I Have America Surrounded

Rosemary had organised a team of people who were prepared to get Tim out of America. There had been many obstacles to overcome. Once out of the prison, they would have to avoid the roadblocks that would appear across central California as soon as his absence was noticed. Tim would need to be moved to a safe house, and there were the matters of disguises and fake paperwork, and of finding a way to leave the country unnoticed. There was also the matter of the finance needed to fund the entire operation. It was not a simple task, but Rosemary was intelligent and determined, and Tim had legions of supporters who were more than willing to help. Assistance like this was a luxury that Tim did not have in his part of the operation. It was his job to find a way to get himself outside the jail without being shot.

Many options were considered while Rosemary made arrangements and the months passed. Tim studied the movement and timings of the guards and the gun trucks. He discreetly made enquiries amongst the few cons he felt he could trust. The simplest idea was to wait until the winter, when the thick sea fogs rolled in. Then he could simply climb the fence at the back of the compound under cover of the fog, and pray that he could slip unnoticed past the guards who patrolled the open land. But real, thick fogs were unpredictable, making it difficult to synchronise the escape with Rosemary’s preparations. It would also mean waiting until the middle of winter, which he had no intention of doing. Besides, he thought he had found another way: an escape route that could just work. There was a telephone wire that ran for 40 feet from the roof of the cellblock, across an internal road, and ended at a telephone pole that was on the far side of the fence. For weeks he studied it out of the corner of his gaze, wary of being caught looking too intently at any part of his route. He found that the best way to study it was during the yoga practice he performed daily in the yard, stretching his body into positions in which his half-closed eyes could look beyond the fence into the freedom beyond. He began playing handball in order to improve his physical fitness. And he waited for the signal from outside.

Tim crouched at the edge of the cellblock roof, looking down at the 20-foot drop below the cable. The height was crucial to his plans, as the cable was higher than the floodlights. This meant that on a reasonably foggy night he could pull himself across without being spotted by the guards or snipers watching the fence. But it also meant that it would take a lot of courage to launch himself away from the security of the roof, with nothing but faith and a thin wire between him and the ground below. He had been able to study this cable out of the window while sitting on the toilet, and felt sure that it could hold his weight. He would now put that belief to the test.

He put his sneakers and handball gloves on. Lying down on the edge of the roof with his head hanging over the drop, he clutched the wire in both hands and hooked his legs over it. Was it foggy enough? It was not a perfectly clear night, but there was more visibility than he would have liked. But there was nothing he could do about that, and from the moment he stepped out of his cellblock, turning back had not been an option. It was now time to risk everything. A fall could kill him, and if he was seen from this point on he would be shot on the spot. He tensed both hands and pulled himself away from the roof and out into the void beyond.

He had thought that the crossing would be short: a series of long, smooth pulls that would take no more than a couple of minutes. Instead, he found that a second telephone cable was suspended from the first, and the hoops that attached it every 10 inches or so got caught in his hands and feet. Swinging wildly, he struggled for every inch. After about 50 pulls he was exhausted, and physically couldn’t move any further. He was still no more than a third of the way across, hanging over the patrol road a good 20 yards from the fence. Leary hung on to the wire for dear life, sweating, panting and hurting, the 20-foot drop below seeming like an abyss. He was too old for this, he realised. It was just a month before his fiftieth birthday and his body simply wasn’t up to it. Why hadn’t he given up smoking, or worked out more? Was this why no one had ever escaped this way? Perhaps the wire had been placed there as a trap, as a joke by guards who were laughing at him even now through the scopes of their rifles? He glanced down and saw inmates sitting around in the TV room. Then he was lit up in a sudden glare of light.

A patrol car had appeared around the corner. He could see the blue of his denim sleeve turning yellow in the headlights. Slowly the car came towards him along the tarmac road. It passed underneath him. He looked down and could see the guard extinguishing a cigarette in the ashtray.

The car kept moving. He hadn’t been seen.

Then, from somewhere deep inside him, there erupted an enormous surge of energy. He was no longer thinking rationally, but his body was working, his arms and legs moving desperately. He was fixated on the fence. If he was shot, then he wanted to fall on the other side of the fence. At some point he was aware of his glasses falling away, but his limbs kept moving. ‘I wanted Errol Flynn,’ he later wrote, ‘and came out Harold Lloyd.’5 Then his fingertips touched the wood of the telephone pole. He grabbed the metal stakes at the top of the pole with both hands, before letting go of his legs and swinging down and around to the far side of the wood. It was a move he had practised many times on the end of his bunk. He half climbed, half slid down the pole and lay in the grass, still and panting, watching the lights of the prison that now lay behind the fence. The camp was quiet.

Then he spotted his spectacles glinting in the grass, lying just a few inches from the free side of the fence. He retrieved them and adjusted them on his nose with what he called his ‘funny professorial gesture’. For a moment he had regained the Errol Flynn-like composure that was an integral part of his mental rehearsals of this escape. Then he completely lost it again as he turned to walk quietly down the bank away from the fence, slipped on a stone and tumbled down amongst an avalanche of rocks.

He ran though the dark, listening out for patrols, following a route from memory that Rosemary had described to him. Walls of illuminated prison windows watched him disappear across the open land, run alongside a dry creek bed and follow a small ditch past the main prison gate. He ran past the sign that announced ‘California Men’s Colony—West Facility’, and found the railroad tracks alongside Highway 1.

Awareness of his new freedom hit home as he ran at full speed along the highway, stopping only to hide in bushes when headlamps signalled the approach of a passing car. This short sprint triggered an ecstatic, almost animalistic feeling. Despite his difficulty on the telephone wire, he was in good shape for a 49-year-old man. He was six feet tall, with a bouncy way of walking that made him seem taller and physically more imposing than he really was, and his slender build was more characteristic of a tennis coach than an academic. At the time of his arrest his hair was starting to turn grey, which accentuated the classical aspect of his features. But while his face was aristocratic, his mannerisms were restless and American, and his eyes and smile had an unmistakably Irish charm. It was this subtle Irish glimmer that overrode the American and classical aspects of his appearance and became the prominent characteristic in the memories of those who knew him. His reckless Irish streak could also be relied on to override the other elements of his personality at pivotal times in his life.

Moments later, he reached the three trees.

CHAPTER 2 The Children Will Grow up Wondering about Their Mother

Timothy Leary’s arrest and imprisonment was not the first time that his love of forbidden substances had got him into trouble. His training at the prestigious West Point military academy in Massachusetts had also ended in such a fashion. On that occasion the substance in question was whisky.

Leary had been excited and a little overawed when, on 1 July 1940, he was accepted into the American armed forces. He was 19 years old, and war was engulfing the globe. West Point was steeped in the pageantry of American military history, and the sense of theatre created by the parades, flags and uniforms really appealed to him. But as soon as the need to conform began to be drilled into him, his doubts started to surface.

The physical side of the army wasn’t a problem. He completed the toughest part of the training without difficulty. This was ‘Beast Barracks’, or army basic training done in half the time to make it twice as hard. What was problematic, however, was the requirement to unthinkingly obey his superior officers. Tim’s interest lay in battlefield strategies and military history, and when he joined the army he had thought that it would be an essentially intellectual career. He hadn’t seemed to realise that he would initially be trained to disengage his intellect and simply do as he was told. With hindsight, it is difficult to see how Tim ever thought that he would be suitable for the army. In later years he would sum up his philosophy with the words, ‘Think for yourself. Question authority’ In the military an attitude such as this could get a soldier and all his squadron killed.

Another problem was the monastic conditions that the new cadets lived in. Opportunities for meeting girls were almost non-existent. Their best chance of doing so was when attending sporting events, because they were allowed a few hours of free time between the end of the event and the return to barracks. On the day that the sporting season came to an end, the cadets knew that they needed to make their last opportunity count. Following the army–navy football game in Philadelphia,1 Leary and a friend managed to find a brothel. Feeling magnificent and indestructible when he left, Tim bought four half-pints of whisky He ended up sharing these with the senior cadets in the toilets on the troop train home. This was a terrific honour, for the strict class system at the academy usually forbade the first years, or ‘plebes’, from speaking to the senior first classmen.

Leary’s involvement in this illicit drinking session was immediately obvious the following day, when he missed the morning reveille formation. Too hung over to attempt anything, he failed to make it out of bed. He readily admitted to the drinking, but did not offer the information that he had supplied the alcohol. When this was discovered, the Honour Committee decided that he had lied to them. They requested his resignation.

How should he respond? Tim knew that resigning from West Point would be a huge disappointment for his mother. But, more importantly, he felt that the Honour Committee was wrong. He had not lied; he had simply not told them the whole truth. Others considered that this was splitting hairs, and that his statement had still infringed the ethical code of the Honour system. Tim, however, was a man who was almost incapable of accepting blame, and he clung to this detail as proof that he had behaved ethically. He announced that he would not be resigning.

A court martial was arranged. The military trial in the elegant, wood-panelled room, with the officers in full dress uniform, their sabres laid on the table, was just the sort of event that had initially attracted Tim to West Point. The court examined all the evidence regarding the forbidden drinking session, and declared that there were no grounds for dismissal of Leary from the service. But he was still guilty of defiance. As punishment, he would be ‘silenced’.

Being silenced, or ‘sent to Coventry’ as it is also known, is a military punishment that effectively turns a recruit into a non-person. The victim is ignored, and the rest of the squadron are forbidden to speak to or acknowledge him. Tim’s roommates were moved into new sleeping quarters and he had to sit alone in the mess hall, surrounded by empty seats. It is a harsh punishment, similar to being jailed in solitary confinement while simultaneously having to undergo the rigours of regular training. Few people can take it for long. To make matters worse, the Honour Committee planned to get rid of him by ‘demeriting’ him. His every action was scrupulously studied for signs of failure. He was written up for ‘untrimmed hairs in nostrils’. A shaving cut was cited as ‘careless injury to government property’.2

It may have been the injustice of his punishment that inflamed Leary’s stubbornness. It may have been a test of personal integrity, or it may have been nothing more than sheer bloody-mindedness, but despite now having no hope of a military career, Tim took this punishment and stayed in the academy. He refused to let it beat him. Months passed.

This was not what was supposed to happen. The point of silencing someone is that they will, sooner or later, break down under the treatment. Cadets are not supposed to be able to keep going, especially when, like Leary, they are in their first year and still have over three and a half years to serve. Leary threw himself into reading and sports. The strain turned him into a chain smoker, but he still won the long-distance run and competed at baseball.

In due course he became a sophomore, a third classman in the West Point system. The new influx of cadets saw him and started asking questions about his treatment. The last thing the military wanted was an influx of recruits who start questioning the system. Senior cadets were starting to speak out, too. As time went on, the judgement of the Honour Committee began to look more and more questionable. In August 1941, after nine months of silencing, Leary was approached by a pair of cadet officers who were acting as unofficial go-betweens for the Honour Committee. They asked him what his terms would be to leave West Point.

Leary replied that he would need a written statement of his innocence from the Honour Committee, and he wanted it read out publicly. After a couple of days, this was agreed to. The Cadet Adjutant called for silence during lunchtime in the mess hall, and read out the brief statement of innocence to an unprepared audience. At first there was a stunned silence, and then applause from some of the braver cadets. After lunch Leary packed his bags and left.

When Tim told this story in later years, he framed it as a terrific victory, a triumph of one innocent man’s will against a seemingly unbeatable bureaucracy. Ultimately, of course, he had been rejected by the army and his peers, and had been forced to resign. Yet he found a perspective on events from which he could view his failure as a personal success. He had rejected the consensus viewpoint of the Honour Committee and instead invested his own point of view with a greater level of importance. He had learnt that it was possible to position a defeat in such a way that it appeared to be a success. There is much in this incident that seems to foreshadow the path his life would take, from the forbidden substance to his willingness to fight authority. But it was his ability to choose the way he viewed the events that was perhaps most indicative of what was to come. That and the realisation that the personal cost of a fight like this could be extremely high.

Forbidden alcohol at West Point had previously played a different, more fundamental role in Tim’s life. He had been conceived on the base following a dance at the West Point Officer’s Club.3 It was 17 January 1920, the day after Prohibition had made alcohol illegal, and his parents were loosened by bathtub-distilled gin.

His newly married mother, Abigail Ferris, was not accustomed to behaving loosely. The Ferris family were farm gentry from the village of Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. It was a strongly Catholic household, full of religious art and books, but years of social respectability had given the family’s religion a puritanical, almost Protestant ethic that differed from normal Irish Catholicism. Abigail was extremely devout and is said to have attended Mass daily. There were no wild parties in the farmstead, no drinking or dancing or merriment. The family was ruled by a series of pious spinsters. Men were not to be trusted, and sex was too horrific to contemplate. Abigail’s sister Mae wept for three days when Abigail got married, and begged her not to go on honeymoon. Tim’s father never visited the Ferris homestead.

The Learys were polar opposites. They were city dwellers in Springfield; rich, sophisticated and fun. They were among the first generations of Irish immigrant families to rise up and become professionally respectable. Tim’s grandfather was a professor at Tufts University, and became the medical examiner for Boston. He had significant real estate holdings and was thought to be the richest Irish-American in western Massachusetts. Like the children of many a wealthy patriarch, the younger generation of Learys veered more towards hedonism than enterprise. There were affairs, intrigue and glamour. Gossip and laughter were more common than religion or worry.

Tim’s father, also named Timothy but commonly known as ‘Tote’, gradually slipped into alcoholism after Tim was born. After West Point he practised dentistry, but although he was successful enough to become General Eisenhower’s dentist during World War II, it seems to have been a career that he had little enthusiasm for. He knew that he would be a wealthy man when his father died, and the drink helped the years to pass by while he waited. Tim grew up, caught in the culture gap between the two sides of his family. It was to the Leary side that he was most attracted, and the Ferrises could see this. The Leary blood in him would be a constant worry for them.

Tim was an only child and was often lonely in his earliest years. Like his father and grandfather, he was named Timothy after St Timotheus4and was raised as a strict Catholic. He did what was expected of him by attending mass and becoming a choirboy, but he never seemed happy or engaged by his life. He had an imaginary friend5 for whom he would make his mother set an extra place at the table. He enjoyed the conversation of his imaginary friend and was an avid reader, but real people didn’t seem to interest him. He much preferred the cartoon character Felix the Cat, who merrily smiled and whistled throughout all his adventures. Prohibition may have made alcohol illegal at the time, but this never concerned Felix. He would usually have a glass of champagne in his hand. It wasn’t until Tim discovered sports and, later, girls that his more sociable, charming side started to emerge.

His grandfather6 died when he was 14, and the family discovered that the wealth they had been expecting had all but disappeared in the stock market crash, family loans and poor management. Tote went out to get drunk and never returned. Tim would not see him again for 23 years.

Tote had been a poor father, but he was a strong influence. He was a charming rogue, a storyteller and a drunk who had a passionate dislike of middle-class morality and institutions. When he left he seemed to become an archetypal loner figure for Tim, a nonconformist who walked away from his life when he realised that it wasn’t sustaining him. Long-suppressed feelings of abandonment would surface many years later, during a psilocybin trip with the writer Jack Kerouac, but the overriding impact of his drunken, occasionally abusive father was that he was the first person Tim knew who was brave enough to ‘drop out’. Although there was good reason to, Tim could not bring himself to hate him for it.7

The West Point silencing was a terrible disappointment to the maternal side of the family. It was clear by this point that a pattern was emerging in Tim’s life. His career at Classical High School, Springfield, for example, initially showed great promise. He became editor of the school newspaper, The Recorder, and helped it win the interstate award for excellence. He was popular, concerned more with his extra-curricular activities than his academic work, and the girls voted him the ‘cutest boy’. But poor attendance and some controversial editorials in the paper led to a confrontation with the principal that soured his leaving. The principal, Dr William C. Hill, had adopted Kant’s Categorical Imperative as the school motto: No one has the right to do that which if everyone did would destroy society. Tim and Dr Hill clearly saw the world very differently. Leary’s reprimand for absenteeism ended with Dr Hill shouting, ‘I never want to talk to you again. Just stay away from me and this office.’8

Strings were then pulled to get Tim into the Holy Cross Jesuit College. This meant a great deal to his mother, since she dreamed that he would become a priest. Again he started promisingly, but the lack of girls became unbearable. He began gambling, skipping classes and indulging in general schoolboy mischief. It was around this time that Tim, previously a diligent choirboy, began to question Catholicism and rejected his faith. He dropped out during his second year. After entering West Point and being silenced he enrolled in the University of Alabama and, more by accident than design, started studying psychology9 He was found spending the night in the girls’ dormitory, and expelled.

Aunt Mae worried that Tim was doomed to keep falling into trouble, letting himself down and distressing his family. In a pattern that he would repeat throughout his life, Tim would use his intelligence, drive and potential to raise himself into lofty situations that he then allowed the rebellious part of his nature to hijack and destroy. What could be done about his Leary blood? How could his behaviour be improved? It is ironic that these concerns were being raised about him, for his later professional career would be dedicated to trying to answer those very questions.

Being kicked out of university meant that he lost his draft deferment. Tim returned to the army in 1942 and enlisted into the anti-aircraft artillery. Here he learnt how to load metre-long artillery shells into enormous 90-millimetre cannons, only to have his hearing damaged by proximity to the artillery. He was forced to wear a hearing aid, and the disability prevented him from being sent into combat. He was given a clerical position in an army hospital, and took the opportunity to complete his psychology degree. He left the army with an honourable discharge shortly after the war, by which time he had been promoted to the rank of sergeant. He was awarded the standard certificate signed by President Truman, which extended to Tim the ‘heartfelt thanks of a grateful nation’ for answering the call of duty and bringing about the ‘total defeat of the enemy’. He does not appear to have treated this certificate with a great deal of respect or care, for it is now damaged and looks as if at some point a dog has tried to eat it.10

Leary wasn’t cut out to be a soldier or a priest, but psychology did appeal to him. It was an intellectually adventurous pursuit, on the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. It seemed that great advances were being made in understanding the human mind. On this frontier he could hunt for answers to profound questions, such as why do people act in a destructive manner? How could a person’s behaviour be changed? How can a person be made ‘better’? Of course, he wasn’t searching for answers in order to improve himself. He didn’t think that his behavioural patterns were too bad at all. It was other people who had the problems, and it was them he wanted to help.

The stifling conformity of 1950s’ America was, intellectually at least, supported by contemporary psychological thought. There exists, the psychologists argued, such a thing as ‘normality’. This is how people’s minds, personalities and behaviour should be. But many people differed, by varying degrees, from this norm. They may have been unmotivated, homosexual, radical or mysteriously unhappy. These people were considered abnormal. It was the job of the psychologists to cure them and make them ‘normal’.

The psychologists were confident that they were up to the task. Wonderful new anti-anxiety drugs, such as Librium and Thorazine, had recently been invented, and they were being prescribed at a terrific rate. Therapy became fashionable. And if these methods were not sufficient to deal with severe deviancy, then whole sections of problematic brain tissue could be removed or neutralised through surgery or electric shock treatment.