Walter Clark, Marge King, Timothy Leary, and Jean Millay, photographed in Vacaville prison
Tim Leary: A Personal Appraisal
WALTER HOUSTON CLARK
Many people have asked me my opinions about Timothy Leary. When I first came to the Boston area in 1961 he was the most talked about professor at Harvard. He had much to say about the capacity of psilocybin to release religious experience and, though I was skeptical, I joined a seminar he had organized for scholars of religion, to learn what I could.
I was told at Harvard that his researches were useless, but I felt I should study firsthand some of the convicts he said were “talking like medieval mystics.” To my amazement I discovered that what he said was in general true. Authorities at Concord State Prison and in the Department of Corrections in Massachusetts were very enthusiastic. I have been able to follow up six convicts (five armed robbers and one rapist) on long sentences, directly or indirectly involved with his work, who followed up his rehabilitation efforts on their own. Formerly revolving door recidivists, they have now been out of prison for from five to thirteen years, yet no prison system has summoned the courage to follow up this remarkable pilot program.1 Since then I have experimented on myself with drugs and fully support Tim’s optimism in regard to the capacity of drugs, properly used—not on convicts but with them as full partners in experimentation—to blunt many of the potential Atticas throughout America.
In 1963, a few weeks before the end of the year and the termination of his contract, Tim was dismissed from Harvard with no offer of a hearing. No adequate study of his research had been made, and Harvard didn’t learn, for several years, information it should have had in hand before the dismissal. But by that time hysteria was rampant and the reputation of anyone with even peripheral relations with Tim suffered. The trustees at Andover Newton threatened me with dismissal, which I would have suffered had not my colleagues (unlike all but a handful of Leary’s at Harvard) stood up for my right to teach my classes and live my life according to my own best judgment.
Unsatisfied with the publicity that Leary’s dismissal had gained him throughout the country, several years later the U.S. government arrested him when a small amount of marijuana was found on his daughter in a border incident, in which he claims to have been framed—and I believe him. California sentenced him to ten years, and five more when he was convicted of escape. He is now in the custody of a federal prison in San Diego.
The Newsletter has suggested that I write my appraisal of Tim, because I know him well and have kept in touch with him over the years. But, since Tim is a complex person, the reader must understand that this appraisal is personal rather than final.
Emulating Harvard’s previous judgment of Tim without hearing, a group in San Francisco recently sat in judgment to investigate “Leary’s lies” without his presence. I do not say he never told a lie. I suppose if his mother were hidden in a closet he would lie to the murderer seeking her life and he, analogously, may have lied to protect himself and his friends on other occasions. But I can testify that I never thought he lied to me, nor have I ever suspected him of doing so. Incidentally, there have been occasions when proof has reached me of his essential integrity in this and other respects.
I can also report that though I have studied at Harvard since 1925 in pursuit of three degrees, he remains in my mind as by far the most creative Harvard professor I have known. Furthermore, as I detailed in Chemical Ecstasy, a clue to one side of his personality is to be found in the extent to which he illustrates the basics of William James’s definition of saintliness, found in The Varieties of Religious Experience:
These are not the popular stereotypes of the saint, but they apply to Tim. One of the Massachusetts “most dangerous” convicts told me that Tim was the first person he ever met whom he trusted absolutely to be on his side; another, equally dangerous, said that Tim was the only man he ever knew about of whom he had never heard another convict say a critical word. Testimonies like these cannot be brushed off even by Tim’s most intrepid enemies. Despite the fact that he has been conned, robbed, and imposed on by thousands, I have never known him to be annoyed or irritated by others save once, when a presumptuous and manipulative lawyer had gratuitously filled Tim’s home with uninvited guests, who were ordered out in the middle of the night when Tim returned to find them there. Michel Hauchard, the Swiss confidence man, who took advantage of his jailing by Swiss police to persuade him to sign a long-term contract with him as his business agent and who consequently was able to swindle him out of thousands of dollars, he dismisses with some gentle irony in Confessions of a Hope Fiend. Many persons have testified to his kindness and humanity in chance meetings. And I have never really known him to show arrogance.
Jesus told his followers to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” My reaction to Tim has often been, “Would that he were as wise as a serpent!” However great his creativity one would hardly credit him with excessive shrewdness. He is careless with details, treats money—when he happens to have some—only as means to an end. Yet his “elation and freedom,” his urge to say “yes, yes” to almost anything that appeals to him, have landed him in situations from which even his friends and family have not been able to rescue him. Brilliant though he is in creativity, his mind ordinarily is anything but systematic. This has freed him for consideration of the long view (some call him grandiose) and even his friends, like myself, hardly know whether in Terra II2 he is pulling our legs. But at the very least, like Jonathan Swift, he is delivering his ideas of utopia in superb ironic rhetoric.
Along with these qualities he is a stubborn man. No one familiar with the story of his endurance of silence for almost a year at West Point would deny this. After his cavalier and sorry treatment at the hands of the Harvard authorities he refused to be intimidated, as many of his colleagues were, with the result that he soon became known in establishment circles as a Pied Piper in his promotion of the LSD-type chemicals. For this he has often been pilloried, even by some of his supporters, as the man who killed sensible research with these drugs. I have had my moments when I have counted myself one of them, but then I have asked myself whether the Harvard establishment really intended to promote research with these drugs, carefully or otherwise. Soon after Leary left, responsible experimentation with the drugs was cut off at Harvard Medical School. Since then I know of no Harvard scientist willing to risk his reputation through a move toward experimentation on human beings with these important and only moderately hazardous substances.
Walter Clark, Marge King, Timothy Leary, and Jean Millay, photographed in Vacaville prison
Had I been in Leary’s place I would not have acted as he did. But I also have my moments when I wonder whether he boldly used the only method to introduce fresh and open young minds to the values of LSD. Other countries certainly have not covered themselves with glory in pushing back the frontiers of the mind through the use of psychedelic substances. According to Mexico’s Tiempo, Guido Belsasso, a product of Harvard Medical School of the Leary period, supported a raid on the creative Instituto de Psicosintesis and Salvador Roquet by policemen with loaded pistols and machine guns, which resulted in the arrests of Dr. Roquet, assistants, and twenty-five patients in group therapy. He and Pierre Favreau were kept in jail for five months while they proved their innocence. Such outrages have punctuated the history of even the most responsible and creative attempts to alleviate human suffering with psychedelics in other countries, even when the attempts were as successful as Dr. Roquet’s. Such sequelae I attribute largely to the outrage over Harvard’s dismissal of Leary and subsequent attempts of the government to undermine his credibility with youth.
We remember that it took the medical establishment a century to acknowledge vaccination as the most effective way to combat smallpox. But now we are beginning to witness the phenomenon of young men who ingested LSD a decade ago coming into positions of responsibility in mental health fields. It is on them that our hopes rest for making constructive use of these powerful chemical tools. And without Leary would we have these cogent allies?
By the turn of the twenty-first century will Timothy Leary be seen as a corrupter of youth and a wrecker of research with the psychedelics or as one of the adventurous thinkers of our time? He is a complex person compounded of faults and a brilliant intuitive mind. I know no one who has made as many mistakes. But I also know few persons for whom I hold more affection or who possess what I sense as a very deep-seated integrity, no matter how overlaid with mistakes and inconsistencies. I have no idea how history will appraise this attractive personality. But if I’m allowed my guess I would say that within twenty-five years he will hold an honorable place as one of the germinitive thinkers of our day, one of the pioneers in an intellectual ferment preliminary to many of the innovations to come in the next century.
Just to narrow his influence to the field of mental health, I would say that he belongs in the ranks of Ronald Laing, Stanislav Grof, and especially Salvador Roquet, the most gifted, gentle, yet most daring of all our psychedelic pioneers. All of these men owe something to Timothy Leary and know of the hidden powers lying behind the psychedelic drugs and their creative usefulness when used properly. We do not use spades when power shovels are available for moving earth, though spades may still remain useful. The psychedelic in skilled and experienced hands are psychotherapeutic power shovels making possible the healing of minds to an extent impossible with more conventional instruments. This type of healing is often associated with transactions at a depth that can only be called religious, despite the rejection of it by the religious establishment.
For nearly fifteen years I have been studying, investigating, and doing research with these fascinating drugs. In my considered opinion Timothy Leary, along with the psychotherapists I have mentioned and many others who combine wisdom secured through the drugs with great courage, make even the best of our plodding, sincere, but conventional psychiatrists pale into nonentities in their insights into human nature. But, since the dawn of history, it is innovators, like Socrates and Galileo, who have been rejected, jailed, and executed.