STRAIGHT DOPE ON LSD GURU TIMOTHY

'60s Icon Would Have Reveled in Painstaking Account of His Career

Timothy Leary, A Biography By Robert Greenfield; Harcourt; 663 Pages; $28

Timothy Leary, who once said that he had looked forward to dying all
his life and who has now been dead for 10 years, was born in
Springfield, Mass., on Oct. 22, 1920. But the Leary who occupies the
public mind -- that unpredictable, incorrigible and ultimately
unknowable human emblem of '60s counterculture and of the uninhibited
drug use that permeated and fueled that counterculture -- did not
emerge until somewhat later.

If one had to put a precise date on it, one could do worse than to
choose Aug. 9, 1960 -- the day that Leary sampled hallucinogenic drugs
for the first time. At that time, Leary was a graduate of UC
Berkeley's psychology program, a lecturer at Harvard University and
the author of a respected book, "The Interpersonal Diagnosis of
Personality." He was, in the eyes of those around him, a perfectly
conventional academic, a working stiff, a square.

And then came the mushrooms.

Mexican mushrooms -- "big black moldy damp" mushrooms, which, Leary
later recalled, tasted "worse than they looked," and which were packed
with psilocybin. The experience was unforgettable, and irrevocable:
"It was the classic visionary voyage and I came back a changed man."
Changed in many ways, but above all possessed by a newfound conviction
that hallucinogenic drugs would not only open new doors in the
exploration of conscious human experience but also would somehow
provide solutions to modern society's deepest problems.

Within a few short months, Leary was roaming the Eastern seaboard
alongside Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and others, delivering these
substances to intellectuals and important public figures in hope of
turning them on to the new regions of consciousness he felt himself to
have discovered.

Having begun with psilocybin, Leary would soon direct his main
attention, and greatest enthusiasm, toward a much more powerful
hallucinogen: LSD. Acid was still legal at the time and, indeed,
astonishingly easy to obtain.

Leary's student George Litwin recalls writing to Sandoz Laboratories
on Harvard letterhead and receiving not the expected application form
but a large bottle of LSD accompanied by a note that read, "We
appreciate your request and we are interested in sponsoring work in
this area. Here's a starter kit to get going and please send us a
report of the results." Of course, not everyone was quite as casual as
the Sandoz staff regarding the experimental use of psychedelics.
Leary's drug research soon became controversial and, inevitably, the
subject of public scrutiny.

His dismissal from Harvard in 1963 drew headlines and helped make him
a nationally known figure, while failing entirely to deter him from
his pro-LSD crusading.

From Harvard, one of the centers of American intellectual culture, he
moved with surprising ease into the counterculture, a social milieu
far more accepting of the sort of quasi-messianic figure that Leary,
with his gospel of better consciousness through chemistry, was fast
becoming.

Leary's firing from Harvard was not his first clash with authority,
nor was it to be his last. He attempted to continue his drug
experimentation in a private residence in New York state, but faced
repeated raids by squads of government agents under the command of G.
Gordon Liddy. (In the early 1980s, in one of the more bizarre
developments in Leary's life, he would befriend and go on a national
debate tour with Liddy.) Arrested and harshly sentenced for
marijuana-related offenses, he would spend much of the 1970s in prison
and, after his escape from his first prison stint, in overseas exile.
Famously, he was at one point identified by Richard Nixon as the most
dangerous man in America. His involvement with the Weather Underground
and other radical political groups may have raised his public profile
still further, but it did little to endear him to the powers that be.

And yet, one comes away from "Timothy Leary: A Biography" with the odd
sense that the root of all this radicalism and anti-authoritarianism
was a deep desire for acceptance. Underneath it all, one can't help but
think, Leary just wanted to be loved.

It's not clear that he ever really understood the beatniks, hippies
and revolutionaries he associated with in the '60s, and the politics
of the Weather Underground and other radicals seemed to go, for the
most part, right over his head. On the whole, he seemed much more
interested in so-called inner revolution: Change your mind, and social
reality will follow -- a narcissistic apoliticalism that was to become
popular with many disillusioned former revolutionaries in the
self-centered '70s. His final decades find him happily making a place
for himself in Los Angeles' celebrity culture, working his connections
to try to get someone to make a film based on his life story, and,
when it becomes clear that his time is running short, making a last
desperate bid for fame by threatening to take his own life -- and
broadcast the suicide live over the Internet.

Some readers of Greenfield's book will see this later stage of Leary's
life as a sad diminishment of what went before.

Others will wonder whether there was really much to Leary to begin
with -- and how much, in the grand scheme of things, his influence
really mattered. (If Leary hadn't worked to popularize it, would LSD
have quietly vanished from the scene?)

The majority of his writings border on incoherence (indeed, quite a few
cross that border), and some are simply embarrassing ("Starseed: A
Psy-Phi Comet Tale," to name just one). His various journals and
autobiographies frequently contradict one another, and are even more
frequently contradicted by the recollections of other, usually more
reliable witnesses.

Moreover, Leary's inability to honestly address concerns regarding the
potential negative effects of LSD and other drugs seems to be evidence
not only of a deep naivete but also of a lack of intellectual
integrity: Even as he continued (with rapidly diminishing
plausibility) to refer to his hallucinogenic adventures as "research,"
he showed himself more than willing to omit bad trips, attempted
suicides and other troublesome evidence from his written records.

And as is well known, his eventual release from prison was made
possible only by his willingness to testify against many of his former
friends and associates and -- in order to demonstrate to the world the
depth of his change of heart -- to publish scathing criticisms of John
Lennon, Bob Dylan and others in the pages of William Buckley's
National Review.

Armchair psychologists will find it difficult to resist the conclusion
that Leary's manic desire for fame and celebrity status, and his
apparent inability to achieve genuine and lasting intimacy with any of
his romantic partners (not to mention his even more striking inability
to muster much interest of any sort in his children) stemmed largely
from the series of tragedies and misfortunes that punctuated his
family life. (These included his being abandoned by his father at age
14, and the suicide of his first wife, Marianne; much later, the
daughter he had with Marianne would also commit suicide.) It is left
up to the reader, though, to draw such conclusions. Greenfield himself
resists, entirely too successfully, the temptation to psychologize,
analyze or interpret his subject in any way, and the result is a
curiously inert reckoning of the activities of a figure who rarely if
ever stood still for very long.

As a compendium of historical data pertinent to its subject (and a
correction to the various exaggerations and falsehoods promoted by
Leary himself), Greenfield's book performs a useful service.

But given the nature of the life it documents, it's hard not to see
such a straightforward, factual account as being, well, awfully
square. (Then again, Greenfield's occasional attempts at lyricism make
one glad that he sticks, for the most part, with the straightforward
and factual.) I suppose a reader with an immense intrinsic interest in
the subject might consider this a page-turner. But I can think of only
one person so fascinated with the Timothy Leary myth. And he's been
dead for 10 years.