In fact, we could go on for 1,500 words just trying to decide what to call the guy. Up until 1968, the envelopes in NEWSWEEK’s clipping files still identified him as LEARY, TIMOTHY F., EDUCATOR: a holdover from his career as a well-respected clinical psychologist at Harvard. A personality test he designed was so widely used that he had to take it himself in 1970, while doing time in a California prison. In 1960, at the age of 40, Leary took hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico and did the archetypal ’60s turnaround. Within five years, Harvard had canned him for giving experimental doses of psilocybin – then legal – to some 400 students, and he had become a guru who used a Madison Avenue-style slogan (““Turn on, tune in, drop out’’) to market a heartfelt, if naive, transcendental agenda: expand your consciousness with LSD and break free of repression, whether psychic or political. And he meant everybody: he found it ““inconceivable’’ that turned-on parents wouldn’t share acid with kids as young as 7. In the skinny minute it took for LSD to transmute from sacramental chemical to the hydrogen bomb of party drugs, Leary evolved from spiritual leader to cheerleader: who said the sacred wasn’t fun? Only the young acid casualties – ““eggs that had to be broken,’’ as Diana Trilling wrote at the time, ““to make Dr. Leary’s omelette.''
In 1966 Leary’s Xanadu in Dutchess County, N.Y., was raided by the then District Attorney G. Gordon Liddy, later a Watergate burglar, still later Leary’s sidekick in vaudevillian ““debates.’’ (High point: Liddy singing ““America’’ with Leary on piano.) In 1970 he was busted for pot, but the Weather Underground helped him escape from prison in a laundry truck – we’re not making this up – and he took refuge with the Black Panthers in Algeria. (By now Leary was calling it a ““sacred act’’ to shoot cops.) Eventually federal agents recaptured him; after he cooperated with investigators he was denounced by Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin. And his own son Jack called him a power-crazed egotist who – ouch – ““liked to drink a lot more than he liked to drop acid.''
After his release in 1976, the ever-resilient Leary spent the rest of his life being famous for being famous. He kept the pot boiling as a ““stand-up philosopher’’ and a software designer, touting the PC for the same reasons he’d touted LSD: as an opener of the doors of perception and a whoopee cushion under the seats of power. At least in public, he remained the dauntless, wisecracking psychonaut to the end. He was ““thrilled’’ to be dying, couldn’t wait for those mysterious minutes between the last heartbeat and the fade-out of the brain. His last words were ““Why not?’’ It was the one-liner he’d been fine-tuning all his life.
