Bill Minutaglio - The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD

Richard Nixon famously called Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America.

N EW Y ORK T IMES

When Nixon called me that, I was thrilled. The president of the United States, whom many Americans and the rest of the world thought was a crazed, psychotic danger, for him to be calling me that thats my Nobel Prize, thats my bumper sticker, thats my trophy on the wall.

T IMOTHY L EARY

If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.

D R. M ARTIN L UTHER K ING J R.

Timothy Leary met with one of us many years ago on a humid, rainy day in Houston. It was a time when he was trying desperately to uncover what had been done to him during his life as a fugitive running from the president of the United States.

As he sipped some beers and curled up in a creaky wooden chair in one of the oldest bars in the city, he said he was having little success getting to the deeply hidden truths that might detail how he was once hunted by Richard Nixons FBI and CIA as the most dangerous man in America.

In several subsequent conversations, Leary began to look forward, predicting, accurately, that the world would be connected via computers and that space exploration and travel might become more commonplace. But still, he remained achingly wistful about the massive secrets hed never fathom while he was alivethe specifics of how, in one burst of time, he had been at the utter mercy of bomb-throwing revolutionaries, gun-toting militants, an international arms smuggler, secret agents on four continents, and even the occupant of the Oval Office.

This book is not a biography of Timothy Leary. Its goal is to finally reveal a dramatic, hidden piece of modern American historya madly careening, twenty-eight-month global hunt for one man.

Thousands of freshly available and unexamined primary resources were used: court documents, personal letters, criminal files, secret government cables, internal paperwork from foreign governments, and audiotapes recorded clandestinely at the White House. Hundreds of boxes of archival material from New York, California, Washington, Texas, the District of Columbia, Algeria, Afghanistan, and Switzerland were consulted, many for the first time. Key foot soldiers in the hunt for Leary gave their first interviews.

News accounts translated from sources in Europe unearthed fresh details. Previously sealed FBI documentspublicly available for the first timewere used to construct the chronology and conversations. The once-elusive facts behind Learys life on the lam were also finally corralled with help from Learys longtime personal archivistand the New York Public Library curator who oversaw the unveiling of Learys personal papers. This book is built on primary sources and firsthand accounts. Strict attention is paid to exact dialogue and quotes from Leary, Nixon, and others. Interior thoughts and monologue derived from memoirs and primary sources are presented in italics. A complete list of endnotes is available on our websites.

In the end, a startling truth emerged: Timothy Leary and Richard Nixon had much more in common than they ever knew. Each led an outsize, prolific life. Each saw truth as a cosmically malleable enterprise.

Each man thought the other was leading America to hell.

Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis