Editor's note: Updated 3:50 p.m. March 26, 2019, with KERA Think podcast.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon was faced with terrorist bombings around the country, the tragedy of the Kent State shootings and massive anti-war protests that paralyzed major cities. So how did he find even an hour to devote to an acid-drenched celebrity guru like Timothy Leary, much less proclaim him "the most dangerous man in America?"
And given the staggering amounts of LSD, marijuana, hashish and other drugs he consumed daily, how did Leary even manage to stand up, much less escape from a California prison, elude a 28-month global dragnet, hold his own with Eldridge Cleaver and other exiled Black Panthers, and hopscotch from Paris to Algiers to Denmark to Switzerland to Austria?
The answer to the first question lies in Nixon's dark genius for dividing and demonizing. Nixon created and collected useful enemies, so when his war on drugs faltered, he cannily picked Leary to serve as Psychedelic Enemy No. 1 in the crusade against potheads, needle freaks and acid-dropping outlaws.
The answer to the second question is delivered in The Most Dangerous Man in America, a brisk, riveting book that, thanks to the use of present tense, novelistic color and frequent cross-cutting between characters and locations, moves a ton of information with crackling immediacy. Minutaglio, who spent many years as a writer for The Dallas Morning News and now teaches journalism at the University of Texas, teams up again with Davis, his co-author on Dallas 1963 and the president of the Texas Institute of Letters. Drawing on hundreds of sources including newly opened troves of Learyana and first-time interviews with some of his pursuers, the authors take us on a fascinating trip through one of America's craziest epochs.
If Nixon really believed that Leary was a major drug kingpin, it was a paranoid stretch. Had Leary vanished in a purple haze in 1970, the country still would have been awash in drugs. But it's easy to see why Nixon fixated on Leary, who was once busted for marijuana possession by no less than G. Gordon Liddy, later Nixon's henchman and the mustachioed maestro of the Watergate break-in.
In addition, Leary had poked a stick in Nixon's eye with his victory in a Supreme Court case that challenged another bust. In Leary vs. United States (1969), a unanimous court held that the Marijuana Tax Act violated his Fifth Amendment rights and was therefore unconstitutional.
Minutaglio and Davis pick up their story in May 1970. After yet another arrest, Leary is doing 10 years in a California low-security prison while facing other charges that could leave him in the slammer until he's 80. His wife, Rosemary, and his activist attorney set up an escape plan financed by something called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Leary disciples who share his wacky dream of creating "cosmic consciousness" through LSD. Aiding and abetting the caper is the anarchist Weatherman Underground, including the fugitive bombers Bernadette Dohrn and Bill Ayres (who would later resurface when he was linked to Barack Obama in the 2008 election).
The authors do a fine job of stitching together the many disparate Learys: the "High Priest of LSD," the Harvard psychologist with a genius IQ, the sensualist, the showman, the manipulator. Some of the book's best scenes take place when Leary joins the fugitive Cleaver, a confessed rapist and the author of Soul on Ice, in his Algiers "embassy." As the gun-toting Panther smokes hash and impotently barks about destroying Nixon's America, we see both the absurdity of the situation and the danger he poses to Leary.
There's plenty of byzantine political scrambling as Nixon orders more troops into the Leary hunt, Cleaver and Huey Newton fight for control of the Panthers, and Leary — well, suffice to say he and Cleaver do not make a lasting match. Their breakup sends Leary and Rosemary skittering across Europe, where they display an uncanny knack for finding well-heeled groupies to support them.
The Most Dangerous Man in America has "movie" written all over it, from Leary's initial prison break to Nixon's gathering fury as the "Pope of Dope" eludes the manhunt. But you never know what Hollywood will do to a great idea, so grab this book and enjoy the trip.
Dallas writer Chris Tucker teaches politics and history in Richland College's Emeritus program.
The Most Dangerous Man in America
Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD
Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis
(Twelve, $30)
Available Jan. 9.