I asked him what he thought real death would be like.
He reached over to his nitrous tank, filled a large black balloon, and sat quietly for a few moments. “I don’t think of it,” he said, looking a little surprised at his own answer. “I mean, yes, every now and then, I go: ’Shit!’ You know, every now and then. The other night I was looking around and I thought, ’Good God, my friends here—their lives have been changed by this. The enormity of it.’ But I just take it as the natural thing to do.”
He took a sip from his balloon, and seemed to be looking off into his own thoughts. “It’s true that I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time,” he said. “The two minutes between body death and brain death, the two to thirteen minutes there while your brain is still alive—that’s the territory. That’s the unexplored area that fascinates me. So I’m kind of looking forward to that.”
Leary stopped talking for a moment, clenching at his stomach, his face crumpled in pain. After several seconds, he gained his breath and returned to his balloon.
“The worst that can happen,” he said, his voice husky from the nitrous, “is that nothing happens, and at least that’s, um, interesting. I’ll just go, ’Oh, shit! Back to the Tibetan score card!’ But yes, it’s an experiment that I’ve been looking forward to for a long, long time. After all, it’s the ultimate mystery.”
TIMOTHY LEARY was fond of pointing out that the probable date of his conception was January 17, 1920: the day after the start of Prohibition—the official beginning of America’s troubled attempts to regulate intoxicants and mind-altering substances in this century. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 22, 1920, Leary was the only child of his Irish-American parents. His father, Timothy—also known as Tote—had been an officer at West Point and later became a fairly successful dentist who spent most of his earnings on alcohol. In 1934, when Timothy was thirteen, Tote got severely drunk one night and abandoned his family. Timothy would not see him again for twenty-three years. In the most recent (and best) of his autobiographies, Flashbacks (1983, Tarcher/Putnam), Leary wrote: “I have always felt warmth and respect for this distant male-man who special-delivered me. During the thirteen years we lived together he never stunted me with expectations.” But his father also served as a “model of the loner,” and for all his charming and gregarious ways, Leary would have trouble in his life maintaining intimate relations with family members—a problem that would not disappear until his last several years.
By contrast, Leary’s mother, Abigail, was a beautiful but dour woman who was often disappointed by what she saw as her son’s laxity and recklessness. In her own way, though, she also served as a model. In Flashbacks, Leary wrote: “I determined to seek women who were exactly the opposite to Abigail in temperament. Since then, I have always sought the wildest, funniest, most high-fashion, big-city girl in town.”
For years, Leary seemed prone to the wayward life that his mother feared so much. He studied at Holy Cross College, West Point, and the University of Alabama and had serious problems at each establishment (in fact, he was more or less driven out of West Point for his role in a drunken spree), though he finally received a bachelor’s degree during his Army service in World War II. Then his life seemed to take a turn. In 1944, while working as a clinical psychologist in Butler, Pennsylvania, Leary fell in love with and married a woman named Marianne. After the war, the couple moved to California’s Bay Area, and had two children, Susan and Jack. It was at this point that Leary’s career began to show some promise. In 1950, he earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, and over the next several years, along with a friend and fellow psychologist, Frank Barron, Leary conducted some research that yielded a remarkable discovery. He and Barron were interested in proving just how effective psychotherapy was. Instead, by testing a wide range of subjects over an extensive period they learned that one third of the patients who received therapy got better, one third got worse, and one third stayed the same. In essence, Leary and Barron proved that psychotherapy—at least in its conventional applications—couldn’t really be proven to work. Leary wanted to discover what would work—what methods might provide people with a genuine healing moment or growth experience. He began exploring the idea of group therapy as a possible viable solution, and he also started developing a theory of existential-transactional analysis that was later popularized in psychiatrist Eric Berne’s Games People Play.
By the mid-1950s, Leary was teaching at Berkeley and had been appointed director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation in Oakland. He had also produced a book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, which would enjoy wide-ranging praise and influence. But behind all the outward success, Leary’s life was headed for a cataclysm. After the birth of Susan, in 1947, Timothy’s wife, Marianne, went through a bad bout of postpartum depression, and became increasingly withdrawn from the world and, according to Timothy, from her husband and family. As time went along, both Marianne and Timothy began drinking heavily and fighting regularly. The source of their arguments was often the same: For two years, Leary had been conducting an affair with a friend’s wife at a rented apartment on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. The affair, combined with the drinking, the quarreling, and Marianne’s depression, became increasingly painful for her.
On a Saturday morning in October 1955—on Timothy Leary’s thirty-fifth birthday—he awoke to find himself alone in bed. He stumbled around the house, groggy from a hangover, calling Marianne’s name. A few minutes later he found her inside the family’s car, in a closed garage, with the motor running and exhaust clouding around her. She was already cold to the touch. Leary called to his startled children, who were standing in the driveway, to run to the nearby firehouse for help, but it was too late. Marianne had withdrawn for the last time.
Leary’s hair turned gray within a short time.
“He took a lot of the blame on himself,” says Frank Barron, his research partner at the time. “After that, Tim was looking for things that would be more transformative, that would go deeper than therapy. He was looking, more or less, for answers.”
By the end of the 1950s, Leary had quit his posts at Berkeley and the Kaiser Foundation, and moved with his two children to the southern coast of Spain. Though he was working on a new manuscript, The Existential Transaction, he was, by his own description, in a “black depression,” and felt at a loss about both his past and his future. In January 1959, in Torremolinos, he later wrote that he went through his first thorough breakdown and breakthrough. One afternoon, he suddenly fell into a strange feverish illness. His face grew so swollen with water blisters that his eyelids were forced shut and encrusted with a dried pus. Over the next few days, the disease got worse: His hands became paralyzed and he couldn’t walk. One night, he sat awake for hours in the darkness of his hotel room, and after a while, he began to smell his own decay. In his book High Priest, he described it as his first death: “I slowly let every tie to my old life slip away. My career, my ambitions, my home. My identity. The guilts. The wants.
“With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my social life were gone. I was a thirty-eight-year-old male animal with two cubs. High, completely free.”
The next morning, the illness had abated. Timothy Leary was about to be reborn.
IN THE SPRING of 1959, Leary was living with his children in Florence, Italy, when Frank Barron, his old friend, paid a visit. Barron brought with him two bits of information. First, during a recent research trip to Mexico, he had located some of the rare “sacred mushrooms” that had been alleged to provide hallucinations and visions to ancient Aztec priests, and the holy men of various Indian tribes in Latin America. Back at his home in Berkeley, Barron had eaten the mushrooms—and had a full-blown, William Blake-quality mystical experience. He thought that perhaps these mushrooms might be the elusive means to psychological metamorphosis that he and Leary had been seeking for years. Leary was put off by his friend’s story, and, as he later wrote, “w
arned him against the possibility of losing his scientific credibility if he babbled this way among our colleagues.”
Barron’s other news was more mundane but of greater appeal to Leary: The director of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, Professor David McClelland, was on sabbatical in Florence and would probably be willing to interview Leary for a teaching post. Leary visited McClelland the next day and explained his emerging theories of existential psychology. McClelland listened and read Leary’s manuscript on the subject, then said: “What you’re suggesting . . . is a drastic change in the role of the scientist, teacher, and therapist. Instead of processing subjects, students, and patients by uniform and recognized standards, we should take an egalitarian or information-exchange approach. Is that it?” Leary said, yes, that’s what he had in mind. McClelland hired him on the spot. “There’s no question,” he said, “that what you’re advocating is going to be the future of American psychology. You’re spelling out front-line tactics. You’re just what we need to shake things up at Harvard.”
Leary began his career at the Harvard Center for Personality Research in early 1960. That summer, he took his children on vacation to Cuernavaca, Mexico. Life, for the first time in several years, felt rewarding. Things were good at Harvard. Leary was enjoying his research and teachings, and was also enjoying the esteem of his colleagues. One day, an anthropologist friend stopped by the villa where Leary was staying. The friend—like Barron—had been seeking the region’s legendary sacred mushrooms, and asked if Leary would be willing to try some. Leary was reminded of Barron’s statement—that perhaps mushrooms could be the key to the sort of psychological transformation they had been searching for—and his curiosity got the better of him. A week later, he found himself staring into a bowl of ugly, foul-smelling black mushrooms. Reluctantly, he chewed on one, washed back its terrible taste with some beer, and waited for the much-touted visions to come. They came, hard and beautiful—and in the next few hours, Leary’s life changed powerfully and irrevocably. “I gave way to delight, as mystics have for centuries. . . . ” he wrote in Flashbacks. “Mystics come back raving about higher levels of perception where one sees realities a hundred times more beautiful and meaningful than the reassuringly familiar scripts of normal life. . . . We discover abruptly that we have been programmed all these years, that everything we accept as reality is just social fabrication.”
Leary decided that mushrooms could be the tool to reprogram the brain. If used under the right kind of supervision, he thought, they could free an individual from painful self-conceptions and stultifying social archetypes, and might prove the means to the transformation of human personality and behavior, for as far as individuals were willing to go. It took some work, but Leary persuaded Harvard to allow him to order a supply of psilocybin—the synthesized equivalent of the active ingredient in the magic mushrooms—from the Swiss firm Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Leary also joined forces with Barron, who had been invited by McClelland to spend a year teaching at Harvard, to help him devise and administer what would become known as the “Harvard Drug Research Program.” In that strange and unlikely moment in educational and psychological history, the seeds of a movement were born that would transfigure not just Leary’s life, but the social dynamics of modern America for years and years to come.
LEARY, OF COURSE, was not the first psychologist or modern philosopher to explore the potential effect of psychedelics—which is the term that had been given to thought-altering hallucinogenic drugs. The respected British author Aldous Huxley had already written two volumes on the subject, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, and other philosophers and psychiatrists, including Gerald Heard, Sidney Cohen, and Oscar Janiger (the latter’s Los Angeles practice included such renowned patients as Cary Grant and Anaïs Nin) had been working toward various modes of psychedelic therapy and had achieved some notable results in treating conditions such as neurosis and alcoholism. More notoriously, the CIA and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps had conducted covert research using powerful hallucinogens with the aim of brainwashing foreign and domestic enemies or driving them insane. But three factors set Leary’s work apart. One was the incorporation of his transactional analysis theories into the overall experimental model: Therapists would not administer drugs to patients and then sit by and note their reactions but would, in fact, engage in the drug state along with the subjects. Another element was Leary’s implementation of an environmental condition that became known as “set and setting”: If you prepared the drug taker with the proper mindset and provided reassuring surroundings, then you increased the likelihood that the person might achieve a significant opportunity for a healthy psychological reorganization. But the final component that set Leary apart from all other psychedelic researchers was simply Leary himself—his intense charisma, confidence, passion, anger, and indomitability. He was a man set ablaze by his calling—and though that fieriness would sometimes lead him into a kind of living purgatory, it also emblazoned him as a real force in modern history.
For the first two years, things went well with Leary’s Harvard experiments. Along with Barron and other researchers, Leary administered varying doses of psilocybin to several dozen subjects, including graduate students. He also gave the drug to prisoners and divinity students, with noteworthy results: The prisoners’ recidivism rate was cut dramatically, and the divinity students, for the first time in their lives, had what they described as true spiritual experiences. In addition, Leary made two important contacts outside the university: Aldous Huxley and poet Allen Ginsberg (the latter had given the Beat literary movement its most exciting moment with his revolutionary poem “Howl”). With Huxley, Leary probed into the metaphysical fine points of the psilocybin mind state and debated whether psychedelics should remain the property of a small, select group of poets, artists, philosophers, and doctors, who would take the insights they learned from the drug and use them for the benefit of humanity and psychology. With Ginsberg, though, Leary settled the debate. Like Huxley, Ginsberg was convinced that it was indeed a keen idea to share the drug with writers and artists—and in fact arranged for Leary to do so with Robert Lowell, William Burroughs, Thelonious Monk, and Jack Kerouac, among others. But Ginsberg also believed in what became known as “the egalitarian ideal”: If psychedelics had any real hope of enriching humankind, then they should be shared with more than just an aristocracy of intellectuals and aesthetes. Leary came to agree—fervently. Psychedelics, he believed, could be a way of empowering people to inquire into and transmute their own minds, and he suspected that probably the people who were most open to such an experience, who could benefit from it the most, were the young.
In the fall of 1961, Frank Barron returned to his job at Berkeley, and Leary found a new chief ally: a good-humored and ambitious assistant professor named Richard Alpert, who had a penchant for fine clothes, valuable antiques, and high living. From the beginning, Alpert and Leary shared a special bond. “I had never met a mind like Tim’s,” says Alpert. “He was like a breath of fresh air because he was raising questions from philosophical points of view. I was absolutely charmed by that. And there was a way in which our kind of symbiosis worked—our chemistry of the Jewish and the Irish, or the responsible, grounded, solid person and the wild, creative spirit. I thought that I was at Harvard by shrewd politicking rather than by intellect, therefore I didn’t expect anything creative to come out of me. And then I found that Timothy was freeing me from a whole set of values.”
But for some others at Harvard, it seemed as though Tim might be freeing up just a few too many values. Some professors began to complain that Leary and Alpert’s drug project was attracting too many graduate students, therefore detracting from the potential of other research agendas. Beyond that, some found the whole thing too unsavory—the very idea of giving students drugs that apparently took them out of reality, under the auspices of the university. Also, McClelland was growing uncomfortable with what was seen as the increasingly “religious” overtones of the
enterprise. Leary, Alpert, and others began touting once obscure Eastern sacred texts, such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Zen Buddhist scripture. What was Leary doing, McClelland wanted to know, advancing the values of societies that had been backward for hundreds of years?
At the insistence of several professors, McClelland scheduled an open meeting in the spring of 1962 to debate the merits of continuing the drug project. The day before the event, McClelland called Alpert into his office. “ ’Dick, we can’t save Timothy,’ ” Alpert recalls McClelland saying. “ ’He’s too outrageous. But we can save you. So just shut up at tomorrow’s meeting.’ ” Alpert gave McClelland’s advice some thought. “Being a Harvard professor,” he says, “gives you a lot of keys to the kingdom, to play the way you want to play. Society is honoring you with that role.”
The meeting turned out to be more like a prosecution session than a discussion. Two professors in particular, Herbert Kellman and Brendan Maher, tore into Leary with a vitriol rarely seen at Harvard meetings. They insisted that if he was to continue his project, he would have to surrender the drugs to the university’s control and only administer them in the environment of a mental hospital. To Leary, it would mean retreating to the medical standard of the doctor as authority and the subject as lab rat—the same model that Leary had sworn to bring down. “Timothy was blown away by all the vehemence and vindictiveness,” Alpert says. “He was, for once, speechless. At the end there was a silence in the room. And at that moment, I stood up and said, ’I would like to answer on behalf of our project.’ I looked at Dave McClelland, and Dave just shrugged, and that was the beginning of the process that would result in our end at Harvard.”
In 1963, in a move that made front-page news across the nation, Timothy Leary was “relieved” of his teaching duties and Richard Alpert was dismissed for having shared psilocybin with an undergraduate. (At the time Alpert and Leary were reported to be the only professors to be fired from the university in this century.) “I remember being at that press conference,” says Alpert, “surrounded by people who saw me as a loser, but in my heart, I knew we’d won.”
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