The Most Dangerous Man in America

January 22, 2018
Minutaglio and Davis (Dallas 1963) make use of newly declassified FBI documents and secret White House recordings to chronicle the 28-month global hunt for Dr. Timothy Leary in this rip-roaring slice of American history. Leary, a Harvard psychology professor who became known as “the high priest of LSD,” caught the attention of the Nixon administration in 1970 after he escaped from a California prison, where he was serving time for possession of marijuana. President Nixon was looking for a poster child for his War on Drugs—an identifiable “bad guy” whose apprehension would signal victory—and Leary fit the part. The story follows Leary’s time on the run, which, aided by the radical left-wing organization the Weathermen, extended from Africa to Europe to Asia before his eventual capture by a DEA agent in Afghanistan in 1973. The authors switch among the perspectives of Leary, the agents following him abroad, and Nixon, who grows increasingly preoccupied by the case. The authors use the present tense to describe the events, giving the story line a vivid immediacy. In one scene, supported by a White House recording, Nixon and his cabinet members decide to make Leary public enemy number one and then begin shouting Leary’s name in unison, as if rallying fans before a high school football game. This dramatic account is backed by extensive research, but its primary purpose is entertainment rather than education.

November 15, 2017

In 1970, former Harvard professor and LSD advocate, Timothy Leary (1920-66), with the help of the Weather Underground (at the time known as the Weathermen Underground), broke out of a low-security California prison and fled the country under a false identity. The Richard Nixon administration used Leary's celebrity and reputation as the "High Priest of LSD" as a face for the War on Drugs. If Leary was caught and prosecuted, the administration thought it would be a boon for Nixon's diminishing popularity. As a result, Leary spent the next three years avoiding the FBI and extradition while dropping acid and hoping for political asylum. This bizarre story is pieced together by PEN Award-winning authors Minutaglio and Davis, who draw heavily on primary sources to create an engaging narrative. At times, it is difficult to tell if the authors are poking fun at Leary or venerating him; perhaps they are doing both. More than simply describe Leary's escape from prison, the hunt that then ensued across North Africa and Europe, and his ultimate capture, the authors document a particular moment in American history and the paranoia that plagued government and counterculture alike. VERDICT For readers interested in the counterculture and mid-20th-century history.--Timothy Berge, SUNY Oswego Lib.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2017
A riveting international chase between a tenacious but paranoid cat and a wily but delusional mouse.Minutaglio (In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas, 2010, etc.) and Davis (Curator, Wittliff Collections/Texas State Univ.), who collaborated previously on Dallas 1963 (2014), deliver a rich and frequently hilarious chronicle of the Nixon administration's 28-month pursuit of one very slippery old hippie. The comedy of errors began when Timothy Leary, ex-Harvard professor and America's leading advocate of LSD, received a stiff jail term in California for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Broke but extremely well-connected on the outside, he staged a daring escape. Almost immediately, he became the top quarry for the new president, who was fending off daily protests from student demonstrators over Vietnam and was bent on showing the world just how tough he was on drugs, crime, and corrupters of youth. Leary quickly proved to be an elusive target; with help from the Weather Underground, he and his wife, Rosemary, holed up in Algeria under the wary protection of Eldridge Cleaver's Black Panthers. Leary found himself having to forge a new persona--"a marriage of dope and dynamite, flower and flames," as one associate put it--and it was not a comfortable fit. The free-living, free-loving Leary had a most turbulent asylum amid gun-toting revolutionaries who were all about killing the fascist pigs. Soon enough, Leary was dodging Nixon and his cronies all over the world. Ultimately, it's a story whose twists would involve a wealthy playgirl, a shadowy financier, and government officials who were torn between aiding the Hanoi-bombing hunter or his acid-gulping prey.Minutaglio and Davis are superb storytellers, and throughout the narrative, they nimbly move between their two converging subjects. Their account is expertly detailed and blessedly fat-free.

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Starred review from November 15, 2017
A scrupulously researched work of narrative history that contains precisely zero longueurs is as rare as a square with a packet of Afghan hashish stowed away in the hollowed-out heel of her boot. Rarer still: a book about Timothy Leary and his incense-lighting, prayer-rug-toting, LSD-evangelizing, ohm-chanting, teenage-girl-sexing cohort that will command the rapt attention of even those among us who find the notion of earnest hippies as unpleasant and recherche as a forgotten hunk of Camembert. Minutaglio and Davis have taken what could have been a painful exercise in bloviating boomer self-aggrandizement and instead fashioned a pitch-perfect, exhilarating work about one of the strangest chapters in the American experience, one so exciting that even the postscript rivets. The authors focus on the 24 months between the time Richard Nixon, neck-deep in Vietnam atrocities and domestic unrest, declared Timothy Leary to be the most dangerous man in America and Leary's fugitive days until his arrest. This was a stroke of narrative genius, for the trajectories of Tricky Dick and the man whom the Swiss called the Pope of Dope include nearly every interesting person alive in the early 1970s, from the Black Panthers to Art Linkletter. Absolutely unforgettable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)