Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out

The book I am reviewing today is maybe the best book I read in the past year. "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD" by Bill Minutaglio and Steven Davis. I read this book about a year and a half ago, while Eva and I were visiting San Francisco, as part of deciding whether or not we would move here. This book has everything: drugs, guns and 1960s revolutionary fervor. 

The main character of this history is Timothy Leary, the Harvard-trained psychologist turned guru of 1960s drop out culture. He coined the term "turn on, tune in and drop out," the phrase with which he sought to encourage students of that generation to trip acid and drop out from all of their school and work affiliations. This advice stemmed from Leary's own experience of taking acid -- during the trip, he felt that he had learned more about human psychology than he had ever learned in years of study at Harvard and similar institutions. After his acid trip, Leary quit his job at Harvard, and set about encouraging others to follow his same path. Richard Alpert, a colleague of Leary's at Harvard, followed the same path, and came to be referred to as Ram Dass, and became a significant guru of the 1960s as well.

This book follows Leary as he spends time in jail, and then is broken out of jail by fellow 1960s radicals (I think it was the Weather Underground that broke him out of jail, but I need to double check that). Leary eventually ends up in Algeria, where he is taken in by members of the Black Panther Party, who had taken up residence in Algeria following the Algerian revolution. The Algerians had succesfully expelled their French colonial masters, and the Panthers, who sought to overthrow the U.S government, which they viewed as akin to the colonial rulers of French Algeria, had natural allies in the immediate government of Algeria post-revolution. The Black Panthers had something of an embassy in Algeria, which gives a sense of how close the U.S. was to full scale revolution in that decade. Leary ended up having significant disagreements with the U.S. born Black radicals in Algeria -- despite initial harmony, the Panther leader in Algeria, Eldridge Cleaver, came to loathe Leary, who he increasingly viewed as a drugged out and useless white hippie. Cleaver, at the end of the day, wanted to work with "stone cold, sober" revolutionaries, and Leary was certainly not that.

As an aside, I find the debates between Cleaver and Leary, if you can call them that, still very interesting up until the present moment. Is a revolution that seeks to be armed, militant, and stone cold sober, doomed to be oppressive, gray and hierarchical? Alternatively, does Leary's notion of revolution, where everyone just drops out of school to trip acid all day, have any real chance of toppling the mighty force of U.S. empire? I don't want to spoil the book, because it is really an amazing and captivating read, but *spoiler alert* the book concludes with Leary seemingly completely addicted to acid, and dating younger and younger women. The upshot of that, for me, is that mind altering substances and psychedelics in particular, are wonderful substances with many possibilities for therapeutic, and even revolutionary purposes, but they're definitely not a substitute for staying grounded in more traditional methods of organizing. But at the same time, maybe Cleaver would have benefitted from loosening up a little bit, too.

This book also contains very interesting details about how the CIA would write fake letters between Cleaver and other Panther leaders, in order to foment division among the Panthers. It turns out that the CIA is remarkably talented at pretending to be Marxists, and remarkably talented at using Marxist terminology to break up social movements. Present-day leftists would do well to study this history to be less susceptible to these tactics in the future. Personally, I have a hard time imagining any present-day CIA employees being well-versed enough in Marxism to pull off these kinds of stunts in the present (from my time at Yale, my sense is that the up and coming state department employees are not the brightest tools in the shed -- usually just white men in suits who really like nodding enthusiastically at things that other white men in suits say -- but I suppose you never know what the future holds).

Anyway, this is a really fascinating book and I recommend it highly. It shows a lot of debates and disagreements that are still significant for left-wing movements in the present day, and also just shines a light on what a wild decade the 1960s (and subsequent decades) were. And how narrowly the capitalist status quo was able to maintain power in those decades, and how close we were to having a full-on Maoist revolution in the U.S. in the 1960s. It really feels like if Leary had taken it a bit easier on the acid, and if Cleaver and some other Panthers had been a bit less egotistical, we would really be living in a different world in 2024.