Book Review of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis. It's an excellent limited account of a wild, street-fighting time in America (early 70s) and offers lessons for us today, esp. as we get ready to boot you-know-who out of office, one way or the other.

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by John Kendall Hawkins

He'll take you up, he'll bring you down,

He'll plant your feet back on the ground.

He flies so high, he swoops so low.

Timothy Leary.

- The Moody Blues, "Legend of a Mind" (1968)

Wow. It's a trip, thinking back 50 years, half a century ago, to 1970. Fewer and fewer of us can. Onnacounta. We're getting old and older. Like Daltrey said, "Hope I die before I get old," but I must have overslept. Too much dope. Fact is, though, there are more young people on Earth now than ever before, and my generation isn't even talked about anymore. I myself can't always determine the fine line between my memories and what They Said (MSM, cartoons, educators, and voices from various master-slave relations I was in-and-out of) happened. Even J-E-L-L-O ads from my pre-lingual years still come at me like product placements in the middle of some other thought; capitalism gets us young, democracy comes down to Prell or Head and Shoulders, the lesser of two evil lathers.

The 70s are so sketchy now, I can't always be sure that I didn't shoot George Wallace. I remember I was a pump jockey at a gas station during the pearl harbor oil shortage of 1974, my first job: mile-long car lines, anger under the sun, pumpin' til the gas ran out; everybody cursing Arabs (before they converted to Islam in our minds). But when I began reading The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, the 70s came rushing back, especially the early 70s, and 1970 in particular. Domestic bombings by the day. So many plane hijackings, it was like folk were confusing it with hitchhiking. So much violence. Amerika at war with peace, in the form of Timothy Leary.

The Most Dangerous Man in America is an outstanding account of what happened in the early years of the 70s, once the afterglow of 60s 'happenings' had worn off and -- bang! -- the Middle Class was faced with four dead in Ohio (May 4, 1970). President Richard Nixon was seemingly out of control, escalating and expanding the unpopular war in southeast Asia, and declaring war on the Youth Culture at home. Where had all the hippie flowers gone? Well, the hippie flowers famously placed in the rifle barrels of Pentagon soldiers by beautiful people had been shot out in a 21-gun salute to the death of the 60s counterculture -- in a kind of butterfly effect, petals falling from the sky like machine-gunned angels. So much violence.

In flawless, often colorful prose, Minutaglio and Davis limit the scope of their 70s narrative to just before Timothy Leary is busted in May 1970 for a pot violation in California, and then jailed, to his escape and capture after three years on the lam overseas. By concentrating on these three years, and all the action contained therein, the authors are able to encapsulate perfectly the madness of the times -- the daily riots, street theatrics, explosions, racist arrests, corrupt politics, and kids old enough to be forced to fight in Nam but not old enough to vote. Minutaglio and Davis are especially effective in employing the strategy of having a fascist il Duce-bag president chase down Timothy Leary, the symbol of mental freedom and flower power, as if he were the Osama bin Laden of Love.

The Most Dangerous Man in America has four parts and an Epilogue. Part I: You Say You Want A Revolution gives us a taste of Leary's doings in 1970, and how Nixon and Reagan conspired to take him down and jail him. Part II: The Sheltering Sky details his post-prison break escape to Algeria, where he is the unwelcome guest of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers. Part III: High On A Mountain relates Leary's insane times in Switzerland, dropping Rosemary (his wife) and El Cid (his real mate), and meeting up with and exchanging notes with Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. Part IV: Happyland takes us through his trippy removal from Afghanistan, where he'd gone, with his new Ulrike Meinhof-like girlfriend, Joanna, to live among the happy poppy people, like so many American and Euro hippies had done back then.

The authors open by notifying the reader that the book is not a biography of Timothy Leary, but an account of his 28-month life on the lam. They tell us that their primary sources are court documents, personal letters, criminal files, secret government cables, internal paperwork from foreign governments, and audiotapes recorded clandestinely at the White House. That told, they set the scene:

Anti-war radicals are bombing the Capitol and other government buildings. Black Panther militants are calling for Nixon's execution. There are explosions and fires in cities around the nation. Even worse, as far as Nixon is concerned, are the attacks from the Democrats and the media that threaten to undermine his reelection campaign.

The radical elements are bringing it to The Man: Revolution!

In the White House, Nixon is meeting with a "counterespionage team, an elite group of loyalists who have sworn to destroy Nixon's political enemies." The team is headed by G. Gordon Liddy, an ex-FBI agent. Nixon's expansive enemy list includes politicians (Ted Kennedy, George McGovern), celebrities ("Hanoi" Jane Fonda, John Lennon), journalist (Jack Anderson, Tom Wicker) and counterculturalists (Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary). They decide to go after Leary, the "turn on, tune in, drop out" guy. Liddy is especially eager, because as a New York prosecutor he had "led a task force checking into rumors of LSD, pot, and hash-and skinny-dipping hippie women, hulking jazz men playing flutes for audiences of squirrels, body-painting orgies, and men with flowers in their hair riding white stallions."

In 1970, Leary, the Harvard psychology professor, who'd opened up the Harvard Psilocybin Project, and started turning people on and who "envisioned leading a mass conversion, a planetary spiritual awakening guided by LSD." Word of Leary's experiments spread throughout the counterculture underground and in mainstream media, such as Playboy, whose readers he told,

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.

They didn't call it the sexual revolution for nothing; some women are probably still in orbit. Nam-like flashbacks of ecstasy embedded in post-menopausal moments, no VA there for them, no VA needed.

But that wasn't the way Nixon and California governor Ronald Reagan saw it. To them, drugs were a scourge on the nation's youth, and LSD had a growing reputation for evil:

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.

They blamed Leary and they targeted him. "To [Reagan and Nixon], there is no real difference between Timothy Leary and Charles Manson," write the authors.

After he beat a drug rap -- "failing to pay the federal marijuana tax" -- that could have seen him imprisoned for 30 years, he decided to challenge Reagan in the upcoming gubernatorial race. The authors relate:

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.

Reagan would have none of that. Not long after, Leary was pulled over by cops and two marijuana roaches were discovered in the car -- a felony! and "enough to disqualify Leary from running against Reagan for governor." A judge, appointed by Reagan, gave him 10 years in hoosegow.

Well, by all accounts, Leary was a model prisoner, in the year he was at the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo before the Weathermen (named after a line from Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues") helped him escape. He brings his legendary status with him, all eyes on him. Minutaglio and Davis describe him,

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.

No doubt, these latter lectures supplement what's left of the men's meagre libido lives and extend his popularity.

Leary had cheated on his prison entry psych exam (a test he had partly written years earlier; it was like giving inkblots to Rohrschach -- he knew where all the bats were) and was assigned quarters where the oldies were running out the clock. The authors gloriously describe what he finds at his dorm:

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.

That's all Leary needs to be exposed to: He begins immediately to plot his escape; no gray sealdom for this astral voyager. F*ck no.

Leary is approached early on by an inmate named Bellinger with whispered intimations of how best to get out. It will involve Leary "getting into the best shape of his life." He spends his days rigorously exercising, followed by chilling out with lotus-positioned mediations. Seen as low-risk, he's ignored by guards, and uses one of their extended donut-dunkin coffee breaks to make his move. He makes his cable-crawling escape over the barbed wire fence of the prison and meets up with a Weatherman waiting in a car up the road who takes him underground. F*ck The Man!

Minutaglio and Davis create excellent dramatic tension in this first part of the narrative by nicely executed scene switches from Leary to other important characters. We get Michael Kennedy, his lefty lawyer, dubbed "Ares" by Leary for his war-like courtroom tactics, working to coordinate his escape with the Weathermen. His wife Rosemary, a dutiful, beautiful visitor to the prison, terrifies the guards, who suspect she's smuggling LSD to Leary:

They nervously search her, scared of accidentally touching the acid and having it seep into their pores-and losing their minds.

What a wonderful vision! Right up there with Gay Bomb blowback possibilities.

And there are back-and-forths to Nixon's White House, where the president is depicted as a madman playing a madman. He's often drunk and slurring and picking up the phone at 3 AM to order bombings:

"Bomb the sh*t out of them," he'll say, ordering strikes against North Korea or Syria. Kissinger and the other staff will discreetly put things off until morning, when Nixon will inevitably have little memory of what happened the night before.

Nixon had a war on two fronts: bombing folks back to the Stone Age in Southeast Asia, and getting bombed by the Stoned Age kids at home.

The narrative gets juicier, wilder, and funnier as it goes. In Part II: The Sheltering Sky, the narrative flies us to Algiers, where Eldridge Cleaver and a heavily-armed squad of Black Panthers are invited to set up an "embassy" that honors their radical cheek back in the USA. The Weathermen and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a Leary-inspired acid cult, get Leary to Algiers, where Yippie "diplomat" Stew Albert, who'd been at Abbie's Wall Street redistribution of wealth party and at the Pentagon levitation negotiations, and who owned the reputation for being the first of the Yippies to get his head bashed by police at the 1968 DNC fiasco in Chicago, tries to coax Cleaver into sheltering El Cid's high priest. No way, Cleaver's thinking, when suddenly Leary is there and thrust upon him.

The opening section has a welcome anecdote in which Grace Slick is invited to the White House as part of a college reunion party for one the President's kids. She invites Abbie Hoffman as an escort. He is to take the acid under her fingernail and slip some into Nixon's drink "to have the leader of the free world tripping his ass off." But a security guard recognizes him and he's tossed before the mischief can be executed. Similarly, Timothy Leary, put off some by Cleaver's intensity, gun-toting and studied anger (Cleaver employs Pinteresque pauses to make his interlocutors squirm), see him spend much time plotting to spike Cleaver's drinks with LSD to loosen him up. But Cleaver's on to him intuitively; he's uncomfortable with someone so loose and prone to 'inappropriate' laughs and sunshine grins.

Cleaver is an excellent embodiment of Black rage without a workable political recourse in a democracy:

Before he fled to Algeria, Cleaver had run for president on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. "We don't need a war on poverty," he shouted at campaign rallies. "What we need is a war on the rich." He vowed to never live in the White House if elected. Instead, he promised: "I would send a wrecking crew there to burn the motherf*cker down."

Rat own, but was this a viable alternative to the Lesser of Two Evils parties?

Furthermore, Rosemary, Tim's wife, is tragically unhappy being relegated by the Panthers to the anti-feminist role of a housewife (bad enough she had to begin wearing a bra again as part of her getaway disguise), cooking, sewing, and cleaning up baby Panther turds. And Cleaver's wife, Kathleen, was none too happy either about housewifing. An Angela Davis type who'd gone to North Korea (paradise) and had allowed Kim il-Sung's wife to name her baby "Joju Younghi," the authors describe her:

She's almost like the black version of [Bernadine] Dohrn, another bewitching, magic-broomstick-riding child of privilege who has morphed into a steel-minded terrorist-cum-revolutionary.

It's a situation Rosemary and Tim eventually find relief from in their own place, f*cking and tripping. Living the life of a kaleidoscopic orgasm. Or, you could vote Republican.

Eventually chased out of Algeria as the result of American pressure, Rosemary and Tim move on to Switzerland serendipitously (they catch wind that they'll be arrested on landing in their planned trip to Copenhagen, so stay in Geneva, their stopover on the way). In Part III, they meet up with Michel Hauchard, who strikes Tim as "one of those perpetually smooth and ultimately ominous power players from a James Bond movie like Goldfinger." The slick Hauchard forces Leary to sign over his future book deals, and proceeds, in return, to knock back Leary's extradition to America. Resigned, Leary writes in his diary: "Switzerland could be a good place to let things cool down, blow over." Back in Washington, Nixon continues his downward slide to instability:

Now the president is staring hard at Kissinger:

"Get them on the floor and step on them, crush them, show no mercy."

Is he referring to the Left? To the counterculture? Rosemary and Tim? No, he's talking about enemies in Congress.

While the Americans continue to pursue extradition and apply pressure to Leary by making his stays in cantons more problematical as his "reputation" is spread by the State Department, the rich Swiss continue to bail him out, until finally he's so marginalized, that he's literally driven to Lugano, at the border of Italy, where he's put up by relatives of Hermann Hesse. By now, he's with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, the rich 'radical' socialite, who replaces Rosemary, who has run off with a mutual friend, John Schewel. An oval landscape painting arrives signed by Herman Hesse. John Lennon sends him $5000. The Stones talk of becoming his neighbor. Leary finally meets up with Albert Hofmann, the inventor of acid, and, at Lake Geneva, the two lunch on perch, drink wine, and share notes over LSD.

Meanwhile, Nixon, still a year away from re-election, grows increasingly apoplectic and emotionally unstable after the Pentagon Papers are leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsberg and it becomes clear that Viet Nam is an unwinnable war, and thus bombing Southeast Asia back into the Stone Age is a criminally insane policy. Fearing the president's growing impulsivity, the authors tell us,

The secretary has already quietly passed word to the joint chiefs of staff:

Ignore military orders from the president.

Nixon orders his crack team to burgle the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to purloin some mentalgon papers on the leaker:

Goddamn it, get in and get those files. I want it implemented on a thievery basis" You're to break into the place-blow the safe and get it.

He'll eventually tell the People that he's "not a crook," but his orders, followed, say he's impeachable.

Though nothing of value is obtained, the burglary is seen as "a great success," and Nixon keeps the team together and sends them out to infiltrate his enemies, with resonance that carries over to the surveillance excesses we face today. He tell his team that "Good intelligence is the best way to fight terrorism." With that said, to stunned operatives, he elaborates:

He has ideas about how to proceed: widespread electronic surveillance, a secret campaign to intercept and monitor private mailings, burglarizing homes and offices, planting bugs, rewarding informants, planting undercover spies everywhere.

And then, most stunningly,

He says the CIA has to become involved in domestic espionage against American citizens, in clear violation of national law.

Why, it's a pubic centimetre away from a coup d'etat. (And Sy Hersh's Atlantic account of the last days of Nixon, during which he didn't want to give up power, should be re-read as a cautionary tale moving forward to November.) The team will go on to bungle things at the Watergate complex and turn his Nixon's presidency into criminal sh*t.

Minutaglio and Davis, throughout the book, paint a picture of Americans suffused in paranoia, from the compromised politicians to the hoi polloi 'voters', within the Nixon White House, and among the Black Panthers and Weathermen (later re-named the Weather Underground in deference to feminist complaints within the ranks), and in generous doses from Leary's thinking. Paranoia reigns. Radicals are bombing MIC structures and hijacking planes -- it's Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" in play.

After Kent State and the Pentagon Papers, Americans know they're being lied to by an evil government. The FBI's COINTELPRO program's infiltrations of radical groups guaranteed constant paranoia: such seeding was the goal. In the case of the Panthers, the FBI even so far as to create a comic book depicting Blacks killing cops and blaming it on the Panthers. Like placing "conspiracy theory" into narratives, such paranoia planting guarantees a resolution determined by 'authority' figures.

By the time we get to Afghanistan, Leary's last stop before being rendered back to America, the narrative feels like a "long strange trip" that's been overdrawn, Leary and Joanna are burned out, and devoid of cash. Finally chased out of Switzerland by forces they could defer but not defeat, they fly into Kabul thinking they'll hook up with the King's nephew and find shelter. He arrives looking like a nut job with purple hair and she's all orange, looking like "a weeping pumpkin," due to hepatitis. But Afghanistan is on the verge of a coup, and, looking around at the poppy trippers everywhere, a generation's jig seems to be up. The authors describe the scene:

The streets of Kabul are pockmarked with long-haired pilgrims who stay too long-chasing the dragon, snorting heroin, smoking it, shooting up.And now there are all these barefoot, strung-out hippies hopelessly addicted to the cheap, constant heroin... Hollow-eyed people from Kansas or Texas shuffle into the embassy asking for money or a doctor or just a plane ticket home.

As Lennon would sing in "God," released in December 1970, "The dream is over."

There is no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and the US, so Joanna and Tim are essentially conned and kidnapped -- rendered -- back to the US. A special agent, the cocky Terrence Burke -- Ivy League-Marine-CIA background -- arrives on a private plane and invites Tim and Joanna on, then surprises them with an offer they can't refuse:

Tim begins shouting: "There is no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and the United States. This arrest is illegal."

"You're wrong there, professor," Burke bluffs. "This is an American plane, you're standing on American soil."

He points to the armed soldiers standing outside. You can stay here, he says, but you're not going to like the Afghani prison cells.

And they're off and up, not exactly an astral plane, but eventually, after they switch to a US-bound jet in London, Timothy Leary and Joanna manage to climb the stairway of the jumbo jet to mile high heaven, the authors describing it:

Leary's bony old-man ass is rising and falling like a wrinkled seesaw, his weird head of hair rocking like a plum in the ocean. Grunts, groans, and tangled legs. The smell of sex in the air.

One last blast of Nirvana before a decompressing trip back to hoosegow.

The Epilogue is itself an incredible descent back into a kind of Inferno, snatched away from Beatrice and returned to a black hole, where he loses his light, Charles Manson chiding him on the left and Eldridge Cleaver broken and old on the right. It's a pathetic fall from grace, accentuated by Leary's having turned snitch, and ratting out his hippie friends, and gratuitously having a go with a what-have-you-done-for-us-lately razzing of Dylan, our beloved song-and-dance man.

Some have said that Leary was just showing his true weak-ass colors, when off El Cid, and it's conceivable that his ratting -- with its promise of earlier release -- was motivated by a desire to drop again into that space where all darkness is taken away and clarity takes over. Only in America could he be forgiven and re-embraced upon release from prison by a new generation, like a Che T-shirt avatar, come alive. Come alive, to "debate," G. Gordon Liddy (complete doco film available at archive.org) reminiscent of banker Jerry Rubin going up against Abbie, still on the lam. Only in America does Leary get payback by holding a rock concert at Nixon's Californian library and pissing on the dead fascist's floor.

You ask yourself the obvious question: Does Timothy Leary have any relevance to our times and concerns? Probably nobody could sum it up better than another delinquent from that time, the one-and-only gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he sums up Leary's countercultural vibe:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that '60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously ... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody ... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

Remember, the light at the end of the tunnel may be the event horizon at the cusp of a big black hole.

And, look at the White House, containing a grown up, broken bad, Richie Rich, who grabs nooky and everything, and who sends squadrons of Kent State-like 'soldiers' to break some heads and quell unwelcome (but justifiable) civil unrest, and who lies with every breath, and falls in love with wealth itself, and turns his back on me (and you). We're a Wall Street collapse away from total chaos in the streets, and should that scene be supplemented by the re-election of Trump, it'll be a revolution! Get off the grid while you can -- albeit that doesn't have the same cachet as "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

And if we must keep playing that goddamn military song that says cancelled culture all over it (you know the one I'm talking about), instead of "America the Beautiful," please, o please, mandate that it must be the more honest Jimi version,

Electric El Cid.

Authors Website: https://tantricdispositionmatrix.substack.com/

Authors Bio:

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.