Talk:Timothy Leary

The most dangerous man in America

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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From the NYT source in question:

"Dr. Tim" was accused of sending many young people off on bad drug trips, and Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America." But it was not only the right that was cutting: "His rhetoric has a patina of phoniness," The New Republic's review of "High Priest" said. The New Yorker, reporting on a "celebration" in 1966, was merely condescending, saying that after the show, "with his disheveled hair and his white garments, he looked like a shipwrecked sailor, and very much alone."

I'm not sure why journalist Laura Mansnerus added this Nixon quote to Leary's obituary, and as much as I would like this quote to be true, I'm afraid to say this is one of those famous apocryphal quotes from Nixon that no researcher has ever been able to verify or confirm as true. Because of that, I think it should be removed from this biography. What is far more interesting is to try and figure out where the quote ("the most dangerous man in America") originated from and who first published it. I've tried to do so and was left spinning my wheels. It's quite an interesting problem. Viriditas (talk) 00:37, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Follow up

• Journalist John Bryan made a similar claim in 1980, except he wrote that Orange County District Attorney Cecil Hicks called Leary "The Most Dangerous Man Alive" in 1972 when he set bail for Leary while he was on the run.
  • Leary confirms this particular claim in What Does Woman Want? (1976); but it should be noted that Bryan might be citing Leary here
• Writer Jay Stevens says it was a federal judge not a district attorney who called Leary "the most dangerous man in the world"
• Editor Daniel Weizmann repeats the claim in an introduction to Leary's posthumous work (1997), saying Nixon made the claim in 1968 when Leary was a candidate for governor of California.
• Ron Chepesiuk in The War on Drugs: An International Encyclopaedia (1999), says Nixon made the claim in 1970, not 1968.
• Writer Don Lattin makes the claim twice in his book The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010), with no footnotes.
• Minutaglio and Davis in their book The Most Dangerous Man in America (2018), attribute the statement Leary made in an interview: "He told one interviewer, “Richard Nixon called me the most dangerous man alive, and of course, I tried to be as dangerous to him as I could be."
  • Elsewhere in the book, the authors attribute the quote to Michael Horowitz in 1972.
  • Again, the authors attribute the impetus of the quote to others, in this case, Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, whom the authors say tried to convince the Swiss (where Leary was on the run) of Leary's criminality. "Mitchell impresses on his hosts the idea that President Richard Nixon believes Timothy Leary is the most dangerous man in America."
  • "Nixon’s old friend, Secretary of State William Rogers, is also a law-and-order man. He and Nixon had originally become friends hunting Communists together during the McCarthy era, chasing them out of the shadows. But now that Nixon is president, Rogers has seen a darkness fall over his old ally. Nixon has always been obsessed with the enemy within, but now he’s increasingly vengeful, intent on punishing anyone who might oppose him. The president has even been steadily easing Rogers out of his inner circle. Rogers knows there’s one way he can prove to Nixon that he is still just as unforgiving when it comes to law and order: by bringing back Timothy Leary in chains. Rogers contacts the heads of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and spells it out: "There is a dangerous escaped American criminal on the loose, residing in Villars-sur-Ollon. Can your people hunt Timothy Leary down and hold him in prison until we can ship him back to the United States?"
• Author Robert Anton Wilson said that the National Review "listed Timothy as one of "the three most dangerous men alive" in The Starseed Signals

Nixon White House tapes

• There's apparently a Nixon White House tape from July 23, 1971, that shows how Nixon formulated the plan to target Leary as a way to lift his poor poll numbers and help his re-election. I'm trying to find a copy online to listen to it. Viriditas (talk) 04:41, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
  • Tape 066-002, sometimes referred to as Conversation No. 66-2. Event begins at 16:00. Leary first mentioned at 18:09. No mention of "most dangerous man in America".
    • Oddly, while the tapes are online, there's no extant transcript. That doesn't make sense to me. It's been 52 years, and nobody has published the entire (unclassified) transcipts from Nixon's tapes? Somebody make it make sense. Viriditas (talk) 05:05, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Reference [36] to New York Times is inaccurate

One can look up reference [36] = the Dec 3, 1966 New York Times on the "TimesMachine" and see that p.25 says nothing about Leary, in fact this page is only advertising. There is no mention of Leary on p. 24 or p.26 either. This reference is inaccurate and needs to be corrected or removed.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/12/03/issue.html 73.227.29.92 (talk) 02:54, 13 July 2024 (UTC)