CHAPTER 2
before the deluge (1954–1966)
Fifties Culture
Later in his life Timothy Leary often said, “If you want to understand the sixties, you need to understand the fifties.” He was, for the most part, talking about the early experiments with psychedelics by psychiatrists, artists, and the United States government, as well as the oppressive shadow of McCarthyism and cultural and political orthodoxy.
When the Beatles’ animated film Yellow Submarine was released in 1968, it depicted the enemies of joy as “the blue meanies.” Some saw the cartoon villains simply as cops, but to a lot of us the blue meanies were a metaphor for materialists, racists, warmongers, repressive religious fanatics, and those who wished to censor artists. We imagined shadowy conservative white men wearing business suits who had won far too many of the arguments after World War II.
In the eyes of the counterculture, the “establishment” had created a materialistic and inhibited society that trapped many of our parents, a society which we, with the help of the Beatles, were determined to change for the better. All sixties change-agents, famous or obscure, owed a debt to the many who blazed progressive paths in the far less hospitable fifties.
Starting in 1952, Mad magazine satirized the materialistic advertising culture. In the early sixties, waiting for puberty to take hold, I used to read every word of every issue as if the contents were manna from sarcastic heaven. At the same time, older baby boomers were enjoying subversive comics like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Hugh Romney (who later renamed himself Wavy Gravy), Dick Gregory, and Lord Buckley as mind-expanding alternatives to the borscht belt humor of the vaudeville era. I loved the comedy routine 2,000 Year Old Man, which was recorded as a series of albums in the 1960s. Straight man Carl Reiner asks the ancient protagonist played by Mel Brooks what mankind’s earliest religion was. Brooks responds: “At first we worshipped Phil. He was the biggest and strongest among us and we worshipped him and we feared him. Then one day a bolt of lightning struck Phil and killed him. And we looked at each other and we said to each other, There’s something bigger than Phil.”
Elvis Presley and others created the first wave of mass-appeal rock and roll, which helped loosen sexual repression and forged a musical culture that was shared by whites and blacks. American music culture of the fifties also spawned a deeper and edgier jazz, and, in the early sixties, a feisty, liberal folk music boom that included Joan Baez’s mixture of vocal purity and pacifist politics and Bob Dylan’s early albums, which had several “protest” songs.
Hollywood gave the world antiheroes played by Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, and the sexuality of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Kim Novak.
The American intellectual community of the fifties and early sixties included radical thinkers such as Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer. J.D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye inspired millions of teenagers to mock “phonies.” (Salinger’s subsequent book, Franny and Zooey, has extensive references to mystical Christianity, Zen Buddhism, and Hindu Advaita Vedanta, and influenced the “new age” movement in future decades.)
The most radical white cultural expression came from the beatniks, most notably from Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” which among its many lasting effects on Western culture began a decades-long process of defeating censorship in the arts.
It can be argued that the fifties ended in November 1960 when John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. He was twenty-seven years younger than his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower. The following February, a month after he had taken office, President Kennedy crossed an American Legion picket line to see the film Spartacus, written by formerly blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. The new president effectively ended the blacklist that had excluded hundreds of left-wing writers, actors, and directors from working in Hollywood films and network television, thereby creating the space for a more rebellious and diverse mass culture.
Ideas about sex were changing too. After World War II, Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist at the University of Indiana, researched the sex lives of thousands of Americans and published two books on his findings: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. In addition to stimulating more honest conversations about heterosexual sex, Kinsey’s works were among the first to bring information about homosexuality into mainstream culture.
1960 was also the year that birth control pills were introduced for mass consumption, a development that dramatically changed how everyone thought about sexual activity.
Civil Rights
In May 1954 the United States Supreme Court issued the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools. That lawsuit was filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been formed in 1909 to combat racial discrimination and in the ensuing years had become the “establishment” civil rights organization with the most conventional political clout.
The Montgomery bus boycott from December 1955 to December 1956 succeeded in ending segregation on the city’s buses and propelled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into international fame, and further popularized nonviolent civil disobedience, a tactic which the NAACP had eschewed. (Dr. King formed his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, shortly after the boycott.)
For the next several years, further progress was stymied by white segregationists. While the NAACP and Dr. King maintained leading roles, new more militant organizations also sprung up, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
By 1960, Malcolm X had emerged as a prominent spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI) and as a new militant black voice who was outspoken in his contempt for Dr. King’s use of nonviolence. Malcolm X grew to greater renown when he befriended Cassius Clay shortly before Clay upset Sonny Liston for the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship on February 25, 1964. Clay’s wit and poetry (he composed doggerel predicting the results of his fights) were a dramatic contrast to the mob-connected, glowering, inarticulate Liston, and at the age of twenty-two, Clay was the youngest man ever to win the heavyweight championship.
Immediately after the Clay/Liston fight the new champion announced that he was a Muslim and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Every kid I knew loved Ali, so many of us experienced cognitive dissonance while reading the laments of older sports writers who compared the new outspoken champion unfavorably to Joe Louis, the black boxing hero of the older generation, who had always been polite outside the ring.
Malcolm X would not benefit from the champ’s explosion of popularity because on March 8, Malcolm publicly broke with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Ali, who overnight had become one of the most popular black Americans, remained loyal to the NOI.
In 1961, CORE began freedom rides to integrate buses and interstate bus terminals in the South; the group later expanded to voter registration. On June 21, 1964, CORE workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman disappeared. Their bodies were later found—they had been murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
That same year, in response to the blatant voter suppression of blacks in Mississippi, civil rights activists, including Fannie Lou Hamer, formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The group sent sixty-eight representatives to the Democratic Convention that August in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and demanded to be seated as delegates. President Lyndon B. Johnson orchestrated a “compromise” that offered the MFDP a mere two nonvoting seats at the convention while retaining the all-white “official” Mississippi delegation. Hamer and her MFDP colleagues were outraged. The sense of betrayal would fuel an increased militancy in many quarters of the civil rights movement in years to come.
After Malcolm X left the NOI, he converted to Sunni Islam, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, returned with a more nuanced view of race relations, and was tragically killed, allegedly by members of NOI, on February 21, 1965. A month later, on March 21, 1965, after a couple of failed attempts, Dr. King led the Selma-to-Montgomery March for Voting Rights in Alabama.
The Road to Vietnam
During this same period, there was a subculture of Americans who objected to the Cold War foreign policy that had taken hold after the death of Franklin Roosevelt. My parents were among this minority who felt that President Harry Truman had betrayed many of Roosevelt’s ideas, particularly with regard to the Soviet Union. They had volunteered for Henry Wallace’s ill-fated, anti–Cold War third-party campaign in 1948. Like the parents of many of the baby boomers who would become my friends in the sixties, they were appalled by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his “ism.” They felt that McCarthy wildly exaggerated the threat of American Communists and used the ensuing hysteria to ostracize non-Communist liberals and Socialists who had been part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The Korean War started on June 25, 1950, nine days before I was born, at the peak of the American baby boom that would be at the cultural center of the late sixties.
The protests against the war in Vietnam in the sixties would be driven by resistance to the military draft, but there had been a draft fifteen years earlier for the Korean War, and many of the arguments that were used against the Vietnam War applied to Korea as well. Yet there had been no mass resistance to the Korean War. What had changed in America between 1950 and 1965 to create the space for such a dramatically different response just one generation removed?
One factor was that the Korean War itself left an unsatisfying aftertaste to much of the American public. More than 36,000 American soldiers died in the war, but it did not produce an emotionally satisfying victory like World War II had. Instead there was a negotiated settlement, the benefit of which was at best an abstract concept to many Americans.
“Pacifist” is another word like “hippie” and “Socialist” that was supposedly unacceptable for serious people. Yet many Americans felt that pacifists like Britain’s Lord Bertrand Russell, who had vainly opposed World War I and who was outspoken until his death in 1970, had been vindicated by history. Among these were two Quaker organizations, the American Friends Service Committee and the War Resisters League, which brought a quiet, spiritual fervor to the peace movement.
The oldest person integral to the peace movement of the sixties, Abraham Johannes “A.J.” Muste, was born in 1885 and began his career as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. A believer in nonviolence, Muste opposed America’s participation in World War I. During the 1920s he switched his focus to the labor movement, but by the thirties he had renewed his commitment to pacifism, for which he would be known for the rest of his life. Muste also opposed US involvement in World War II and said in 1940, “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at all,” which he meant as a spiritual belief consistent with many religious teachings but which reinforced his outsider status in the American political world including most of the left.
Nonetheless, as chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, A.J. Muste was a mentor to many who would lead the nonviolent civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties, including James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr. An unrelenting critic of the Cold War, Muste led various efforts to stop nuclear proliferation and was later among the first to criticize the war in Vietnam.
Muste never particularly related to the counterculture. In an obituary of Albert Camus for Liberation magazine, he favorably contrasted the French existentialist with beatniks, whom Muste claimed “stupidly give up the search for meaning.” Yet in the context of the antiwar movement of the midsixties, Muste, by then in his early eighties, had a unique status. Although physically frail, he had a spectral presence and exuded a moral purity that made him the elder statesman of the pacifist side of the movement. Asked for his motivation at a candlelight vigil outside the White House to protest the Vietnam War, he said, “I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”
Dave Dellinger was thirty years younger than Muste, but as a fifty-year-old in 1965 when the Vietnam protests began, he too was a pacifist elder in the movement. Dellinger had refused to fight in World War II, and was sentenced to a term in jail where he was punished for not recognizing racially segregated seating. In 1956, Dellinger, Muste, and others started Liberation magazine, which became an important voice of the non-Communist left.
The nuclear arms race accelerated over the course of the fifties. The level of American paranoia increased markedly between the winter of 1959, when the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro overturned the US-backed government, and the spring of 1961, when the Soviet Union launched a satellite with a pilot named Yuri Gagarin into outer space, the first time a human being escaped the force of gravity.
“There was the constant sense of doom,” recounts Joel Goodman, my best friend in high school. In Barry Alexander Brown and Glenn Silber’s film The War at Home, an antiwar activist recalls being given a copper dog tag at his public school in New York so he could be identified if a nuclear bomb destroyed the city.
I remember reading a pamphlet that had a graphic showing the impact of a five-megaton nuclear bomb, through a series of concentric circles. At the center was the area in which everyone would be immediately vaporized or otherwise killed. A few miles beyond that people would die from radiation poisoning within twenty-four hours. A few miles beyond that people would die within the year. Of course, New York City was considered one of the most likely targets; the suburb where my family lived was in that terrifying third circle.
In my last couple of years of elementary school, a business had grown in America around the building and selling of fallout shelters. The theory was that these structures would prevent radioactive contamination in the event that the Chinese or Soviets dropped nuclear weapons on us. I was torn between jealousy of my friends who had one and a growing sense that it was an absurd scam.
In 1961, Dagmar Wilson, a children’s book illustrator who lived in Virginia with her family, became upset after reading about the arrest of Bertrand Russell at a London demonstration against nuclear testing. She and a few friends formed Women Strike for Peace to support Russell’s agenda.
Barry Commoner, a biologist and professor at Washington University in St. Louis, suspected that the radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests could endanger the health of children exposed to the cancer-causing isotope strontium-90. Commoner’s research led him to believe that the radiation would contaminate the soil and grass, which would be eaten by cows. Those same cows would go on to produce milk that would be consumed by children whose growing bodies were particularly vulnerable.
As a college student at the University of Wisconsin, Cora Weiss had organized recall petitions against Senator Joseph McCarthy for his anti-Communist witch hunt. Several years later, now the mother of three young daughters, Weiss joined Women Strike for Peace. She organized a project for Commoner in which mothers around the country sent the professor young children’s baby teeth. “We gave them to the tooth fairy first so the kids could get their five cents,” Weiss recalls.
Commoner published the “Baby Tooth Survey” in a November 1961 edition of Science. It showed that levels of strontium-90 in children had risen steadily in those born in the 1950s, with those born later showing the most increased levels.
Women Strike for Peace were not doctrinaire pacifists. Weiss explains, “It was close enough to the memory of World War II that some of us believed in the concept of a just war.” Yet they saw nothing just about atmospheric nuclear testing. Wilson, Weiss, and Bella Abzug (who would later be elected to Congress) were among a small group that organized fifty thousand women to march at various locations across the country, calling for an end to atmospheric nuclear testing. Weiss focused on the opinion of Middle America. “We wore hats and white gloves. I wanted to make sure it was safe for Mommy and Daddy and little children, so we insisted on no civil disobedience and no unruly behavior.”
President Kennedy was said to have been deeply troubled by reports of radioactive contamination of milk, and in August 1963 the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned testing in the atmosphere and in the oceans. Weiss remembers fifty members of Women Strike for Peace gathering outside the White House in support of the signing, which took place in Moscow.
Jacqueline Kennedy personally delivered coffee and donuts to the women. “We were all young enough then that we ate the donuts,” Weiss says wistfully. “We were told by one of his aides that President Kennedy wanted to acknowledge the role that Women Strike for Peace had played in creating public opinion supportive of the treaty.”
This Cold War peace movement was the context in which I first crossed paths with Joel Goodman. We met on my first day at Fieldston, in seventh grade, in the fall of 1962. Joel’s father was Percival Goodman, a prominent New York architect best known for his innovative designs of postwar Jewish synagogues. Percy was also a radical intellectual and the older brother of the celebrated writer Paul Goodman, a pacifist who had recently published a critique of modern American society called Growing Up Absurd, which became an ur-text for many sixties radicals.
Although seven years apart in age, the brothers were close. Multiple copies of Paul’s books were stacked in Joel’s parents’ apartment on the Upper West Side. Percy was twenty years older than my father and was a remote figure to me and I suspect to Joel. When I would have dinner at their apartment during sleepovers, Percy, Paul, and Joel’s mother Naomi would be occupied in their world of intellectual discourse while we “kids” had our own coded conversations which we were sure had much more relevance to the world.
Yet, at the same time, we internalized the political values of our parents. Joel’s cousin Matty (Paul’s son) was a year older than him and had refused to participate in air-raid drills at the Bronx High School of Science the year before. Joel suggested to me that we should have our own protest. (Although we thought we were alone on the cutting edge, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement had been arrested for protesting air-raid drills in 1955; Joan Baez had refused to participate in an air-raid drill at Palo Alto High School in 1958; Norman Mailer and Paul Krassner first met at an anti–air raid drill demonstration in 1961.)
The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in October 1962, six weeks into the school year, increasing our sense of urgency. Our message was that air-raid drills were not only pointless, but they added to an atmosphere that normalized the idea of nuclear war. My parents approved. The sign I made with a black marker said, Don’t Prepare for War, Prevent It.
It was a liberal school so we were not expelled. (The alumnus Fieldston boasted most about was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who helped develop the American nuclear bomb. Oppenheimer later turned against the arms race and was subsequently ostracized by many in the military and political establishments.) We were suspended for a day and Fieldston quietly stopped having air-raid drills.
The pre–Vietnam War peace movement was richly expressed in the late fifties and early sixties folk music scene, particularly by the previously blacklisted Pete Seeger, and by Baez, who released her first album at the age of nineteen in 1960.
In the early 1950s, folk singer Ed McCurdy, who had been known for recording bawdy Elizabethan songs, wrote and released the peace song “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”—“Last night I had the strangest dream I’d ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.” The song would be translated into seventy-six languages and recorded by dozens of artists, including Seeger, Baez, Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, and Simon & Garfunkel on their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, which was released in 1964.
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” written in 1955 and recorded by Seeger in 1962, is a pacifist lament about the costs of war. It was later recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, the Kingston Trio, Marlene Dietrich, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton, the Four Seasons, Earth, Wind & Fire, Olivia Newton-John, and Flatt & Scruggs, among others. In 1963, peace songs on popular folk albums included Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” which he quickly followed with another antiwar classic, “With God on Our Side,” which appeared on 1964’s The Times They Are a-Changin’. Also released in 1964 was Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier,” which Donovan covered the following year; 1965 saw the release of Phil Ochs’s album I Ain’t Marching Anymore.
However, in 1965, pop radio was still the only way most American kids could hear new music. Barry McGuire, a former member of the pop folk group the New Christy Minstrels, had a number one hit record with Eve of Destruction. Written by P.F. Sloan, the lyrics were a despairing depiction of the American political culture. It referenced the civil rights struggle in Selma, the Vietnam War, and, implicitly, the assassination of President Kennedy. It was much more radical than anything that had previously been heard on Top 40 radio.
A few months later the promilitary song “Ballad of the Green Berets” by Sergeant Barry Sadler, which was widely perceived as an affirmation of the rationale for the Vietnam War, also went to number one. It is hard to imagine a single human being who would have been a fan of both songs. Polarization was at hand.
Several movies added to the sense of potential apocalypse. In 1959, On the Beach, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire, dramatized the horrible aftermath of a nuclear war. Two films in 1964 showed how an American military could be drawn into such a war: Fail Safe, starring Henry Fonda, and my favorite, Dr. Strangelove, in which Peter Sellers played three different characters. In 1967, the Academy Award for Best Documentary went to The War Game, written and directed by British filmmaker Peter Watkins. A docudrama about the devastation caused by a nuclear war, it was originally produced for British television but the BBC refused to air it because “the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.”
Young people were primed to weigh in. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was created in 1960 at the University of Michigan. At its first convention in 1962, SDS issued a new American left-wing manifesto called the Port Huron Statement, primarily written by twenty-two-year-old Tom Hayden, who was SDS president at the time. Hayden was brought up in Detroit, where his Irish-Catholic family were members of a church presided over by Father Charles Coughlin, who had been a controversial conservative critic of President Roosevelt in the 1930s and was also a notorious anti-Semite. Hayden met Martin Luther King Jr. on a picket line protesting segregation at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. He then joined the Freedom Riders and was arrested and beaten in Mississippi and Georgia. For the rest of his life, Hayden approached activism through the prism of the nonviolent civil rights movement.
SDS agreed with the peace movement’s critique of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. It supported the civil rights movement, and criticized major political parties and labor unions for complacency about poverty. Even so, SDS was critical of what they called “the old left” because of its factionalism and its top-down decision-making hierarchies. SDS advocated “participatory democracy” and supported civil disobedience to help achieve these goals.
To the extent that there was an American left that had any political influence in the fifties and early sixties, it had vigorously denounced communism in response to the pressure of McCarthyism. SDS rejected this liberal orthodoxy and invited a representative from the Progressive Youth Organizing Committee, a Communist group, to attend their convention as an observer. This, in turn, freaked out many older Socialists who had walked a very thin line in the preceding years, most notably Michael Harrington, whose book The Other America was one of the catalysts for President Johnson’s War on Poverty programs. Harrington, who was part of a leftist group called the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), was intent on distinguishing between Socialist programs/ideology and the totalitarian repression of existing Communist governments. To the “new left” exemplified by SDS, the “old left” was hobbled by memories of the late forties and early fifties, and there was also a suspicion among many students that the self-styled lefty elders were merely being protective of their turf. (A.J. Muste agreed with Hayden about inclusivity and the old pacifist addressed SDS conventions in 1964 and 1965.)
In an article for the Nation in 2002 about the fortieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, Hayden still sounded pissed: “While the draft Port Huron Statement included a strong denunciation of the Soviet Union, it wasn’t enough for LID leaders like Michael Harrington. They wanted absolute clarity, for example, that the United States was blameless for the nuclear arms race . . . In truth, they seemed threatened by the independence of the new wave of student activism . . .”
During the early part of his career, when he was best known for political protest songs, Bob Dylan seemed to share Hayden’s irritation with the old left. In late 1963, when Dylan was presented with the Tom Paine Award by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which had been formed in the early fifties to oppose McCarthyism, he made a contrarian speech that signaled his independence from any political dogma. Shortly thereafter, Dylan briefly visited the SDS National Council meeting and told SDS leader Todd Gitlin that he had been turned off by “these bald-headed potbellied people sitting out there in suits.” (It was around this time that the phrase “generation gap” became a useful part of understanding certain conflicts.)
The role of the student left increased dramatically after August 7, 1964, shortly before the Democratic National Convention, when President Johnson pressured the US Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that set the stage for escalation of the war in Vietnam, without a formal declaration of war. Only two senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, opposed it. President Johnson had the good fortune of being opposed in the 1964 election by the conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, whose rhetoric was so extreme (including the suggestion that he would use nuclear weapons in Vietnam) that Johnson was able to run as the “peace” candidate. Nonetheless, disappointment by civil rights activists about the Democratic Convention, anxiety about the Cold War, and the SDS critique of American-style capitalism fostered activism to the left of the Democratic Party on many college campuses.
In October 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California, Berkeley, when a former graduate student named Jack Weinberg was arrested while manning a CORE table, defying university rules against political activism on campus. A series of campus protests ensued and students were supported by numerous activists, including Joan Baez. On November 3, President Johnson defeated Senator Goldwater in a landslide, but this had no effect on the underlying issues at Berkeley. On December 2, 1964, the most prominent of the student leaders, Mario Savio, made a famous speech on the steps of Sproul Hall that concluded, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”
Almost immediately after Johnson’s reelection, he ordered an escalation of the war. Opposition, led by the peace groups, immediately grew. The antiwar movement initially focused on the academics and other experts who had the background to contradict the rationales advanced by the policy intellectuals of the Johnson administration. SDS organized the first major teach-in at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on March 24 and 25, 1965. The event was attended by about 3,500, and consisted of debates, lectures, movies, and musical events aimed at protesting the war.
Not to be outdone, Berkeley radicals created the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) and produced their own thirty-six-hour teach-in beginning May 21, 1965, which attracted 30,000 participants. The State Department was invited by the VDC to send a representative, but declined. Two UC Berkeley political science professors who had agreed to speak in defense of President Johnson’s handling of the war withdrew at the last minute. An empty chair was set aside on the stage with a sign taped on the back reading, Reserved for the State Department.
The attendees included several who would emerge as key figures in the antiwar movement over the ensuing decade, including perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, independent left-wing journalist I.F. Stone, Buddhist scholar Alan Watts, satirist and editor of the Realist Paul Krassner, comedian Dick Gregory, novelist Norman Mailer, Bob Moses from SNCC, Yale professor Staughton Lynd, Stanley Sheinbaum of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and folk singer Phil Ochs.
The teach-ins helped frame the antiwar side of the debate for the next several years. Separate and apart from long-running pacifist arguments against the Cold War was a critique of the dubious establishment rationale for this particular conflict. President Eisenhower had concocted the “domino theory” that suggested that if Vietnam fell under Communist control, there would be a chain reaction that could take over the entire Asian continent, including Japan, and then represent a profound threat to the United States. For many young people who were not in thrall to McCarthy-era paranoia, this simply did not pass the smell test. Moreover, the South Vietnamese government that the US was supporting often acted like a tyrannical dictatorship rather than expressing anything resembling the “democratic” values that the US claimed to support. The North Vietnamese president, Ho Chi Minh, was depicted by the Johnson administration as a puppet of the Soviet Union and Communist China, but in reality Ho was a nationalist (as well as an accomplished poet) and not a villain worthy of an American war.
Earlier in the sixties there had been tension between the South Vietnamese Buddhist community and the Catholic minority who ruled the government. Some Buddhist monks had burned themselves to death to protest discrimination by the American-backed government. A mirror of this horrible image came home on November 2, 1965, when American Quaker Norman R. Morrison immolated himself in front of the Pentagon.
By this time, Joel and I were hanging out a lot with Peter Kinoy, a senior whose father was Arthur Kinoy, a brilliant and well-known left-wing attorney who had filed the last appeal for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two US citizens executed for committing espionage, and later represented Martin Luther King Jr. and many others in the civil rights and peace movements.
On November 27, 1965, SDS staged a March on Washington to protest the war. Joel, Peter, and I organized a busload of Fieldston kids to attend. The marquee speakers were Coretta Scott King and Dr. Benjamin Spock, but it was the new SDS president, Carl Oglesby, who made the speech that I remembered most clearly on the bus ride back to New York.
Speaking with mournful disappointment in the agenda of the “liberal” Democratic administration, Oglesby said: “Their aim in Vietnam . . . is to safeguard what they take to be American interests around the world against revolution or revolutionary change, which they always call communism . . . [T]here is simply no such thing, now, for us, as a just revolution . . . [We] have lost that mysterious social desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral drive. We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-wasted, bullet-headed make-out artists. A nation—may I say it?—of beardless liberals . . . Some will make of it that I overdraw the matter . . . [a]nd others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these I say—don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”
In August of 1966, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had ruined the lives of many liberals and leftists during and in the aftermath of McCarthyism, held a hearing to investigate antiwar protesters, including Jerry Rubin, who, in defiant contrast to intimidated witnesses in the past, appeared at the hearing in a Revolutionary War costume, complete with a three-cornered hat. The protesters were represented by Arthur Kinoy, who after repeatedly trying to make a point was physically ejected from the hearing room. The next day, there was a photo on the front page of the New York Times of the diminutive Kinoy (my friend’s dad was 5'2") in a choke hold while huge House security men dragged him out of the hearing room. In 1975, when HUAC was finally dismantled by the full House, that image was frequently cited as the beginning of the end of the infamous committee.
Those who objected to the swagger of the new left were not limited to old Communists or anti-Communist Socialists. In 1966, conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. launched the show Firing Line to give conservative views a national television megaphone to counteract the supposed liberal bias of the networks. (In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, a “new right” was created parallel to, and opposed to, the culture I was inspired by.)
Also in 1966, the National Organization for Women was founded. Their focus was on a wide variety of areas in which millions of women felt disadvantaged or oppressed, including the way women were often treated in the civil rights and antiwar movements.
Art and Entertainment
On February 9, 1964, eleven weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, demonstrating, among other things, that teenage girls could be sexually attracted to guys with long hair. I was one of millions of teenage males to grow my hair as long as I could get away with while I was still in school, and longer still once there were no authorities to force a haircut. Over the next few years, the trade-off for being attractive to younger women was the hostility of older guys and authority figures who would often mock us with the question, “Are you a boy or are you a girl?”
The Beatles’ massive popularity opened the door for numerous other English pop and rock bands to capture the hearts of those girls, the so-called British invasion. In July, the Beatles’ witty film A Hard Day’s Night was released. The film revealed the band’s feisty antiestablishment attitude, and broadened the audience of rock and roll overnight to include older teenagers, college kids, and alienated guys. Young folkies and future rock stars such as David Crosby, Jerry Garcia, and Jorma Kaukonen hastily got electric guitars and formed rock bands. A year later, on July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, outraging some folkie purists while inspiring countless others. Among the albums released in 1965 were the Rolling Stones’ Out of Our Heads, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, Phil Ochs’s I Ain’t Marching Anymore, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Do You Believe in Magic, and the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had a slightly distorted, trippy photo of the band on the cover. It included the song “Norwegian Wood,” which introduced Beatles fans to an Indian instrument called a sitar. Albums released in 1966 included the Beatles’ Revolver, the Byrds’ Fifth Dimension, and Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.
In the early sixties, cosmopolitan and campus cultures were impacted by European films by directors such as Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, France’s Jean-Luc Godard, and Italy’s Federico Fellini, who brought more psychology, impressionism, and mysticism to movies than Hollywood typically produced. British filmmakers presented the subversive comedy of Pete Sellers and Alec Guinness, as well as the angst of angry young men in films written by playwright John Osborne and others.
In America in 1966, the TV series Star Trek debuted and Lenny Bruce died.
LSD
From the midfifties through the midsixties there was increasing experimentation and research into mind-expanding drugs. Awareness of such herbs or chemical substances in Western civilization had been restricted to a few therapists and anthropologists until 1954, when Aldous Huxley published a description of his experiences with mescaline in the book The Doors of Perception. (A dozen years later the book’s title would inspire the name of rock band the Doors.)
Huxley was a native of England, where he achieved fame as a writer, most notably with his visionary novel Brave New World. He was also a pacifist who had been close to Bertrand Russell as a young man. In the 1930s, Huxley moved to Los Angeles, where he became deeply involved with Eastern religions, in particular the Vedanta form of Hinduism. Huxley’s spiritual teacher, Swami Prabhavananda, was dubious about the spiritual validity of mescaline, but Huxley, while remaining involved with the Vedanta Society, insisted that some of the experiences he got from psychedelics (a word that his friend Humphry Osmond coined in 1956) were consistent with those achieved through meditation and other spiritual practices.
Huxley befriended Los Angeles psychotherapist Oscar Janiger, who was then conducting research with another psychedelic known as LSD. The formal scientific name for the chemical was lysergic acid diethylamide and it had been accidentally discovered in Switzerland in 1943 by a chemist named Albert Hoffman. (In the sixties, we started calling it “acid.”) Separate from his larger study, Janiger launched a project with artists because he believed they could contribute language and depth to an understanding of LSD that were inaccessible to traditional scientific observation. In addition to Huxley, Janiger gave LSD to actors Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, and Rita Moreno, classical music conductor André Previn, and author Anaïs Nin, as well as several visual artists who created paintings under the influence.
Janiger concluded that he could not understand his research without some personal experience, and over the course of his lifetime he took LSD thirteen times. His preference was to stay as invisible as possible and to avoid controversy. Janiger would not publish or otherwise publicly reveal any of his research for several decades.
Huxley, although shy of conventional publicity, was nonetheless one of the Western world’s most prominent public intellectuals and he believed that transmission to others was part of his purpose in life. In The Doors of Perception he pointed out that what made William Blake so influential was not merely the grandeur of his inner visions but his talent for rendering them through his art and poetry.
Huxley wrote of the expanded appreciation he had for music while taking mescaline. His rhapsodic perceptions about Bach’s music, reproductions of famous paintings he observed on a walk to a local store in Hollywood, and the pulsing inner life of flowers were remarkably similar to the kinds of experiences that acidheads like me would rave about in the late sixties.
Huxley contextualized his mescaline experience as compatible with the Hindu notions of dharma and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “[T]his purely aesthetic Cubist’s-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was . . . back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.”
Yet Huxley was carefully calibrated in his spiritual claims. “I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescaline or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call a ‘gratuitous grace,’ not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available.”
Huxley viewed psychedelics with a sense of discretion that would not be shared by the more flamboyant Dr. Timothy Leary—a brilliant Harvard psychology professor with a restless mind who was intrigued by the use of psilocybin mushrooms in religious rites by the indigenous Mazatec Indians of Mexico.
In 1960, Leary took psilocybin in Mexico, and immediately developed an evangelistic enthusiasm about psychedelics. Leary belatedly read The Doors of Perception; finding great commonality in their experiences, he befriended Huxley.
Leary soon launched a research project at Harvard centered around LSD. Although there was no scientific way of determining the exact effect of psychedelics on the brain, he speculated that the chemical temporarily removed habits of thinking created in early childhood, causing users to experience the world through the uninhibited senses of a baby. “We think that LSD temporarily suspends your imprint—instead of seeing everything like a tired old snapshot.” He also believed that the chemical (or “sacrament,” as he was soon to call it) permitted access to parts of the brain that were not consciously available to most people. Yet Leary also echoed Huxley’s sense of proportion on the spiritual value of psychedelics: “You don’t worship a sacrament, you use it as a key.”
Like Janiger, Leary felt that artists were essential to a deeper understanding of LSD. He reached out to Janiger’s younger cousin, Allen Ginsberg. After his first LSD trip, Ginsberg shared Leary’s experience of “agape.” The poet had been exploring Eastern religion in the years since he’d become a beat celebrity and the acid experience conformed to many of his spiritual concepts. He was so inspired by that first acid trip that he called the White House from Leary’s home to see if he could persuade recently elected President Kennedy to take LSD with the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. (The poet was not put through to the president.)
Ginsberg agreed to help turn on other artists to LSD and soon thereafter he hosted Leary in New York. In a harbinger of the various reactions that would play out on a mass stage later in the decade, not everyone had the same experience. They gave some to jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. A week later Ginsberg saw Dizzy at the Five Spot (a popular club for downtown jazz fans) and asked him how he liked the drug. The trumpeter replied, “Whatever gets you high, man.” Not long afterward Ginsberg encountered Monk at the same club and the pianist pointedly asked if he had anything stronger.
Poet Robert Lowell and novelist Jack Kerouac took LSD in Ginsberg’s East Village apartment. Ginsberg recalled that Lowell liked Leary, but couldn’t shake off his habitual gloom. At one point Leary exuberantly said, “Love conquers all,” and Lowell pensively responded, “I’m not so sure about that.” Kerouac was similarly ambivalent. Once the acid kicked in, he was silent for over an hour, and then, while looking out the window of Ginsberg’s apartment on 2nd Street between avenues A and B, the author of On the Road mused, “Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.”
A couple of years later, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert, who had been a precocious academic star, were fired by Harvard for doing research into LSD that included studies with undergraduates. Before his first LSD trip in 1961, Alpert considered himself “an adult in a world that was defined by the intellect. The high priests of America were scientists and intellectuals. What was valued is what you knew you knew. Introspection was rejected. What was respected was what could be measured from outside, not from inner experiences. Anything you couldn’t measure was treated as irrelevant.”
Decades later, long after he had changed his focus to Eastern spiritual traditions and been renamed Ram Dass by his guru, Alpert would still acknowledge the huge debt he owed to LSD for having liberated him from that mind-set: “I was teaching at Harvard and had a highly valued position, a promise of tenure. Then I had these chemicals and I questioned the entire social structure. A part of me that I met was more valid than the part of me that had been part of the whole social game.”
After being fired by Harvard, Leary was given the use of a mansion in Millbrook, New York, by several members of the Hitchcock family, heirs to the Mellon fortune, who admired his work. He created an organization for the study of psychedelics called the Castalia Foundation, named after a fictitious intellectual colony depicted in Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi).
When Huxley found out he was dying, he asked Leary to get him some LSD. Huxley’s wife Laura injected him with the psychedelic. Huxley passed away while tripping on November 22, 1963, the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It would require the most hardened rationalist not to take note of the synchronicity of these deaths and their relationship to what we now call “the sixties.”
Near the end of his life, Huxley had advised Leary on how to deal with the wave of young psychedelic seekers of my generation he foresaw materializing. “Be gentle with them, Timothy. They want to be free, but they don’t know how. Teach them. Reassure them.” He had once told Leary, “Do good stealthily.” Wishful thinking. Leary had an insatiable appetite for the spotlight. Of course, as things turned out, Leary himself would have far less influence and control over the way the masses handled psychedelics than could be imagined at the time.
Even while performing on a much larger media platform, with a kind of showmanship that Huxley never aspired to, Leary tried to uphold Huxley’s values. He and Alpert continually stressed the importance of “set and setting” for LSD trips, suggesting that there should always be a guide and that the environment should be carefully selected for positive, inspiring, and nurturing qualities. Huxley had introduced Leary and Alpert to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he felt connected ancient wisdom to the psychedelic experience. They oversaw a new translation of the text that was reimagined as a guide to LSD sessions. It had suggestions on how to navigate through the kinds of personality issues that could cause a bad trip. (On the Beatles’ Revolver, one of the best-selling albums in the world in 1966, the lyrics of the John Lennon song “Tomorrow Never Knows” were taken directly from the Leary/Alpert version of the ancient text.)
Leary and Alpert were also involved in a study of twenty theology students at Boston University. They created two groups: one took psilocybin, the other took a placebo. Both groups listened to the same sermon on Good Friday and immediately afterward taped a description of their experiences. These descriptions were sent to theologians around the United States without letting them know which group each participant was in.
Of those who took psilocybin, nine out of ten were deemed to have had a revelatory experience. Of the other group, the theologians only identified one. This did not constitute scientific “proof” but it was enough for Leary and Alpert to validate their instincts about the relationship between psychedelics and spirituality.
When mass media and rock and roll propelled LSD to the status of a household word, the criticisms from various establishments increased. Reporters had no trouble finding antipsychedelic doctors, many of whom cited the increased presence of hippies on bad trips in hospital emergency rooms. There were reports of people who while tripping thought they could fly and jumped off buildings to their deaths. In 1969, Art Linkletter, who hosted the popular TV shows People Are Funny and House Party, would become a high-profile critic of LSD in general and Timothy Leary in particular. Earlier that year, Linkletter’s twenty-year-old daughter Diane had jumped to her death from a sixth-floor kitchen window. Linkletter claimed that she was on LSD and blamed Leary for having popularized the drug.
One can sympathize with the anguish of a parent in Linkletter’s position and still disagree with his conclusions. The autopsy of his daughter showed that in fact there was no LSD in her system, but Linkletter speculated that she’d had an LSD flashback. Diane Linkletter’s boyfriend, Edward Durston, told the cops that she was determined to kill herself and that drugs were not a factor in her death. Nonetheless, Linkletter continued to blame Leary and the counterculture for his daughter’s death and became a prominent anti-LSD voice in the media.
Some biologists emerged in the media suggesting that LSD could lead to chromosome damage in a way that might cause birth defects in children. In the late sixties this assertion was given credence even by some of the underground media. The passage of time and births of millions of people to parents who took LSD proved that no such pattern existed.
Shortly before Christmas 1965, Leary was arrested in Laredo, Texas, for possession of a small amount of marijuana. The judge who gave him the exorbitant sentence of thirty years in prison referenced Leary’s pro-psychedelic writing as one of the reasons. The Supreme Court overturned that decision in 1969 on Fifth Amendment grounds, but the template for legal persecution of Leary was set. Richard Nixon, before being elected president, absurdly called him “the most dangerous man in America.”
In his 1967 book Alternating Current, Octavio Paz wrote:
We are now in a position to understand the real reason for the condemnation of hallucinogens and why their use is punished: the authorities do not behave as though they were trying to stamp out a harmful practice or a vice, but as though they were attempting to stamp out dissidence. Since this is a form of dissidence that is becoming more widespread, the prohibition takes on the proportions of a campaign against a spiritual contagion, against an opinion. What the authorities are displaying is ideological zeal: they are punishing a heresy, not a crime.
Decades later, in 1989, Ram Dass still saw the criminalization of LSD as a defense of the establishment rather than having any legitimate public health purpose. “People were raised to respect authority,” he explained. “After LSD, many people saw what they felt inside as being as valid as any external institutions. So it undermined authority and was a threat to social structure. Soon, society realized people are less controllable when they have had an experience of intuitive validity.”
Another public proselytizer of LSD in America in the early sixties was the celebrated author Ken Kesey, who in his early twenties had voluntarily participated in a study of psychedelics at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in Northern California. The study, it turned out, was the CIA-funded Project MKULTRA. The government wanted to figure out if psychedelics could be used in espionage or warfare. In 1960, at the age of twenty-five, Kesey began writing the best-selling novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
After Kesey published his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, he decided to come out of the psychedelic closet and took several of his friends on a trip to New York on a brightly painted bus he called Furthur. This was the debut of a loosely knit group of psychedelic adventurers around Kesey whom he called the Merry Pranksters. He agreed to have journalist Tom Wolfe follow him around for a year. Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which Kesey is the main character, was as influential in glamorizing LSD as Leary’s media appearances were.
Kesey was into a much more anarchic, festive approach to LSD than Leary and Alpert. He didn’t have much use for ancient texts; his belief was to just get as far out as you could. Yet there was still a sense of mission. Furthur was driven by Neal Cassady, who was famous for having been the basis for the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road. Comedian Hugh Romney, who had emerged in the hip Greenwich Village folk world earlier in the sixties, joined the Merry Pranksters for a time and affectionately recalls it as “a chance to sign up on a spaceship and make energetic progress toward the good.”
One of Kesey’s frequent sayings to the group that clustered around him was, “Get them into your movie before they get you into theirs.” Wolfe suggested that Kesey wanted “control” of the Pranksters and he inaccurately portrayed the novelist more like a cult leader than a catalyst who helped empower a diverse collection of people to do their own thing.
At a Berkeley teach-in about Vietnam prior to a march on the Oakland Induction Center, Kesey surprised radicals by insisting, “You’re not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching. That’s what they do.” Kesey then played “Home on the Range” on his harmonica and suggested that the members of the crowd observe the war and then “turn your backs on it and say fuck it.” Wolfe cited this moment in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as an example of Kesey’s flakiness. Former SDS president Todd Gitlin also criticized Kesey’s speech: “This was not what the organizers wanted to hear on the verge of a march into fearsome Oakland to confront the army base.” But with the hindsight of half a century, I feel that Kesey was getting at a poetic truth.
On November 27, 1965, Kesey threw a multimedia party called “The Acid Test” at Prankster Ken Babbs’s house. It featured music by a band named the Warlocks. A week later there was a second “Acid Test” and the members of the Warlocks played again, but under a new name: the Grateful Dead.
Word about LSD quickly reached the minds of teenagers like me and Joel Goodman. Joel first smoked marijuana the year before I did, when we were both in tenth grade. A younger student was interviewing Allen Ginsberg for our high school paper, the Fieldston News, and Joel was asked to go along to keep him company, presumably to avoid putting a teenage boy in a position where he was alone with the poet. After the interview was done, Ginsberg took out a joint and asked the kids if they wanted to get high. “It was very, very pleasant,” Joel remembers, but he had no idea how to get more for himself.
Joel had long, curly brown hair similar to Bob Dylan’s on the cover of Blonde on Blonde, and it was a time when hair length and body language magically connected hip people. One day, not long after the Ginsberg initiation, Joel was in a local hardware store when a young Puerto Rican clerk named Lucky asked him if he wanted to buy some pot. Joel and Lucky quickly grew close, and Joel became a dealer to some of his friends like me.
I still remember the music that was playing at the party at Peter Kinoy’s parents’ apartment when I first smoked pot: the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, the Stones’ Out of Our Heads, and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream. (The Kinoy parents were not there. Both Peter and his younger sister Joanne, who I had a big crush on at the time, later told me that they had been subject to, and ignored, grim lectures on the perils of drugs and the unique vulnerability of the families of political radicals.)
The next week, I was walking down a corridor in school when an older kid named Paul Mintz urgently called me over to listen to a song on one of the portable record players that had recently been introduced into the marketplace. It was Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the one with the chorus that goes, “Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?” Mintz and I weren’t friends; his mind was just so blown by the brilliance of the song that he had to play it to anyone who looked receptive. I was definitely an apt target. Something was happening, and Joel, Peter, our other friends, and I were in on it, and my parents and the people who made decisions in Washington weren’t. As Joel recalls, “There was the world that was in the newspapers and that our parents and teachers lived in, and then there was the real world that we lived in . . . Of course, I was oblivious to the fact that while I was riding the subway, straight people had actually built it and kept it running. So in retrospect, maybe both worlds had some reality to them.”
Richard Alpert (like Leary and Kesey) had been an achiever. I, however, was a nonachiever. For years, I got mediocre grades. (Since I did well on intelligence tests, the teachers’ name for kids like me was actually “underachiever.”) I was terrible at sports, and extremely awkward socially. Alpert had used LSD in part to opt out of the “game” he had won but felt trapped in. I was thrilled that there was an alternative to the game I was doing so poorly at.
Joel remembers, “The idea was to try to love everybody. There was a feeling that we were part of a kind of chumminess that we were excluded from otherwise. We weren’t sports stars or straight smart kids. It was a perfect fit to have a place to belong to and a milieu. Add that to the general conviviality of getting high with friendly people. It was kind of idyllic.”
Lucky had a connection to the pure LSD manufactured by the Sandoz company in Switzerland, where it had been discovered. Since the media had been completely wrong about marijuana leading to heroin use, and about the war in Vietnam, we had no problem rejecting the scare stories about jumping off roofs. Lucky told us solemnly, “You don’t have to be scared of yourself.” We were in.
We had a vague respect for Leary but didn’t pay any attention to his advice about how to trip. We looked out for each other. We avoided weird scenes and mostly stayed inside listening to music, watching TV, coloring with markers, and philosophizing about the meaning of life. Sometimes we’d go to Central Park, or to an Indian restaurant on West 110th Street (we thought we were part of a very elite group who knew about curry); I liked to go to the movies on acid, and saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, Marat/Sade, and Blow-Up while tripping. The only time I got a little freaked out was when I was watching How I Won the War, starring John Lennon. I whispered worriedly to Joel, “Either this is very strong acid or this is a very weird movie.” Later, when I rewatched the film, my faith in acid was reinforced: the problem was the movie.
One of the biggest values of LSD to me was to uncouple me from assumptions that the intellectual world I’d grown up in had made about what was considered “deep” and “serious,” which I always found depressing. I loved the “permission” to be happy. We all did. That was a big part of the revolution that was not televised. After an apparent revelation on an acid trip, I wrote a column in the Fieldston News in which I asserted that external accomplishments such as good grades should not define us. After all, we didn’t choose our friends based on their grades, but on intuitive connections. While researching this book, I came across something that Dr. Leary had written, saying virtually the same thing. I can now see that I may have been more influenced by him than I admitted at the time.
Peter Kinoy, who’d always had a gift for drawing and painting, recalls an evening when he took acid and, in an homage to Picasso’s Guernica, stayed up all night creating a collage of images about the recent Newark race riots. His father liked it so much that he hung it in his Rutgers Law School office. “I felt it was the first time my dad understood that the culture that meant so much to me connected with what he cared about,” Peter says.
On October 6, 1966, LSD became illegal in California and it was soon banned all over America. Leary had already contrived a quixotic response. On September 19, he had announced the creation of the League for Spiritual Discovery, which was incorporated as a religion in what would turn out to be a futile attempt to get psychedelics relegalized by defining them as religious sacraments.
One of the organization’s stated purposes was “to help each member discover the divinity within by means of sacred teachings, self-analysis, psychedelic sacraments, and spiritual methods and then to express this revelation in an external life of harmony and beauty . . . to help each member to devote his entire consciousness and all his behavior to the glorification of God. Complete dedication to the life of worship is our aim, as exemplified in the motto, ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’”
The big winner of the moment, however, was the aforementioned Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Owsley was thirty-two years old in 1967 and his nickname was “Bear.” He was the descendant of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government attorney. His grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley—a member of the United States Senate after serving as governor of Kentucky and in the US House of Representatives—campaigned against Prohibition in the 1920s.
By the end of 1966, Owsley, who had studied chemistry, was geared up to manufacture millions of acid tablets that became known by their colors, including Monterey Purple, White Lightning, and Blue Cheer—which became the name of a very loud Bay Area rock band.
Because Owsley’s form of delivery of the psychedelic was a tablet, the purity was assured. (They couldn’t be diluted or contaminated as could be done to the contents of capsules.) Soon thereafter, a group in Orange County, California, replicated some of Owsley’s ethos and called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Their signature tablet was called Orange Sunshine.
By all accounts, Owsley and the members of the Brotherhood were sincere inner seekers and psychedelic evangelists, but because LSD was illegal, the dealers were, by definition, criminals. Despite their cosmic aspirations, they brought with them a connection to other criminals and to some of the darkness and paranoia that go with the territory.
Meanwhile, all the currents of the counterculture were being magnified a hundredfold by newspapers, magazines, radio, and television—which were collectively being referred to by the suddenly trendy term “the media.”