Who was Timothy Leary?
Prophet? Charlatan? Mystic? Mephisto? Years after his death his legacy is still contested, with advocates and detractors both passionately debating his worth. The Pied Piper of LSD, the man who coined the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out,” eulogized in song, his image disseminated on posters, Leary was perhaps the most famous academic of the 1960s, ranking with Marshall McLuhan as prophet of the post-industrial age. He began the decade as a Harvard professor and ended it in prison. During his life he was a clinical psychologist doing groundbreaking work in behavioral change, but he became a rebel, a guru, a fugitive, and a prisoner. Leary’s life never lacked for adventure, nor his work for controversy, but to this day it remains unclear whether drugs were his salvation or his ruin. Born to an alcoholic Army dentist and a prim New England aristocrat, in his autobiography, Flashbacks, Leary claimed he was conceived the day after prohibition took affect, implying a predestined–or ironi
He’s mostly remembered as the Johnny Appleseed of acid, the man who turned the world on to LSD. When he was dying in 1996, he was mostly famous for being famous, the oldest celebutant, a 76-year-old guy in a wheelchair at the Viper Room. But back in the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Timothy Leary was an icon of the counterculture, a beatific presence at San Francisco’s Human Be-In, which ushered in the 1967 Summer of Love. He was the most famous member of the World War II generation to embrace the hippies — a handsome, charming rogue hero, incessantly hounded by federal, state and local police intent on stomping out his psychedelic search. Born in 1920, Leary was raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, a small industrial city 90 miles east of Boston. His father, Timothy Francis Leary, was a dentist, a charming drunkard known as “Tote” who abandoned his wife, Abigail, and son and drifted down the social ladder in an alcoholic haze. Abigail was the most important woman in young Tim’s life, a virtuo
