Reputations (1994–2002): Season 8, Episode 7 - Timothy Leary: The Man Who Turned America On - full transcript
Our aim is to transform American society.
In the next 5 or 10 years we expect that between 20 and 30 million Americans
will be using LSD regularly in their spiritual development and in psychological growth.
In the 1960s Timothy Leary brought psychedelic drugs
out of the laboratories and onto the campuses of America.
The greatest pushers in this country today are the missionaries,
who make and distribute LSD.
Because they are convinced it's a wonderful way...
As that poisonous, evil man dr. Timothy Leary has said:
It is a way to "turn on, tune in and drop out".
Leary became the outspoken leader of a generation that wasn't even his own.
The kids who take LSD aren't gonna fight your wars,
middle-class middle-age whiskey drinking generals.
They not going to join your corporations,
middle-class middle-age whiskey drinking corporation presidents.
The former Harvard academic committed the cardinal sin
of insighting young Americans to reject the values of their parents.
Turn on, tune in and drop out.
In 1946 Timothy Leary was all set for a glittering but conventional career.
A 25-year old clinical psychologist,
he had just arrived at the university of California at Berkeley to work on his PhD.
Of all the people I've known (and I've certainly known some very bright people)
I would not rate him in simple IQ terms
as very very high.
He was just all around awfully good company a lot of fun.
Tim was an excellent psychologist. He always had a lot of people around him.
He liked being the center of attention. Without a doubt.
And he was candid about it. He was the center of the circle.
That was his place in life.
Leary made his name with a pioneering research project on personality.
He and several colleges charted the characteristics people display in their various relationships.
Then Leary organized them for the first time into a model
for other therapists to use for diagnosis.
Leary's book won acclaim from the American psychology association
and spawned many follow-up studies.
Significantly, he took most of the credit for himself.
I was rather surprised. He mentioned me in the preface,
saying that I tributed... contributed balance and good sense.
That was about it.
Mervin was very mad. I don't know weather he told you that or not.
I was a bit mad too.
Despite the professional squabbles, Leary's personal life thrived.
He moved into an affluent suburb of Berkeley
with his wife, Marianne, and their two young children.
I was very fond of her.
She was very attractive, slender.
Tim regarded her as a puppy,
something to be cared for and vulnerable.
Tim told me that she had had a depressive episode
several months before they married, before he knew her.
But none of this stood in the way of a hectic social life.
Learys were involved in quite a complex set of social relationships
involving heavy drinking, wife swapping.
Activities like this.
I was invited for dinner and she was cooking in the kitchen
and bending over taking pan out of the oven, a roast out of the oven,
she said in context of something that she was talking about:
"I have never refused a man".
And I... that seemed unfathomable to me,
but I thought they lived a different life from mine.
Marianns friends claim Leary encouraged her
to be promiscuous to justify his own affairs.
Everybody flirted at parties in Berkeley.
But the rule is if the intelligent wife allows flirtation she drives a line on love.
He could have all the girlfriends he wanted but he couldn't fall in love with them.
In the spring of 1954 Leary's office
took on a new member of staff, Mary della Cioppa, known as Dell.
I felt charmed by her presence.
And when Tim met her
he felt much much more so.
And it was clear for me that there was some
instant magnetism going between them.
And I was especially aware of that
when after a week he asked me to get a sofa and have it put in his office.
This time Leary broke the rules.
He fell in love with Dell.
Marianne was clearly profoundly depressed.
And it worried me considerably.
I attempted to talk to her, but it got nowhere.
The 22 of October 1955 was Leary's 35th birthday.
He woke to find a letter on a pillow beside him.
It was a suicide note.
He found Marianne's body in their car in a garage.
The engine was still running.
She died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Before taking her own life she'd cooked Tim a birthday cake.
In a way she was saying: "You, son of a bitch,
look at what you've done. You've killed me and you've deprived your children of their mother."
It was going to be a long hard road for him to recover.
And I think that is what dominated his life maybe from then on.
Leary's affairs and Marianne's suicide
were two more sorry episodes in the Leary family history.
His father, a medical officer at West Point Military Academy,
had abandoned the family when Tim was 13.
An only child, he was brought up by his mother and aunt.
Both - devout catholics.
Timothy would tell me how they were always very disapproving of him.
Encouraging on the one hand, but if he did anything wrong there was hell to pay.
Leary had started brightly enough. He became the editor of his high school magazine.
He was even voted "cutest boy" by the girls of the school.
Following in his father's footsteps, young Timothy went on to become a cadet at West Point.
Why didn't you shine no shoes?
I didn't have time, sir.
Mr. Don Jone, you have time for everything.
You have no good explanation, you say "No excuse, sir".
But in his first year Leary was caught drunk.
Worse, when questioned about it, he lied.
That was a breach of West Point's honour code.
When he refused to resign, the senior cadets silenced him, forbade him to speak to anyone.
His mother implored him to see it through.
"I give thanks to the blessed Lord
for saving me from the terrible ordeal of explaining to the world
that my son was sent home from West Point for violating his honour.
I beg of you: do everything you can to prove
by your actions that you are the kind of a son I want".
"I can't stand it, mother, if you going to pray for me and worry.
If you expect me to be a run-of-the-mill, every day 100% good fellow, you must be disappointed.
I would rather starve in the gutter".
Leary endured his isolation for 10 months before resigning.
The next year, 1942, he was expelled from Alabama University
after being found in the girls dormitory.
He wrote his mother throughout the years looking for her approval.
I don't know that he got it.
After Marianne's death Leary and Dell
did go through a marriage ceremony in Mexico.
But their relationship didn't last.
Now, alone with 2 young children - Susan and Jack,
Leary quit Berkeley and travel to Europe to ponder his future.
I visited Tim in Florence
and after couple days I told him I had very recently sampled the actual mushrooms.
Not a pill but the actual mushrooms of the Mazatec Indians,
the so-called "sacred mushroom".
And I told him that this is important to psychology,
because it gave me moments of insight
into certain things that happened during the war, for example,
traumatic episodes, that I had suppressed.
And he said, "Frank, you'd better not tell many people about this,
no psychologist, because they'll think you nuts".
The following summer Leary went to Mexico, where he sampled "magic" mushrooms for himself.
Later, he wrote about it:
"The fungi where placed on the table by the pool.
I picked one up.
It tasted even worse than it looked. Bitter, stringy.
I began to feel strange, mildly nauseous, detached.
Everything was quivering with life, even inanimate objects.
I gave way to delight, and discovered a sea of possibilities, other realities.
By that swimming pool I learnt more about the mind
then I had in 15 years as a diligent psychologist".
It was 1960.
At the age of 40 Leary's adventures with mind-altering psychedelic drugs had begun.
He said to me then: "You were wright."
"This is a very important potential tool
and it's going to affect all society."
I think is what he said.
But the first tremors would be felt at Harvard University.
Leary had been head-hunted by Harvard psychology department
in it's drive for fresh minds and ideas.
With Leary, it would get more then it bargain for.
Teaming up with a colleague, Richard Alperd,
Leary won approval for a research project,
exploring the potential benefits of the active ingredient
in "magic" mushrooms - psilocybin.
Leary and his project were certainly popular with graduate students.
I met Tim in his tiny little cubical office.
He was very engaging, very witty, very funny. I was immediately taken by him, felt tremendous rapport.
He described to me the research he was currently undertaking with the psychedelic psilocybin.
I immediately committed myself to it.
I asked him what I needed to do and he said:
"You just needed to participate as a subject in the experiments
and actually take the substance with me and a few other students".
So I said, "Yes".
Psychedelic drugs were legal then
and most of the graduate students in psychology said "yes" to Leary,
leaving his colleges short of research assistants.
Some of the best and brightest students were attracted to this project.
And it created a bit of jealousy and envy.
Leary's boast that psychedelic drugs were the key to the unconscious mind
also wrangled with his fellow teachers.
But one project did yield remarkable results.
"The Marsh Chapel experiment" was designed by a graduate student under Leary's supervision.
It investigated whether psylocibin, taken in a religious setting,
could induce experiences comparable to those described by the great mystiques.
Randall Laakko was one of ten theology students who took the psilocybin.
I had a real struggle with the chemical
and at one point I thought in fact I had died and I was in hell.
I began saying the bible verse:
"For God so loves the world, that if gave His only begotten Son
that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life".
And I kept repeating that over and over again
and then I came to the awareness that it was not helping me at all.
Laakko fled from the chapel with Leary following.
Outside his terror evaporated.
That was a glorious sunny day.
I remember seeing an elderly couple walking down the sidewalk hand in hand.
And that was the most profound and beautiful experience to me.
This was an image of people who indeed loved one another
and had lived their lifes together.
Everything in the world just seemed to glow inwardly with life.
Everything was alive. And I don't mean just leaving things,
but even inanimate things. They just lived.
And I was seeing things like had never seen them before.
Leary steered Laakko back into the chapel.
I do remember laying down on the floor.
Leary lay right next to me. Almost as though we were lovers.
I can remember the smell of his hair,
being extremely physically close.
And then feeling my hand run down his body, touching him.
What he was doing was giving me human contact again.
Nine of the ten theology students reported
that they had indeed experienced something like a mystical revelation.
I would say ya, did change my life.
The experience that they demonstrated to me,
the reality of god's presence in all the world,
and in all experience.
If our eyes are opened and we are able to perceive and take that in.
And by eyes I mean our spiritual inner awarenesses.
The experiment had demonstrated that psychedelics could indeed open the doors of perception.
But still, some of Leary's research students didn't want to take the drug themselves.
Several students had come to me to complain
that Leary was pressuring them to take the drug, psilocybin,
with the statement that "if they were too square"
(that words of his ... to take this",
and then they, probably, they shouldn't be in the field of clinical psychology at all.
Then, when you are a graduate student and you aiming for a Ph.D.
in clinical psychology that's a pretty ominous remark.
Leary argued that only by taking psilocybin
could his researchers understand its effect on consciousness.
But much of his research was done at his Harvard home
and the line between research and pleasure blurred.
His pet project on psychedelics and creativity
brought a stream of artists and writers to his house.
Among them, the poet Allen Ginsberg.
Leary gave Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky this psilocybin
and they promptly took off their cloths and lounged around.
And then at a certain point Ginsberg decided that he wanted to do something for world peace.
And so he would call up Kennedy and Khrushchev, get them all on the phone
and solve this problem about the bomb and everything right then and there.
They were not able to get that two most powerful men of the world on the phone, so they settled for Jack Kerouac.
It became difficult to maintain a balance there.
And I should say we lost our balance a bit.
That became less rigorous and there was an increase in the use of psilocybin as a recreational substance.
Soon after appearing together in this training film,
Brendan Maher and Timothy Leary faced each other at a stuff meeting
called to examine Leary's working methods.
I simply asked him to tell the audience
what he knew about the medical action of these drugs.
The answer he gave me was:
"I don't have to know these things. I have an adviser from the medical school".
And he gave the name of the adviser.
And I turned to him whenever (there's any question -??)
Now, unknown to Tim this adviser, who I gather Tim had never met,
was already in the audience. He ????? was already had been invited here to ??????.
And he rose to his feet and said: "I've never met you".
"I have nothing to do with your research. I don't know what you talking about".
And he said "no".
Harvard's controversy over psychedelic drugs now became national news.
In the end, Leary's college, Richard Alpert,
became the first professor to be fired from Harvard in almost a century.
For giving psilocybin to an undergraduate.
When Alpert left, Leary went with him.
He liked to claim that he too had been sacked. It added to his radical image.
Leary and Alpert looked for the right surroundings in which to continue to spread the word about psychedelic drugs.
Their saviour was Leary's close friend, Peggy Hitchcock.
We went up to see if this old house might work as a haven
for this little group of people who have sort of found themselves exiled from where they've been living.
And so we did. We saw this house. It looked like it would be just perfect.
Peggy came from one of America's wealthiest families.
The old house was a 64-room mansion,
set in 2000 acers of upstate New-York.
It was owned by her brothers.
And Leary lived here in Millbrook virtually rent free for the next 4 years.
By now Leary had moved on to a more powerful,
but still legal psychedelic drug - LSD.
LSD was a guarantee to really take you to place
that was very much more of a... death and rebirth experience.
Which was exciting but also could be quite terrifying.
At first Leary persuaded discipline regime.
Visitors paid for weekend seminars where they were taught how best to use LSD.
In his natural habitat the prophet preaches.
Timothy Leary in a Saturday morning session of word and silences.
The session tonight we concentrate on making the experience
pleasant, and educational,
and safe.
Tim was very clear about the need for proper controls
and proper support for these experiences.
And by that I mean he emphasized the importance of what we called "set and setting".
"Set" being the expectations that one had going into an experience of this type,
and "setting" referring to the environment at which it occurred.
Really, it's all so simple.
Each next moment. This is it.
LSD was beginning to enter the American consciousness.
While Leary gave psychedelic lessons to the chic of New York,
the residents of California were being offered an altogether
more rockous introduction to the drug.
The self-styled "Merry Pranksters" believed LSD should be available to all.
They were driving their magic bus across America,
offering the drug to anyone willing to take "the acid test".
It's going to be a graduation ceremony
and a commencement exercise
essentially for "the heads" and other people
who would like to know what the "heads" are doing.
Are you going to tell what's bad about LSD?
Not necessarily.
The Pranksters may have treated LSD with less respect then Leary,
but they recognized that he had placed the psychedelic trail before them.
Tim carried the standard, he was there first.
He ran this thing called IFIF which was the "International Federation For Internal Freedom".
And ours on the bus was ISIS. We were the "Intrepid Search for Inner Space".
One summer morning in 1964 the Pranksters dropped in in Millbrook.
We showed up there like a carnival of clowns.
Green smoke pouring out of all the windows.
Tim didn't feel like dealing with them basically.
So, they asked me if I would be willing to show them around, and I said: "Sure".
Oh, can I remember Peggy. I got a picture in this machine with Peggy.
She looks like 2 million dollar lollipop, I tell you.
But I've really gone there to see Leary.
And Leary was there, but he'd been upstairs.
And so we didn't see him.
We felt like he was a kind of been snooty.
Apparently, Leary had been tripping all night and had only just gone to bed.
So the psychedelic cheerleaders from the East and West coasts
didn't meet at all during the 1960s.
Leary now took his message to New York's theatre land
with a music and light show to recreate the LSD experience.
To turn on you have to have a key
to get in touch with the neurological, sensory
and cellular information that you got stored
in that 2 billion year old receptacle you call your body.
Now, how do you turn on? Well I will tell you this:
you can't turn on with words, you can't turn on with thinking, you can think...
He did these shows and they became great success.
Then what happened is that people wanted to start, wanted to come up to Millbrook
and see this place and...
And it seized to be a private operation.
And there were like hordes of people more and more coming up there.
I just felt less and less comfortable.
Anyone who was hip in the 60s came to Millbrook.
On any given week-end there were hundred people there floating through.
Strange New York city types, bohemians, jet-setters,
German counts, you name it, you could find them at Millbrook.
Close behind came the media.
Leary revelled in his role of psychedelic spokesman.
Dr. Leary, what are you up to here?
We're teaching people how to use their head.
Point is, that in order to use your head you have to go out of your mind.
Soon, Tim sort of gave in to the extraordinary adulation
that he was getting as a cult figure and as a...
...the word that was barely used in America in 1964-65 - a guru.
A drug guru.
Exactly who is who and who is supposed to do what...
Tim was too enamoured of the attraction and attention of lots of people.
I don't think he was so good at living his life out in terms of the emotional intelligence
that was required for example to raise children or to maintain relationships.
With Leary showing more interest in fame then consciousness
his old Harvard friends began to drift away.
Gunther Weil and Peggy Hitchcock were the first to leave, followed by Richard Alpert.
Alpert went to India in search of enlightenment.
And returned as baba Ram Dass, achieving fame as one of America's leading mystics.
Meanwhile, in 1964 Leary married Nena von Schlebrugge.
He was 44, she 24.
The marriage lasted less then a year.
By the following summer he was living with Rosemary Woodruff,
who would later become his fourth wife.
Tim... he was beautiful.
He took me from being an insecure neurotic New-Yorker, to some extent,
to feeling like a sex goddess.
By the winter of 1965 even Leary wanted a break from all the attention.
He left Millbrook with Rosemary and his children,
Jack and Susan, now teenagers, and headed South.
At the Mexican border they were sent back
by a policeman whom Leary recognized from an earlier stay in Mexico.
Returning to the American side, they were stopped and strip-searched.
Was at that point I believed we recognized that perhaps we've been set up for this.
That our phone had been tapped. That was the only way they could've known that we are going
to cross at that particular point
was because we mentioned on the phone. And no the reason for that policeman to have be there.
1/8 of an ounce of marijuana was found. Most of it in daughter Susan's underwear.
Her farther took responsibility.
It was his first offence.
But his notoriety owned him a 30-year prison sentence.
Released on bail pending appeal Leary returned to Millbrook where his troubles continued.
This is indeed the G. Gordon Liddy show. We good to go and ready to launch.
G. Gordon Liddy is one of America's leading radio talk show hosts.
In 1973 he was imprisoned for his part in the Watergate scandal.
...in jail myself, I can tell you that the one overriding interest is getting the hell out of there...
Liddy first came to the notice of the White House as an assistant DA
whose patch covered the Millbrook estate.
According to our informants the panties were dropping as fast as the acid
and this disturbed the local burgers, considerably.
We understood from our informants that the front door was always opened.
And the plan was to sneak in.
Jacky was doing his homework and he went downstairs for some food or something.
Came running back up the stairs and saying that there were bunch of hunters
downstairs with guns.
As we started up the stairs
you know, there the indigens (???) appeared.
They coming out the doors, half of 'em were wacked on some drug or another.
They really came in expecting an orgy.
And instead found a quite family scene.
They were led by Timothy Leary and his then inamorata Rosemary.
She was in a diaphanous gown and he was wearing a half-a-way shirt. Period.
And my first view of Timothy Leary - as I was up the stairs and he was coming down - was spectacular, to say the least.
Tim was wearing a long night shirt.
And I was wearing my grand-mother's Christmas gift which is a long flannel nightie.
The Leary's bedroom, there was a container of vegetable matter
and Rosemary was protesting saying that that was her sacrament.
I told the state troopers not to take that plant, that that was my favourite plant
and that they insisted and of couse it was a dead fuchsia plant with a lot of peat moss at the bottom.
The police claimed they found both marijuana and LSD at the house.
But the case was thrown out by a grand jury and never went to trial.
Leary was feeling the effects of the backlash against LSD.
Undoubtedly it can cause psychological damage.
But a flurry of propaganda films now exaggerated it's dangers.
Any stress in this rising phase will trip this man into a bad-trip.
He will be terrified.
He is not seeing pretty visions. He's seeing monsters. He is loosing his mind and he feels it going.
There's only one escape from this discomfort.
That's suicide.
This man will kill himself.
Leary had brought LSD into the limelight.
And in doing so he had brought opprobrium on more then just himself.
Scientific research had shown that psychedelic drugs could help
in treating alcoholism, chronic pain, even schizophrenia.
But by 1967 LSD was illegal in most of the USA.
And all research projects involving psychedelic drugs had been closed down.
Most of them blamed Tim Leary. Fairly legitimately.
Because he certainly was the pointman that popularised this thing
and threw it into the public domain. And they all warned him.
The dirty hippy paper you heard so much about.
Only a quarter.
LSD was now seen as a catalyst of the hippy culture
that so dismayed the American establishment.
And Timothy Leary who for so long had preached caution in it's use
now simply trotted out his mantra.
Turn on, tune in and drop out.
We turned on, and we tuned in, and we were very dropped out.
He said that in 1966.
And by 1970 there were drop-outs everywhere, there were communes all across America.
So, people were listening.
And as the counterculture grew, so did the campaign against the Vietnam war.
Leary's influence seemed more dangerous then ever.
When the White House looked at the counterculture for leaders
one person stood front centre.
He was the oldest. He had the most impressive credentials - Harvard.
He had a way of turning up, not just at parties of the jet-set and wealthy,
but also in the pages of "Playboy", and "Esquire",
and various large newspapers, and that man was Timothy Leary.
Leary was arrested a dozen times during the late 60s
and the more he was targeted, the more provocative he became.
I urge all of you go back to your campuses and start some sort of a drop-out movement.
That's only way we going to bring this country of menopausal,
whiskey drinking congressmen senators... to the senses.
And when I mean their senses I mean these senses, cause they forgot...
The government... Well, he was very convenient scapegoat, cause here he was upfront, telling everybody turn on, tune in and drop out.
And so the more that he was condemned he kind of took on that persona.
And he said well fine. That's the way it is. I will be the corrupter of youth.
We found dr. Timothy Leary and his companions here in the mountains of southern California in a spot that Leary called heaven.
In 1968 the 30-year sentence Leary had been fighting
since his arrest at Mexican border was overturned by the Supreme Court.
The media sought his reaction. He gave them an announcement.
We going to become next governor in the state of California.
We gonna start a new political party. And by party we mean party.
It was an opportune moment he couldn't waste and he had to say something.
To really get their attention.
We want to turn on the whole state. There is no excuse for any Californian
not to be high and happy and laughing all the time.
It was a show off. It was an ego maniacal show off.
Standing against Ronald Reagan Leary received the ultimate stamp of approval from the counterculture.
John and Yoko invited us to Montreal where they were staging a "bed-in for peace".
All we are saying
is give peace a chance
All we are saying
is give peace a chance
John asked how he could help and we asked him to write a song for us.
And we told him slogan was "come together, join the party".
So John subsequently wrote "Come together".
Leary never did make it to the governor's mansion.
Before his campaign got going he was jailed for 10 years
for possession of 2 joints.
The judge at his trial called him "the most dangerous man in America".
In prison he was given a psychological test that he had helped to develop in the 1950s.
He filled up the test in such a way that
suggested that he couldn't possibly be a risk and that he would be benign and well-behaved.
So, "the most dangerous man in America" was housed in the lowest security wing of the prison.
A few months later he escaped.
Tim essentially had to climb upon a roof,
a hang from a telephone wire, he pulled himself hand over hand
until he reached a telephone pole.
Shimmied down a telephone pole and drop to the ground outside the walls of the prison.
Leary and Rosemary were smuggled out of the country by the Weathermen,
an underground group committed to subverting the American establishment.
They delivered Leary to Algeria where the Black Panthers,
the most militant of America's radical organisations,
had a government in exile, led by Eldridge Cleaver.
My plans are to work with the Black Panther Party for the overthrow of the American government.
Where do you expect to be doing this work?
Throughout the world.
They are based... their international sections are based in Algeria (????)
But we are likely to show up at any place - North Vietnam, North Korea -
wherever people struggling for freedom - we'll be there.
The hopes were that this would create kind of united front
between the hippies, and the leftists, and the Panthers
by putting Cleaver and Leary together.
It failed miserably.
We are in there for the revolution in Babylon.
But the Learys and the Panthers didn't see eye to eye on the revolution.
We had thought of the Black Panthers as our cultural heroes.
But they thought we were irresponsible hippies.
As the Learys prepared for yet another dinner party they received a visit from the Panthers.
Shortly before I guessed we were expected
Eldridge and several panthers burst into the apartment and dragged us off.
Forced to flee from Algeria Leary spent a further 18 months
on the run from the American authorities.
He split up with Rosemary.
And was finally recaptured by American agents in Afghanistan.
Now, facing up to 75 years in jail, Leary began collaborating with the FBI.
He informed on the people who had helped him to escape.
But his evidence alone was not enough to convict them.
Tim wrote me a letter enclosing a card from an FBI agent
actually who I should contact.
What he was asking me to do was to corroborate
his tale of the escape
and name the people that he was naming.
And I could not do that.
So, I went on the run.
How long for?
22 years.
Rosemary changed her name and went underground.
She did not re-emerged until 1995.
After cooperating with the FBI Leary was back on the streets in 1975.
In demand on the chat-show circuit he continued to push his favourite message:
"think for yourself. question authority".
Good for Eve! I love to be descended from Eve.
The first human being was a woman, who stood up on her two feet
and took the fruit and said: "Hey, if this is the tree of knowledge
I'm gonna eat it, because I'm a human being and forget it, Jehovah.
Forget it, go back, jump on your squad car and go back to headquatters, Jehovah.
He married once more, for the fifth and last time and moved to Hollywood.
He would be with some great group of these, you know, punky looking you know fabulous woman
with 3 degrees, but she's 22 and she's got white hair, and everything's pierced and she's an expert on computers.
You know, some amazing young woman on his arm.
And he would come and just be the life of the party.
He can not deny it. He is a selfconfessed lawer.
His comeback was complete, when he played out a bizarre double act
in a lecture tour with his former arch enemy G. Gordon Liddy.
The real difference between us, 180 degrees, it's not left wing or right wing.
It's past versus future.
And mr. Liddy is desperatly facing backward, worshipping tradition.
And I am a futurist.
It was no idle boast. Leary had championed the computer age since the 1970s.
And when the Internet arrived, he was quick to exploit it to secure his own immortality.
his existence and his entire body of work.
So the way he did that basically was "have a virtual walkthrough of the house".
And everything whithin the house, it's all is interactive.
You can click on the painting, or click on the book and then find out about so and so.
By 1990 Leary was divorced and alone again.
In 1995 he learnt he had cancer.
The way that he told me which was: "Oh, did you hear by the way I've got prostate cancer
and I've decided you know... death is the last taboo and this is what we gonna do.
Was attacked with this much of enthusiasm as anything else.
Think for yourself, think for yourself.
Leary appeared undaunted by the prospect of his own death.
You know, my dad was really tired of being alone on intimate level.
The struggle just to make ends meet. He'd worked very very hard until his last days.
Still performing until he physically couldn't any more.
Finding out he had prostate cancer he called it "mademoiselle cancer",
you know was a great relief to him.
Turn on, tune in, drop out.
Yes I did act as a PR person for the brain
and the possibilities of changing the brain.
Leary intended to go out in a blaze of publicity.
He announced he'd die life on the Internet.
And that his head would be cryogenically preserved.
He shunned conventional painkillers which slowed him down,
using instead marijuana and balloons filled with laughing gas.
Always weary of intimacy he spent even his last months at the centre of a crowd.
Towards the end of his life he would say to several people:
"I was a good boy, wasn't I? I did alright, didn't I?"
I think some of that stemmed, well obviously, from the experience with his mom and his aunt,
but also from his experience of having grown up in the Catholic church.
It kind of frightened me a little bit that he would feel it necessary to ask:
"I did OK, didn't I? I was a good boy?"
By the last month of his life Leary could hardly move.
But he still managed one last outing and one last brush with the law.
I was in the car, ahead of the car that Timothy was in.
And 2 other girls were sitting on the back of the car.
They were dancing along to the radio.
And I see through the rear view mirror a policeman. He pulls the car over.
Timothy's friend turns to the policeman and says:
"Look, officer, slide us a break here. My friend here is dying of prostate cancer.
We just wanted to show him a good time before he dies".
And the policeman looks at Timothy
and it's very obvious that this man is dying of something.
And he looks at the girls. And he says: "Well, OK".
"But you, girls, better sit in the car here".
And so it was Timothy's last caper.
3 weeks later Timothy Leary died.
He would hope that he was seen as a great philosopher.
On the other hand, the cold superrationalist in me says that he simply going to be a historical artefact.
That he will be a larger then "Life" figure who in some way
lived the great American novel that never got written about - the 60s.
In accordance with his last request, Leary's ashes were launched into space.
He is now orbiting the Earth every 96 minutes.
In the next 5 or 10 years we expect that between 20 and 30 million Americans
will be using LSD regularly in their spiritual development and in psychological growth.
In the 1960s Timothy Leary brought psychedelic drugs
out of the laboratories and onto the campuses of America.
The greatest pushers in this country today are the missionaries,
who make and distribute LSD.
Because they are convinced it's a wonderful way...
As that poisonous, evil man dr. Timothy Leary has said:
It is a way to "turn on, tune in and drop out".
Leary became the outspoken leader of a generation that wasn't even his own.
The kids who take LSD aren't gonna fight your wars,
middle-class middle-age whiskey drinking generals.
They not going to join your corporations,
middle-class middle-age whiskey drinking corporation presidents.
The former Harvard academic committed the cardinal sin
of insighting young Americans to reject the values of their parents.
Turn on, tune in and drop out.
In 1946 Timothy Leary was all set for a glittering but conventional career.
A 25-year old clinical psychologist,
he had just arrived at the university of California at Berkeley to work on his PhD.
Of all the people I've known (and I've certainly known some very bright people)
I would not rate him in simple IQ terms
as very very high.
He was just all around awfully good company a lot of fun.
Tim was an excellent psychologist. He always had a lot of people around him.
He liked being the center of attention. Without a doubt.
And he was candid about it. He was the center of the circle.
That was his place in life.
Leary made his name with a pioneering research project on personality.
He and several colleges charted the characteristics people display in their various relationships.
Then Leary organized them for the first time into a model
for other therapists to use for diagnosis.
Leary's book won acclaim from the American psychology association
and spawned many follow-up studies.
Significantly, he took most of the credit for himself.
I was rather surprised. He mentioned me in the preface,
saying that I tributed... contributed balance and good sense.
That was about it.
Mervin was very mad. I don't know weather he told you that or not.
I was a bit mad too.
Despite the professional squabbles, Leary's personal life thrived.
He moved into an affluent suburb of Berkeley
with his wife, Marianne, and their two young children.
I was very fond of her.
She was very attractive, slender.
Tim regarded her as a puppy,
something to be cared for and vulnerable.
Tim told me that she had had a depressive episode
several months before they married, before he knew her.
But none of this stood in the way of a hectic social life.
Learys were involved in quite a complex set of social relationships
involving heavy drinking, wife swapping.
Activities like this.
I was invited for dinner and she was cooking in the kitchen
and bending over taking pan out of the oven, a roast out of the oven,
she said in context of something that she was talking about:
"I have never refused a man".
And I... that seemed unfathomable to me,
but I thought they lived a different life from mine.
Marianns friends claim Leary encouraged her
to be promiscuous to justify his own affairs.
Everybody flirted at parties in Berkeley.
But the rule is if the intelligent wife allows flirtation she drives a line on love.
He could have all the girlfriends he wanted but he couldn't fall in love with them.
In the spring of 1954 Leary's office
took on a new member of staff, Mary della Cioppa, known as Dell.
I felt charmed by her presence.
And when Tim met her
he felt much much more so.
And it was clear for me that there was some
instant magnetism going between them.
And I was especially aware of that
when after a week he asked me to get a sofa and have it put in his office.
This time Leary broke the rules.
He fell in love with Dell.
Marianne was clearly profoundly depressed.
And it worried me considerably.
I attempted to talk to her, but it got nowhere.
The 22 of October 1955 was Leary's 35th birthday.
He woke to find a letter on a pillow beside him.
It was a suicide note.
He found Marianne's body in their car in a garage.
The engine was still running.
She died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Before taking her own life she'd cooked Tim a birthday cake.
In a way she was saying: "You, son of a bitch,
look at what you've done. You've killed me and you've deprived your children of their mother."
It was going to be a long hard road for him to recover.
And I think that is what dominated his life maybe from then on.
Leary's affairs and Marianne's suicide
were two more sorry episodes in the Leary family history.
His father, a medical officer at West Point Military Academy,
had abandoned the family when Tim was 13.
An only child, he was brought up by his mother and aunt.
Both - devout catholics.
Timothy would tell me how they were always very disapproving of him.
Encouraging on the one hand, but if he did anything wrong there was hell to pay.
Leary had started brightly enough. He became the editor of his high school magazine.
He was even voted "cutest boy" by the girls of the school.
Following in his father's footsteps, young Timothy went on to become a cadet at West Point.
Why didn't you shine no shoes?
I didn't have time, sir.
Mr. Don Jone, you have time for everything.
You have no good explanation, you say "No excuse, sir".
But in his first year Leary was caught drunk.
Worse, when questioned about it, he lied.
That was a breach of West Point's honour code.
When he refused to resign, the senior cadets silenced him, forbade him to speak to anyone.
His mother implored him to see it through.
"I give thanks to the blessed Lord
for saving me from the terrible ordeal of explaining to the world
that my son was sent home from West Point for violating his honour.
I beg of you: do everything you can to prove
by your actions that you are the kind of a son I want".
"I can't stand it, mother, if you going to pray for me and worry.
If you expect me to be a run-of-the-mill, every day 100% good fellow, you must be disappointed.
I would rather starve in the gutter".
Leary endured his isolation for 10 months before resigning.
The next year, 1942, he was expelled from Alabama University
after being found in the girls dormitory.
He wrote his mother throughout the years looking for her approval.
I don't know that he got it.
After Marianne's death Leary and Dell
did go through a marriage ceremony in Mexico.
But their relationship didn't last.
Now, alone with 2 young children - Susan and Jack,
Leary quit Berkeley and travel to Europe to ponder his future.
I visited Tim in Florence
and after couple days I told him I had very recently sampled the actual mushrooms.
Not a pill but the actual mushrooms of the Mazatec Indians,
the so-called "sacred mushroom".
And I told him that this is important to psychology,
because it gave me moments of insight
into certain things that happened during the war, for example,
traumatic episodes, that I had suppressed.
And he said, "Frank, you'd better not tell many people about this,
no psychologist, because they'll think you nuts".
The following summer Leary went to Mexico, where he sampled "magic" mushrooms for himself.
Later, he wrote about it:
"The fungi where placed on the table by the pool.
I picked one up.
It tasted even worse than it looked. Bitter, stringy.
I began to feel strange, mildly nauseous, detached.
Everything was quivering with life, even inanimate objects.
I gave way to delight, and discovered a sea of possibilities, other realities.
By that swimming pool I learnt more about the mind
then I had in 15 years as a diligent psychologist".
It was 1960.
At the age of 40 Leary's adventures with mind-altering psychedelic drugs had begun.
He said to me then: "You were wright."
"This is a very important potential tool
and it's going to affect all society."
I think is what he said.
But the first tremors would be felt at Harvard University.
Leary had been head-hunted by Harvard psychology department
in it's drive for fresh minds and ideas.
With Leary, it would get more then it bargain for.
Teaming up with a colleague, Richard Alperd,
Leary won approval for a research project,
exploring the potential benefits of the active ingredient
in "magic" mushrooms - psilocybin.
Leary and his project were certainly popular with graduate students.
I met Tim in his tiny little cubical office.
He was very engaging, very witty, very funny. I was immediately taken by him, felt tremendous rapport.
He described to me the research he was currently undertaking with the psychedelic psilocybin.
I immediately committed myself to it.
I asked him what I needed to do and he said:
"You just needed to participate as a subject in the experiments
and actually take the substance with me and a few other students".
So I said, "Yes".
Psychedelic drugs were legal then
and most of the graduate students in psychology said "yes" to Leary,
leaving his colleges short of research assistants.
Some of the best and brightest students were attracted to this project.
And it created a bit of jealousy and envy.
Leary's boast that psychedelic drugs were the key to the unconscious mind
also wrangled with his fellow teachers.
But one project did yield remarkable results.
"The Marsh Chapel experiment" was designed by a graduate student under Leary's supervision.
It investigated whether psylocibin, taken in a religious setting,
could induce experiences comparable to those described by the great mystiques.
Randall Laakko was one of ten theology students who took the psilocybin.
I had a real struggle with the chemical
and at one point I thought in fact I had died and I was in hell.
I began saying the bible verse:
"For God so loves the world, that if gave His only begotten Son
that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life".
And I kept repeating that over and over again
and then I came to the awareness that it was not helping me at all.
Laakko fled from the chapel with Leary following.
Outside his terror evaporated.
That was a glorious sunny day.
I remember seeing an elderly couple walking down the sidewalk hand in hand.
And that was the most profound and beautiful experience to me.
This was an image of people who indeed loved one another
and had lived their lifes together.
Everything in the world just seemed to glow inwardly with life.
Everything was alive. And I don't mean just leaving things,
but even inanimate things. They just lived.
And I was seeing things like had never seen them before.
Leary steered Laakko back into the chapel.
I do remember laying down on the floor.
Leary lay right next to me. Almost as though we were lovers.
I can remember the smell of his hair,
being extremely physically close.
And then feeling my hand run down his body, touching him.
What he was doing was giving me human contact again.
Nine of the ten theology students reported
that they had indeed experienced something like a mystical revelation.
I would say ya, did change my life.
The experience that they demonstrated to me,
the reality of god's presence in all the world,
and in all experience.
If our eyes are opened and we are able to perceive and take that in.
And by eyes I mean our spiritual inner awarenesses.
The experiment had demonstrated that psychedelics could indeed open the doors of perception.
But still, some of Leary's research students didn't want to take the drug themselves.
Several students had come to me to complain
that Leary was pressuring them to take the drug, psilocybin,
with the statement that "if they were too square"
(that words of his ... to take this",
and then they, probably, they shouldn't be in the field of clinical psychology at all.
Then, when you are a graduate student and you aiming for a Ph.D.
in clinical psychology that's a pretty ominous remark.
Leary argued that only by taking psilocybin
could his researchers understand its effect on consciousness.
But much of his research was done at his Harvard home
and the line between research and pleasure blurred.
His pet project on psychedelics and creativity
brought a stream of artists and writers to his house.
Among them, the poet Allen Ginsberg.
Leary gave Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky this psilocybin
and they promptly took off their cloths and lounged around.
And then at a certain point Ginsberg decided that he wanted to do something for world peace.
And so he would call up Kennedy and Khrushchev, get them all on the phone
and solve this problem about the bomb and everything right then and there.
They were not able to get that two most powerful men of the world on the phone, so they settled for Jack Kerouac.
It became difficult to maintain a balance there.
And I should say we lost our balance a bit.
That became less rigorous and there was an increase in the use of psilocybin as a recreational substance.
Soon after appearing together in this training film,
Brendan Maher and Timothy Leary faced each other at a stuff meeting
called to examine Leary's working methods.
I simply asked him to tell the audience
what he knew about the medical action of these drugs.
The answer he gave me was:
"I don't have to know these things. I have an adviser from the medical school".
And he gave the name of the adviser.
And I turned to him whenever (there's any question -??)
Now, unknown to Tim this adviser, who I gather Tim had never met,
was already in the audience. He ????? was already had been invited here to ??????.
And he rose to his feet and said: "I've never met you".
"I have nothing to do with your research. I don't know what you talking about".
And he said "no".
Harvard's controversy over psychedelic drugs now became national news.
In the end, Leary's college, Richard Alpert,
became the first professor to be fired from Harvard in almost a century.
For giving psilocybin to an undergraduate.
When Alpert left, Leary went with him.
He liked to claim that he too had been sacked. It added to his radical image.
Leary and Alpert looked for the right surroundings in which to continue to spread the word about psychedelic drugs.
Their saviour was Leary's close friend, Peggy Hitchcock.
We went up to see if this old house might work as a haven
for this little group of people who have sort of found themselves exiled from where they've been living.
And so we did. We saw this house. It looked like it would be just perfect.
Peggy came from one of America's wealthiest families.
The old house was a 64-room mansion,
set in 2000 acers of upstate New-York.
It was owned by her brothers.
And Leary lived here in Millbrook virtually rent free for the next 4 years.
By now Leary had moved on to a more powerful,
but still legal psychedelic drug - LSD.
LSD was a guarantee to really take you to place
that was very much more of a... death and rebirth experience.
Which was exciting but also could be quite terrifying.
At first Leary persuaded discipline regime.
Visitors paid for weekend seminars where they were taught how best to use LSD.
In his natural habitat the prophet preaches.
Timothy Leary in a Saturday morning session of word and silences.
The session tonight we concentrate on making the experience
pleasant, and educational,
and safe.
Tim was very clear about the need for proper controls
and proper support for these experiences.
And by that I mean he emphasized the importance of what we called "set and setting".
"Set" being the expectations that one had going into an experience of this type,
and "setting" referring to the environment at which it occurred.
Really, it's all so simple.
Each next moment. This is it.
LSD was beginning to enter the American consciousness.
While Leary gave psychedelic lessons to the chic of New York,
the residents of California were being offered an altogether
more rockous introduction to the drug.
The self-styled "Merry Pranksters" believed LSD should be available to all.
They were driving their magic bus across America,
offering the drug to anyone willing to take "the acid test".
It's going to be a graduation ceremony
and a commencement exercise
essentially for "the heads" and other people
who would like to know what the "heads" are doing.
Are you going to tell what's bad about LSD?
Not necessarily.
The Pranksters may have treated LSD with less respect then Leary,
but they recognized that he had placed the psychedelic trail before them.
Tim carried the standard, he was there first.
He ran this thing called IFIF which was the "International Federation For Internal Freedom".
And ours on the bus was ISIS. We were the "Intrepid Search for Inner Space".
One summer morning in 1964 the Pranksters dropped in in Millbrook.
We showed up there like a carnival of clowns.
Green smoke pouring out of all the windows.
Tim didn't feel like dealing with them basically.
So, they asked me if I would be willing to show them around, and I said: "Sure".
Oh, can I remember Peggy. I got a picture in this machine with Peggy.
She looks like 2 million dollar lollipop, I tell you.
But I've really gone there to see Leary.
And Leary was there, but he'd been upstairs.
And so we didn't see him.
We felt like he was a kind of been snooty.
Apparently, Leary had been tripping all night and had only just gone to bed.
So the psychedelic cheerleaders from the East and West coasts
didn't meet at all during the 1960s.
Leary now took his message to New York's theatre land
with a music and light show to recreate the LSD experience.
To turn on you have to have a key
to get in touch with the neurological, sensory
and cellular information that you got stored
in that 2 billion year old receptacle you call your body.
Now, how do you turn on? Well I will tell you this:
you can't turn on with words, you can't turn on with thinking, you can think...
He did these shows and they became great success.
Then what happened is that people wanted to start, wanted to come up to Millbrook
and see this place and...
And it seized to be a private operation.
And there were like hordes of people more and more coming up there.
I just felt less and less comfortable.
Anyone who was hip in the 60s came to Millbrook.
On any given week-end there were hundred people there floating through.
Strange New York city types, bohemians, jet-setters,
German counts, you name it, you could find them at Millbrook.
Close behind came the media.
Leary revelled in his role of psychedelic spokesman.
Dr. Leary, what are you up to here?
We're teaching people how to use their head.
Point is, that in order to use your head you have to go out of your mind.
Soon, Tim sort of gave in to the extraordinary adulation
that he was getting as a cult figure and as a...
...the word that was barely used in America in 1964-65 - a guru.
A drug guru.
Exactly who is who and who is supposed to do what...
Tim was too enamoured of the attraction and attention of lots of people.
I don't think he was so good at living his life out in terms of the emotional intelligence
that was required for example to raise children or to maintain relationships.
With Leary showing more interest in fame then consciousness
his old Harvard friends began to drift away.
Gunther Weil and Peggy Hitchcock were the first to leave, followed by Richard Alpert.
Alpert went to India in search of enlightenment.
And returned as baba Ram Dass, achieving fame as one of America's leading mystics.
Meanwhile, in 1964 Leary married Nena von Schlebrugge.
He was 44, she 24.
The marriage lasted less then a year.
By the following summer he was living with Rosemary Woodruff,
who would later become his fourth wife.
Tim... he was beautiful.
He took me from being an insecure neurotic New-Yorker, to some extent,
to feeling like a sex goddess.
By the winter of 1965 even Leary wanted a break from all the attention.
He left Millbrook with Rosemary and his children,
Jack and Susan, now teenagers, and headed South.
At the Mexican border they were sent back
by a policeman whom Leary recognized from an earlier stay in Mexico.
Returning to the American side, they were stopped and strip-searched.
Was at that point I believed we recognized that perhaps we've been set up for this.
That our phone had been tapped. That was the only way they could've known that we are going
to cross at that particular point
was because we mentioned on the phone. And no the reason for that policeman to have be there.
1/8 of an ounce of marijuana was found. Most of it in daughter Susan's underwear.
Her farther took responsibility.
It was his first offence.
But his notoriety owned him a 30-year prison sentence.
Released on bail pending appeal Leary returned to Millbrook where his troubles continued.
This is indeed the G. Gordon Liddy show. We good to go and ready to launch.
G. Gordon Liddy is one of America's leading radio talk show hosts.
In 1973 he was imprisoned for his part in the Watergate scandal.
...in jail myself, I can tell you that the one overriding interest is getting the hell out of there...
Liddy first came to the notice of the White House as an assistant DA
whose patch covered the Millbrook estate.
According to our informants the panties were dropping as fast as the acid
and this disturbed the local burgers, considerably.
We understood from our informants that the front door was always opened.
And the plan was to sneak in.
Jacky was doing his homework and he went downstairs for some food or something.
Came running back up the stairs and saying that there were bunch of hunters
downstairs with guns.
As we started up the stairs
you know, there the indigens (???) appeared.
They coming out the doors, half of 'em were wacked on some drug or another.
They really came in expecting an orgy.
And instead found a quite family scene.
They were led by Timothy Leary and his then inamorata Rosemary.
She was in a diaphanous gown and he was wearing a half-a-way shirt. Period.
And my first view of Timothy Leary - as I was up the stairs and he was coming down - was spectacular, to say the least.
Tim was wearing a long night shirt.
And I was wearing my grand-mother's Christmas gift which is a long flannel nightie.
The Leary's bedroom, there was a container of vegetable matter
and Rosemary was protesting saying that that was her sacrament.
I told the state troopers not to take that plant, that that was my favourite plant
and that they insisted and of couse it was a dead fuchsia plant with a lot of peat moss at the bottom.
The police claimed they found both marijuana and LSD at the house.
But the case was thrown out by a grand jury and never went to trial.
Leary was feeling the effects of the backlash against LSD.
Undoubtedly it can cause psychological damage.
But a flurry of propaganda films now exaggerated it's dangers.
Any stress in this rising phase will trip this man into a bad-trip.
He will be terrified.
He is not seeing pretty visions. He's seeing monsters. He is loosing his mind and he feels it going.
There's only one escape from this discomfort.
That's suicide.
This man will kill himself.
Leary had brought LSD into the limelight.
And in doing so he had brought opprobrium on more then just himself.
Scientific research had shown that psychedelic drugs could help
in treating alcoholism, chronic pain, even schizophrenia.
But by 1967 LSD was illegal in most of the USA.
And all research projects involving psychedelic drugs had been closed down.
Most of them blamed Tim Leary. Fairly legitimately.
Because he certainly was the pointman that popularised this thing
and threw it into the public domain. And they all warned him.
The dirty hippy paper you heard so much about.
Only a quarter.
LSD was now seen as a catalyst of the hippy culture
that so dismayed the American establishment.
And Timothy Leary who for so long had preached caution in it's use
now simply trotted out his mantra.
Turn on, tune in and drop out.
We turned on, and we tuned in, and we were very dropped out.
He said that in 1966.
And by 1970 there were drop-outs everywhere, there were communes all across America.
So, people were listening.
And as the counterculture grew, so did the campaign against the Vietnam war.
Leary's influence seemed more dangerous then ever.
When the White House looked at the counterculture for leaders
one person stood front centre.
He was the oldest. He had the most impressive credentials - Harvard.
He had a way of turning up, not just at parties of the jet-set and wealthy,
but also in the pages of "Playboy", and "Esquire",
and various large newspapers, and that man was Timothy Leary.
Leary was arrested a dozen times during the late 60s
and the more he was targeted, the more provocative he became.
I urge all of you go back to your campuses and start some sort of a drop-out movement.
That's only way we going to bring this country of menopausal,
whiskey drinking congressmen senators... to the senses.
And when I mean their senses I mean these senses, cause they forgot...
The government... Well, he was very convenient scapegoat, cause here he was upfront, telling everybody turn on, tune in and drop out.
And so the more that he was condemned he kind of took on that persona.
And he said well fine. That's the way it is. I will be the corrupter of youth.
We found dr. Timothy Leary and his companions here in the mountains of southern California in a spot that Leary called heaven.
In 1968 the 30-year sentence Leary had been fighting
since his arrest at Mexican border was overturned by the Supreme Court.
The media sought his reaction. He gave them an announcement.
We going to become next governor in the state of California.
We gonna start a new political party. And by party we mean party.
It was an opportune moment he couldn't waste and he had to say something.
To really get their attention.
We want to turn on the whole state. There is no excuse for any Californian
not to be high and happy and laughing all the time.
It was a show off. It was an ego maniacal show off.
Standing against Ronald Reagan Leary received the ultimate stamp of approval from the counterculture.
John and Yoko invited us to Montreal where they were staging a "bed-in for peace".
All we are saying
is give peace a chance
All we are saying
is give peace a chance
John asked how he could help and we asked him to write a song for us.
And we told him slogan was "come together, join the party".
So John subsequently wrote "Come together".
Leary never did make it to the governor's mansion.
Before his campaign got going he was jailed for 10 years
for possession of 2 joints.
The judge at his trial called him "the most dangerous man in America".
In prison he was given a psychological test that he had helped to develop in the 1950s.
He filled up the test in such a way that
suggested that he couldn't possibly be a risk and that he would be benign and well-behaved.
So, "the most dangerous man in America" was housed in the lowest security wing of the prison.
A few months later he escaped.
Tim essentially had to climb upon a roof,
a hang from a telephone wire, he pulled himself hand over hand
until he reached a telephone pole.
Shimmied down a telephone pole and drop to the ground outside the walls of the prison.
Leary and Rosemary were smuggled out of the country by the Weathermen,
an underground group committed to subverting the American establishment.
They delivered Leary to Algeria where the Black Panthers,
the most militant of America's radical organisations,
had a government in exile, led by Eldridge Cleaver.
My plans are to work with the Black Panther Party for the overthrow of the American government.
Where do you expect to be doing this work?
Throughout the world.
They are based... their international sections are based in Algeria (????)
But we are likely to show up at any place - North Vietnam, North Korea -
wherever people struggling for freedom - we'll be there.
The hopes were that this would create kind of united front
between the hippies, and the leftists, and the Panthers
by putting Cleaver and Leary together.
It failed miserably.
We are in there for the revolution in Babylon.
But the Learys and the Panthers didn't see eye to eye on the revolution.
We had thought of the Black Panthers as our cultural heroes.
But they thought we were irresponsible hippies.
As the Learys prepared for yet another dinner party they received a visit from the Panthers.
Shortly before I guessed we were expected
Eldridge and several panthers burst into the apartment and dragged us off.
Forced to flee from Algeria Leary spent a further 18 months
on the run from the American authorities.
He split up with Rosemary.
And was finally recaptured by American agents in Afghanistan.
Now, facing up to 75 years in jail, Leary began collaborating with the FBI.
He informed on the people who had helped him to escape.
But his evidence alone was not enough to convict them.
Tim wrote me a letter enclosing a card from an FBI agent
actually who I should contact.
What he was asking me to do was to corroborate
his tale of the escape
and name the people that he was naming.
And I could not do that.
So, I went on the run.
How long for?
22 years.
Rosemary changed her name and went underground.
She did not re-emerged until 1995.
After cooperating with the FBI Leary was back on the streets in 1975.
In demand on the chat-show circuit he continued to push his favourite message:
"think for yourself. question authority".
Good for Eve! I love to be descended from Eve.
The first human being was a woman, who stood up on her two feet
and took the fruit and said: "Hey, if this is the tree of knowledge
I'm gonna eat it, because I'm a human being and forget it, Jehovah.
Forget it, go back, jump on your squad car and go back to headquatters, Jehovah.
He married once more, for the fifth and last time and moved to Hollywood.
He would be with some great group of these, you know, punky looking you know fabulous woman
with 3 degrees, but she's 22 and she's got white hair, and everything's pierced and she's an expert on computers.
You know, some amazing young woman on his arm.
And he would come and just be the life of the party.
He can not deny it. He is a selfconfessed lawer.
His comeback was complete, when he played out a bizarre double act
in a lecture tour with his former arch enemy G. Gordon Liddy.
The real difference between us, 180 degrees, it's not left wing or right wing.
It's past versus future.
And mr. Liddy is desperatly facing backward, worshipping tradition.
And I am a futurist.
It was no idle boast. Leary had championed the computer age since the 1970s.
And when the Internet arrived, he was quick to exploit it to secure his own immortality.
his existence and his entire body of work.
So the way he did that basically was "have a virtual walkthrough of the house".
And everything whithin the house, it's all is interactive.
You can click on the painting, or click on the book and then find out about so and so.
By 1990 Leary was divorced and alone again.
In 1995 he learnt he had cancer.
The way that he told me which was: "Oh, did you hear by the way I've got prostate cancer
and I've decided you know... death is the last taboo and this is what we gonna do.
Was attacked with this much of enthusiasm as anything else.
Think for yourself, think for yourself.
Leary appeared undaunted by the prospect of his own death.
You know, my dad was really tired of being alone on intimate level.
The struggle just to make ends meet. He'd worked very very hard until his last days.
Still performing until he physically couldn't any more.
Finding out he had prostate cancer he called it "mademoiselle cancer",
you know was a great relief to him.
Turn on, tune in, drop out.
Yes I did act as a PR person for the brain
and the possibilities of changing the brain.
Leary intended to go out in a blaze of publicity.
He announced he'd die life on the Internet.
And that his head would be cryogenically preserved.
He shunned conventional painkillers which slowed him down,
using instead marijuana and balloons filled with laughing gas.
Always weary of intimacy he spent even his last months at the centre of a crowd.
Towards the end of his life he would say to several people:
"I was a good boy, wasn't I? I did alright, didn't I?"
I think some of that stemmed, well obviously, from the experience with his mom and his aunt,
but also from his experience of having grown up in the Catholic church.
It kind of frightened me a little bit that he would feel it necessary to ask:
"I did OK, didn't I? I was a good boy?"
By the last month of his life Leary could hardly move.
But he still managed one last outing and one last brush with the law.
I was in the car, ahead of the car that Timothy was in.
And 2 other girls were sitting on the back of the car.
They were dancing along to the radio.
And I see through the rear view mirror a policeman. He pulls the car over.
Timothy's friend turns to the policeman and says:
"Look, officer, slide us a break here. My friend here is dying of prostate cancer.
We just wanted to show him a good time before he dies".
And the policeman looks at Timothy
and it's very obvious that this man is dying of something.
And he looks at the girls. And he says: "Well, OK".
"But you, girls, better sit in the car here".
And so it was Timothy's last caper.
3 weeks later Timothy Leary died.
He would hope that he was seen as a great philosopher.
On the other hand, the cold superrationalist in me says that he simply going to be a historical artefact.
That he will be a larger then "Life" figure who in some way
lived the great American novel that never got written about - the 60s.
In accordance with his last request, Leary's ashes were launched into space.
He is now orbiting the Earth every 96 minutes.