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

by Bill Minutaglio, Steven L. Davis

Overview

From Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, authors of the PEN Center USA award-winning Dallas 1963, comes a madcap narrative about Timothy Leary's daring prison escape and run from the law.

On the moonlit evening of September 12, 1970, an ex-Harvard professor with a genius I.Q. studies a twelve-foot high fence topped with barbed wire. A few months earlier, Dr. Timothy Leary, the High Priest of LSD, had been running a gleeful campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Now, Leary is six months into a ten-year prison sentence for the crime of possessing two marijuana cigarettes.

Aided by the radical Weather Underground, Leary's escape from prison is the counterculture's union of "dope and dynamite," aimed at sparking a revolution and overthrowing the government. Inside the Oval Office, President Richard Nixon drinks his way through sleepless nights as he expands the war in Vietnam and plots to unleash the United States government against his ever-expanding list of domestic enemies. Antiwar demonstrators are massing by the tens of thousands; homemade bombs are exploding everywhere; Black Panther leaders are threatening to burn down the White House; and all the while Nixon obsesses over tracking down Timothy Leary, whom he has branded "the most dangerous man in America."

Based on freshly uncovered primary sources and new firsthand interviews, The Most Dangerous Man in America is an American thriller that takes readers along for the gonzo ride of a lifetime. Spanning twenty-eight months, President Nixon's careening, global manhunt for Dr. Timothy Leary winds its way among homegrown radicals, European aristocrats, a Black Panther outpost in Algeria, an international arms dealer, hash-smuggling hippies from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and secret agents on four continents, culminating in one of the trippiest journeys through the American counterculture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455563593
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	08/13/2019
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	1,047,833
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Bill Minutaglio is the author of several books, including Dallas 1963, for which he won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction with Steven L. Davis. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Esquire.

Steven L. Davis is the PEN USA-award winning author of four books focusing on iconoclasts, including Dallas 1963 with Bill Minutaglio and J. Frank Dobie: A Liberated Mind. He is the president of the Texas Institute of Letters and a curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Editorial Reviews

"Fascinating...rigorously researched...[THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA] offers the pleasures of the tick-tock genre. Much like Leary himself, the book is plenty of zany fun."—The New York Times

"One of the decade's most audacious and exciting stories, told with page-turning panache."—The Boston Globe

"...[A] rip-roaring tale of hallucinogenic drugs, revolutionary politics and an intercontinental standoff...Minutaglio and Davis have taken a largely forgotten chapter from the recent past and turned it into a vigorous page-turner."—San Francisco Chronicle

"It's a rollicking tale that brings to life the antic atmosphere of America in the 'Me Decade.'"—Wall Street Journal

"THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA is a wild ride across time, space, and multiple cosmic planes during an era when America came close to losing — or finding? — its mind. Leary and Nixon: surely no other country on earth could have produced such a perfectly, surreally antithetical pair. Crack open this book and prepare to have your mind blown by the reality of this very strange tale."—Ben Fountain, PEN/Hemingway and O. Henry Prize-winning author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories

"A pitch-perfect, exhilarating work about one of the strangest chapters in the American experience, one so exciting that even the postscript rivets...A stroke of narrative genius."—Booklist (Starred Review)

"A riveting international chase between a tenacious but paranoid cat and a wily but delusional mouse... 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."—Kirkus (Starred Review)

"The glory of [THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA] is its fast-paced, rollicking narrative that brings the freakishness of the revolutionary 1970s to life. Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis have pulled off a meticulous observation of their subjects with turns of phrases that pop with pleasure. I galloped through the book; could not put it down."—Jan Jarboe Russell, New York Times bestselling author of The Train to Crystal City

"Our intrepid authors, pounding the present tense like the brake pedal on a runaway 18-wheeler, narrate a story more wild, inventive, and sex-drenched than a Dennis Hopper movie."—Glenn Frankel, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic

"A vivid, eye-opening alternate view of an especially bizarre period of American history...Far too strange to be fiction, the book brilliantly details an American tragedy of two men, each of whom considered the other to be the most dangerous man in America."—James Fadiman, PhD., microdose researcher and author of The Psychedelic Explorers' Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys

"Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis weave a riveting tale that will keep readers on the edge of their seats."—Bookish

"A deeply researched, entertaining, and informative look at the symbolically joined paths Nixon and one of his nemeses, LSD guru Timothy Leary, followed in the early 1970s, the era that would ultimately be defined by Watergate."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Can you dig it? In their wild new book, authors Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis...have crafted a hopped-up, sometimes risibly over-the-top narrative that...delivers an outlandish concoction of twists, turns and international intrigue."—Newsday

"A vivid evocation of a raucous time in recent American history."—Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher

01/22/2018
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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

11/15/2017
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.

Library Journal

★ 2017-11-13
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.

Kirkus Reviews