Timothy Leary was a Great American

Hard to believe that the timid and mostly square Pittsburgh Post-Gazette let me praise America's 1960s drug guru on the front page of its opinion section when he died in 1996, but here's proof.

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Timothy Leary’s Still Dead

June 9, 1996

A great American has died.

But no flags were lowered.

No important politicians delivered instant eulogies.

In fact, many Americans who knew who Timothy Leary was probably cheered secretly to themselves when the 1960s drug guru recently died of prostate cancer at 75.

Rolling Stone's old-hippie editors might honor him and put him on a future cover. But men who begin their careers as important clinical psychologists at Harvard and end up as world-famous drug pushers just don't get elected to the Hall of Fame of Great Americans.

Great Americans of our day are people like Billy Graham, Colin Powell or Jimmy Carter. Not kooky troublemakers and professional media stuntmen who do whatever it takes — become "stand-up philosophers," stage vaudevillian debates with G. Gordon Liddy or make a media event of their own slow deaths — to perpetuate their own notoriety.

President Nixon, a Truly Great American who recognized a threat to the nation when he saw one, summed up the conventional, responsible point of view. He once called Leary "the most dangerous man" in the country. Though Leary took it as a compliment; most adults then and now probably would agree with Nixon.

But like it or not, along with his flaws and excesses, Leary — America's pioneering acid head — was blessed with many of the same character traits and political values that go into the making of most Great Americans.

What's more, he loved America — in his own way — to the same degree that a flag-waving, law-abiding member of the Rotary Club does.

***

Wind chimes tinkled. BMWs purred past. Police and ambulance sirens cried in the distance.

Timothv Leary and I were sitting on the grass in front of his modest rental apartment in Beverly Hills, hiding from the mid-afternoon Southern California sun under the shade of a eucalyptus tree.

It was 1980 and Leary was in his "stand-up philosophy" period. That meant for $6.50 you could see him on stage at an L.A. rock club making fun of Hollywood's "loser, alcoholic culture" and telling everyone to jump on what he said was going to be the next big mind trip — space travel.

As research for my freelance article, I had gone to one of his shows. The audience was mostly male yahoos, which meant Leary had to ratchet up the drug content of his act to about 20 percent.

It was a slightly ragged but often funny show about his wild past and everyone's else's exciting future, but Leary twanged my libertarian heartstrings with a revolutionary call to smash the protected Big Three Network TV Oligopoly.

"In the '80s we're going to take media away from ABC and NBC and everyone's going to get in the media," he said with a fair degree of prescience. "You can build yourself a satellite dish. It'll cost you $20,000, but you can bootleg one for $300.

“So break the law. Get yourself a satellite so you'll have a 1,000 shows coming in. Get yourself a little transistor we'll be building up cable TV and small networks and wrench power away from the big establishments."

Although I had inhaled a few in my day, I was no devotee of the drug or hippie culture. I have never touched Leary's sacrament, LSD. I was uncomfortable about interviewing him. Were my counter-culture qualifications in order?

Politically, I was then what I am today — a free-market libertarian with a strong background in Roman Catholicism, conservative Republicanism and Brooks Brothers blazers.

I had no problem with Leary's drug taking or public drug pushing. I was in favor of getting rid of all victimless crime laws for adults, including drug laws. Personally, however, when it came to hallucinogens, I was (and am) quite content with the current dimensions of my own mini-brain.

But my apprehensions were unfounded. As we sat in the shade, and as he exchanged happy hellos to a passing parade of his elderly neighbors who knew exactly who he was, the ex-most dangerous man in America was as friendly and entertaining as a tavonte uncle.

His blue eyes were as bright and clear as his mind, which bounced around from breaking New Age stuff like the Gaia Theory to regional politics, genetic research and space colonization.

His sense of humor was in high gear. His sentences trailed off now and then, but I remember being amazed at what good shape he was in for a high- mileage dude whose brain had been fried and retried a few thousand times.

Leary had just turned 60 — the same age as my Dad. And because Leary was the only father home during the day in his relatively quiet neighborhood, he spent many of his afternoons in the street teaching Iranian kids how to play baseball. It was a nation-scaring thought that would make a perfect opening sentence for the freelance story I was hoping to sell to The New York Times.

***

The interview went well. In fact, of all the famous folks I met and interviewed at length during my 12 years in La La-land — Truly Great Americans like Jimmy Stewart and Tommy Lasorda — it remains the most memorable. It also taught me a valuable lesson about the distortive powers of the mass media. Everything that Leary said smashed the simplistic stereotype I had brought with me.

He was no leftist, no America-hater, no control freak. He had been thrown in prison for possessing two joints of marijuana, yet he sounded more patriotic than John Wayne.

"America is the greatest country that ever lived. The young people are the greatest young people to ever hang around. The whole experiment has been a tremendous success.”

He was not the least bit penitent for his alleged sins against America. "I'm extremely pleased with the amount of trouble I've been able to stir up." He loved being controversial. He was doing his life's work — making the authorities nervous, stirring up trouble.

"I'm doing what I always do defending the American conservative-libertarian way of life: Encouraging individuality and disrespect for authority and trying to keep the government out of our lives, like every red-white-and-blue American, heh, heh, heh."

Leary, who employed that diabolical, teen-age laugh often, admitted he was no adult. It was a deliberate choice. When you become an adult, he said, you stop changing. You die.

In fact, when I asked him to name the greatest single threat to more individual freedom in America he didn't say Commies or Republicans or the FBI. He said “old people."

But he wasn't complaining. It's part of evolution. Old people run everything, he said, and they've always been impediments to change.

Leary was upbeat, optimistic, future-looking and philosophically consistent: He wanted everyone to be smarter, better and happier. He wanted individuals to be as free as possible in body and mind.

Nothing he said offended me.

He knew he gave out "vibrations of cheerful, reckless, arrogant enthusiasm" that "put off 90 percent of people, because the whole culture is Judeo-Christian and is based on the Vale of tears” — the idea that you're supposed to suffer."

Your most important message to the 10 percent who pick up your signal, Doctor?

"That the evolutionary process is intelligent. It is benign and it's evolving and it's continuing. The more you understand evolution, the wiser you are, the funnier you are, the happier you are and the more secure you are."

The more people who understood this, he said, "the happier they'll be, the nicer, the more friendly, the more hopeful, the more confidence they'll have, heh, heh, heh. I wish more people understood … but that'll take time."

***

Everyone knows Timothy Leary had his flaws and excesses. He had a wicked irresponsible streak. His hedonistic drug mantra — "Turn on, tune in, drop out" — created unknown casualties among America's impressionable youth.

But he used no guns, employed no trickery and engaged in no fraud. His most powerful weapon was his unshackled and zany mind, boosted by his savvy showmanship and the mass media, whose generous promotional help made him a regular — if threatening — character in the American sitcom of the '60s and '70s.

Yet as I found out to my great surprise when I interviewed him, the real Leary and the media Leary were not the same people.

The real Leary was much more than a merry drug huckster. He was as anti-authoritarian as Tom Paine. As freedom-loving as Thomas Jefferson. As iconoclastic as Mark Twain. As adventurous as Amelia Earhart. As suspicious of religion as H.L. Mencken. As futuristic as Buckminster Fuller. As good-neighborly as Mister Rogers. As interested in people improving themselves as Dale Carnegie. And as enthusiastic about life and its possibilities as Teddy Roosevelt.

I know Richard Nixon wouldn't buy it, but to me that adds up to a Truly Great American.

***

In November of 1980, Leary was fired from his job as a morning radio host at a rock station in conservative Orange County. I wrote a piece about the sacking of Uncle Tim for L.A. Weekly.