Psychedelia, page 52
Most successful in this respect was the enlisting of Henry and Clara Luce to the psychedelic VIP brigade. Owner of Time and Life magazines, among others, Henry Luce was a tremendously influential figure in mid-century USA, and his involvement in the LSD cause was a major coup. While Life had offered Gordon Wasson generous space for his famed 'magic mushroom' story in 1957, it appears that the Luces' first psychedelic experiences did not occur until 1959. Assisted by LSD researcher Sidney Cohen, Gerald Heard arranged an LSD session for his acquaintance Clara Luce, and in perfect accordance to the Huxley-Heard agenda she was instantly converted into an acid advocate. She later claimed that the psychedelic trips of her and her husband Henry had saved their marriage, and remained an outspoken high society supporter of The Psychedelic Experience while Henry Luce initially kept a lower profile. However, towards the end of his career Luce openly encouraged employees to try LSD, and during a speech at a major banquet in the mid -1960s he stunned the vast audience by referring to his and Clare's LSD experiments. That different kinds of people have different kinds of acid trips may be evident from Luce's official biography, which recounts one of his psychedelic journeys thus:
He claimed to have talked to God on the golf course, and found that the Old Boy seemed to be on top of things and knew pretty much what he was doing'
The track record of Henry Luce's magazines makes it clear that there was a cautious but notable pro-psychedelic agenda in the media house up until his death in 1967. As an example, the hugely influential multi-page coverage of LSD in Life February '66 (the ubiquitous Larry Schiller again contributing) carried typical scare propaganda headlines, but the actual textual content was remarkably benign. About six months later the magazine ran an interesting and entirely unprejudiced feature on the new 'LSD art' emerging in New York City and elsewhere, putting Richard Aldcroft's clever Infinity Projector on the cover. Counterculture leader Abbie Hoffman later claimed that Luce media did more to popularize LSD than Timothy Leary, and even if that may seem overstated, a review of what Time and Life published on psychedelic drugs in the pre-hippie era displays a respectful, mildly positive bias. For a while, the Huxleyan VIP trip method clearly seemed to work. Its success was directly linked to an aspect of LSD-25 which defines the first phase of modern psychedelic culture (1945-1963) more than any other: it was an elite drug.
Exactly how high up this aristocratic psychedelization reached is difficult to discern, but as one examines the scattered evidence from the pre-hippie era, the number of notables who experimented with psychedelic drugs is remarkable; poets, painters, diplomats, politicians, even scientists like Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winning physicist. In the world of politics, a particularly intriguing thread of psychedelization leads into the 'Camelot' days of the White House, from which John F Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby seemed to radiate hope for a Western world weighed down by the Cold War and ever more powerful nuclear weapons. Conspiracy theorists have found this connection particularly to their liking, but the fact remains that several indications point towards JFK taking LSD a few times. Timothy Leary has stated as much, but Leary's autobiographies are notoriously fuzzy on the distinction between what Tim likes to think happened, and what actually did happen (he also claims having had sex with Marilyn Monroe, as an example). However, in recent years Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), long silent on this subject, came forth and in the movie documentary Power & Control- LSD In The Sixties (2005) he stated in unequivocal terms that Kennedy did take LSD in the early 1960s.
The mysterious death of a young woman named Mary Pinchot stands at the center of the JFK affair, which has been corroborated by several sources outside what Leary claims in Flashback (1983). Formerly married to a CIA official, Pinchot became one of Kennedy's several lovers in 1962 - 63. Entertaining close ties to Leary's group at Harvard, Pinchot and a few other wives and girlfriends to powerful men in Washington DC developed a light-hearted yet undeniably risky 'conspiracy' to have their partners experience LSD. The idea, basically a local implementation of the Huxleyan VIP model, carried obvious potential due to its proximity to absolute power (in addition to her love tryst with JFK, Pinchot was the sister in law to Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor). The closest sign of this bold women's acid club having success in affecting White House policy was a speech given by John F Kennedy in June 1963:
Every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace should start by looking inside himself.
(JFK at American University June 10, 1963)
Kennedy, whose administration at the time was already engaged in two international conflicts bordering on war, went on to state that 'war makes no sense' in an age of nuclear weapons able to destroy the entire world. In another speech a few weeks later he urged America to 'step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace'. These statements are remarkably similar to the sentiments of the late '60s peace movement, yet whether they reflect any profound change in JFK's stance or simply was the political message he deemed appropriate for the Summer of '63 is impossible to say.
What is known is that Mary Pinchot, the week after Kennedy's assassination, contacted Timothy Leary in a terrified state and asked for a secure hiding place, and that she, less than a year later, was found dead by a canal in Washington DC, the victim of a supposed robbery. The year after, Pinchot's main co-conspirator to psychedelicize the White House, ABC journalist Lisa Howard, died of a presumed suicide. Like the Charles Olson scandal of the 1950s, the Mary Pinchot case offers an intriguing combination of psychedelic drugs and CIA cloak and daggery that causes its resurrection by investigating journalists now and then, even without the massive industry of JFK conspiracy theories. From the perspective of Psychedelia, it represents yet another missed opportunity; Pinchot's psychedelic love affair with Kennedy may be the closest the Huxley-Heard agenda of the 1950s ever came to truly changing the world. Following JFK's assassination in November 1963 a new era began, not least so for modern psychedelic culture. In one of synchronicity's more poignant moments, Aldous Huxley passed away the very same night that John F Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas; on his death bed Huxley asked for and received 100 micrograms of LSD from his wife Laura.
5
It is possible to identify the exact moment when Timothy Leary decided to abandon whatever scientific credibility his ex-Harvard Ph D still carried in this world, and become a freewheeling spokesman for the advantages of LSD instead. Like everything he did, this was a deliberate move with a calculated effect. Unlike most things he did, and unlike what pop culture history would have you believe, the intentions behind this action were not entirely benign. Fed up with legal hassles and harassment from the police, which seemed to him actions of inexplicable ingratitude for the spiritual benevolence offered by Millbrook's psychedelic academy, his patience finally snapped. If some perceived him as an enemy, then by Jove there would be war. Naturally gifted for media mani- pulation, he had received personal advise from Marshall McLuhan on how PR battles are fought and won. Towards the end of the Summer 1966, following a much-publicized raid on Millbrook led by future 'Watergate' stooge Gordon Liddy, an enraged Leary set several new projects in motion. The almost simultaneous release of not less than three phonograph records (on Broadside, Pixie and ESP, respectively) opened a channel for him to communicate his psychedelic gospel via a popular media format where the message could not be edited or censored.6
Secondly, and most importantly, Leary agreed to do a long interview with Playboy magazine. Playboy was a proudly open-minded publication which had written about psychedelic drugs as early as 1963, yet the Harvard trio had only been covered in passing until now. That Leary is pushing a deliberate PR agenda is almost blatantly obvious when reading the long but surprisingly shallow Playboy feature. In the interview, Leary plays up the supposed aphrodisiacal properties of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and makes a number of statements in that field that make little sense or are simply not true. The other writings Leary produced in 1965-66 were occasionally spaced-out and fanciful, yet they represented a marked desire to broaden the understanding and push the envelope of the psychedelic trip. What Leary says about LSD in Playboy seems more aimed at a college frat party crowd; it is the testimonies of a person who no longer expects or cares about being taken seriously. Behind the enthusiastic talks about making love on LSD one can discern a crass Learyan analysis of how Middle America's neurosis is primarily sexual, and for any media subject to create maximum impact it needs to be linked to sex. If the aim of the game is to win a public relations war over a drug, a Playboy interview which describes how to get better sex via that drug is a very powerful attack.7 Inaccuracy or deception are factors of a lesser order.
Leary's new and antagonistic plan succeeded in the sense that he was catapulted to global fame in less than a year's time, and from that platform he continued to preach his psychedelic gospel, now reduced to effective, media-friendly slogans. His target was no longer jazz musicians and Beat poets, but the youth of America. Behind the smiles and daisy flowers he was exacting revenge on the square, middle-aged men of law and order by convincing their sons and daughters to take LSD and drop out of school. Leary could point to having done exactly this himself, so he was clearly not a phony, but one of the few over 30 that one could trust. For a little while, this game worked so well that Leary became a hero of the emerging counterculture, and in the starry -eyed zeitgeist of the 'Summer Of Love', very few people thought to question the soundness of his agenda. On the contrary, he was joined on his platform by the Beatles and his old friend Allen Ginsberg, who had always promoted the wide dispersion of psychedelic drugs, as opposed to Huxley's VIP trip model. When David Crosby gave his unannounced pro-LSD speech at Monterey, he was trying to play the role of Tim Leary, except that his timing and delivery was off in a way that Leary never was. Other would-be spokesmen tried similar stunts, while every rock band in the world took a cue from Sgt Pepper and went psychedelic, complete with hidden dope messages and surreal lyricism. Thanks to Leary and McCartney and Crosby and Donovan and all the others in the Class of '67, psychedelic drugs, and LSD in particular, were suddenly trendy, an unlikely fad.
This would not have been possible if it hadn't been for a particular set of circumstances that marked this eventful decade. Past discussions tend to be confused by the fact that the 1960s spanned two distinct phases, with a watershed point right in the middle. The traditional stories of 'the sixties' tell us very little of the changes that psychedelic culture underwent, from entering the decade as a research field for psychologists, until exiting the decade as a street drug with a violent reputation. As has been pointed out by musicologist Andrew Brown, when senior citizens reminiscence about 'the sixties', they usually mean a time-frame of roughly 1968-74. A lot of things associated with 'the sixties' did not actually occur or become commonplace until the early '70s. The calendaric period 1960-69 would seem a more natural candidate for 'the sixties' label, and this perspective offers a different and less clichéd picture than what has been handed down in the past.
The story of psychedelic research in the modern age is primarily the story of a long and varied search for analogies and labels for the hallucinogenic experience. The structuralistic charge behind this endeavor received further fuel from an increasingly politicized climate in '60s society in general. No era can properly understand itself as it is being played out, because so much of what is said and done is of the nature of propaganda. The political deliberations range from minute, personal causes such as career advancements, to vast agendas of governments, and an infinite number of actors and shades of self-interest in between. The contemporary noise on any given day was so loud that no trustworthy analysis could be made then and there, but only in retrospect, from the vantage point of another epoch.
This observation, ironically made by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in the midst of the specific period under scrutiny, has perhaps never been more true than when applied to the second half of the 20th century. Rash metaphors and a strongly charged societal climate--this was not an ideal environment for the West's first major embracement of psychedelic substances. Concurrent to Psychedelia's dispersion through the medical, military and artistic world, the largest generation of children the Western world had ever seen took their earliest steps towards what would, in a few year's time, become nothing less than a demand for total world domination. A s Foucault observed, the contemporary views of the era will always be marked by distortion and day- to-day politics.8 Applied on the 1960s and 1970s, the accuracy of this axiom assumes the same massive format as the 'Baby Boom' generation itself, entering the adult world armed with the sincerity of the child and the arrogance of the usurpator.
A thorough understanding of the era when Psychedelia went public will have to wait until its last remnants have passed away (assuming that anyone still cares), and in the present context the main issue is the manner in which this bump in the demographic road affected psychedelic culture. Seen from the perspective of the branch psychedelicist, the genuinely new thing that did occur in the 1960s was that Psychedelia entered mainstream pop culture in a broad and persistent sense, and the interaction between these two cultures was appropriately colorful and memorable. Unfortu- nately, for reasons implied above, the stories of this marriage have been myopic and biased, and modern attempts at uncovering an unbiased view of the hippie counterculture era frequently meet with stubborn resistance. Everyone knows what psychedelic drugs did for the sixties, but what did the sixties do for psychedelic drugs?
Notes
* * *
1 Timothy Leary, interviewed for CBS Radio services, 1986.
2 quote from Paul Drummond's Eye Mind (2008), slightly shortened.
3 In addition to Korzybski, the 13th Floor Elevators were strongly influenced by the teachings of Gurdjieff (and Ouspensky). The idea of a new and superior language, aquired by a higher evolved consciousness and focused on the relationship between things, can be found in Ouspensky's In Search Of The Miraculous (1949), even if Ouspensky's tireless categorizations seem to go against this concept.
4 Actual quote from Paul McCartney: '[LSD] opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think of what we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part! It would mean a whole new world if the politicians would take LSD. There wouldn't be any more war or poverty or famine.' Paul's quote first appeared in Queen, a UK-based magazine at the time. The quote was reprinted by Life magazine in their June 16th 1967 feature, 'The New Far- Out Beatles' by Thomas Thompson.
5 In addition to its lack of common sense, the idea of crowd control via LSD sprayed from helicopter is technically unworkable; CIA's experiments with aerosol dispersion of LSD showed that the compound was too heavy and immediately fell to the ground rather than lingering in the air.
6 In addition to the legal hassles, it's also possible that Leary some time in 1966 gave up the hope on his professional field of psychology to ever produce meaningful perspectives on The Psychedelic Experience. In the mid-'60s his scientific ideas became increasingly far-flung, as evident from the essay he wrote for the ETC journal in December '65. The theory of 're-imprinting' that both Leary and Alpert hung onto well into '66 gained little support, and in retrospect it seems as weak as their Tibetan 'Bardo' model. After this, Leary concentrated on his Millbrook-based artistic enterprises, parallel to his emerging role as global LSD prophet.
7 Art Kleps who was a resident on the compound suggests that Leary's Playboy 'sex orgy' angle on the LSD trip was also a reflection of the highly liberated climate at Millbrook at the time.
8 Michel Foucault offers another viewpoint that is useful for understanding the opponent side to psychedelic culture – meaning 'straight' society, the government, the traditional church and the protectors of the consumerist achievement/reward society. His discourse on the identification, isolation, institutionalization and formal classification of the mentally ill as an enclave within, yet estranged from, common society is perfectly applicable on the attitude towards users of psychedelic substances. See Madness And Reason (1964).
'The tragedy of your times, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want.' 1
XIV
TIL WAITING IS FILLED
1
1963 marks the end of the first stage of modern psychedelic culture, which could be called the Scientific-Artistic Phase. As mentioned above, the fundamental attitude towards psychedelic drugs during this phase was that of the elite; be it the specialized psychiatrist running guinea pig experiments on poorly informed patients, or the quiet advocacy of The Psychedelic Experience among jet-set bohemians. Two leading intellectuals who would bridge this era into the coming Counterculture Phase, Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts, were both egalitarians at heart. Ginsberg had objected to the restrictive approach of Huxley and Heard from the beginning, while Watts had served as a spiritual teacher for the layman masses via his popular radio broadcasts during the 1950s. Timothy Leary also spanned these two and vastly different phases to some degree, but his position as a psychedelic Avatar did not become truly significant until he decided to become a public person, like Ginsberg and Watts already were, in 1966. Prior to this, the IFIF-Millbrook scene was primarily concerned with objective research and Huxleyan instruction of small, select groups of visitors. Huxley's famous observation that Leary seemed a little square is amusing in retrospect, but from the perspective of the psychedelic phase that ended in late '63, not that far -fetched. The Harvard Leary was flamboyant, likable, egocentric, extrovert, but he was all these things within the framework of a faculty psychologist. There were certainly others like him on campus in '61. The Timothy Leary that went public in the Autumn 1966 however, was entirely unique.
