Sitting in a storage complex in Long Island City, waiting to be sorted and processed, are several hundred boxes that make up the complete archive of Dr. Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned fugitive drug propagandist. The material was recently acquired from Leary’s estate by the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, whose collection includes Mesopotamian clay tablets from the third millennium B.C.; documents from America’s founding, including a handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson; letters and manuscripts by Hawthorne, Melville, Mencken; the papers of Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses; and the archives of this magazine.
Against this eminent backdrop, Leary, who was labeled by Richard Nixon (albeit with some hyperbole) “the most dangerous man in America,” seems an odd fit. His notoriety began with his controversial stewardship of the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which in 1960 commenced a series of experiments into the effects and therapeutic potential of hallucinogens. The increasingly loose and unorthodox methodology of this analysis virtually eliminated the distinction between experimenter and subject, and Leary’s handling of the drugs was cavalier, to say the least. “Would you be willing to meet this guy for a drink, size him up and then if you think he is a swinger, make arrangements to give him mushrooms?” he wrote to a colleague in 1961. “As a pharmacist he might teach us a lot.” Allen Ginsberg took notice, and initiated Leary into the cultural cognoscenti. They gave psilocybin to Robert Lowell (to no great effect), and before long Ginsberg was writing Leary to ask, “Do you want I should take on Monk or Franz Kline or De Kooning?”
The project’s lack of discretion and diminishing credibility aroused the ire of the Harvard faculty and student body, resulting in a dispute over its merits that wound up in the pages of the Harvard Crimson and then the national press. By the end of the year, the university had shuttered the project. Defiant, Leary and his chief collaborator, Richard Alpert, defended their work in a letter to the Crimson. “A major civil liberties issue of the next decade will be the control and expansion of consciousness,” they declared. “Who controls your cortex? Who decides on the range and limits of your awareness? If you want to research your own nervous system, expand your consciousness, who is to decide that you can't and why?” Both were soon out of a job, but Leary continued to pursue his idiosyncratic research with a large supply of L.S.D., most of it administered at a magnificent twenty-five-hundred-acre estate in Millbrook, upstate from New York City. By the mid-sixties, following numerous run-ins with the law, he had completed his metamorphosis from Ivy League academic to countercultural high priest, tirelessly espousing the gospel of mind expansion and the politics of ecstasy.
After a prison stint in the mid-seventies, Leary toured the lecture and club circuit as a “stand-up philosopher.” He even launched a show alongside Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, who had plagued Leary in his Millbrook days as a Dutchess County assistant district attorney. The psychedelic era having dissipated entirely, Leary turned to futurism, advocating space migration and personal computing. He became an enthusiastic booster of the Internet and cyberculture. Years spent hobnobbing in Hollywood renewed his celebrity. But while his influence on pop culture is undeniable, it’s difficult to escape the impression of Leary during this period as a fading opportunist, trading on his sixties iconography as best he could before his death from prostate cancer in 1996.
The Leary trove is immense, spanning his childhood to his death, comprising some three hundred and fifty boxes of correspondence, experimental data, legal records, and manuscripts, as well as several hundred hours of video and audio recordings. Robert Greenfield’s informative 2006 biography, reviewed for the magazine by Louis Menand, made extensive use of the archive, examining Leary’s mythos with a great deal of skepticism. Greenfield portrays Leary as a narcissistic professional whose willful intemperance and disaffection with middle-class life triggered his reinvention as a drug-fueled neurological religionist—a kind of radical illustration of the excesses of the American Dream.
Greenfield also catalogs the various casualties of Leary’s strange adventure, not least the suicides of his first wife and his daughter Susan, who was swept along with her brother Jack into a traumatic whirlwind of alternative living. He relates how Leary, facing a lengthy incarceration for possession of a small amount of cannabis and a 1970 prison escape, informed on former lawyers and associates in an effort to ingratiate himself to federal authorities and win his freedom. To aid their investigation during this period, the F.B.I. seized Leary’s papers from his longtime archivist, Michael Horowitz. (Leary was godfather to Horowitz’s daughter, Winona Ryder.) “Transgressors—both mercenary and conceptual—play a key role in the religious rituals of an electronic media culture,” Leary wrote in one particularly angry and self-pitying tirade from federal prison. “The ceremonies of hunting sinners, publicly trying them, and assigning retribution is the basic religious ceremony of domesticated primates.” Remarkably enough, this was published in the National Review in April, 1976. Shortly after the issue appeared on newsstands, Leary was granted federal parole. In a letter to his mother the following June, he wrote, “You may know that William Buckley was very helpful in getting my release from prison—and has published articles I've written in his magazine.”
Leary’s hucksterism and the insouciance with which he regarded scientific protocol undeniably imperiled the study of psychedelic drugs, about which he testified before the U.S. Senate in 1966. His widespread advocacy of hallucinogens helped give rise to the Summer of Love, but also helped ensure the criminalization of these substances. Only recently have scientists and psychologists been able to win regulatory approval for their study. Nevertheless, Leary occupied the vanguard of this field (much of it covertly funded by the C.I.A., as detailed in “Acid Dreams,” by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain) when it was just developing, and his archive has been likened to a clearinghouse for drug research. In addition to his Harvard records and correspondence with such figures as Albert Hoffman (who first synthesized L.S.D. in 1938) and Aldous Huxley, Leary’s papers include the complete records of the various entities he established to continue his hallucinogenic studies: the International Federation for Internal Freedom, the Castalia Foundation, and the League for Spiritual Discovery. They constitute an immense amount of material to be assessed and reëvaluated by researchers today. The piles of case studies, session reports, and letters describing personal experiences in his archive are among the earliest ever recorded in such a fashion, and will offer scholars a unique perspective on the subject.
Cultural historians will turn to the collection in an effort to shed greater light on this paradoxical figure who typified the acid-fueled, utopian indulgences of a far younger generation. Leary’s escapade was seriocomic—a midlife crisis that took on the dimension of a cultural revolution. In a private, lucid moment, he might have conceded this disproportion. As a young Tim Leary presciently noted in a letter to his mother from West Point, from which he would drop out after being censured by its honor committee, “You thought I wanted to reform the world and bring it some great, metaphysical truth. To be frank, what I really long for is fame.”
