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December 28, 2008
An Untold American Success Story; Part 5
Although the influence he exerted on American culture from the middle of the Twentieth Century on hasn’t faded much since his death in 1996, Timothy Francis Leary's career was so varied as to defy classification; he was literally one of a kind.Born in 1920, Leary was the only child of an alcoholic Springfield, Mass. dentist who abandoned his family in 1933. After High School, he attended Holy Cross and West Point, but left both without a degree before earning a BA from Alabama, an MA from Washington State and a PhD in Psychology from UC Berkeley in 1950.
He then stayed at Berkeley to teach for five years before moving on to Harvard, from where he was expelled by the faculty in 1963 for reasons that are still unclear.
His departure from Harvard under circumstances that would have destroyed most careers seems only to have stimulated Leary into an even more peripatetic life outside academia and added to his fame, influence, and ability to polarize opinion during the decade that will probably always be known as its century's most influential.
Leary's career eventually included six marriages. In addition to lecturing, the publication of several books, advocacy of personal drug use, controversial psychedelic research, and the support of variety of causes, he was consistently able to come up with support for his own lifestyle as needed.
His activities did result in several arrests for marijuana possession with the imposition of 2 long sentences, both of which were eventually reversed.
His first arrest was at Millbrook, by future Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy in 1966 when the latter was serving as the local prosecutor.
Leary's career was so interesting I will be forced to break up what was intended as one entry into two. The next will focus on the psychedelic agents he is most famous for using, some other, generally younger "shamans" of the Sixties and Seventies, and why I think the manifest ignorance of the drug war on the subject of psychedelics in general is such convincing evidence of our policy's intellectual bankruptcy (and our species' craven cowardice).
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at December 28, 2008 12:05 AM