CHAPTER THREE

HISTORY

The First Wave

WHEN THE FEDERAL AUTHORITIES CAME down hard on Timothy Leary in the
mid-1960s, hitting him with a thirty-year sentence for attempting to
bring a small amount of marijuana over the border at Laredo, Texas, in
1966,* the embattled former psychology professor turned to Marshall
McLuhan for some advice. The country was in the throes of a moral panic
about LSD, inspired in no small part by Leary’s own promotion of
psychedelic drugs as a means of personal and cultural transformation and
by his recommendation to America’s youth that they “turn on, tune in,
drop out.” Dated and goofy as those words sound to our ears, there was a
moment when they were treated as a credible threat to the social order,
an invitation to America’s children not only to take mind-altering drugs
but to reject the path laid out for them by their parents and their
government—including the path taking young men to Vietnam. Also in
1966, Leary was called before a committee of the U.S. Senate to defend
his notorious slogan, which he gamely if not very persuasively attempted
to do. In the midst of the national storm raging around him—a storm, it
should be said, he quite enjoyed—Leary met with Marshall McLuhan over
lunch at the Plaza hotel in New York, the LSD guru betting that the media
guru might have some tips on how best to handle the public and the
press.
“Dreary Senate hearing and courtrooms are not the platforms for your
message, Tim,” McLuhan advised, in a conversation that Leary recounts
in Flashbacks, one of his many autobiographies. (Leary would write
another one every time legal fees and alimony payments threatened to
empty his bank account.) “To dispel fear you must use your public image.
You are the basic product endorser.” The product by this point was of