never be necessary to write another one. Greenfield spent a long time 
with his subject; they first met in Algiers in 1970, when Leary was a guest 
of the Panthers. He has been thorough, but not efficient. It is good that 
he interviewed many of the survivors of those years; it is not so good that 
he let them ramble on unedited in his text. Oral history is an unreliable 
genre to begin with; in an era when most of the witnesses were intoxicated 
much of the time, the quotient of credibility that attaches to their 
anecdotes is low. The job of the historian is to select and condense. Also, 
to tell a story.

Greenfield?s Leary is a heartless and damaged man. The portrait is 
convincing. Still, people did find him magnetic?not only beautiful women 
but colleagues and fellow-celebrities. He was obviously reckless, fatuous, 
exasperating, and full of himself, but people liked him, and they liked 
being around him. The career that Leary?s most resembles is that of another 
renegade psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, whose orgone box?meant to accumulate 
the energies of the cosmic life force?was a fad among enlightened people in 
the nineteen-fifties. Norman Mailer used an orgone box; so did Dwight 
Macdonald and Saul Bellow.

In the early days, LSD, too, was an élite drug. Many people unconnected 
with the counterculture ?experimented? with it: Henry Luce and his wife, 
Clare Boothe Luce, were enthusiasts. (Mrs. Luce thought that LSD ought to 
be kept out of the hands of ordinary people. ?We wouldn?t want everyone 
doing too much of a good thing,? she said.) Leary administered psilocybin 
to the founder of Grove Press, Barney Rosset, who didn?t like it (?I pay my 
psychiatrist fifty dollars an hour to keep this from happening to me,? he 
complained). Psychedelics were tried by Lenny Bruce, Groucho Marx, and 
Arthur Koestler (?I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this 
morning I forgot what it was,? he said). Leary, in accordance with Huxley?s 
policy, would have been happy to restrict the use of psychedelics to people 
like these and to administer them in controlled environments, but at a 
certain point psychedelics got onto the street, and he found himself 
preaching to kids. The popularization of LSD wasn?t Leary?s doing; it was 
the music?s. When he finished listening to ?Sgt. Pepper?s? for the first 
time, at Millbrook in 1967, Leary is supposed to have stood up and 
announced, ?My work is finished.? Psychedelia had become a fashion.

It didn?t last long. Congress made the sale of LSD a felony and possession 
a misdemeanor in 1968, and handed regulation over to the Bureau of 
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. In 1970, psychedelic drugs were classified 
as drugs of abuse, with no medical value. Scientific reports circulated 
that LSD caused genetic damage; recreational drug use began to acquire a 
negative aura. And after 1968 the economy began to tighten. It was the 
Nixon recession; people were anxious about moving on with their careers. 
Getting wasted was for losers. And where were all those great insights, 
anyway? Huxley probably believed that LSD provided a window onto the hidden 
essence of things as a matter of conviction, and Leary probably believed it 
as a matter of convenience. But the LSD experience is completely 
suggestible. People on the drug see and feel what they expect to see and 
feel, or what they have been told they will see and feel. If they expect 
that the secret of the universe will be revealed to them, then that?s what 
they will find. An illusion, no doubt, but it?s as close as we?re likely to 
get.

full: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/060626crbo_books

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