I didn't know that. Thanks.
The Acid Guru's Long, Strange Trip
In September 1970, the Weather Underground helped Timothy Leary escape from a federal prison. It wasnt a natural alliance. Leary was a hippie icon, but he usually kept the Left at arms length, preferring psychedelic spirituality to armed revolution. The Weathermen, meanwhile, came from the most Stalinist recesses of the New Left. Their heroes included Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong, and their methods were aimed less at blowing peoples minds than at blowing people up.
Nonetheless, Leary played his new role with gusto, issuing a P.O.W. Statement that reads like a parody of revolutionary rhetoric. Brothers and Sisters, he wrote, this is a war for survival. Ask Huey and Angela. They dig it. ... To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act.
Less than six years later he wrote another essay, this one gracing the less Mao-friendly pages of National Review. It was an unrestrained attack on the 60s and its celebrities. The Weathermen who rescued Leary were dismissed (accurately) as a bewildered, fugitive band of terrorists. John Lennon was accused (less accurately) of ripping off the slogan of Learys aborted gubernatorial campaign in California, Come Together. (In fact, Lennon had written Come Together to be Learys campaign song.) Pages of bile were directed at Bob Dylan and his snarling, whining, scorning, mocking songs. At one point Leary declared, Squeaky Fromme stands in a Sacramento courtroom for believing exactly what [Dylan] told her in the Sixties and blamed her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford on the fact that she was unlucky enough to have owned a record player in her vulnerable adolescence. ..."
Lots more:
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2006/nov/06/00033/
I met Leary back in the late 60’s, he was really into LSD and had quite a few devoted followers....he was nuts.
He seemed to be chasing a new kind of a kick. He'd had problems in college with alcohol parties. And then as a teacher, he happened upon psychotropic experiments. And at first he did seek applications for it. But his objectivity went out the window and he opted instead for just escapism, instant revelation, and monied lecture circuits.
Later in life he was still proud to have tried whatever drugs were in current vogue or experimentation (including animal tranquilizers and even heroin).
He may say that a lot of poor souls misbelieved the hype of the 1960s but Timothy Leary led his share down a wrong path.