Strange trip
In the spring of 1970, an inmate at the California Men’s Colony filed one of the more eccentric legal pleas ever to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Timothy Leary was the nation’s highest-profile LSD advocate, but it was marijuana that got him in trouble. C
That June, the 49-year-old hippie luminary decided that his final appeal needed a literary touch. In his cell in San Luis Obispo, he typed out a poem and addressed it to William O. Douglas, one of the top court’s left-leaning justices. “They have hunted us to the ground,” he wrote, “Rashly, wickedly, and in violation of our/ national law... / Because we laughed and cried/ FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM!”
Douglas, evidently not a fan of free verse, was unmoved. Weeks later, Leary settled on another path to liberty: He’d bust out of jail, leave “Amerika” for good. Remarkably enough, his plan worked — for a while, anyway.
Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis revisit
this wild saga in “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” a rip-roaring tale of hallucinogenic drugs, revolutionary politics and an intercontinental standoff between a lawand-order president and a louche ex-professor.
The coauthors — their previous collaboration was “Dallas 1963,” an acclaimed account of the John F. Kennedy assassination — say their new book draws on “thousands of freshly available and unexamined primary resources” from multiple countries. Their deep dive into government archives supports a narrative that never lacks for drama. Davis and Minutaglio’s prose is lean and brisk, and in Leary, they’ve found a brilliant, ridiculous main character who was one of the era’s emblematic figures.
As a Harvard professor, Leary began experimenting with LSD in the early ’60s, and he soon became a countercultural tribune. He had some advice for the thousands who gathered in Golden Gate Park for a “Be-In” in January 1967: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” In other words, try psychedelics and forsake mainstream values. From the time he took office in 1969, President Richard Nixon believed he was among the nation’s most destructive voices.
Leary’s notoriety, combined with draconian sentencing guidelines, earned him a term of up to 10 years after he was caught with two joints in the small Orange County city of Laguna Beach. When his appeals failed, he resolved to escape from CMC’s minimumsecurity wing. On Sept. 12, 1970, he climbed a tree, crawled over some barbed wire and took off into the night. Aided by self-declared subversives who helped him get money and fake IDs, he fled to North Africa.
In Algiers, Leary and his wife, Rosemary, linked up with another outlaw expat. Eldridge Cleaver, a Black Panther who’d been on the run since a 1968 shootout with Oakland police, was enjoying the largesse of Algeria’s power brokers. “The Panthers were given a beautiful two-story manor to use as their embassy,” the authors write. For the Algerians, Leary was a “valuable bargaining chip ... as they negotiate(d) huge oil and gas deals with the Americans.” But for the intense Cleaver, his libertine housemate was a pest whose “mind has been blown by acid.”
Leary’s next lifeline came from Switzerland when a weapons dealer, hoping to skim some cash from the fugitive’s future book deals, stepped in to sponsor him. His arrival in Europe was big news — Switzerland’s French-language papers dubbed him “‘le Pape de la Drogue’: the Pope of Dope,” the authors say.
The Justice Department repeatedly tried to have Leary extradited, but foreign officials who objected to America’s conduct of the Vietnam War weren’t eager to help Nixon. That summer, the president targeted drug users — “hopheads,” he called them — with renewed intensity. During a July meeting, Nixon and his staff discussed labeling Leary as America’s most notorious drug offender. In August, the feds arrested dozens in coordinated raids, and Leary, still at large, was hit with new charges. His bail, the authors note, was “set at an astonishing $5 million — the highest ever levied in” America.
Leary evaded authorities for almost 2½ years, and as Minutaglio and Davis tell it, there was never a boring moment. But his saga ended without much of a bang. Detained in Afghanistan, he ended up in Folsom State Prison. The erstwhile rebel was soon cooperating with FBI agents. In April 1976, he was set free.
This is an energetic nonfiction narrative, one made up of short chapters and cinematic scenes. Attentive readers will note that the authors don’t hesitate to describe their characters’ facial expressions and body language. These are details that seem to be harvested from memoirs written by key players (among other sources), but ultimately, they’re unverifiable. On the whole, though, this is a well-researched and factually sound book.
And an eventful one, too. Minutaglio and Davis have taken a largely forgotten chapter from the recent past and turned it into a vigorous pageturner. “The Most Dangerous Man in America” isn’t what you’d call an important work of history, and it has its imperfections. But it also happens to be awfully entertaining.