Tim Leary, Director of Psychology Research, Kaiser Foundation Hospital, Oakland

Tim’s closest friend in the Berkeley doctoral program was Francis Xavier Barron. He was born in Lansford, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town in the northeastern corner of the state. Like Tim, Frank was a smart Irish-Catholic kid who demonstrated early writing talent as the editor of his high school newspaper and yearbook. He was also a fair athlete, running long distance and playing a variety of team sports, including baseball. In 1938, at the age of sixteen, he matriculated at La Salle College in Philadelphia. The summer after he earned his BA in philosophy, Frank became sports editor of his hometown paper. Yet, a previous summer job in a mental hospital had sparked his interest in psychology and he enrolled in graduate courses in that subject that fall at the University of Minnesota. He left school to volunteer for the Army in February 1943. After ten months in an airborne infantry unit, Frank was accepted into the Air Corps cadet program. But before he could begin flight training, he was sent back to a company preparing for D-Day. He landed in Normandy and spent the rest of the war as a field hospital medic. He was awarded two battle stars for service during the Ardennes and Rhineland campaigns. He studied moral science at the University of Cambridge while waiting for a ship to take him back to the United States. Frank returned to Minneapolis, completed his MA, and was accepted into the Berkeley program.

Frank had met Elaine Wesley before the war, when they were both graduate students at Minnesota. She now accompanied him to the Bay Area, where they were married in a civil ceremony in 1948. Elaine found a full-time, well-paid position as a clinical psychologist at UC-San Francisco’s Langley Porter Clinic, which was founded in 1941 as California’s first neuro-psychiatric institute. Meanwhile, Frank began classes at Berkeley. He and Tim were soon close confidantes and frequent drinking companions. But while Tim dreamed up his psychlotron and entered Hugh Coffey’s orbit, Frank asked Donald MacKinnon to supervise his dissertation. MacKinnon agreed, and when he launched IPAR in 1949, Frank became a research assistant. Frank conducted his doctoral research while completing his internship requirement at Langley Porter. He sought to understand how the impact of psychotherapy could be measured, monitored, and perhaps even predicted by personality traits. He found that 17 of 33 psychoneurotic patients who had been treated for six months had improved, according to the standard psychological assessments. He analyzed intake files and saw that the patients who showed improvement had provided similar answers to 68 of the 550 questions in the MMPI. The 16 patients who had not improved with therapy responded to those questions in different ways. Frank further noted that these particular items related to the patient’s “ego-strength.” In his dissertation – entitled “Psychotherapy as a special case of personal interaction: prediction of its course” – he focused on these 68 questions to develop his own set of “prognostic indices.”

Frank earned his PhD in the spring of 1950 and was hired full-time at IPAR. But he refused to sign the oath, and was suspended. He worked without pay until September 1950, when he accepted an offer to spend the next year teaching at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Elaine remained at Langley Porter while Frank was away. The controversy was unresolved when he returned, and he began working as a freelance consultant. Fortunately, some of Frank’s contract projects overlapped with his ongoing interests. For example, he received a grant from the Army to study combat fatigue in Korean War veterans. He determined that the ego-strength scale he had developed to gauge patient responses to psychotherapy was also “highly successful” in identifying which soldiers would return hostile fire, and which would freeze in battle. He wondered if his scale could measure resilience in the face of other psychologically trying circumstances. To transform his system into an acceptable assessment tool, of course, he would have to prove his results with a much larger pool of subjects. It could be the work of years. Or: he could use other data sets to cross-validate his scale. He chose the latter approach. He compiled files relating to varied populations, including men and women who had received treatment at Langley Porter, male graduate students at Berkeley, and male Air Force officers. And Frank reached out to his friend Tim at the Kaiser clinic, who readily agreed to share data from the team’s files.

Frank reviewed the relationship of his ego-strength scores to the therapeutic outcomes in the cross-validating samples, and concluded that “a significant determinant of personality change in psychotherapy is strength of the ego before therapy begins.” People with higher scores exhibited “physiological stability and good health, a strong sense of reality, feelings of personal adequacy and vitality, permissive morality, lack of ethnic prejudice, emotional outgoingness and spontaneity, and intelligence.” Observers applied adjectives such as “alert, adventurous, determined, independent, initiative, outspoken, persistent, reliable, resourceful, responsible” to these patients. By contrast, lower scores were associated with terms like “affected, dependent, effeminate, mannerly, mild.” Frank recognized that the markers of high ego strength are usually not obvious at the time of intake, because the people who seek therapy “are almost invariably in some sort of psychological difficulty.” His evidence suggested, however, that “such strengths are latent in the personality, and that they emerge as therapy progresses.” Frank surmised that the crises that convinced a person with good ego-strength to enter a mental clinic would likely be “situation-linked,” while a person with poor ego-strength faced “characterologically based” difficulties. The implication was that therapy could help a temporarily troubled person make it through a challenging situation, but it could not change a chronically troubled person’s fundamental nature. He suggested that researchers could use ego-strength to estimate resourcefulness and adaptability. It could also be a predictor of therapeutic outcomes, although he warned that clinicians should proceed with caution. “Certainly,” Frank wrote, “it should not serve as the basis for categorical recommendations to treat or not to treat certain patients.”

Frank worked on his data throughout 1952, and completed a pair of articles: “Some Test Correlates of Response to Psychotherapy,” and “An Ego-Strength Scale Which Predicts Response to Psychotherapy.” By the time the two reports had been published in successive issues of the Journal of Consulting Psychology in 1953, the oath dispute had been settled, and Frank had been reappointed at IPAR. Having now validated his assessment system, which he would market as BESS (Barron Ego-Strength Scale), he looked for a fresh topic.

Frank Barron

Frank decided to explore how traits such as originality and flexibility contributed to individual achievement and effective leadership. This was a good fit for IPAR, where researchers were already turning away from the treatment of neuroses and toward the development of human potential. In fact, the entire institute was beginning an ambitious, years-long, wide-ranging investigation of creativity. The IPAR team would study dozens of scientists, artists, writers, engineers, and architects, following the methods pioneered by Murray at Harvard and later honed by him and MacKinnon at OSS Station S. The subjects were invited to live together on the Berkeley campus for several days, during which they were interviewed, engaged in games, and worked on craft projects, alone or as a group. They were observed during meals, cocktail parties, and other “down” periods. Of course, they were subjected to more than a dozen psychological assessments, ranging from the venerable TAT to the new BESS. Frank contributed one of the project’s major insights. The initial assumption had been that creativity was an attribute of “effective” individuals. Yet, testing had showed that these individuals were rarely well-adjusted. Many rated as highly neurotic. How was this possible? Lack of adjustment might be considered a positive trait if it bred self-confidence and self-reliance. Frank reviewed ego-strength scores and found high ratings for these factors. He concluded that deep reserves of ego-strength rendered some individuals more willing than others to trust their own intuition and take risks, which enabled them to direct apparent neuroses into innovation and high achievement.

Frank had landed back at IPAR around the time Tim returned from Spain. As they caught up over drinks, Tim became very excited by Frank’s conclusions. One of the main objectives of the interpersonal project was to help clinicians predict an individual’s response to therapy. If it could be shown that a patient would likely not benefit from psychotherapy, then some other intervention (or none at all) might be the best course of action. The potential benefit of accurate prediction would be a more efficient use of the limited resources in the mental health system. Tim asked Frank if it was possible to adapt and apply his work to the Kaiser clinic. Although he had cautioned against using his ego-strength scale to make treatment decisions, Frank repaid Tim’s earlier support of his own project by agreeing to review the more recent Kaiser case files. Because they had to conduct this research in between their other duties (Tim would take on his new role as research director within the year), it would take them some time to reach conclusions about the clinic’s successes or failures. More immediately, Tim had to find help for the overworked Helen Lane. In addition to managing data collection, manuscript preparation, and the day-to-day administrative operations of the clinic’s research project, Lane was helping Tim manage his Psychological Consultation Service (PCS). Frank recommended that Tim hire Mary Della Cioppa, one of the secretaries he knew from the Berkeley campus, to be Lane’s assistant at the clinic. Lane interviewed her, was impressed, and gave her the job.

Since returning from his sabbatical, Tim had gotten into the habit of inviting women who worked at the clinic, two or three at a time, to join him for lunch. Several times a week, they would walk to Pland’s, a popular saloon in Oakland, where they would consume enormous hamburgers, attack mounds of French fries, and would occasionally drink so much alcohol that they would stagger back to the office just in time to go home for the day. Tim saw this as innocent fun. A decade ago, he had been something of a ladies’ man. But he was now in his 30s. Married with two small children. He had grown a bushy mustache that contrasted unfavorably with his close-cropped hair. He had developed a slight belly paunch. It was an accepted fact that he had terrible taste in clothes. And there was this frequent fiddling with the hearing aid. He once confessed to Merv Freedman that the women he knew considered him “a good fellow,” but they were not “sensually attracted” to him. Lane’s new assistant would probably agree with his self-assessment. But Tim found her charming. Frank had not mentioned that Mary looked so much like the movie star Audrey Hepburn. She was thirty-two years old and married, but Tim set out to seduce her. He was so circumspect about it, even clumsy, that it took some time before she recognized his intentions. He persisted and finally succeeded. Around the time he took over as Director, Tim stopped taking the staff women to Pland’s. Instead, he rented a small apartment on Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks from the clinic, where he and Mary met for sex three or four times a week.

As measured by the rising number of published articles and conference presentations, the team’s research seemed to be thriving under Tim’s leadership. But the ambition Freedman had noticed in his old Berkeley partner after his sojourn in Spain had continued to grow as well. For example, some six months before Rolfe LaForge and Bob Suczek would publish their pivotal article announcing the Interpersonal Check List (that is, while the manuscript would likely have been undergoing editing), Tim published “The Theory and Measurement Methodology of Interpersonal Communication,” in which he outlined “some methods that the Kaiser Foundation has developed for isolating and defining human interactions.” This marked the first time Tim had written about this project as a solo author. Around that same time, PCS began selling analytical worksheets for the still embryonic Kaiser system. Tim had begun unilaterally monetizing the team’s collective research.

By the summer of 1955, Tim and Frank had studied more than 120 patients at the Kaiser clinic. They reviewed the measurable changes in psychological status after eight months of psychotherapy, and found that roughly one-third of the patients improved, one-third got worse, and one-third had not changed. Frank’s system predicted the improvement in 75% of the cases, while rival assessments were able to achieve 65%, at best. The ego-strength of the improved patients had increased, as well. That was the good news. The bad news was that Tim and Frank had also followed a control group, specifically, patients who had been placed on the waiting list rather than being assigned to a therapy group. The result for the untreated group was also one-third unchanged, one-third worse, and one-third better. They published “Changes in Psychoneurotic Patients With and Without Psychotherapy” in the Journal of Consulting Psychology in August 1955. Frank also discussed the data a few weeks later in San Francisco, at the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting. He chose to emphasize the positive, reporting that his ego-strength scale gave a relatively accurate forecast of patient improvement, and was also useful for other purposes, such as selecting soldiers for resilience and initiative. Frank’s optimism impressed a reporter from the Oakland Tribune, who noted that the US military was interested in using his methods.

Tim should have been as confident about the future as his friend. The team’s articles with their news of the Kaiser system’s progress had been well received by the clinicians it was designed to assist. And the Interpersonal Check List had just made its professional debut. But he was discouraged by this data about psychotherapy. Could it really be true that just as many patients had little chance of improvement, and might even get better, if they were left on their own? What was the point of making a thing more efficient, if its efficacy was so uncertain? Tim found himself going over the data sets again and again, seeking math errors or omissions. He could find no plausible alternative interpretations than the one they had published. If he was searching for a route to reliably help people solve their problems, this was the wrong trail. Tim wondered whether he was even in the right forest.

Tim’s professional misgivings were further clouded by personal issues. He and Marianne were having difficulties. They continued to host parties most weekends for their friends and neighbors. Various members of his Kaiser staff regularly attended, including Mary, with or without her husband. Tim’s affair had been going on for two years, and Mary’s presence was occasionally a source of tension at parties. But not always, because the glances and gestures they exchanged were often lost in the alcohol-fueled flirtations among the other guests. This behavior typically began with bawdy jokes and ended with awkward clinches while a tipsy pair danced to the jazz records. Despite sporadic necking in shadowy corners, Tim believed that true infidelity was rare among this circle, which he had nicknamed the “International Sporting House Set.”

Tim was likely mistaken about adultery, although if any of his friends were cheating, they apparently practiced mutually assured discretion much better than he did. Tim’s affair with Mary had quickly become an open secret both at the office and at home. Marianne told her friends that she did not expect to be attractive for much longer and was worried that Tim would leave her. She confided in at least one friend that she had considered suicide. She began to see a psychiatrist, but also began an affair with one of the sporting husbands. She was drinking more than ever and acting out. The children were banished to their bedrooms during parties, but on one notorious occasion, Marianne became aware that her daughter had crept out to watch the adults from the staircase. Without turning, Marianne shouted: “I hate Susan!” Another night, she ran from the house and lay in the middle of the dark street. Tim followed, picked her up, locked her in their car, and rejoined the party. The tone of the Queens Road parties deteriorated as many of the old regulars stopped attending. In some cases, the couples had separated. Frank and Elaine were in this category; they divorced in 1955. In other cases, people wanted to avoid the drama. When Freedman returned from Vassar for the summer, the Learys threw him a party. He saw Marianne’s deep distress and also noted Tim’s chilly indifference. He thought Tim encouraged his wife’s bad behavior.

The Site of Many Cocktail Parties, Berkeley CA, 1950-1955

Tim and Marianne were not hosting on Friday, October 21, 1955. Instead, they had been invited to a small dinner party. Inauspiciously, this was at the home of the man with whom Marianne had been having her affair. But they would host at Queens Road the next night, when they would celebrate Tim’s thirty-fifth birthday. They decided to have a drink before driving to their friends’ place. As they drank their martinis at the kitchen table, Marianne suggested that they should separate for a while. Or maybe it was Tim who first hinted at the possibility. She could take the children back to Europe, maybe Switzerland this time, where one of her college friends was living. Marianne would learn to ski while the children attended school. Before anything was settled, it was time for them to go to dinner. An hour later, Tim stepped away from his hosts’ table to call Mary, who would not be at his birthday party because she and her husband were flying to Lake Tahoe Saturday morning. Tim urged her to drop by for a nightcap. Mary arrived a little before midnight, and Tim tried to convince her not to fly to Nevada, but to run away for the weekend with him instead. As they were arguing about this outside, Marianne emerged from the house. She stumbled on the steps, and fell into the grass, unconscious. Tim assured Mary she would be fine in the morning. He carried the limp Marianne into the house as Mary drove away.

Tim woke up on his birthday with a hangover, which he expected. However, he was alone in the bed, which was unusual. He searched the house, calling Marianne’s name. He stepped outside and walked down the steps Marianne had tripped on the night before. He heard his car’s engine running behind the garage’s heavy redwood door. Tim found Marianne laying across the front seat, still in her nightgown. Tim’s shouting woke Susie and Jack, who ran to the driveway in their pajamas. Tim told for Susan to run to the firehouse on Shasta Road. He told her to make sure that the firemen brought oxygen. It was no more than six houses down the block, but it was already too late. Tim rode in the ambulance with her to Merrick Memorial Hospital. Marianne was declared dead there at 9:28 AM.

Tim called Helen Lane and told her the news. She dutifully called his therapy patients to cancel their upcoming appointments at the house. Next, she alerted the dozen friends who had been invited to the birthday party. While Lane spread the word locally, Tim called his father-in-law in Oregon City. He did not tell Mr. Busch that his daughter had killed herself. Tim was also stingy with details when he informed his mother in Massachusetts. To these devout Catholics, suicide was a mortal sin. The family told friends that Marianne had died of a heart attack, and arranged for her to be buried in consecrated ground.

In California, the truth was widely known within twenty-four hours. The Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chroniclereported that the Alameda County coroner had assessed that the death was a “probable suicide.” An Associated Press story bearing the stark headline “Psychologist’s Wife Ends Life After Conference” appeared the same day in the Long Beach Independent Press Telegram. The AP writer noted that that the “pretty wife” killed herself after staying up until 2 AM “discussing her marital status with her husband, a Kaiser Foundation Hospital psychologist.” The account misspelled her name as “Mary Ann,” but included the accurate detail that the coroner had found a note on a pillow, which read: “I cannot live without your love.” Tim had told the police that his wife had recently consulted a psychiatrist. He admitted that she had woken him sometime after midnight and wanted to talk about their marriage. But Tim had not shared that, after Marianne had described her depression due to his adultery, he had ended the argument and rolled over to go back to sleep. His last drunken words to her were: “That’s your problem.”

Tim returned to work within a few weeks. He perceived shock all around. And pity. A few people Tim spoke to expressed anger that Marianne had done this on his birthday, which shocked him. It was obvious that some others blamed him, though. He blamed himself as well, but was uncertain what he had or had not done to bring on this tragedy. He found a psychoanalyst, but only scheduled a few sessions. Abigail came to Berkeley not only to aid her son in his distress but also to comfort her eight-year-old granddaughter and six-year-old grandson. She made it quite clear, however, that she would not be staying indefinitely to help Tim raise the children. Tim considered sending them to live with the Busch family, but he abandoned the idea and asked Helen Lane to help him find a nanny. A few months later, Mary left her husband and moved into the Queens Road house. Tim and Mary were married in Mexico in the summer of 1956. Mary was fond of Susie and Jack, but she did not intend to take on the role of surrogate mother. The grieving children were prone to acting out to attract their father’s attention. Mary saw that Tim could be affectionate one minute and angry the next. She also noted that he favored his son over his daughter.

Tim continued to contribute to the team’s project. In April 1956, for example, he published “A Methodology for Measuring Personality Changes in Psychotherapy.” He had co-written the article with Joan Harvey, a clinician who was engaged to marry LaForge. However, Tim increasingly seemed more interested in commerce than in collaborative scholarship. PCS was now advertising booklets that provided instructions and the necessary worksheets for calculating interpersonal indices, for plotting them on a profile sheet, and for preparing a summary. There were versions for diagnosis of individual personality, group dynamics, and family dynamics, respectively, each offered at a price of $5 for 20 booklets, or $50 for 500. The PCS product line was not limited to record books, forms, and worksheets. The Kaiser researchers had originally used the TAT to gauge “private symbolization,” but later decided that this test did not address the range of relationships they sought to measure. To solve this problem, they developed the “Interpersonal Fantasy Test” and created twenty-six images to replace the classic TAT illustrations. The pictures portrayed key interpersonal relationships between a “fantasy self,” and paternal, maternal, “cross-sex,” and therapist figures. For example, a son and mother are depicted next to a train. It was possible that the mother, or son, or both, or neither, might be departing on the train. As with TAT images, the drawing is ambiguous, as neutral as the artist could manage. Does the subject fantasize that a loving relationship exists between these figures? Or hostility? Maybe domination? Tim subsequently authored another solo article, “A Theory and Methodology for Measuring Fantasy and Imaginative Expression,” to introduce the new test. His company then began selling the picture cards at $15 per deck.

That same year, Tim wrote and PCS published Multilevel Measurement of Interpersonal Behavior: A Manual for the Use of the Interpersonal System of Personality. This 110-page pamphlet provided Tim’s most in-depth account to date of the emerging system, which he now described as “a complex combination of methods and measures for assessment of personality.” He explained the rationale for employing the MMPI, TAT, and Interpersonal Check List, specified the procedures for administering and scoring them, and detailed the process of converting test scores into the sixteen interpersonal diagnostic categories. He discussed the system’s applications to individual, family, and group dynamics, and offered practical guidance (including a sample budget) for readers interested in using the system in their own research. In his introduction to the manual, Tim claimed that the system was designed to be objective (“employing reliable ratings of units of behavior which are then manipulated by standardized statistical methods”), interpersonal (“it selects for analysis those aspects of personality which concern a subject’s relationship to others”), and multilevel (“it studies how a person acts with others … describes his actions with others … fantasies his actions with others … [and] idealizes his actions with others”). Finally, he wrote, the system was intended to be functional (“it is aimed at predicting interpersonal behavior in specified, crucial situations, particularly in psychotherapy”). Indeed, despite the doubts raised in his own research with Frank, Tim declared that the “most important use of interpersonal diagnosis is in the prediction of the future course of treatment.”

The manual was priced at $12.50, and included additional examples of forms, worksheets, and now the Interpersonal Check List, which PCS was also selling separately at the rate of $4 for 20, or $35 for 500 (a template for convenient scoring was available for $3). This was bound to generate tension within the team. In order to encourage independent research, LaForge had been convinced by his colleagues not to copyright the check list in 1955. But here it was, presented as “Figure 1” in a pamphlet published by Tim’s company under his name. A footnote to the associated worksheet (“Figure 5”) identified the ICL’s developers as “Rolfe LaForge, Ph.D., and Robert Suczek, Ph.D., and other staff members of the Kaiser Foundation Research Project in Psychology.” But the same note maintained that “[t]his booklet has been prepared by Timothy Leary, Ph.D., and published by the Psychological Consultation Service.” Instead of his fellow researchers, the four collaborators Tim listed on the title page were his staffers Helen Lane, Anne Apfelbaum, Charlotte Kaufmann, and Mary Della Cioppa. Also, on page one, and twice later in the text, Tim referred his readers to a book that he claimed would acquaint them with the system’s theoretical background, current research findings, and clinical applications. The book he cited three times was: “T. Leary, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, New York: Ronald Press, 1956.” Of course, it was not unusual for scholars to cite their own work. The difficulty was that Tim’s book would not actually be published until January 1957.

Tim had submitted the long-gestating manuscript to his publisher that summer. He could look forward to the next project. Or else relax and enjoy the fall. Yet, although completing a first book, or any book, was a professional milestone worthy of major celebration, he was in a subdued, backward-looking mood as the first anniversary of the suicide approached. On Friday night, October 19, he and Mary hosted “Psychologists for Whitney,” a fundraiser for a friend who was running for the state assembly. It was as near as they got to a birthday party that weekend. Around this time as well, Tim saw with his father for the first time in more than two decades. After abandoning his family, Tote moved to Boston, where he unsuccessfully sought to resume his dental practice. He held and lost various odd jobs until the outbreak of World War II, when he joined the merchant marine. After the war, he worked in construction in South America. Most recently, he had returned to the sea as a ship’s steward. With the quiet assistance of an aunt and uncle, and without informing his mother, Tim corresponded with his father. They shared a brief visit in New York City. Tote was admitted to a VA hospital there a short time later, suffering with cancer. When he died on December 23, Tote left his son a few personal items and the last $4.41 in his hospital account. Tim’s book was published just two weeks later, on January 8, 1957.

At Mary’s suggestion, Tim dedicated the book “To Marianne Leary.”

Early in his Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation, Tim stated that the “original and basic aim” of the Kaiser team’s project “was (and still is) the study of ‘process in psychotherapy.’” After six years, he could now not only discuss a functional interpersonal system but could also describe “some of its diagnostic and prognostic features.” Interestingly, he characterized these theories and systematic procedures as “dynamic behaviorism” possessing two attributes: “the impact one person has or makes in interaction with others”; and “the interaction of psychological pressures among the different levels of personality.” Their theory was that human behavior was not merely stimulus and response within one person, as followers of Skinner insisted. Rather, it was a push and pull across space and time among and between people. To prove this, the team had analyzed thousands of interactions observed and recorded during many hundreds of sessions of individual and group therapy, and reviewed countless assessment forms and self-reported fantasies. Although much of the evidence Tim provided, including many of the tables, figures, and forms had appeared in previous articles and in his manual, IDP was much more than a compilation of that previous material. In this lengthy volume (at 500 pages, it was a bargain at $12) Tim provided new information on underlying theories, offered a thorough discussion of the sixteen personality types, five levels of interaction, and 128 adjectives on the interpersonal check list, and presented a handful of fascinating case studies that illustrated the diagnostic power of the Kaiser methodology.

Yet, IDP was more than an account of the genesis, evolution, and function of the Kaiser team’s research program. In light of psychiatrists’ well-publicized complaints about the encroachments of non-medical psychological consultants, Tim’s book also represented a positive, even aggressive, declaration about the role clinical psychologists were already playing in the ongoing therapeutic revolution. For example, Tim wrote in his preface that, in addition to its immediate utility in psychiatric clinics, the interpersonal system would be suitable in several other practical settings. He suggested that the Kaiser methods would have applications “in the psychiatric hospital, in psychosomatic medicine, in industrial management, and in group therapy.” To make his point even plainer, Tim then asserted: “As to its implications for the profession of psychology, in my own mind at least, a new concept of the ‘clinical psychologist-as-diagnostician’ has emerged.”

That Tim was onto something important was confirmed when Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality was extensively reviewed, and not only by psychologists. An assessment in the American Journal of Sociology concluded that the “system must be recognized as a major advance in the treatment of the interpersonal dimension of personality.” This praise was offered “[d]espite its limitations.” Chief among these limitations was “the very complexity of the system.” For example, “simultaneously scoring of self and other, distinctions which, although conceptually illuminating and valuable, in practice are unmanageable.” And the reviewer for the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic put aside interprofessional tensions and hailed the publication of IDP as “an important event,” which would stimulate the “search for ‘objective’ methods applicable to psychotherapy research.” Its essential contribution was the classification scheme, as there was “a place for systematic hierarchical ordering in psychology as in any natural science.” Of course, she wrote, the interpersonal system’s ultimate “contribution to process research in psychotherapy depends upon whether that process can be captured by a molecular approach.” If Tim had read these reviews, he may well have accepted that the critiques about complexity and classification were quite fair. Late in IDP, he himself confessed to the potential “problems created by the novelty of the interpersonal system.” These included “sixteen variables, five levels, fourteen variability indices” and also the “16,384 verbal diagnostic types or 65,536 diagnostic codes.”

Reviewers in the psychology journals often shared similar concerns, but consistently hailed IDP as a breakthrough. An assessment in Contemporary Psychology included some negative comments about the contents, but concluded “this book has real merit,” and “unquestionably represents a major advance in clinical diagnosis.” “As a contribution to personality theory and methodology,” the review noted, “it presents many provocative, sound, and clever ideas.” Indeed, after IDP “it will be more difficult for future psychological trend-analyzers to maintain that clinical concepts are outside the realm of experimental techniques.” The author of the review Educational & Psychological Measurement recognized that IDP was the result of a “fairly monumental research project.” It also noted that the Kaiser team’s measures “have been more or less arbitrarily selected and presented as though they presumably would meet with widespread approval.” Yet: “although critics of the system as presented may object to certain of its subjective and intangible aspects, they would no doubt be hard put to come up with one which is freer of such deviations from strictly operational or empirical procedures.” The Journal of Counseling Psychology admitted that “this is not an easy book,” but argued that the Kaiser project “is a grand effort in a difficult field, and those of us who are interested in personality assessment will have to read Leary’s exploration with considerable care.” Perhaps most authoritatively, the members of the American Psychological Association voted Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality the year’s best book on psychotherapy.

Plotting Personality, 1957

Over the next few decades, scores of researchers would examine and extend the theories and material applications Tim had presented in Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality. He likely anticipated and welcomed this outcome, because he knew that despite his own 500-pages, there was more to say on the topic. In the final paragraph of the main text (that is, before the five appendices), he modestly wrote: “this volume is concluded with no sense of completion or closure, but with an impatient dissatisfaction resulting from the many limitations of these shaky initial steps.” He then ended the book (“perhaps abruptly”) with a note about his own expectations regarding the future. There were “two problems which are currently engaging the energies of the Kaiser Foundation research project,” he wrote, “a study of the interlevelmechanisms of personality organization and the measurement of changes in personality during psychotherapy.” This was probably a true statement when Tim completed the manuscript. Yet, within a year of the book’s publication, the team had begun to disband and disperse. This was in part because the book was so exhaustive that, despite Tim’s demurrals, the system seemed to be all but complete. Also, IDP’s success opened doors for the young clinical psychologists who had gained their early experience on the Kaiser project. Many of them now pursued fresh opportunities and would go on to enjoy distinguished careers in teaching and research. Rolfe LaForge, for example, became a longtime professor at San Francisco State University.

Even the founders began to drift away. Abel Ossorio had left higher education and joined the government, and eventually took a prominent oversight role at NIH. Merv Freedman completed his Mellon Fellowship at Vassar in 1958, but did not return to the Kaiser clinic. Instead, he was appointed to a two-year term as director of the Mellon Foundation, after which he became a college administrator in the Bay Area. Hugh Coffey earned a spot in the US government’s Fulbright Scholars list for 1957-1958 (despite his stance on the loyalty oath) and spent that year in India. And Frank Barron, who Tim acknowledged in IDP had been serving since 1950 as an “official and unofficial consultant to the research project,” was already gone when the book was published. After his divorce, Frank spent 1956 at Harvard, then at 1957-1958 as Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University.

Tim’s triumph with Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality presaged the project’s end in another important way. Tim thanked some two dozen colleagues by name in the book’s introduction. He mentioned the generous government and private grants that supported the clinic’s research for six years. He described contributions and guidance from former professors in graduate school. And he made appropriate attributions throughout the text. For example, the second appendix was mostly a summary of LaForge and Suczek’s 1955 ICL article. Tim properly acknowledged this fact in a footnote thanking the original authors for “permitting the extended quotation from their manuscript.” Of course, he suggested that no one he named or cited should “be held accountable for any weaknesses in the theoretical design” he discussed in the book. Rather, “[f]ull responsibility for the present version of the system is assumed by the author.” It was a customary statement. But Tim was already personally profiting from the system created by collaboration, and now he seemed willing to accept professional credit as well. For all of the acknowledgements and citations, “Timothy Leary” was still the only name on the book’s cover. It bruised feelings. Some but certainly not all reviewers referred to the Kaiser team or project, but Tim was always the focus of the attention. It was perhaps predictable when just one year after the publication of IDP, a researcher not affiliated with the project published an article referring to “The Leary Interpersonal Check List.” Soon enough, the team’s elegant circular solution became “The Leary Circumplex.” Fairly or not, some team members grew disillusioned.

Finally, as the team crumbled, Tim seemed to be falling apart as well. He was particularly affected by Coffey’s departure, the context of which was more complex than it seemed. Coffey was a married father of three children, but also a closeted gay man, and Tim had a complicated relationship with homosexuality. His mother Abigail, especially after Tote had gone away, had become a stern moralist. Tim then attended two all-male colleges, Holy Cross and West Point, where indulging sexual urges of any sort had been dangerous and fraught for very different reasons. The state treated homosexual activity as a crime, and psychiatry defined same-sex attraction as a disorder. Yet Tim’s most influential mentors, Ramsdell and Coffey, were gay, the first more or less openly and the other furtively. It was possible that Tim had been sexually involved with one or both of them. If so, that may have become a source of regret, shame, and of course, anxiety. When relationships within the team frayed generally, Tim specifically distanced himself from his old friend. Around this time, Coffey was busted while allegedly cruising for sex in a public restroom. The arrest occurred just a few blocks from the clinic. When this was reported in local papers, Mary was shocked at how much the news affected Tim. He seemed terrified by the potential for scandal. Yet, it proved to be a short-lived crisis. This time, the university stood by Coffey. He spent a year in India, returned to Berkeley, and taught there for two more decades.

It was clear that Tim and Mary’s marriage had been a mistake. They argued frequently and began fighting physically. The children recognized the signs – and especially the sounds – of strain. They increasingly saw and treated Mary as an intruder. Once, Tim tried to restrain Mary during a shouting match and she broke his nose. He neglected to have it set properly. She continued to work at the clinic, but moved out of the Queens Road house. Tim went to Mexico with Helen Lane, intending to arrange a quick divorce from Mary. Instead, he began an affair with Helen. He returned to Berkeley bearing reconciliation gifts for Mary, which did not work. During another shouting match outside her apartment, Tim hit Mary again. Her landlady called the police. The officers gave Tim a verbal warning before leaving left. In return, he had given them a false name. The divorce was finalized within weeks.

The success of his book among strangers was no consolation for Tim’s growing alienation. And for all of the praise put forth, Tim knew that his book had not been universally admired. Hans Eysenck was an influential psychologist who gave IDP a negative review. Five years earlier, Eysenck had shocked the profession by publishing “The Effects of Psychotherapy: An Evaluation” in Journal of Consulting Psychology. He surveyed reports of improvement of patients after therapy and compared them with estimates of recovery without therapy. He found that the rate of success was no greater than one would expect from “spontaneous” improvement. Moreover, the data suggested negative correlation: in some cases, therapy left a patient in worse shape. Eysenck had predicted that his “results and conclusions will no doubt contradict the strong feeling of usefulness and therapeutic success which many psychiatrists and clinical psychologists hold.” Rebuttals from psychotherapy’s defenders and Eysenck’s sometimes-heated responses filled journals for many years to come. Now, in 1957, Eysenck reviewed Tim’s book for the British Medical Journal. He questioned the utility of circular, polar-style coordinates, when a tried-and-true Cartesian grid would have been sufficient. Of course, he complained about the unnecessarily complicated system. But “[p]erhaps the worst failing of the book,” he wrote, was “the omission of any kind of proof for the validity and reliability of the diagnostic system advocated.” It was “simply not enough,” Eysenck groused, for Tim to say that validity “can be checked by the reader.”

Eysenck’s questions about the validation of the categories in the Kaiser system would have stung Tim’s ego and perhaps pricked his conscience. Although his and Frank’s conclusions in 1955 was very much in line with Eysenck’s observation in 1952, Tim did not refer to either study in Interpersonal Diagnosis Of Personality. Instead, he wrote the equivocal statement to which Eysenck had so specifically objected. Whether or not Tim saw the review in BMJ, he was in fact worrying about the problem Eysenck had raised (the same one Tim identified in the last line of IDP): “measurement ofchanges in personality during psychotherapy.”

Tim found a new collaborator in Dr. Merton Gill, a Berkeley psychiatrist who had worked at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka before launching his California practice in 1953. He shared Tim’s interest in improving methods to evaluate psychotherapy’s effect. In fact, Tim cited Gill’s work in IDP, specifically his book that outlined “a theory and technique for assessing the variables which are crucial to prognosis.” They presented a joint paper in Washington DC, at an interdisciplinary meeting organized by the American Psychological Association. The attendees included David Shakow, the pioneer of research and training standards that informed the VA’s modern clinical psychology curriculum, and Carl Rogers, the advocate of “client-centered” therapy. These leading scholars of psychotherapy spent four days in April 1958 evaluating their field’s objectives and methodologies. Tim and Gill proposed that therapy’s effects might be measurable through “Patient-Therapist Verbalizations.” This presentation was Tim’s last public appearance as Kaiser’s research director.

Now divorced, Tim was also depressed, distracted, and neglecting his duties. The Kaiser clinic had already received some five hundred thousand dollars in grants to support the psychological research project. By early 1958, however, mental health support was facing budget cuts, even as federal funding for physical science surged in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of the Sputnik satellite. That spring, a NIMH auditor had arrived in Oakland for a meeting while Tim was once again seeking solace in Mexico (this time, with local prostitutes). As usual he had left Helen Lane in charge. It was the second time Tim had missed a scheduled review. The director’s absence amid the obvious turmoil that was engulfing the clinic made the decision easy. NIHM swiftly terminated the grant. In March, Kaiser Foundation Hospital administrators announced that the psychiatric clinic in Oakland, which treated nearly 700 adults and some 250 children in 1957, would end service on July 1. The Kaiser plan’s members would now be referred to the hospital for in-patient psychological consultation.

In June 1958, Tim wrote to Susan, who was at a summer camp with Jack. He told her that he would soon be coming to pick them up. They were going to be living in Europe for a while.

Jack, Susie, and Tim

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Sources:

Timothy Leary, “The Theory and Measurement Methodology of Interpersonal Communication.” Psychiatry (18:2; May 1955); pp. 147-161.

Timothy Leary and Joan S. Harvey, “A Methodology for Measuring Personality Changes in Psychotherapy.” Journal of Clinical Psychology (12:3; April 1956), pp. 123-132. Also,

Timothy Leary, “A Theory and Methodology for Measuring Fantasy and Imaginative Expression.” Journal of Personality(25:2; 1956), pp. 159-175.

Timothy Leary, Multilevel Measurement of Interpersonal Behavior: A Manual for the Use of the Interpersonal System of Personality (Berkeley CA: Psychological Consultation Service, 1956).

Timothy Leary, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation (New York, NY: The Ronald Press Company, 1957).

Timothy Leary and Merton Gill, “The Dimensions and a Measure of the Process of Psychotherapy: A System for the Analysis of the Content of Clinical Evaluations and Patient-Therapist Verbalizations.” In Eli A. Rubenstein and Morris B. Parloff (eds.), Research in Psychotherapy: Proceedings of a Conference, Washington, D.C., April 9-12, 1958 (Washington, D.C.: National Publishing Co./American Psychological Association, 1959), pp. 62-95.

Timothy Leary, Changing My Mind, Among Others: Lifetime Writings, Selected and Introduced By the Author(Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982).

Timothy Leary, Flashbacks: An Autobiography (Los Angeles CA: J.P. Tarcher, 1983).

Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography (Orlando FL: Mariner Books/Harcourt, 2007).

Michael Horowitz, Karen Walls, and Billy Smith, An Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary (Hamden, CN: Archon Books of The Shoe String Press, 1988).

R.G. Armstrong, “The Leary Interpersonal Check List: A Reliability Study.” Journal of Clinical Psychology (14; 1958), pp. 393-394.

Stephen Strack, “Introduction to the special series—Interpersonal Theory and the Interpersonal Circumplex: Timothy Leary’s Legacy.” Journal of Personality Assessment (66:2; 1996), pp. 212-216, at 212.

Jerry S. Wiggins, “An Informal History of the Interpersonal Circumplex Tradition.” Journal of Personality Assessment(66:2; April 1996); pp. 217-233.

“Psychologist’s Wife Ends Life After Conference,” Independent Press Telegram (Long Beach CA). Sunday, October 23, 1955. Obituary, D8.

“Low-Cost Psychiatry Clinics In Oakland Face Closing,” Oakland-Tribune (March 7, 1958), p. 7.

Frank Barron, “Psychotherapy as a special case of personal interaction: prediction of its course.” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1950).

Frank X. Barron, “Some test correlates of response to psychotherapy,” Journal of Consulting Psychology, 17 (17:4; 1953), pp. 235-241.

Frank X. Barron, “An ego-strength scale which predicts response to psychotherapy.” Journal of Consulting Psychology(17:5; 1953), pp. 327-333.

Frank Barron, “Complexity-Simplicity As a Personality Dimension.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology(48; April 1953), pp. 163-172.

Frank Barron, “Some Relationships Between Originality and Style of Personality.” American Psychologist (9; 1954), p. 326.

Frank Barron, “The Disposition Toward Originality,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (51:2; September 1955), pp. 478-485.

Frank Barron and Timothy F. Leary, “Changes in Psychoneurotic Patients With and Without Psychotherapy.” Journal of Consulting Psychology (19:4; August 1955): pp. 239-245.

Frank Barron, “Originality in Relation to Personality and Intellect.” Journal of Personality (25; 1957), pp. 730-742.

Frank Barron, “The Needs for Order and for Disorder as Motives in Creative Activity.” In C.W. Taylor, et al., Proceeding of the Second Research Conference on the Identification of Creative Scientific Talent, 1957 (Salt Lake City UT: University of Utah Press, 1958).

Frank Barron, “Introduction,” in Michael Horowitz, Karen Walls, and Billy Smith, An Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary (Hamden, CN: Archon Books of The Shoe String Press, 1988), p. 12.

Frank Barron, The Shaping of Personality: Conflict, Choice, and Growth (New York NY: Harper & Row, 1979).

Frank Barron, “Barron’s Ordinary Wars,” in Alfonso Montuori (ed.), Unusual Associates: a Festschrift for Frank Barron(Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press, 1996), pp. 438-446.

F.X. Barron, No Rootless Flower: An Ecology of Creativity (Cresskill NJ: Hampton, 1995).

Frank Barron, “Barron’s Ordinary Wars,” in Alfonso Montuori (ed.), Unusual Associates: a Festschrift for Frank Barron(Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press, 1996), pp. 438-446.

Erica Goode, “F. X. Barron, 80; Studied Science of Creativity.” The New York Times (October 13, 2002), sec. 1, p. 42.

Alfonso Montuori (ed.), Unusual Associates: a Festschrift for Frank Barron (Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press, 1996).

Tom Riley, “How’s Your Ego-Strength? Researchers Can Tell.” Oakland Tribune (September 4, 1955), p. 4A.

H. J. Eysenck, “The Effects of Psychotherapy: An Evaluation.” Journal of Consulting Psychology (16:5; October 1952), pp. 319-324, 323.

Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Oakland CA: University of California Press, 1995).

Gregory Peck, in a scene from the film The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)

The cover of the October 25, 1948, issue of Time Magazine bore a close-up portrait of the psychiatrist Dr. William Menninger. In the background, on a blue field, was an illustration of a brain, with one lobe of the bifurcated gray matter bearing a keyhole. A silver skeleton key, adorned with a question mark, floated above Menninger’s pin-striped shoulder, suggesting that the secrets of the human mind were within reach.

Menninger was a good choice for a cover story about this topic.

After rising to the rank of Brigadier General as the chief of the Army’s psychiatric corps during World War II, he had returned to his family’s renowned private clinic in Topeka, Kansas. By the end of the decade, the Menninger Foundation was training approximately 15% of the psychiatrists being educated in the United States. He was also an influential public advocate for his vocation. He successfully lobbied for the National Mental Health Act of 1946, organized and led the reform-oriented Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP), and launched a nation-wide campaign to build support for the overcrowded and understaffed state mental hospitals. He served as the president of the Central Neuropsychiatric Association (1947-1948), the American Psychoanalytic Association (1947-1949), and the American Psychiatric Association (1948-1949). Finally, in addition to writing articles and delivering speeches across the country, he managed to publish four books during the same year Time came calling: Psychiatry in a Troubled World: Yesterday’s War and Today’s Challenge (part wartime memoir and part professional manifesto); You and Psychiatry (an introduction for the general public); Understanding Yourself (a brief “Life Adjustment Booklet” aimed at young people); and, Psychiatry: Its Evolution and Present Status (a collection of lectures he delivered at Cornell University, where his son was a student).

In light of his unusually high profile, the Time reporter cheekily referred to “Dr. Will” as “psychiatry’s U.S. sales manager.” Sales manager was probably unfair. But it is fair to ask why the market for the product was growing.

Pointedly, the Time article was entitled “Are You Always Worrying?”

The Key to the Human Unconscious?

Menninger’s main argument for supporting the 1946 Mental Health Act was that traumatized veterans were not the only Americans who would benefit from a bit of psychological readjustment. Nearly two decades of economic depression and war had severely strained the people as well as institutions. The country was finally enjoying boom times, as evidenced by rising corporate profits and notably, the births of many, many babies. Yet, the explosive release of pent-up potential stressed society in new ways. Consumer goods were available again, but prices were rising with the demand. New homes were built to accommodate growing families, but suburban living – the daily commute, weekend chores to maintain the yard, and social obligations ranging from church services to chambers of commerce events – seemed almost to be a second full-time job. There was a Rat Race underlying the pursuit of the American Dream. Everyone was striving to make up for lost time. Everyone feared falling behind. The women who had found fulfillment by serving the war effort, whether wearing the uniform abroad or wielding industrial tools on the home front, struggled with the peacetime expectations that they return to traditional roles of wife and mother. Worse, the promised peace did not actually arrive. The Cold War’s threat of atomic annihilation cast a mushroom-shaped shadow over all.

As a result, along with signs of prosperity, there was an epidemic of classic neurotic behaviors: sleeplessness, alcohol abuse, marital discord, juvenile delinquency, despair, and sexual disorders ranging from frigidity to homosexuality. Menninger was seeking to call attention to these developments in his extensive lobbying and writing.

Menninger was not the only one to notice these developments, of course. W.H. Auden famously captured the mood in “The Age of Anxiety,” a book-length poem depicting the hunger for human connection in an increasingly commercialized, corporatized modern world. When one alienated young man wonders whether he will ever find a fulfilling vocation, another character answers: “Well, you will soon / Not bother but acknowledge yourself / As market-made, a commodity / Whose value varies, a vendor who has / To obey his buyer.” “The Age of Anxiety” earned Auden the Pulitzer Prize in poetry the same year Time profiled Menninger’s crusade for greater public awareness of mental health issues.

W.H. Auden, 1939

Social scientists soon began to confirm the poet’s insights. One of the first to do so was Rollo May, who took a degree in English from Oberlin College in 1930, and then spent the next three years teaching at a missionary boarding school in Greece. While in Europe, he attended lectures by Alfred Adler, a Viennese therapist who believed that humans are motivated primarily by issues of social connectedness, as opposed to Sigmund Freud’s insistence on the primacy of sexual drives. This established Adler as one of Freud’s chief rivals. He was also influenced by European existentialism, a philosophical outlook that emphasized the search for meaning in an indifferent, even absurd universe. After returning to the US, he attended Union Theological Seminary. His first book, The Art of Counseling, was an account of his experience as an ordained minister. He left the ministry after the war, however, and studied psychology at Columbia University. He earned his doctorate in clinical psychology in 1949. May’s dissertation, an interdisciplinary study that was clearly a response to and frequently quoted from Auden’s poem, became his second book, The Meaning of Anxiety in 1950. One of May’s insights was that “[c]linical experience has proved to psychologists and psychiatrists alike that the central problem in psychotherapy is the nature of anxiety.” Anxiety was not new, of course. But the neurotic behaviors people were exhibiting in such abundance were evidence that what had once been covert, was now overt.

Following Auden, May argued that people were increasingly anxious because they had become aware that in the culture of consumerism, they had themselves become the commodity. “The market value,” May wrote, “then becomes the individual’s valuation of himself.” The methods of relieving such tension ranged from healthy (“the normal function of laughter”) to the clearly unhealthy (“alcoholism or compulsive sexual activity”). However, he warned, “[f]rantic activity of any sort – e.g., compulsive work – may serve to relieve the tension mobilized in the organism by anxiety.”

Like Menninger, May believed that it was possible to address the epidemic of anxiety through psychotherapy. However, contrary to Menninger’s declared preference for Freudian psychoanalysis, May supported Adler’s ideas about focusing therapy on promoting socialization and belonging.

The same year the May’s book appeared, professors David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney published The Lonely Crowd, a study of the sociological aspects of the new corporate economic arrangements. The book famously described the “well-heeled organization men” who succeeded at their jobs mostly by accommodating their behavior to the expectations of others, especially their own managers. The authors warned that such “other-directed” people risked subordinating their authentic selves to the needs of “forbiddingly powerful and efficient institutions.” Lonely Crowd was followed a year later by C. Wright Mills’ White Collar, another widely read portrait of the alienation to be found in the increasingly impersonal conglomerates. A consensus was building that the modern economy, no matter how profitable, was on the verge of driving the American people crazy. Yet, the mounting reports from poets, scientists, and journalists also persuaded the public that the stress and ennui people were feeling were not symptoms of mental illness; instead, they were the signs of maladjustment to be expected in anyone living through these nerve-wracking times. Importantly, the media was also retailing stories to the public about the possible remedy for their troubles: psychotherapy. The embarrassment formerly attached to psychological distress diminished. So too did the stigma of seeking professional treatment.

As May had suggested, what had once been covert, became overt. Indeed, rather than shameful, psychotherapy was becoming fashionable. However, fashion was a privilege of those with social status and ready money. Social acceptance was a long way from making psychotherapy readily available to everyone who could benefit from it.

Who would pay for the psychotherapy that was needed by so many?

On November 30, 1951, Menninger addressed the first annual dinner of the National Association for Mental Health in Chicago, Illinois. In addition to published research in his own field, he had obviously been following the developing social science (and perhaps Pulitzer-prize winning poetry) and he recognized that this was a moment of opportunity. He began his speech – entitled “Men, Machines, and Mental Health” – by expressing a wish that American industry would “make aggressive application of the mental health principles that we now know are applicable to workers.” He wished that more companies would also support “all our various groups, not only the executives and the workers but their families as well.” Furthermore, businesses should assume the responsibility for the psychological well-being of their customers, because “the mental health of these people directly affects the pocketbook of industry.” Finally, Menninger wished that industry would concern itself with “the community in which these customers and families all live.” He understood, of course, that achieving these goals would require “the re-evaluation of our value system and the determination of a more effective way of meeting both material and human goals.” Menninger suggested, however, that it would be possible to fulfill his wishes if industries would “promote public-education programs in mental health, help provide and support mental health facilities – guidance centers and clinics and hospitals, including state hospitals – in many, many of our communities, and recognize and do something about the greatest bottleneck of all – the shortage of trained personnel and research.”

Unfortunately, staff shortages and limits on research funding were not the only significant obstacles Menninger needed to address. Another was the resistance of the public as well as industry to the idea that there was a dire need for his suggested mental health reforms. He related a personal experience that he said had recently “given me a little light on this subject.” He wrote to a large number of corporations seeking to raise money for the Menninger Foundation. Although there were some “gratifying responses,” he received what he called “an amazing number” of replies from chairmen or presidents of companies claiming that they were concerned that “our stockholders would not feel we were justified in contributing in this area.” Menninger noted that the public, and many corporations, had contributed generously to fund-raising campaigns for heart problems, polio, and cancer. Why did these same people balk at commencing a similar crusade for improving mental health? The problem, he concluded, is that “we are industry. We are their stockholders.” He called on his audience to express their support for this project. They could not leave this critical responsibility to the presidents and the chairmen.

Menninger, the vaunted sales manager of American psychiatry, may have wondered if his argument made any impact. There is some convincing evidence that it did so. Not through poetry, but through fiction.

The iconic artistic representation of this era’s cultural preoccupations appeared in 1955, in Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The best-selling novel (and the hit film that followed) featured themes of status seeking and domestic conflict, but the heart of Wilson’s narrative is the issue of psychological health. The protagonist Tom Rath is a budding “organization man,” but he is also a World War II veteran who struggles with emotional scars from his traumatic experiences of battle. In order to afford a large suburban home for his family, Rath takes a public relations job at a New York-based television network. The network head is interested in creating a national committee on mental health, which will raise public awareness and lead a drive for improved psychiatric care and more “community guidance clinics.” It is explained to Rath that “more hospital beds are occupied by the mentally ill than by all the cancer, heart, and polio patients put together.” The proposed committee will seek to “do for mental disease what the March of Dimes has done for polio.” Rath is given the task of writing the speech to introduce the idea to influential business and medical leaders. Rath is soon assisting his boss in launching the initiative. The effort proves to be therapeutic for Rath, and by the novel’s conclusion, the man in gray flannel recognizes that his wife and family need his attention more than he needed any money and status he gained by climbing the ladder in the organization.

The cover graphic on the cloth-bound first edition of Wilson’s 1955 novel

If he read the novel, or saw the film, Menninger may have seen a bit of himself in Sloan Wilson’s network executive. Certainly, he would have recognized the aim of his own crusade for mental health in Tom Rath’s journey from traumatized veteran to appreciative husband and father. The arguments made about polio, cancer, and heart patients is too on-the-nose to be coincidental.

Unfortunately, the power of Wilson’s metaphor – the grey flannel suit as the uniform of desperate stiving in modern business – proved greater than his message of well-adjusted redemption. The novel and film did not interrupt the flood of stories that the newspapers, magazines, and the newest mass medium – television – offered detailing the corporate corruption, creeping conformism, and corrosive consumerism in American culture.

Indeed, over a five-year span following the movie’s debut in 1956, the journalist Vance Packard published a series of books on these issues, including: The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers (1959), The Waste Makers (1960) and The Pyramid Climbers (1962). The market was demonstrating that the “Age of Anxiety” was a better brand name for the 1950s than the “Age of Adjustment.”

Time Magazine (October 25, 1948)

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Sources:

W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York NY: Random House, 1947).

William C. Menninger, Psychiatry in a Troubled World: Yesterday’s War and Today’s Challenge (New York NY: MacMillan Co., 1948).

William C. Menninger and Munro Leaf, You and Psychiatry (New York NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948).

William C. Menninger, Understanding Yourself (Chicago IL: Science Research Associates, Inc., 1948).

William C. Menninger, Psychiatry Its Evolution and Present Status (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1948).

William C. Menninger “Men, Machines, and Mental Health,” Mental Hygiene (36; April 1952), pp. 184-196. Reprinted in Bernhard H. Hall (ed.), A Psychiatrist for a Troubled World: Selected Papers of William C. Menninger, M.D., Vol. 2 (New York NY: Viking, 1967), pp. 629-639.

Rebecca Jo Plant, “William Menninger and American psychoanalysis, 1946-48.” History of Psychology (16:2; June 2005); pp.181-202.

Hans Pols, “War Neurosis, Adjustment Problems in Veterans, and an Ill Nation: The Disciplinary Project of American Psychiatry during and after World War II.” Osiris 22:1 (2007), pp. 72-92.

“Medicine: Are You Always Worrying?” Time Magazine (October 25, 1948); https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,799409,00.html.

Rollo May, The Art of Counseling: How to Gain and Give Mental Health (New York NY: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1939).

Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety (New York NY: The Ronald Press Co., 1950).

David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1950).

C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (50th anniversary ed.). (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York NY: Simon & Schuster, 1955).

The Army’s top psychiatrist, Brigadier General William Menninger, returned to civilian life and resumed practice at his family’s clinic in Topeka, Kansas. But he remained a powerful advocate for his profession. In addition to successfully lobbying the US Congress to pass the National Mental Health Act in 1946, he recruited four dozen reform-minded colleagues to form the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP), which under his leadership continued to influence government policy and inform public opinion about mental illness. As the federal network of PHS hospitals and VA clinics steadily grew over the next several years, Menninger led a nationwide campaign to also increase funding for the increasingly overcrowded state sanitariums. He was elected president of the Central Neuropsychiatric Association (1947-1948), the American Psychoanalytic Association (1947-1949), and the American Psychiatric Association (1948-1949). His modernization efforts were not always successful. When he sought to have his associates declare their support for the “eventual integration” of psychoanalytic training into the standard medical curriculum, his motion was defeated by more conservative psychiatrists who questioned Freud’s theories of the unconscious. Undeterred, he emphasized psychoanalysis at the Menninger Clinic, which by the end of the decade was educating some 15% of the psychiatrists being trained in the United States. When his portrait appeared on the cover of the October 25, 1948, issue of Time Magazine, the accompanying story called him “psychiatry’s U.S. sales manager.”

The description was warranted. In addition to writing articles and giving speeches across the country, Menninger published four books in 1948 alone: Psychiatry in a Troubled World: Yesterday’s War and Today’s Challenge (part memoir and part professional manifesto); You and Psychiatry (a primer for the general public); Understanding Yourself (a brief “Life Adjustment Booklet” aimed at young people); and, Psychiatry: Its Evolution and Present Status (based on lectures he had delivered at Cornell University). In Evolution and Present Status, he addressed another of the political battles in which his vaunted salesmanship failed him. In contrast to his position on teaching Freudian analysis, Menninger was very conservative on the question of whether clinical psychologists should continue to practice psychotherapy once the wartime emergency ended. He wrote approvingly, even fondly, of the contributions psychologists made as part of a medical team. He noted that there was always going to be a need for diagnostic testing, which so helpfully informed a supervising psychiatrist’s decisions in the mental hospitals. “Unfortunately,” he complained, “there are some psychologists who have separated themselves from medical associates.” They have “changed their title from clinical to consulting psychologist, and have pretended to practice psychiatric medicine.” He claimed that this development “is lamented by both psychiatrists and clinical psychologists.”

Menninger was projecting his own frustration, of course, and also exaggerating. There was no evidence of lamentation among the first cohort of doctoral-level clinical psychologists. Counseling was obviously a career options open to the class of 1950, but it was only one among many opportunities for them to consider. The top graduates could choose teaching and research, because the universities offering the VA-approved curriculum needed to hire faculty to prepare the next generation in the training pipeline. By 1950, the VA had already expanded its program from twenty-two to forty-one universities, with spots for some seven hundred students. And as had long been promised, many newly minted PhDs received job offers from the VA, NIHM, and other branches of the federal government. Some instead accepted positions in the private sector, where human resources departments relied on personality assessments to screen applicants for creativity, leadership, and other prized aptitudes. And, as Menninger had noted, traditional diagnostic positions were plentiful in the state hospitals, where upwards of a half million mental patients were housed. Finally, despite the howling of psychiatrists, the more entrepreneurial-minded members of the class opened consulting practices that offered counseling, diagnostic testing, or both.

The reasons for the extraordinary demand for psychological services are complex and contradictory. The argument for passing the 1946 Act was that veterans were not the only Americans who could benefit from mental readjustment. Nearly two decades of economic depression and war had severely strained people and institutions. The country was finally enjoying the boomtimes, as evidenced by rising corporate profits and notably, the births of many, many babies. Yet, the explosive release of the pent-up potential stressed society in new ways. Consumer goods were available again, but prices were rising with the demand. New homes were built to accommodate growing families, but suburban living – the daily commute, weekend chores to maintain the yard, and seemingly endless social obligations ranging from church service to chambers of commerce events – seemed almost to be a second full-time job. Everyone was striving to make up for lost time. Everyone feared falling behind. A Rat Race underlying the American Dream. Women who had found fulfillment by serving the war effort, whether wearing the uniform abroad or wielding heavy tools on the homefront, now struggled with the peacetime expectation that they return to the traditional roles of wife and mother. Worse, the promised peace did not arrive. The Cold War’s threat of atomic annihilation cast a mushroom-shaped shadow over it all. As a result, along withprosperity, there was an epidemic of neurotic behaviors: despair, sleeplessness, alcohol abuse, marital discord, juvenile delinquency, and sexual disorders ranging from frigidity to homosexuality. This was the phenomenon Menninger addressed in his lobbying and writing. Pointedly, the Time article that featured Menninger was entitled “Are You Always Worrying?”He was not the only one to notice these developments, of course. W.H. Auden captured the era’s mood in “The Age of Anxiety,” a book-length poem depicting the need for connection amid the bleak alienation of the modern world. It earned Auden the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

Such reporting from scientists, journalists, and poets persuaded the public that the stress and ennui people were feeling were not symptoms of mental illness, but were instead signs of the maladjustment to be expected in anyone living through these nerve-wracking times. Importantly, the media also retailed stories about the possible remedy for such troubles: psychotherapy. As the embarrassment attached to psychological distress diminished, so too did the stigma of seeking professional treatment. Rather than shameful, psychotherapy became fashionable. For the first generation of PhD clinical psychologists, if for no one else, the postwar era really did turn out to be the golden age. They stood to prosper, but nobly so, by helping their fellow Americans make sense of themselves in a changing world.

Tim’s graduate school partners had taken the academic track. Abel Ossorio had accepted a position at Washington University in St. Louis, while Mervin Freedman had remained at UC-Berkeley. Tim himself did not immediately commit to a single career path. Instead, he sampled them all. He maintained a part-time toehold in academia as a clinical professor at UC-San Francisco’s medical school and also as an assistant researcher on the Berkeley campus. He continued to work a few days per week at clinics where he had recently been an intern. He taught a seminar in group counseling at the seminary of the Unitarian Church that had hosted his research. He occasionally accepted contract jobs from a business consulting firm, Edward Glaser & Associates. He contemplated hanging up his own shingle in a few years, but did not seem to be in a hurry to do so. There was such a strong market for his expertise that Tim could have made a lucrative living by this freelancing. But in early 1951, he was presented with an opportunity that seemed almost too good to be true.

The prominent west coast industrialist Henry J. Kaiser began offering America’s first private group health insurance during the Depression. The program was expanded after the war to cover employee families. Kaiser’s company subsequently pioneered preventative medical care through regularly scheduled prepaid check-ups. His Permanente Foundation (named for a stream on Kaiser’s estate on the San Francisco Peninsula) eventually provided these services state-of-the-art facilities, including its flagship hospital in Oakland. Around 1950, Permanente executives debated whether to add psychiatric care to the group plan. Some managers warned that the company would be wasting its money treating hypochondriacs and the merely curious. Surely, they argued, this mania for psychoanalysis and Menninger-penned works would pass. Others countered that creating a psychiatric benefit would be the next logical step in Permanente’s preventative care medical model. Doctors observed that some physical symptoms – hypertension, ulcers, colitis, and even asthma – seemed to have an emotional basis. If this was so, then psychological counseling would reduce medical costs in the long run. This latter argument won the day. To oversee the new clinic, Permanente hired two experienced psychiatrists, Drs. David Harvey Powelson and Mary Sarvis. In turn, Powelson and Sarvis sought to recruit a pair of the newly credentialed PhD-level clinical psychologists. They soon found Tim and Merv Freedman.

Due to their recent VA internships, Tim and Freedman’s duties at the Permanente hospital in Oakland would be familiar. What made the job especially attractive was that, although this was not a university hospital, Permanente’s managers actively encouraged research. During the dedication of the hospital in 1942, Henry Kaiser had declared that one of the key purposes of his insurance plan was “to provide funds for research.” He believed that this supported and would sustain the Foundation’s vision of providing state-of-the-art care. In the years since, the medical staff had taken the boss at his word, and collected data as they treated patients. They shared promising results with new techniques in their in-house newsletter (which soon enough circulated externally). Some doctors mirrored the activities of professors at the nearby universities by publishing in academic journals and applying for grants. Joining the Permanente group presented Tim and his colleague with an unlooked-for opportunity to continue their collaboration on interpersonal behavior. This had seemed unrealistic when Ossorio moved to the middle of the country. But now Tim and Freedman could collect data as part of their regular duties at the clinic, and Ossorio could contribute statistical analyses by correspondence. With a scaled-up version of the psychlotron, they could refine their theories and methods, and demonstrate the utility of their system.

Tim took out a mortgage of $40,000 to buy a 2200 square-foot, four-bedroom, two-bath, stucco-clad house at 1230 Queens Road in the Berkeley Hills neighborhood. Built in 1949, the home’s split-level interior featured eye-catching exposed California redwood beams and floor-to-ceiling west-facing windows that offered a dramatic view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Tim and Marianne imagined the cocktail parties they would host on the spacious deck above their garage. Their new neighbors included many campus colleagues. Tim’s dissertation director Hugh Coffey lived a few blocks away. Marianne had given up teaching in the speech department at Berkeley when she was pregnant with Susie. She now enrolled her children at the nearly co-operative preschool. She volunteered to be the school’s chair of education. She organized regular lunches where she and the other co-op mothers heard lectures, debated current events, and naturally, discussed child-rearing ideas drawn from The Common-Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which psychiatrist Benjamin Spock had published in 1946. Regrettably, Marianne had not had a positive experience with her own children. Susie had immediately resisted breastfeeding, and was on bottled formula within a week. This had been vexing to the first-time mother. Although earlier bottle-feeding was a trend, and Dr. Spock had reassured readers that formula was not evidence of the mother’s failure, Marianne knew this was no way to form a proper bond with her baby. She resented her daughter for it, and felt guilty about her resentment. Two years later, Jack also rejected her breast. Marianne did not need to read about the anxiety epidemic. She experienced it.

Tim was aware of his wife’s struggles with motherhood, having been the one to drive to the store for the bottles, bottle brushes, and artificial milk products when the crisis began with Susie. But that had been at its worst when he was in graduate school. Now that both kids were in school, and he was busy with his new job at the clinic, Marianne would be alright. He was sure of that.

The Permanente team’s good fortune continued when, due to strange developments at Berkeley, their advisor Coffey was available to continue the fruitful collaboration. When Tim brought his psychlotron research proposal to him in 1947, he had heard that some of the faculty considered Coffey to be the psychology department’s “resident radical.” But Tim had not worried about that. After all, “radical” was the critique of anyone open to new ideas, and Tim was counting on Hugh to be that kind of radical. But even when he learned that it meant that Coffey was indeed left leaning politically, Tim was unmoved. After he had watched with dismay as the “red hunting” divided the AVC, he chose to ignore politics.

Unfortunately, Coffey had not ignored campus politics, and his views became a potential problem for him when the California legislature began to consider a bill that would require public employees to affirm their loyalty to their state and nation. California was not acting in isolation, as many states and local governments were enacting similar laws. In fact, they had been encouraged to do so by President Truman. The California bill was slowly making it through the committee process, in part because critics argued that all state employees were already required to swear to support and defend the state and federal constitutions. It was not clear whether, if the new oath law passed, it would apply to staff and faculty of the state higher education system. The University of California Board of Regents created a local policy against employing members of the Communist Party in October 1940, and the system traditionally enjoyed independence from all but the most perfunctory government oversight. The chair of the legislature’s committee on un-American activities, however, had recently introduced a bill that would confirm the state’s authority to determine the loyalty of university employees.

In an effort to placate the anti-communist lawmakers before they took this disastrous step, UC president Robert Sproul suggested that staff and faculty sign a loyalty oath created by the Regents. The Board adopted the recommendation in the spring of 1949, and declared that by the beginning of the academic year on July 1, system employees would be required annually to sign and submit a pre-printed form that included the following language: “I am not a member of the Communist Party or any other organization which advocates the overthrow of the Government by force or violence” and “I have no commitments in conflict with my responsibilities with respect to impartial scholarship and free pursuit of truth.” The text closed with the signer’s affirmation that “I understand that the foregoing statement is a condition of my employment and a consideration of payment of my salary.” During the next meeting of the Berkeley faculty senate, psychologist Edward Tolman forcefully argued against the oath. The demand that a professor reject communism was an infringement on academic freedom, he said, and the requirement that they sign the statement every year as a condition of continued employment was a violation of tenure protections. Moreover, this exercise was redundant, since they had all taken the existing state oath when they were originally hired. Tolman’s position was supported by many of his colleagues, including Coffey. In May 1949, the Board promised to fire so-called “non-signers.” However, Sproul repeatedly convinced the Board to defer the order. As the July deadline approached, the Regents agreed to issue contracts to the non-signers, and opened discussions with the faculty advisory committee on privilege and tenure. Meanwhile, Tolman remained the spokesman of the faculty resistance to the Regents’ oath.

A few months later on September 23, the White House announced that the Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb. The Communist regime had reportedly built the plutonium-based device using technical information stolen from the American nuclear weapons program, which itself had relied heavily on classified research conducted at the Radiation Laboratory founded by Ernest O. Lawrence. The US House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) opened an inquiry into the “Rad Lab” faculty and staff. Concerns over espionage on campus obviously raised the stakes for dissenters.

After standing down for a year, the Regents voted on June 23, 1950, to begin cancelling the contracts of the non-signers. This was the first meeting attended by the new president of the Board, California Governor Earl Warren, who opposed the terminations but was unable to dissuade his fellow Regents. Following the decision, Sproul recommended dismissing 157 employees (including both faculty and staff), but retaining 62 non-signing faculty (out of 75), as recommended by the tenure committee. The Regents unanimously approved the first recommendation but were split on the second. Faced with the imminent loss of their livelihoods, many more employees signed the oath. On July 6, the remaining non-signing faculty organized the Group for Academic Freedom (GAF) and elected Tolman to be their chair. By the time of the Regent’s next meeting on July 21, there were only 39 of them left. Sproul convinced ten of the nineteen Board members present that day to retain these holdouts, again as recommended by the tenure committee. When the Regents met on August 25, however, they voted 12-10 to reverse the July reprieve. Warren continued to lead the opposition, but only succeeded in getting pro-oath Regents to admit that they were firing professors for refusing to conform to university policies, rather than for alleged subversive activities or communist associations. This fact might be important if the faculty filed a lawsuit. The Regents gave the holdouts ten days to comply. A handful reluctantly did so. The final thirty-one non-signers, including Tolman and Coffey, fully expected to receive formal notices that they had been dismissed.

Before the ten days had tolled, GAF sued on behalf of twenty of the terminated faculty (the others had either already resigned from UC, chosen to retire rather than wait to be fired, or were not physically available to sign on when the case was filed). The state District Court of Appeals issued a preliminary stay of the dismissals the next day, and directed the Regents to “show cause,” that is, to defend the legality of their actions. The GAF lawyer argued that the case for reinstatement would be stronger if the faculty continued to perform their jobs, even though they knew they were not being paid. But on September 14, Sproul informed academic department heads that the discharged faculty would not be allowed to continue teaching and researching on UC property. Nor would they be allowed to attend meetings, including thesis committees. Fortunately, Tim had just defended his dissertation when this order was announced, and Coffey was able to sign it before he was locked out of his office. When the last-standing non-signers were ejected from campus, several faculty members who had not been terminated resigned in solidarity. As a consequence, fifty-five courses had to be cancelled that Fall and Spring.

Ironically, Earl Warren was facing a different kind of job crisis during these critical months. He was seeking re-election to an unprecedented third term in November 1950 (as well as eyeing a run for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination). He was being challenged by James Roosevelt, FDR’s eldest son, who was doing well in the polls. Roosevelt had also spoken out against loyalty oaths, which helped him with liberal Democrats, while Warren’s defense of the UC non-signers was hurting him with his own party’s conservatives. He could not afford to appear soft on communism. In early August, even as he was standing against the Regents’ oath, the governor called a special session of the legislature to deal with domestic subversion. On September 21, Warren encouraged the lawmakers to finally take up the issue of the state loyalty oath. The Levering Act (named for its main sponsor, Assemblyman Harold Levering) passed on September 26 with only two dissenting votes in the Senate and five in the Assembly. A separate measure, approving the recent firing of the non-signers at UC, passed the Senate by a vote of 27 to 5. The Levering Act’s language was similar to the Regents’ oath, in that it condemned membership in any party or organization advocating the overthrow of the federal or state government “by force or violence or other unlawful means.” One major difference in the texts was that the UC oath was concerned with present memberships and activities, while the state would require public employees to swear that they had not been members of such organizations in the past five years, and would not advocate nor associate with any such views during their state employment. On October 13, Attorney General Fred Houser declared that the Levering Act oath applied to University of California employees.

Governor Warren carried all of the state’s fifty-eight counties on November 7. He was reelected with a margin of one million votes over Roosevelt, 65% of the popular vote.

In the spring of 1951, a faculty senate committee released a report on The Consequences of the Abrogation of Tenure. According to the authors, the Regents’ actions against tenure and academic freedom had significantly harmed the university’s reputation. They reported, for example, that at least forty-seven candidates for faculty positions ultimately declined the jobs, citing the oath controversy as at least a factor in their decisions. The impact of the argument might have been mooted somewhat by the near-simultaneous conclusion of the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell, who in March 1951 were found guilty of transferring America’s stolen atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The Red Tide was flowing, not ebbing, and who could put institutional reputation above national security?

Then, on April 6, the District Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the non-signers. In Tolman v. Underhill, the judges wrote that because university faculty were public officers (that is, not merely at-will employees), the Regents had violated the state constitution’s prohibition on exerting political influence on higher education. The GAF victory celebrations were brief. On their own motion, the justices of the California Supreme Court suspended the lower court’s decision and declared that they would review the case. In the meantime, they did not require the Regents to reappoint the non-signers. Six months later, on October 19, with several new Warren allies on the Board, the Regents voted 12-8 to repeal UC’s oath, while separately reaffirming the policy against employing Communists. This action was mostly symbolic, since the Levering Act now required all employees to sign an equivalent oath. And because the GAF faculty had filed suit before the Levering Act passed, their specific case continued to work its way to California’s high court.

No one could know how long the litigations would continue or how it would end. Like other GAF members, Coffey needed to find alternative employment, hopefully temporary. When Tim told him about the Permanente clinic, he was considering applying for a lectureship at Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations, an interdisciplinary project of applied sociological, anthropological, and psychological research overseen by Henry Murray. Now Coffey welcomed this chance to work with his former students. The renewed collaboration resulted in a joint paper, entitled “Measurement of the Group Process and the Nature of Therapeutic Improvement in Group Psychotherapy,” which they delivered at the Western Psychological Association’s annual conference in the summer of 1951. Because this was basically an extended analysis of data collected about Berkeley Unitarians, which they had shared in journal articles the previous year, the main significance of the presentation was that it alerted the clinical community that they were continuing to develop their system. When the next article appeared, however, the four authors revealed a bold new agenda.

Published in the December 1951 issue of the Journal of Personality, “The Interpersonal Dimension of Personality” opened with a frank airing of the author’s concerns about the state of their discipline. They complained, for example, that the most influential theories of personality development did not incorporate satisfactory descriptions of the interpersonal behaviors. Rather, the dominant schools typically emphasized a single favored factor – behaviorists preferred to focus on behavioral traits, psychoanalysts on repressed urges, and medical doctors on the diagnostic categories – without considering how that one factor might be related to others. Moreover, researchers often concerned themselves with pathological behavior but rarely addressed the mental functioning of normal individuals. Finally, commonly used personality descriptors did not support objective observation and systematic measurement. The unfortunate result was an overly subjective, medicalized muddle that failed to provide practicing clinical psychologists with day-to-day diagnostic guidance. This article was a declaration that the object of this team’s collective research project going forward was to fill this gap. They intended to offer “a comprehensive schema for description of the much discussed ‘total personality.’”

How did the authors propose to fulfill their extraordinarily ambitious goal? Their “much discussed total personality” was a reference to Kurt Koffka’s argument that psychological phenomena must be viewed as a coherent whole, not as a mere assemblage of individual elements (this was the basis of so-called Gestalt psychology). Taking this idea as a given, they now defined “total personality” as consisting of three interrelated but separate levels: the public; the conscious; and the private. They also invoked Harry Stack Sullivan, who had defined “personality” as the pattern of interpersonal responses individuals relied upon to reduce anxiety, defend against disapproval of others, and maintain positive self-esteem. All behaviors had a purpose, even those that appeared to an observer to be irrational. As this applied both to well-adjusted and maladjusted individuals, it stood to reason that the proper subjects for an improved descriptive “schema” were interpersonal behaviors, not psychiatric symptoms. Their main objective was to “operationalize” Sullivan’s ideas, which they hoped would result in a precise diagnostic tool to apply in psychotherapy.

The authors proposed a systematic method for understanding their three levels as well as for dealing with the relationships among them. They now named four categories for this purpose: interpersonal mechanisms; interpersonal traits; intrapersonal mechanisms; and personal mechanisms. They had refined these categories in their group sessions with the Unitarians. After reviewing thousands of recorded interactions, engaging in a great deal of discussion, and suffering several false starts, they classified interactions with verbs that best characterized what an individual was doing rather than what they were saying. They sorted similar verbs into clusters: their “interpersonal mechanisms.” They had developed their list of “interpersonal traits,” after much trial and error, by replacing verbs used for the mechanisms with adjectives that would indicate the actions the verbs described. They discovered that four basic behaviors frequently observed during group sessions – friendly, hostile, submissive, or dominating – were rarely confused by observers.

The authors seemed to realize that their proposed “schema” – based as it was on multiple mechanisms, variables, types, and traits – was already at risk of becoming complicated, jargon-laden, and confusing rather than clarifying. Ultimately, they avoided this potential disaster by illustrating their ideas using the simplest form possible: a circle. The idea had emerged during their late-night brainstorming at Berkeley, as the three doctoral students worked out how they could graphically represent their results. This was not a stretch for them. Sullivan himself had used a similar illustration to map an “interpersonal situation.” In fact, human beings had been drawing the shape for as long as they had been seeking to understand the world and themselves. Circles had appeared in astrological charts, Hindu chakra paintings, Buddhist mandalas, and Mayan calendars. Why not adopt a circle to explain their interpersonal system? They began to plot data points as if the interpersonal behaviors were being tracked by radar. Both Tim and Ossorio had included these diagrams in their dissertations. Tim had listed “interpersonal traits” on one circle, for example, and “ego-oriented mechanisms” on another.

After contemplating hundreds of terms that they might use to describe types and traits, the authors had culled, combined, and collapsed their list into sixteen categories of behavior. These were named and assigned a letter from A to P, arranged counterclockwise around the circumference of their diagram. The top position, which would be the northern point on a compass rose, was A (dominate), while I (submit) was placed at the southern position. M (love) was to the east, and E (hate) was on the west. Between these cardinal points were other positive or negative descriptions of interpersonal action, such as reject and support. The researchers were now using a version of their circle as a practical “scorecard” to aid them in making consistent ratings of behavior. Knowing that they had set themselves up for a huge undertaking, and perhaps taking pity on their readers, they chose to show only a few examples. Yet, the authors promised that this was “the first in a series of papers designed to present a comprehensive schema for the organization of personality data.”

The evolving interpersonal system, 1951

In time, the project the authors described in “The Interpersonal Dimension of Personality” would be held up as a classic example of “action” research, or applied psychology aimed at finding solutions to social problems. It is unlikely, however, that contemporary readers of the article gave much attention to the professional affiliations listed under each of the authors’ names. Yet, these were noteworthy in their own way. Abel Ossorio was of course associated with Washington University. Hugh Coffey was defiant in the face of his recent dismissal and continued to claim his connection with the University of California. Mervin Freedman and Tim were also listed as UC employees, due to their part-time appointments. They were both also identified for the first time as working for the Permanente Foundation Hospital. The article not only set forth the collaborators’ new research aims, but also announced the ongoing interpersonal project’s new institutional home.

The Foundation supported the cooperative project from the beginning. Harvey Powelson, already chief of the psychiatric clinic, was now named director of psychology research. Coffey was co-director. In fact, despite his entanglement in the oath controversy, he had secured a federal grant from the Public Health Service to supplement the in-house funding (he co-managed the grant Dr. Saxton T. Pope, Jr., with the head of UC-Berkeley’s medical department). The grant money enabled the team to collect and analyze a great deal of new data at the Permanente facilities. Consequently, the “schema” they were beginning to put forward was based on the observation of some 200 subjects who were substantially more diverse than the handful of Unitarian male college students they used for their dissertation research. Initially, they had worked out of the hospital. On September 1, 1951, they moved into a new out-patient psychiatric clinic, a non-descript office block at 243 West MacArthur Boulevard. Over the next five years, they would be able to test, revise, and validate their interpersonal system against thousands of additional verbal and social interactions they observed and recorded during hundreds of psychotherapy sessions.

Tim and Freedman’s research was conducted in the normal course of their work, which was conducting the routine intake assessments that informed psychiatrists’ treatment. When a new patient arrived at the clinic, they would administer a battery of standardized diagnostic exams, as many as ten objective and projective tests, including the Rorschach, MMPI, and TAT. If appropriate, the patient was then assigned to a therapy group with six or seven other patients. Continuing the process they had established during their dissertation research, one or more of the team observed the sessions (or listened to recordings) and noted how an action taken or word spoken sparked a reaction. As they interpreted these interactions, they referred to the circle. If one group member “ridiculed” or “punished” another member (including the therapist), that action was interpreted as an indication of their hostile dominance (D). The team recognized that some forms of hostility were minor (for example, “pressing a point” or “challenging” was not equivalent to ridiculing), and so they developed a system to rate the intensity of an interaction, 3 for extreme, 2 for average, and 1 for mild. Zero was a non-discernible effect. The researchers reasoned that intensity was necessary to distinguish well-adjusted interactions from abnormal responses. The intensity rating was used to locate the behavior within the circle. They meticulously plotted an individual’s unique personality structure, pinpoint by pinpoint.

The team understood that the most important aspect of psychological assessment was consistent, accurate interpretation of results. Yet, they knew that personalities might be changed by successful psychotherapy. How much, and how fast? At regular intervals, the team re-administered the assessments and compared the new results with the baseline established at the same client’s intake. They continually revised their descriptors to align recorded observations with the test data. Their goal was to calculate statistically informed probabilities that would enable clinical psychologists not only to consistently describe a patient’s personality but also to accurately predict how that patient’s personality structure would “adjust” as they underwent therapy. If they succeeded in developing an operational framework of observable variables and measurable outcomes, they could transform a still somewhat hazy art into an empirical science. Best of all, eliminating the guesswork from therapy would undermine psychiatrists’ case for keeping their monopoly over treatment.

With Permanente’s financial backing, the team was able to hire a staff. Tim had met Helen Lane in 1947, when she had been executive director of Berkeley’s AVC chapter, and he now hired her to be the clinic’s office manager. She organized the mounting stack of data files, prepared manuscripts for publication, and kept track of the endless paperwork that came with government grants. As patient traffic in the clinic increased, the pool of subjects grew in proportion, and Tim and Freedman needed to hire additional researchers. Naturally, they called on friends and colleagues from Berkeley. Shirley Hecht, Patrick Sullivan, and Walter Klopfer (all members of the class of 1950) had been aware of their project since it had been proposed and were now happy to help launch the next phase. Other recruits were drawn from the later cohorts. Gene Rolfe LaForge (class of 1952) had been fascinated by the interpersonal circle ever since a fellow graduate student sketched an early version on the chalkboard during a seminar. LaForge recalled that he had instantly recognized the diagram’s “organizing power.” The system, he later wrote, “contrasted sharply with the chaotic residue” of “Freud, Jung, … Sullivan and the other neo-Freudians.” When the team began hiring graduate students to be research assistants, Laforge leapt at the opportunity. He stayed on after earning his doctorate. Among other contributions, he programmed the IBM computer they acquired to perform statistical analysis. Many other Berkeley alumni gained research experience on the interpersonal project, including Robert Suczek (1952); Blanche Sweet, Mary Darby Rauch, Stephen Rauch, and Herbert Naboisek (1953); Martin Levine (1954); Marvin Spanner and Bernard Apfelbaum (1955); Wanda Bronson and Albert Shapiro (1957); and Richard Wolton (1960).

Now in his early thirties, blessed with family and well launched on a promising career, Tim seemed to settle into domestic stability and professional respectability. But he had caught a strain of the anxiety bug himself. He frequently worked very late, splitting time between the Permanente clinic and various Bay Area hospitals and classrooms. He was ambitious but ambivalent about his ambition. Although his working uniform was an academic tweed jacket rather than the grey flannel suit the novelist Sloan Wilson would make famous a few years later, Tim worried that he was rapidly becoming the very model of the mid-century modern American conformist. He would even later describe himself during this period as an “anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars, and drove home each night and drank martinis and looked like and thought like and acted like several million middle-class liberal intellectual robots.”

Tim was being honest with himself about those martinis. As he and Marianne recognized, the house on Queens Road was designed for entertaining. The couple hosted boozy parties most weekends. Or else attended one at a neighbor’s home. Whether as hosts or guests, both Learys often overindulged in the free-flowing liquor. Marianne would slowly become sloppy and sad, while Tim quickly became loud. He was a lecturer at heart, but due to his hearing loss, he had some difficulty modulating his voice, even when sober. With a drink in his hand rather than a stick of chalk, his usual theme was literature. He had eclectic tastes and was eager to share and defend them. After mixing a fresh pitcher of cold martinis for the guests, he might stand on a chair and recite a fragment from a favorite obscure poem. If the date was near enough to James Joyce’s birthday (February 2), he might play scratchy recordings of the Irish author reading from his own Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake. Without realizing it, he was following in his father footsteps. Perhaps he did realize this, but told himself it was just his wild Celtic heritage, not Tote’s spirit, that he was expressing.

Marianne had made several friends at the co-op school, but continued to feel alienated from her children, and increasingly from her husband as well. Between the parties, she began to experience panic attacks. Among other causes, she was haunted by the specter of annihilation. Given the time and place she lived, this feeling was possibly more rational than not. The “Rad Lab” had survived HUAC’s investigation but continued to be an obvious target for espionage, and maybe sabotage. Lawrence, whose atomic research had inspired Tim’s idea for the psychlotron, lived just one mile from the Leary family. Edward Teller, the man who would soon be known as the father of the H-Bomb, moved into the neighborhood the year after Tim bought their house on Queens Road. Dozens of professors in Berkeley – and hundreds of contractors scattered across the greater Bay Area – were involved with classified weapons projects. If the hot war ever came, the brain power seemed a likely target for the Soviet A-bombs. That possibility was almost a certainty after September 2, 1952, when the University of California opened its Livermore Branch, one of two major federal government-funded facilities that developed and maintained the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The lab was located on an old Naval Air Station barely 50 miles from Berkeley Hills. Marianne’s dread of the coming nuclear holocaust obviously contributed to what Tim would describe as her “withdrawal from the outside world.” He was puzzled, and frankly annoyed that, just when things were going so well for him, the “fun-loving, competent young woman” he had married only five years ago was acting depressed and dependent.

Yet, around this time, and despite his success at the clinic, Tim now made the inexplicable decision to withdraw from the world in his own way. He diverted some money from a grant and arranged a personal sabbatical, ostensibly to write a book about the ongoing project. He was still teaching part-time at Berkeley, and the UC system newsletter noted that from October 1, 1952, to March 31, 1953, he would be conducting “research abroad.” In fact, Tim, Marianne, and the children spent these six months vacationing in Spain. They visited museums and historic sites across the country, then settled down for some two months on the outskirts of Palma, the capital of the island of Mallorca (or, Majorca). Marianne wrote to a friend that they frequently socialized with the other ex-patriates, and were experiencing life like characters in the Lost Generation stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of Tim’s favorite authors. They lived well, even elegantly, by taking good “advantage of everything that was cheap.” She noted that “drinking is a cheap pastime.” Whatever else it was intended to be, the trip was clearly not an attempt for the couple to dry out. Meanwhile, Tim learned that another favorite writer, Robert Graves, had moved to Palma in 1946. He crisscrossed the island, seeking in vain to catch a glimpse of the author of I, Claudius (a historical novel), The White Goddess (poetry criticism), and Good-Bye to All That (a World War I memoir).

Not only did Tim fail to encounter Graves by the time the family had to return to California, but he had also not even begun to write his own proposed book. Even so, the time abroad seemed to have been clarifying. When Freedman welcomed his prodigal colleague back to the clinic, he noticed that Tim was now quite comfortable with ambition. He established a private practice, the Psychological Consultation Service, with Powelson as his “psychiatric consultant.” The business address was 1230 Queens Road, the family home, where Tim would meet with clients and conduct personality assessments. But one of the first things Tim did when he resumed work was write a summary of the team’s research to date, “The Variability Dimension of Personality.” Writing this report not only enabled him to catch up on what he had missed, but also gave him a means to re-establish his claim to intellectual leadership of the project. It seemed an opportune moment for him to do so.

The nonprofit Permanente Foundation was struggling and needed to increase enrollment in the group health plan. The hospitals were now renamed to highlight their association with Henry Kaiser. The rebranding was more than an honorific. Managers hoped that the name would remind employees that the founder had always kept their best interests in mind. The medical group resisted the change, and continued to be identified as Permanente, in part to clarify that the doctors worked for the Foundation, not Mr. Kaiser directly. This upright stance was muddled when the name evolved into “Kaiser Permanente.” The Foundation subsequently hired Clifford Keene, MD, to lead the hospital in Oakland. He was a former journeyman ironworker from New York who worked his way through med school, and a WWII veteran who served as an Army surgeon in the Pacific. Keene was medical director at Henry Kaiser’s automobile factory in Willow Run, Michigan (where the Kaiser-Frazer “Henry J” compact coupe was produced from 1950 to 1954), when the founder personally reached out to offer him the job in late 1953. When Keene stepped into his new role in January 1954, the medical staff suspected that an outsider had been brought in to be a severe cost-and-job-cutter. The local AMA chapter saw him as an interloper and initially denied his request to join. But Dr. Keene worked hard to save jobs and repair the hospital’s finances. Ultimately, he rose to lead at Kaiser Permanente itself, which he grew into the largest nonprofit health care system in the United States.

Tim was personally concerned by developments at the top, because the psychiatric clinic itself was poised for a leadership shake-up in 1954. Mary Sarvis and Harvey Powelson had decided to return to academia. They both landed at Berkeley, Sarvis as a professor in the School of Social Welfare and Powelson as chief of psychiatry at Cowell Memorial Hospital, where students and staff received health care. In addition, Merv Freedman was selected for a prestigious Mellon Foundation fellowship. Although he would continue to contribute to team publications, he would be spending the next few years teaching at Vassar College in New York. And Hugh Coffey had returned to Berkeley while Tim was in Spain. On October 17, 1952, the California Supreme Court declared that university staff cannot be required to sign an oath above and beyond the declaration required of other state employees. The UC Board of Regents unanimously decided against seeking a rehearing. The dismissed faculty were reinstated with adjusted salary and rank, to make up for time lost on the tenure track (sixteen non-signers eventually sought back pay as well, and reached a settlement with the Regents in 1956). Coffey had been an assistant professor when the oath debate began, but was now an associate professor with tenure. Like Freedman, he continued to contribute to the project, but full-time teaching and advising limited the time he could spend at the clinic.

Tim asked for an appointment to discuss the future of the clinic with Keene. Having lost the two psychiatrists, and with only one member of the original staff remaining, he worried that his new boss might be less supportive of their project than his predecessor. The meeting started inauspiciously. Looking across his desk, Keene observed “a fellow with glasses, hearing aid, deaf.” He later said that listening to Tim talk about his research was dull. He also admitted that he “never really knew” what the man was talking about, since he “spoke in a peculiar jargon which if he had been speaking in Sanskrit, I couldn’t have understood him less.” Still, Keene could see that Tim was genuinely excited about the interpersonal system (whatever that was), and he was impressed that Tim was planning to write a book about the project. Keene confirmed that the Foundation would continue to support the clinic’s goals, and appointed Tim to be the new Director of Psychology Research.

This was an opportune moment for Tim to assume the job. Although Harry Stack Sullivan had died in 1949, his former students had recently published a collection of his articles as The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. The book would undoubtedly bolster interest in the Kaiser clinic’s efforts to operationalize his theories. The Kaiser clinic’s interpersonal system would soon be there to help the therapists do the job more effectively and efficiently. Conveniently, the clinic had recently received additional funding through a NIMH grant, which facilitated the participation of additional young psychologists from Berkeley and expedited the process of data collection and analysis. Over the summer, Tim and Coffey published “The Prediction of Interpersonal Behavior in Group Psychotherapy” in Group Psychotherapy. This article was immediately followed in the same issue by “A Scale to Measure Inter-Personal Relationships in Group Psychotherapy,” by Ben Finney, a staff member of the counseling center at nearby San Jose College. The juxtaposition of two similarly focused pieces was indicated the timeliness of interpersonal theories. It was also a reminder that the Kaiser team had competitors in this intellectual space. Indeed, it was a commercial space as well: Finney was already selling his “Palo Alto Group Psychotherapy Scale” through the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the national publisher of the SAT and other standardized tests.

In December 1954, the interpersonal project finally delivered on its 1951 promise. The latest configuration of the team – Tim, Coffey, and Freedman (working from Vassar), plus Rolfe LaForge and Herb Naboisek – published “The Interpersonal Dimension of Personality II. An Objective Study of Repression.” Although Tim and Coffey had written “Interpersonal Diagnosis: Some Problems of Methodology and Validation” in the spring of 1954, it was finally published in January 1955. It included an updated version of the diagram the team now called the Interpersonal Diagnostic Circle. The authors reviewed how the group had employed mathematical tools to convert assessment data (such as MMPI scores) into graphable coordinates. Tim and Coffey reminded readers that the purpose of the Kaiser interpersonal diagnostic system was “to make specific, accurate summaries of interpersonal behavior – past, present, and future – at all levels of personality.”

Nine months later in September 1955, with “Interpersonal Dimensions of Personality III. An Interpersonal Check List,” LaForge and Robert Suczek contributed a major milestone in the Kaiser project. Specifically, the long-planned operationalization of the interpersonal system. The check list (ICL, as it came to be called) contained 128 statements, eight items for each of the sixteen interpersonal variables on the diagnostic circle. During intake at the clinic, a new patient was asked to check the box for any item they thought applied to them – for example, “enjoys taking care of others” – or leave a blank when it did not. A therapist or other observer could similarly use the ICL to rate another person. A dimension for the intensity variable, now represented by a four-point scale, was built into the check list. The ICL had been through three major revisions before the authors were comfortable publishing this final version.

The evolving interpersonal system, 1955

LaForge and Suczek had also introduced a new level of efficiency to the process. They printed each of the 128 items on a separate computer card and asked subjects to sort them into “true” or “false,” that is, whether the statement on the card accurately applied to their personality. They machine-punched the cards and fed them into the IBM computer LaForge had programmed. This automation allowed LaForge and Suczek to test, revise, and statistically validate the ICL using data collected over the preceding five years. Most of the data were derived from assessments administered during the intake process at the clinic. But the researchers had also used these tools to assess several hundred Berkeley students, one hundred students at San Francisco State College, a group of dermatitis patients at a nearby private practice, and two hundred overweight women. In sum, the team had observed, coded, and collated hundreds of thousands of discrete interpersonal actions with several thousand subjects. The Kaiser team could now fairly claim that if a patient checked themselves as “helpful,” it was possible to predict with high probability how they would check the other words. Any clinical psychologist could now map a patient’s interpersonal characteristics by translating check list responses into coordinates on the circle. As therapy proceeded, the clinician could accurately track the changes. The ICL, the legend to the map, was the last piece of the puzzle.

Sources

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Mervin B. Freedman, Timothy F. Leary, Hubert S. Coffey, and Abel G. Ossorio, “Measurement of the Group Process and the Nature of Therapeutic Improvement in Group Psychotherapy.” American Psychologist (6:9; September 1951); p. 499.

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Rolfe LaForge, Timothy F. Leary, Herbert Naboisek, Hubert S. Coffey, Mervin B. Freedman, “The Interpersonal Dimension of Personality: II. An Objective Study of Repression.” Journal of Personality (23:2, 1954); pp. 129-153.

Rolfe LaForge, and R.F. Suczek, “Interpersonal Dimensions of Personality: III. An Interpersonal Check List.” Journal of Personality (24: 1; 1955), pp. 94-112.

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Cal. Gov’t Code §§ 3100–3109 (1951) (enacted by Stats. 1950, 3rd Ex. Sess., c.7, p. 15, §1, eff. Oct. 3, 1950. Amended by Stats. 1971, c. 38, p. 50, §5). §3103 contains the oath.

Gerry Gaintner, Kaiser Permanente: A Short History (2011), p. 19, online, at: https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/content/dam/internet/kp/comms/import/uploads/2015/03/GaintnerKPShortHistory.pdf.

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Peter O. Whitmer, with Bruce van Wyngarden, Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America (New York: MacMillan, 1987), photo section.

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Timothy Leary, lecturing on interpersonal psychology at UC-Berkeley

Donald Ramsdell may well have saved Tim’s life by plucking him from an impending combat tour and securing him a billet in the Deshon Hospital. He certainly changed his protégé’s postwar path. His intervention led directly to Tim meeting and marrying Marianne, and indirectly to his earning an undergraduate degree after many false starts. Crucially, Tim’s months at Deshon also ignited a latent interest in research. Although Ramsdell was in uniform, he had remained a professor at heart. He treated the soldiers who passed through his clinic, but he also studied them and tracked their rates of recovery. Tim administered various diagnostic tests designed to assess a patient’s psychological states before, during, and after their treatment. Ramsdell was appreciative enough of his contributions that he listed Tim as his co-author on several publications, including “Comparison of Certain Rorschach ‘Signs’ and Qualitative Performance on the Maze Subtest of the Wechsler Scale Form B” and “An Analysis of the Comprehension Subtest of the Wechsler Scale Form B; with Standards for Scoring.” These titles referred to the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale (WBIS), a test created in 1939 and adopted by the Army in 1942. Ramsdell and Tim were among the first investigators to collect and publish data on the usefulness of the WBIS in a clinical setting. Tim discovered that he had both a taste and a talent for this kind of work. Rather than looking for a job, he decided to return to school.

This option was available to Tim because, like millions of soldiers and sailors who served during World War II, he qualified for new federal benefits created under the 1944 GI Bill. He drew on his tuition assistance to enroll at Washington State College in Pullman. Tim signed up for graduate-level courses with Professor Lee Cronbach, a distinguished educational psychologist whose research focused on evaluating the validity of the sort of diagnostic testing Tim had routinely administered at Deshon. This fortunate intersection of interests enabled Tim to re-purpose his wartime work with Ramsdell. Indeed, his thesis, “The Clinical Use of the Wechsler Mental Ability Scale: Form B,” cited three papers jointly credited to Ramsdell and Leary. After he had barely pieced together a BA after struggling at a half-dozen colleges over some eight years, Tim earned his master’s degree just six months after leaving the Army.

Tim’s rapid progression from expelled undergraduate and enlisted draftee to holder of a Master of Science credential seemed to hint that providence was finally working in his favor. It was certainly an auspicious time for Tim to enter psychology, because Americans would shortly become obsessed with the mysteries of the human mind. The American government, particularly its military leadership class, already was.

Psychiatrists and psychologists alike had served during the war. Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, who had studied psychoanalysis while earning his MD, had participated in the psychiatric screening of potential soldiers in the first world war. Because the scientific study of intelligence and mental deficiency was in its infancy (and also bound up in the unfortunate theories of eugenicists) the results were mixed. The stresses of war brought out neuroses in many men who had passed the doctor’s tests, resulting in far too many cases of “shell shock” for the military leadership’s comfort. The profession thought it could do better when war loomed again twenty years later. Sullivan contributed to the screening guidelines that wereincorporated into the 1940 Selective Service Act. And in December 1940, he became an adviser to the Director of the Selective Service Commission, where he introduced special training for medical examiners (most who were not psychiatrists) who would work with the more than six thousand local draft boards across the country. One month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a skeptic of psychiatry was appointed as the Director, and Sullivan resigned from his advisory role. During the war, he worked for the Office of War Information, lending his psychiatric expertise to America’s foreign and domestic propaganda efforts.

However, Sullivan’s screening criteria remained in place, leading to the rejection of two million of the eighteen million potential inductees examined between 1941 and 1944, approximately six times the rejection rate of World War I. Moreover, because the guidelines were applied to all personnel, not just new recruits, three-quarters of a million soldiers and sailors were eventually discharged for psychiatric reasons. In all, approximately one out of seven serving or considered for service was excluded at some point in the war. In September 1943, when almost as many soldiers were ejected from the Army as were inducted, many of the discharges were based on the psychiatric criteria. In 1944, General George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army, ordered a change in the criteria, so that only men who were obviously psychotic or severely mentally disabled would be rejected or ejected. Unfortunately, this was still a large pool. It was obvious that Sullivan’s standards had been a failure. Shell shock, now usually labeled war neurosis or combat fatigue, returned as a major problem for men who had passed their psychiatric examinations.

The medical care of active troops raised ethical issues. In peacetime, physicians had a clear duty to provide compassionate care and promote healing, above all else to “do no harm.” By contrast, medical objectives during war were intimately bound to military goals. It was the duty of a combat surgeon to repair the bodies of soldiers who, if their treatment was successful, could be potentially returned to the battle. Military psychiatrists faced a comparable dilemma with “psychiatric casualties.” If they succeeded in resolving symptoms, a patient might be sent back to the scene of their original trauma. But like the surgeons, the psychiatrists did their duty well and developed therapies that got many soldiers back in the war. Their most successful techniques included a little talk and lots of rest. Psychologists played a subordinate but still significant role in both screening and forward care. Typically, psychiatrists would not render a diagnosis or recommend a treatment until they had received and reviewed the assessments administered by the staff psychologist. Had Tim remained in his original assignment in the Second Cargo Group, he would have been producing these reports for the unit’s psychiatric officer.

Supporting the psychiatrists was only one of the roles psychologists played during the war. They also managed the General Classification Test, which sorted recruits into one of two thousand occupational and training categories. Depending on the complexity or sensitivity of the job assignment, soldiers and sailors might face other intelligence, personality, skills, and aptitude assessments. The Wechsler was only one of the dozens of test batteries available for these tasks. One of the most widely used, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), had been developed in the 1930s by two faculty members at the University of Minnesota, psychologist Starke Hathaway and psychiatrist J.R. McKinley. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), published in 1935 by Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray of Harvard University, was another influential assessment. It consisted of pictures of people in ambiguous social situations. The test subject was shown an image and asked to invent a story about the people. The theory was that the story would reveal personality. Murray, who held an MD as well as a PhD in biochemistry, developed a special scoring scale that clinicians were trained to apply to the subject’s narratives. Because it permitted a person to project their own idiosyncratic interpretations onto the pictures, the TAT was considered a “projective” test. The MMPI, comprised of standard written questions with predictable answers (true or false), was an “objective” test. Clinical psychologists used both types of assessments to form conclusions about a subject’s mental processes. The scale of their effort was truly incredible. In 1944 alone, psychologists administered sixty million tests to twenty million individuals.

MMPI question booklet and scoring card during the 1940s

The psychiatric and psychological professions were both well poised to reap the benefits of peacetime federal government largesse. Although the GI Bill of 1944 was enacted in part to reward the victorious returning veterans, its provisions went much farther than offering support for college tuition and home mortgages. After the first world war, some veterans felt abandoned by the country they had served and became alienated from civil society. This led to public unrest when the economy soured for civilians and veterans alike. During the twenty years between the wars, social researchers were persuaded that unresolved traumas had been responsible for some of the difficulties veterans had experienced. Consequently, as the second war appeared to be drawing to a close, influential public figures took steps to avoid repeating the tragic pattern of the past. Psychiatrists successfully lobbied for concrete support to help soldiers readjust to civilian life (indeed, the long title of the GI Bill was the “Serviceman’s Readjustment Act”). As a result of these efforts, Congress expanded the Veterans Administration’s authority to promote mental as well as physical health, representing a tremendous potential boon to the psychiatric profession. Following hard on their advocacy for the veterans, psychiatrists stressed that millions of American civilians also suffered from “maladjustment.” On July 3, 1946, President Harry Truman signed the National Mental Health Act, which unleashed unprecedented federal funding in the form of grants to be dispensed by the new National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). That same year, the VA established its Neuropsychiatry Service, with separate divisions for neurology, psychiatry, and clinical psychology, the specific subfield that focused on assessment. One indication of the new opportunities for psychologists was that Ramsdell did not return to the faculty of the University of Alabama after the war. Instead, he became the chief of clinical psychology at the VA hospital in Boston.

The federal initiatives were driving immense changes in mental health care training. For the psychiatrists, the primary effect was professional growth. Before the war, there were barely 3,000 psychiatrists in the country, because only a small number of medical schools taught psychiatry as a specialty. Anticipating a swiftly rising demand for this expertise, those few schools expanded their existing departments. Other schools began teaching psychiatry for the first time. The VA’s new, deeper commitment to mental health would also substantially increase demand for trained psychologists, particularly clinical psychologists. More importantly, government decisions would fundamentally transform the role of clinical psychologists in American health care. During peacetime, most clinical psychologists would seek employment in hospitals and mental institutions. Due to the rapid expansion of the VA network, there would soon be more jobs for clinical psychologists than individuals qualified to fill them. The VA began offering grants to universities to grow the supply pipeline. But in 1946, the VA shocked the academic establishment by announcing that a PhD, the highest research-based credential, would be required for its clinical positions. The problem was that no institution offered a degree in the subject, let alone the lofty doctorate. Clinical psychology was just a practical subfield of psychology, not a standalone academic discipline. Faced with this high barrier to employment for their graduates, and concerned about losing access to the coming flood of federal funding, many universities raced to create doctoral-level programs as soon as possible. They all asked the same question: what would constitute the appropriate curriculum?

Federal officials understood that it would take time, perhaps years, for university faculties to design a new research-based program of study. In the meantime, the VA asked the American Psychological Association (APA) to propose training standards. Fortunately, the request did not occur in a vacuum. David Shakow, the director of psychological research at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts, created one of the first internship programs in clinical psychology, and he had been thinking about systematizing training for years. He had concluded that a clinical practitioner should not only be able to diagnose disorders but also be equipped to conduct the sort of research that would improve their practice. He also proposed that a clinical psychologist should cultivate a “therapeutic attitude.” That is, they must recognize mental patients as suffering human beings, not merely test subjects to be studied and manipulated. There were radical ideas. Not only was providing psychotherapy a jealously guarded province of physicians with psychiatric training, but the proposed attitudewas also contrary to behaviorism, the dominant theory in psychology. This held that observable behaviors (including outward expression of mental disorders) were simply products of stimulus and response, and that manipulating stimuli and measuring responses were necessary for understanding animal behavior, including in humans. By contrast, Shakow thought clinical psychologists should be trained not only to observe but also to intervene. He had been discussing these ideas with colleagues since before the war, but the APA had not considered his proposals.

While the universities and the APA convened committees to consider the issues, the US government’s power and money were already shifting the paradigm. In 1946, the VA launched its own Clinical Psychology Training Program, offering four years of tuition to two hundred doctoral students at twenty-two top universities. The degree-seekers would also work half-time (for half salaries) in a VA facility. The participants would also receive training in psychotherapy.

Although the on-the-job training model resembled Shakow’s internship program, it actually reflected the military’s recent experience, when the wartime demand for psychiatric expertise outstripped supply. Colonel William Menninger, in private life a member of a famous family of psychiatrists, had become the chief of psychiatric services for the Army Medical Corps. He sought to close the gap by establishing a military psychiatry school. Initially, physicians who had received at least one year of psychiatric training were required to complete a thirty-day course. This did not yield a sufficient number of graduates, however, and a twelve-week course was created for physicians with no prior psychiatric work. This plan proved inadequate, as well. Field commanders began to allow clinical psychologists already on the staff to offer some form of rough and ready psychotherapy, if doing so would get a soldier out of bed and back to the battle. Hundreds of clinical psychologists participated, and many found the therapeutic work to be more stimulating than test administration. Of course, psychiatrists strenuously objected, and received assurances that this was a temporary measure, and were promised that psychologists would act under the supervision of qualified physicians. In light of the underlying personnel crunch, such supervision was minimal or nonexistent. This improvisation remained a sore point for psychiatrists, including Col. Menninger himself. But the general military leadership was apparently satisfied with the results, or else the VA would not now be requiring therapeutic training for its future clinical psychologists.

Tim’s streak of luck continued. Soon after he received his MS at Washington State, he was offered one of the VA fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the nation’s top psychology departments. Marianne secured a teaching job in the speech department. The happy couple packed the car, drove south, and rented a small apartment in the hills overlooking the sparkling San Francisco Bay.

As a member of the first cohort of students to receive the VA-designed training, Tim would bear witness to the rapidtransformation of his chosen profession. Although the details of the doctoral curriculum were still under debate when Tim enrolled in September 1946, for example, the first-year course of study prominently featured a new graduate seminar in psychotherapy. Tim noticed that the innovations were not universally popular. Once he had attended some lectures, perused publications, and of course, traded gossip about the faculty with other graduate students, Tim realized that many of the behaviorists at Berkeley resented the VA’s meddling and disdained the therapeutic drift this was driving. They predicted that this craze for psychotherapy and its false promises of “readjustment” would end with the clinical psychologists becoming no more than “junior psychiatrists.” This derision echoed the complaints of psychiatrists. But neither behaviorists nor psychiatrists seemed to recognize that this newest generation of PhDs would not be discouraged by the prospect of being confused with medical doctors. At this early stage in his career, with his prior experience with intelligence assessment, Tim could fairly be counted among the behaviorists. Even so, he was intrigued by the idea that understanding the deeper roots of behavior – not merely observing stimulus and response – could help troubled people achieve stability, happiness, or whatever else their goals were. He saw that the “conservative animal experimenters” were simply uninterested in wading into any new currents of thought. At last, Tim understood that the Berkeley psychology department – and perhaps the whole profession – was undergoing a generational identity crisis that had less to do with the VA than met the eye.

It was true that some of the changes Tim encountered at UC-Berkeley could not be credited to, or blamed on, the VA’s initiatives. For example, the psychology faculty under their own impetus launched a major effort to study personality. Although this new emphasis was unrelated to the developments in the clinical curriculum, it was similarly influenced by the war. In July 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed his friend William Donovan to a newly created position, Coordinator of Information, and tasked him with strengthening America’s intelligence-gathering capability. That fledgling effort was superseded in June 1942, just six months after Pearl Harbor, when Donovan was named director of another new agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which would be responsible for unconventional warfare, including espionage, sabotage, and “morale operations” (propaganda). As a young infantry officer during World War I, Donovan’s dash and courage in battle had earned him the nickname “Wild Bill.” His leadership of this strange organization reestablished that reputation for a new generation. Formally, OSS reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but factually it was an executive agency. Somewhat isolated from the intraservice rivalries already haunting the half-built Pentagon complex, Donovan was able to develop independent recruitment, training, and operational procedures for his covert warriors. His models were Great Britain’s storied Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and especially the newer “dirty tricks” guerilla outfit that Winston Churchill had created, the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Donovan appointed a UC-Berkeley psychology professor named Robert Tryon to be his Deputy Chief for Planning Staff. This seemed an unlikely choice, because Tryon was a pioneer in animal learning research; basically, he was a “rat guy.” In 1940, he published an influential paper that described an experiment in which rats that took few wrong turns through a maze were designated “maze-bright,” while the rats that took many wrong turns were labeled “maze-dull.” Tryon bred the maze-bright rats with other maze-brights, and maze-dulls with maze-dulls. He found that the ability to run mazes efficiently increased in brights with each successive generation, and decreased in dulls (the selective breeding for maze-running did not lead to a rise in general intelligence, however). What did any of this have to do with covert warfare? The answer was that, like most psychologists of his generation, Tryon was a strong behaviorist. Spies, saboteurs, and commandos would be fighting on a strange kind of battlefield, and would experience pressures than their counterparts in “regular” services would not face. Identifying the men and women who could withstand the unique stress and strain of unconventional operations would be difficult using the conventional assessment tools the military relied upon. Donovan believed Tryon’s knowledge of stimulus and response would help him find the right kind of people for OSS’s specialized mission. Tryon accepted the challenge, and set about creating a standalone assessment program, to be developed by America’s top psychologists, based on their latest behavioral research.

The rocky relationship between psychiatrists and psychologists threatened to be a major hurdle blocking Tryon’s objective. The professional jealousy and territoriality had begun long before Pearl Harbor, indeed, the quarrel dated to the first world war. The animosity remained so strong that in September 1940, the Clinical Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Psychology approved a resolution stating that its members should not be assigned to the Army Medical Corps if the nation was drawn into the latest European war. The AAAP’s clinical psychologists were convinced that Army physicians would continue to deny them the authority to diagnosis mental disorders. Tryon wanted to avoid stoking this hereditary family feud. He knew this was possible, because the British had built an SIS assessment program in which psychologists and psychiatrists had worked collaboratively. Tryon ultimately succeeded in banishing the specter of the old professional disputes by convincing both his colleagues and their past antagonists that OSS had no history to squabble over. They had been given a “fresh sheet of paper.”

Perhaps predictably, Tryon filled many OSS psychologists’ billets by recruiting a half-dozen of his own colleagues. The core included several of his former graduate students, all of whom had earned doctorates at UC-Berkely within the last decade: David Krech, Egerton Ballachey, John Gardner, and James Hamilton. Hamilton took the lead in designing the assessment program. Tryon also reached out to his own mentor, Edward Tolman, who had been teaching at Berkeley since 1918. Tolman had published the first paper on the impact of selective breeding on maze-learning, which Tryon built upon in his own study of bright and dull rats. As the developer of the theory known as “purposive” behaviorism, Tolman studied the effect of positive stimulus on learning. This differed from “radical” behaviorism, which focused on punishment as well as reward (B.F. Skinner was the best-known exponent of this approach). Although Tryon drew heavily on Berkeley faculty, he did not only hire his fellow rat researchers. For example, he recruited Nevitt Sanford, who in 1940 had developed Berkeley’s first course on “Personality.” It was the only example on the schedule until after the war. Sanford had studied personality development and psychoanalysis at Harvard, working under the TAT’s co-creator Henry Murray.

TAT image cards from the 1940s

Tryon eventually hired Murray himself and asked him to take over the assessment operation from Hamilton. Aside from the fact that he was a very prominent scholar, Murray brought relevant experience to the job. In 1938, he had advised the British government’s War Office Selection Board, which sought to employ psychological-psychiatric assessments to identify potential military officers. Murray devised the “situation test,” in which candidates performed practical tasks and activities and were rated by multiple observers on “leadership” and other specific criteria. Ratings were pooled to achieve an overall score. Murray brought the idea to America when he designed Station S, the OSS’s assessment center in Fairfax, Virginia, located on the site of the former Willard Estate. Like the would-be British officers, the potential OSS operatives would be given tasks to complete. Sometimes an assignment was unstructured; sometimes it was relatively detailed. Candidates would sometimes act individually, but they would often perform as a member of a team. They would participate in role-playing with other people, in scenarios that might begin as pure play but turned stressful. Candidates were repeatedly questioned, sometimes on topics apparently unrelated to the work. Because the candidate could not know for certain what examiners were assessing at any given moment, it would be difficult for a person to fool observers, and their true character would therefore be laid bare. Ambiguous interactions used to reveal hidden truths, and a hint of deception, were hallmarks of Murray’s work. His intellectual influence was reinforced when Tryon hired Bryn Mawr College professor Donald MacKinnon to be director of Station S. Like Sanford, MacKinnon had earned his doctorate at Harvard under Murray.

When Tryon, Tolman, and Sanford returned to their faculty positions, they were already discussing the creation of a personality assessment center at Berkeley. Personality was not a new topic of study (it was the P in the MMPI, after all), but it was enjoying a resurgence in the popular mind as well as on campus. In 1947, the university granted seven doctorates in psychology, the most it had ever awarded in a single year, and three of the dissertations were related to personality. If this was the beginning of a movement, Sanford and his single course would not be able to meet the moment. The university administration obviously agreed, and promptly hired Donald MacKinnon. In his first year, MacKinnon created and taught courses in “Psychology of the Unconscious,” “Personality Assessment,” and “Personality in Society and Culture.” In 1949, the university established the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR). With MacKinnon serving as director and Sanford as his associate director, it was undeniable that IPAR traced its theoretical roots to Murray’s psychological clinic at Harvard. Its practical roots clearly grew from the fertile soil of their OSS assessment work.

During his first week in the Berkeley program, Tim sat in an auditorium with his fellow graduate students and listened to a guest speaker from Washington, D.C. The visitor congratulated them on their luck at having been accepted into this top psychology program at a time when the federal government was supporting their discipline like never before. Of course, the graduate students were aware of their good fortune, since the landmark mental health law had passed just a few months earlier. Many of the students were no doubt anticipating receiving their share of the promised grants and jobs. But it was premature for this guest to be speaking in such confident terms. After an initial burst of activity, the government was moving slowly. Although the National Advisory Mental Health Council assembled for the first time on August 15, the Congress had not yet appropriated federal funds for the purpose. A private group, the Greentree Foundation, had stepped in to finance that inaugural meeting. Another year would pass before the first grant was awarded. It went to an Indiana University professor named Winthrop N. Kellogg, for his examination of the “Basic Nature of the Learning Process.” Also, because NIMH would not be created until April 1949, the early grants were awarded by the venerable US Public Health Service (founded in 1798). Finally, even after they earned their new PhDs, clinical psychologists would still compete with MD psychiatrists for federal funding, public esteem, and professional primacy. Because most members of both groups had not experienced the fellow-feeling of the OSS project, the feud would continue.

Tim noticed the status and power disparities as soon as he began his internship at the San Francisco VA clinic. During weekly staff conferences, the Chief Psychiatrist sat at the head of a long, rectangular table, flanked first by lower-ranked MDs, and then by medical students. Next were seated PhD psychologists, accompanied by their clinical interns, including Tim. Social workers, usually women, were clustered at the foot of the table. The case management began at the bottom rung of this long ladder of hierarchy. A social worker would recite a patient’s history. Next, a clinical intern reported the results of diagnostic assessments. A PhD psychologist would proffer their views. Medical students debated a diagnosis. A lower-caste MD would make a preliminary recommendation about the treatment. Finally, the chief would pronounce the correct diagnosis and render judgment: the patient would be treated in the ward, transferred to another institution, or else discharged as either healed or helpless. The pattern would be repeated for the next case. Tim understood that the psychiatrists were trained for emotional detachment and were required by custom to be coldly inhuman. Putting aside their icy demeanor, Tim thought their opinions were neither objective nor scientific. Case after case, the psychiatrists retreated to their Freudian labels. If one MD recognized repressed incestuous desires, another was preoccupied with rampant, latent homosexuality. They were diagnosing by rote, not observation. These were the people in charge of psychotherapy?

Tim often felt isolated in these meetings, not only because he found the discussion both repetitive and disheartening, but also because he was still learning to live with his hearing loss. Once, Tim would recall, he raised his hand to suggest that the case management process might be improved if they invited the patient to participate. He reasoned that shutting a patient out of discussions of their own diagnosis only bred paranoia about doctors, while opening the door would demystify the medical system and reduce fear about treatment. The psychiatrists were scandalized. What an audacious and dangerous notion! No, they responded, doing as Tim suggested would confuse patients. It would only delay their recovery. It might damage their future mental health. Tim was disappointed but not surprised. Like the old guard in the psychology department, they would not even entertain new ideas. Tim retreated to his usual stronghold against the stodgy status quo: sarcasm. He began to enliven the dull proceedings with smart-assed remarks about the doctors, the patients, and himself and his fellow students. The psychiatrists would laugh with the others, but no doubt concluded that this was classic passive-aggressive behavior.

In his own way, Tim was also combatting conservatives off campus. Around the time he enrolled at Washington State, he became active in the American Veterans Committee (AVC), which had been formed as the liberal, internationalist alternative to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. In 1945, AVC was the only veterans’ group to play an official role at the San Francisco Conference that laid the intellectual foundation for the United Nations. Under its “Citizens First, Veterans Second” motto, AVC offered membership to women and non-whites, and defended civil liberties in the era of anti-communist witch hunts. Its lawyers submitted amici curiae briefs calling for an end to Jim Crow in the landmark anti-segregation cases Sweatt v. Painter and Brown v. Board of Education. AVC was the first political group to which Tim had ever devoted significant time or energy, and may even have given him his first close personal encounters with both Blacks and leftists. In July 1946, Tim co-wrote an article on behalf of the organization with an assistant professor of sociology at Washington State named Tom Kennedy. In “Progress Toward Solving the Problem of Race Relations,” the authors perhaps too optimistically declared that “in every city in the nation signs of progress in race relations are seen.” They followed this a year later with a piece purporting to analyze the “basic philosophies of the Communist Party as related to the Negro in the United States.” Aside from the papers he wrote with Ramsdell, these were Tim’s first published works since he had been editor of his high school newspaper. At that time, he had been recognized as a budding talent. He rediscovered that he enjoyed contributing his ideas in writing.

Tim was an active enough member that he was chosen to attend AVC’s first two national conventions as a leader of the California delegation. Unfortunately, the group was already splitting into factions. As Tim would describe this development, it was a battle between committed left-wingers and red-hunters. He was neither, and quit AVC after the second convention. It was probably for the best. At the end of his year at Berkeley, Tim was going through the motions. It was the return of his pattern from Alabama, West Point, Holy Cross, even Classical High School in Springfield: after early excitement and a promising beginning, he grew bored and disillusioned by the routine, the ritual, the rote. He was easily distracted by people, popularity, and lately politics. Anything outside the classroom. His rapid progress through the Washington State program had been an anomaly, not a new beginning. Tim knew he had to put the distractions behind him and focus on completing his doctorate.

Tim was now a father. Marianne gave birth to their daughter, Susan, on September 25, 1947. A son, John Busch Leary, followed on October 19, 1949. This was three days before Tim’s twenty-ninth birthday. The sooner he earned his PhD, the sooner he could claim one of those lucrative jobs the federal government kept promising.

After all, Tim only had to complete his coursework, conduct his research, and write a dissertation. Then defend that thesis … in front of a faculty committee he had not yet identified. A committee that had to approve his topic before he could begin. He was going in circles. That was the hitch: he needed to propose a project that would advance the field. He might find a way to improve the diagnostic tools. There could always be better questions, more consistent coding of responses, and more precise guidance for interpretation. Taking on a pen-and-paper project like that was not very interesting – it would be very similar to his master’s thesis – but plenty of his fellow graduate students would be taking this approach. That was perfectly justifiable, as incremental progress was how these tools had advanced step by step, year by year. But how boring. Wasn’t there something more ambitious and more meaningful? The foundations of clinical psychology were shifting under his feet. He was being trained to have a “therapeutic attitude.” That was new, even controversial. Tim was thinking in terms of patients, not subjects. People were complex; despite what behaviorists claimed, human beings were not rats on a larger scale. Life was chaotic; the world was not a maze on a larger scale. Would any orthodox research project lead to any insights that would prepare practitioners to help real people? Tim had his doubts. Would incremental improvements to conventional assessments really help those people? More doubts. Yes, indeed: he was going around in circles.

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One day in 1947, Tim was rummaging among the stacks in the physics library, still avoiding research, when he came across a drawing and description of a cyclotron. The machine had been invented at Berkeley fifteen years earlier by Professor Ernest O. Lawrence. Powerful magnets and high-energy electric fields accelerated protons and other charged particles to tremendous speeds. The action broke the bonds that held the particles together, generated isotopes, and revealed deep characteristics that were otherwise invisible. This was the tool physicists had been waiting for since Newton’s deterministic universe were challenged by Einstein’s relativity theory, and it had earned Lawrence the Nobel Prize in 1939. Finally, physicists could measure how well calculated predicted behavior matched observed data. Sitting there, Tim wondered if the same idea could be applied to personality. What would be revealed if human “particles” were accelerated to the point that conscious and unconscious social constraints dissolved? What deep patterns would Tim discover if he assigned certain values to spoken words, facial expressions, and physical gestures, and then recorded the “collisions”? Could he predict an expected reaction and analyze how well observed behaviors matched his calculations? He thought that a group therapy session might generate the necessary intensity. This could really be something new: nuclear psychology. How far he could push the analogy? He paused. Was this just behaviorism’s stimulus-and-response? No, not if he got the research design right.

What if he called it a “psychlotron”?

Having finally conceived a project that interested him, Tim next had to find people who would be willing to supervise his research. Most faculty he spoke to were not impressed with his gimmicky analogizing from physics. The rat guys were even less excited than usual by personality assessment. However, one key faculty member was intrigued by Tim’s idea. Jean Walker Macfarlane was a pioneer in the study of personality, and researched delinquency in females. She earned her doctorate in psychology 1922, becoming only the second person to do so at UC-Berkeley. She soon founded the Institute of Child Welfare (later renamed the Institute of Human Development), and began a longitudinal study of 250 newborns, which she would follow from birth to age 18. Macfarlane was made a professor in 1929. In 1936, she introduced a course in “Clinical Techniques,” and eventually became the head of the clinical psychology program. Because many members of the department had not yet returned from their wartime assignments, Macfarlane was the person most responsible for managing the rapid expansion of UC-Berkeley’s new curriculum. Tim pronounced her “the only woman on the scene with any political power.”

Hubert “Hugh” Coffey agreed to be Tim’s second faculty advisor. During the war, he had served as an officer in the naval reserve, then worked for a year with the Federal Security Agency, which had responsibility for health, labor, and welfare regulations. He was hired in 1946, specifically to strengthen the clinical program in preparation for the coming surge of enrollment. In 1947, the same year MacKinnon introduced his personality courses, Coffey offered the first class in “Group Dynamics,” which he taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. His students learned to employ role playing, psychodrama, and various thera­peutic techniques. He added “Advanced Group Dynamics and Group Therapy” to the curriculum the next year.

Because clinical research on the psychology of group processes was in its infancy, Tim could have taken his “psychlotron” idea in many directions. Coffey pointed him to Harry Stack Sullivan’s personality theory, specifically his work between the wars. In 1938, Sullivan had written that psychiatrists should focus less on an individual in isolation and consider instead the behavior of people acting and reacting with one another, because “personality is made manifest in interpersonal situations, and not otherwise.” Coffey had himself been introduced to these ideas by one of the OSS alumnae, David Krech, who returned to Berkeley in 1947. Tim looked into Sullivan’s work and agreed that the interpersonal framework seemed to be a good fit for his plan for a group therapy “psychlotron.” It was intriguing that Sullivan had indulged in a similar analogy by imagining the existence of an “interpersonal force field.”

Recognizing that this would be a large project, Tim invited two of his fellow graduate students, Mervin Freedman and Abel Ossorio, to collaborate on the research. Both were veterans taking advantage of the VA training. Ossorio had been born in Mexico, but his family had moved to Los Angeles when he was a child. Freedman, a native of New York City, had been awarded the Bronze Star during the war. Because doctoral dissertations were expected to be individual exercises in original scholarship, their plan to make this a group project ran against academic customs. Tim argued that in the postwar age of “Big Science,” no one objected when several graduate students in physics shared data generated by Berkeley’s nuclear reactor (or cyclotron). Why would a psychlotron be different? The three would build the machine together, but write separate dissertations, and defend their work on their own. Macfarlane and Coffey supported the collaboration, however, and that seemed to settle the issue. Other skeptical faculty predicted that no respectable clinical site would allow three graduate students to lead and even to record group therapy sessions. No MD would agree to supervise them. Tim realized despite himself that the skeptics had a point. He and his partners would have to conduct their experiments outside of the clinic system. Fortunately, they found J. Raymond Cope PhD, the minister of Berkeley’s Unitarian Universalist Church. Dr. Cope estimated that he devoted approximately thirty hours per week to “personal counseling” and enthusiastically agreed to ask members of his congregation to volunteer for their group therapy experiment.

The psychlotron came together surprisingly quickly. Tim, Freedman, and Ossorio worked with fourteen therapy groups of between six and eight members. They chose to focus on the third group, seven male college students between 20 and 30 years old who reported “unsatisfactory” social relationships and “disturbing” personal problems. The trio of graduate students administered the objective MMPI and three projective assessments, the Stein sentence completion test, the Rorschach, and ten pictures from the TAT deck. Four of the seven group members provided them with a pre-therapy autobiographical sketch. The investigators each wrote a case summary of volunteers based on this pre-therapy data. They ran sessions for two-hours twice a week for twelve weeks. The session leader established a permissive and non-threatening climate. Although no one was pressured to disclose, they were prompted with questions about individual and shared problems, concerns, fears, successes, and failures. Tim and his two collaborators observed each session, recorded them, and took notes. Sociometric questionnaires were collected from each participant (including the therapist) at the end of the eighth, sixteenth, and twenty-fourth sessions. To gauge changes in personality after the final session, the researchers re-administered their objective and projective assessments. Finally, they mailed a questionnaire six months after the end of the group sessions.

The transcripts of group discussions and other interviews proved to be their most significant source of data. The trio had purchased a machine that recorded onto a magnetized steel wire. This technology that had been invented before the turn of the century (the first commercial recorder of this type had been manufactured in 1903) and it was still the most convenient method for personal recording. The graduate students used their fellowship stipends to pay the departmental clerical staff to transcribe the hundreds of hours of spoken prompts, answers, arguments, and discussions. Although the wire on the spools occasionally tangled or snapped, the transcribers were able to recover all verbalizations from every group session. The resulting transcript was 600 typed pages.

The pages were full of clues about the interpersonal give-and-take of the members. One participant would make a statement, and another would agree. Another might not. A third might challenge members to consider an alternative view. Interaction and reaction. The investigators categorized statements according to the observable effect of either denigrating or elevating another person. They coded the interactions in terms of spatial coordinates. For example, comments were either up (positive or attractive) or down (negative or repulsive) in relation to the preceding interactions. Taking a cue from nuclear physicists, who observed the traced path of an electron in a cloud chamber, the investigators considered a statement as an interpersonal particle with a behavior trail. After the first few sessions, Tim and his collaborators were confident that they could plot these interactions along x and y axes on a grid.

Once Tim, Freedman, and Ossorio were satisfied with their compass points, they developed sample questionnaires and interpretive guides that would allow future diagnosticians, therapists, and even patients to describe behavior in a calibrated language similar to that used by a radar operator tracking the movements of ships and aircraft. A recorded exchange in a group session could be objectively reported as follows: “Patient X moved 3 points north (i.e., toward domination) in response to the therapist’s southeast approach.” Although this would likely never be credited with the level of accuracy and precision of the instruments chemists and physicists used in their laboratories, the graduate students were convinced they had designed a useful new practical tool for psychologists. The fact that human mental states and experiences were subjective is precisely what distinguished social sciences from physical sciences. Now, elements of interpersonal behavior, as well as changes in behavior over the course of therapy, could be described with a few parameters – spatial relationships and intensity – and could be measured as objectively and as accurately as particle behavior in the physics lab. Their collective conclusion was that Tim’s psychlotron did indeed validate Sullivan’s ideas. Interpersonal forces were of high importance to the project of understanding human behavior.

The three doctoral candidates adopted “Social Dimensions of Personality” as their common framework (and the common main title) as they completed their individual dissertations. In the first contribution, “Social Dimensions of Personality: Concepts and Quantification Methods,” Merv Freedman developed a method for measuring and coding interpersonal activities in therapy. In “Social Dimensions of Personality: Individual Structure and Process,” Abel Ossorio used Freedman’s variables to test Sullivan’s hypotheses about changes that can occur in a person’s behavior during therapy. Tim wrapped up the project with “Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Structure and Process,” a work of approximately 90 pages (counting charts, figures, tables, acknowledgments, and bibliography). Taken together, these interconnected dissertations “operationalized” Sullivan’s ideas, that is, turned theories into tools.

Tim defended his dissertation in September 1950. He claimed that his research had satisfied two general aims: first, “to chart the changes in the interpersonal behavior of seven patients in 24 sessions of group therapy,” and second, “to evaluate the effects of the leader’s role and interpretive techniques on therapeutic success.” Simultaneously, he claimed that the co-investigators (he credited Freedman’s and Ossorio’s contributions throughout) had successfully in their aim of developing a practical and objective “methodology for measuring interpersonal activity in terms of operationally defined mechanisms.” Coffey chaired the examination committee, and since he and Macfarlane had been overseeing the study from the start, there was little chance that they would reject it now. But Tim’s work also satisfied the committee’s third member, Dorothy Nyswander, a behavioral scientist who had helped found UC-Berkeley’s School of Public Health. In November, a few weeks after his thirtieth birthday, Tim was awarded the PhD in Clinical Psychology.

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Rolfe LaForge, “The Early Development of the Interpersonal System of Personality (ISP).” Multivariate Behavioral Research (39:2, 2004), pp. 359-378.

David C. McClelland, “Methods of Measuring Human Motivation,” in John W. Atkinson, ed., Motives in Fantasy, Action and Society (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1958).

Henry A. Murray, and Workers at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, Explorations in Personality, A Clinical And Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 1938).

National Mental Health Act of 1946 (P.L. 79-487); http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/history.cfm; also: http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/organization/NIMH.htm#history.

OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men: Selection of Personnel for the Office of Strategic Services, (New York: NY Rinehart and Co., 1948), pp. 4-5.

Christopher Peterson and Nansook Park, “The Enduring Value of the Boulder Model: ‘Upon This Rock We Will Build’.” Journal of Clinical Psychology 61(9) (September 2005); pp. 1147-1150.

Wade Pickren, “Tension and Opportunity in Post-World War II American Psychology.” History of Psychology 10: 3 (August 2007); pp. 279-299.

Wade E. Pickren and Stanley F. Schneider (eds.), Psychology and the National Institute of Mental Health (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2005).

Hans Pols, “War Neurosis, Adjustment Problems in Veterans, and an Ill Nation: The Disciplinary Project of American Psychiatry during and after World War II.” Osiris 22:1 (2007), pp. 72-92.

Hans Pols and Stephanie Oak, “War & Military Mental Health: the U.S. Psychiatric Response in the 20th Century.” American Journal of Public Health 97:12 (December 2007), pp. 2132-2142.

William C. Menninger, “Psychiatric Experience in the War, 1941-1946.” American Journal of Psychiatry (March 1947); pp. 577-586.

W. C. Menninger, Psychiatry in a Troubled World: Yesterday’s War and Today’s Challenge (New York NY: MacMillan Co., 1948).

(This story broke on April 1, but I saved it so you would not think I was Fooling.)

Since at least the early 20th Century, medical researchers as well as spiritual seekers have haunted the rain forests and the high plains to hunt the powerful psychoactive ingredients produced in such abundance in the roots, leaves, and fruits of the natural world. Interest in both the therapeutic and spiritual potential of these substances has revived with the recent Psychedelic Renaissance. And there is more than health and happiness on the line. There are heaps of money being spent, with hopes of much more to be made. Yet, the world has changed a lot since the traffic on various “Hippy Trails” around the globe peaked in the 1970s. Habitats and ecosystems have shrunk as populations have swelled and climates have changed. Any large-scale harvesting of plants, fungi, and even animals that naturally produce these interesting compounds will pose ethical challenges. Moreover, although some psychedelics can be synthesized, those processes often risk creating unwanted byproducts.

In the first place: Why do these substances exist in Nature?

Among the obvious truths in the history and lore of psychoactive substances is that so many of the most powerful occur naturally. Yet, there are deep riddles, mysteries, and conundrums here. For instance, why would such strange compounds ever evolve in any organism? Also: when and how did humans discover the curious effects of certain plants and fungus? Think about two of the best-known of the “classic” psychedelics to be synthesized, mescaline and psilocybin. The first is derived from a particular cactus, and the second from a species of mushroom. Neither is remotely tasty or appetizing in its natural state, yet someone in the remote past collected and ate them, survived the strange experience that followed, and chose to retain and pass along the knowledge. The mysteries multiply when one realizes that the peyote cactus normally has to be cooked before ingestion (and even then will often upset the stomach), while cooking psilocybe mushrooms will destroy the “magical” effect.

Why and how did human communities begin to gather, cultivate, and experiment with potions and practices that would reveal the worlds beyond their own world? Consider cohoba, a snuff that contains a psychedelic compound known as bufotenin. Bufotenin is found in the seeds of the Anadenanthera, a South American tree within the legume family. Although the seeds can be swallowed, they are more commonly prepared to be smoked or consumed via “intranasal insufflation” (that is, someone blows the snuff into someone else’s nose, through a straw). Who figured that out?

Perhaps the best example of human ingenuity is found in the drinking of ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic tea that has long been used in traditional Amazonian ceremonies. A key ingredient comes from Psychotria viridis, also known as chacruna, a perennial flowering shrub in the coffee family.

This plant is a natural source of the powerful compound modern science knows as DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine). However, steeping the leaves or berries like coffee will not work, because in this natural form, the DMT not orally active. Some clever shaman discovered that brewing chacruna leaves with the stems of the creeping vine Banisteriopsis caapi unlocks the “spirit” power of the DMT.

Which brings us to the riddle of the toad and the tobacco.

In addition to the South American tree, bufotenin is found in various mushrooms. Yet it is most famously secreted by the parotoid glands on the cheeks, neck, and shoulders of Incilius alvarius, Colorado River toad. Also known as the Sonoran Desert toad, this large amphibian is indigenous to northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States. The species was previously called Bufo alvarius, for the Bufotoxins it produces.

The name bufotenin is derived from this class of toxins. We can at least understand the compound’s evolutionary purpose: aside from causing dramatic, often fearsome hallucinations, Bufotenin is a vasoconstrictor, showing intense side effects — high blood pressure, chest tightness, and rapid heart rate — that can be life threatening. The compound can kill a dog unlucky enough to chomp down on a toad in the wild.

That is not the end of the mystery, because bufotenin is not this animal’s only secret weapon. This toad is unique within its genus in that its metabolism creates an enzyme which converts bufotenin into 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), which is structurally related to DMT but is more powerful. (The effect of the enzyme is analogous to the necessary addition of the vine to the ayahuasca.) Contrary to urban (or desert) myths, one does not “lick” the toad to get high. Instead, the milky secretion (known “toad venom”) is harvested by scraping the toad. When dried and smoked, it causes intense hallucinations and a profound, short-lived, psychoactive experience. It appears that once upon a time, the toad was slaughtered, its flesh was smoked, and the toad-jerky was then eaten. Someone learned to milk the toad’s venom, instead. Now it is possible to have one’s toad and keep on tripping, too.

The conundrum of scalability and sustainability

The potential market in these compounds is enormous. A wide variety of psychoactive substances found in nature show potential for treating depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction. The growing interest in personal transformation (and business advantage) promised by a psychedelic encounter add to the urgency. This gives rise to a practical challenge: natural resources are limited. If these substances are ever widely offered, whether for medical, spiritual, professional, or recreational use, can they be produced at profitable scale without exploiting ecosystems or depleting vulnerable species?

On April 1, in the journal Science Advances, a team of more than a dozen researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel published the results of their preliminary effort to transform an abundant plant species into a bio-factory for manufacturing the natural psychedelics. In fact, they produced five such compounds — psilocybin and its active metabolized form psilocin, DMT, bufotinen, and 5-MeO-DMT — in the leaves of a single plant, the native or wild tobacco of Australia, Nicotiana benthamiana.

In plant biology, this particular strain of tobacco is used much like the proverbial lab rats in psychology and fruit flies in genetics. “Benthi” grows fast, is low maintenance, and readily accept foreign DNA. Because the species also naturally produces a high level of tryptophan, which is a key starting material for the target compounds, Benthi was especially useful for the Weizmann group. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid which allows the human body to produce serotonin, melatonin, and niacin. The five psychedelics in the study belong to a chemical family called indolethylamines, which originate from tryptophan-derived precursors.

The researchers inserted the necessary genetic material into the leaves of the Benthi (not to worry: they engineered the plants so that they would not pass on the modified genes). The experimental plant successfully produced the targeted substances, but in smaller concentrations than hoped, presumably because the five gene packages were competing for the same biological resources. To correct this issue, the team turned to AlphaFold3, an advanced AI tool capable of predicting the three-dimensional shapes of proteins. The AI assistant suggested inserting different enzymes. Yields improved.

The authors of this paper know that much more work remains before their technique could produce pharmaceutical-quality psychedelics. The challenges include not only increasing the yields, but also efficiently processing plants to extract the compounds. Even so, the achievement could be laying the groundwork for sustainable and scalable production of promising psychedelic compounds.

One final point: no toads were kissed or killed in the course of this research.

Sources:

Paula Berman, Janka Höfer, Herschel Mehlman, Efrat Almekias-Siegl, Olga Khersonsky, Younghui Dong, Uwe Heinig, Liron Sulimani, Let Kho Hao, Shahar Cohen, Yoav Peleg, Sagit Meir, Ilana Rogachev, David Meiri, Sarel J. Fleishman, and Asaph Aharoni, “Complete biosynthesis of psychedelic tryptamines from three kingdoms in plants.” Science Advances (12:14; April 1, 2026).

Sara Hashemi, “Scientists Engineered Tobacco Plants to Produce Five Mind-Altering Psychedelic Compounds.”Smithsonian Magazine (April 7, 2026). Online: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-engineered-to…ts-to-produce-five-mind-altering-psychedelic-compounds-180988488/.

Andrei Ionescu, “Scientists genetically engineer tobacco plants that produce five different psychedelic drugs.” Earth.com(April 7, 2026). Online: https://www.earth.com/news/scientists-genetically-engineer-tobacco-plants-that-produce-five-different-psychedelic-drugs/.

Rachel Nuwer, “Consciousness Expansion Puts a Species at Risk.” The New York Times (July 10, 2025), p. D3. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/climate/psychedelic-sonoran-desert-toad.html.

Tudor Tarita, “Scientists Engineered a Tobacco Relative to Produce Five Psychedelics at Once.” ZME Science.com (April 7, 2026). Online: https://www.zmescience.com/science/scientists-engineered-a-tobacco-relative-to-produce-five-psychedelics-at-once/.

Andrew T. Weil and Wade Davis, “Bufo alvarius: a potent hallucinogen of animal origin.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology(41; 1994), pp. 1-8.

Chapter One: “A person of fine sensibilities”

Chapter Two: A Veteran and Scholar

Chapter Three: A Middle-Class Liberal Intellectual Robot

Chapter Four: “I Cannot Live Without Your Love”

Timothy Francis Leary Jr. was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 22, 1920. This was nine months into America’s thirteen-year experiment with national alcohol prohibition, a fact that would later astonish Tim, since he grew up under the shadow of his father’s alcoholism.

Timothy Senior’s father was Dennis Leary, a watchmaker and jewelry store owner in Springfield. Dennis had named him after his brother, who was a prominent physician in Boston. After leading the US Army’s Vaccine Corps in Puerto Rico and Cuba, Dr. Timothy Francis Leary became Professor and Chair of Pathology and Bacteriology at the Tufts College Medical School. He was an active researcher and also served as the longtime Medical Examiner for Suffolk County. To avoid confusion with Uncle Tim, the boy was known as “Tote.” Tote eventually followed his uncle to Tufts, applying to the Dental College. He earned certification after three years of undergraduate study, and completed professional training in Heidelberg, Germany. Dennis then helped his son establish a practice in Springfield.

When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Tote was commissioned as a first lieutenant and joined the Army’s Dental Corps. While on leave visiting his family, Lt. Leary was introduced to May and Abigail Ferris, sisters from nearby Indian Orchard. Both the Leary and the Ferris families were Irish and Roman Catholic, but where the former was tied to medicine, the latter was well connected to the Church. Abigail and May’s favorite uncle, Father Michael Kavanaugh, had studied at the Pontifical Vatican Seminary in Rome, and was a rising star in the archdiocese. Tote briefly courted the older sister May, but his affections soon shifted to Abigail (still three years older than Tote). Uncle Michael presided over their marriage on January 7, 1918. May was initially upset at being passed over, but was now more distressed at the prospect of losing her sister’s constant companionship. She accompanied the newlyweds on their honeymoon in Niagara Falls.

Tote was promoted to captain and assigned to the staff at the US Military Academy at West Point. The fighting ended a few months later with the armistice. The Learys began to enjoy a social life marked by dinner parties and dances at the officer’s club. In June 1919, Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, an academy graduate who had ranked first in his class in 1903 (both in terms of grades earned and merits awarded), was named superintendent. At 39-years-old, he was the Point’s youngest leader in a century, and he was intent on modernizing the hidebound institution. He ordered military science instructors to teach lessons learned in the recently concluded world war, and not focus so much energy on the campaigns of the American Civil War. But MacArthur also supported augmenting the school’s traditional core – engineering – with liberal arts and humanities. He hired additional civilian professors to teach those courses. He permitted cadets to take more leave and receive more mail. Because he had vivid memories of his own experiences at the turn of the century, he sought to end the traditional brutal hazing of new cadets by upperclassmen. Finally, he formalized the honor code, which had been customary and therefore subject to caprice. He placed responsibility for the code’s administration on the cadets themselves. These “radical” changes were imposed over the objections of conservative faculty. The superintendent faced criticism from influential alumnae, as well. But Tote became a lifelong admirer. Captain Leary’s commission expired in 1922, the same year General MacArthur’s term at the Academy ended. Tote left the Army behind, but continued to follow the career of the charismatic and controversial MacArthur as he rose in rank, responsibility, and fame. He sent the General his respectful birthday wishes every year.

Prohibiting alcohol had not extinguished demand at West Point, and the social scene hardly slackened even under MacArthur’s reforming hand. Various officers tried their hand at making bathtub gin when they could not obtain bootlegged booze. Tote’s tendency to overindulge at the officer’s club dances had already alarmed Abigail, and to her dismay he continued to drink when he returned to civilian life and re-opened his office in Springfield. Over the next decade, young Tim Jr. and his mother would spend many evenings listening to the drunken Tote recite lines from his favorite poets or else rave at imagined injustices and mistreatment. Those were the nights when he came home to his family rather than spending the night with a woman he met at a local speakeasy. On some nights, instead of being “treated” to Shakespeare’s sonnets, Tim and Abigail would suffer verbal abuse, which sometimes threatened to turn physical. Once, Tim responded by pushing his father down a flight of stairs. He scurried to the roof to escape Tote’s wrath.

Tim could not help but notice the difference between the two sides of his heritage: the pious, conservative, stable Ferris family on one hand, and the less religious but usually more fun and often more chaotic Learys on the other. As an only child, which was rare in the extended family, Tim seemed more suited to the Ferris clan. By the age of ten, he was reading up to ten books a week. He haunted the public library, and even dared to rummage the shelves in his grandfather Dennis’ personal study, which secretly pleased the old man, since none of his children or other grandchildren seemed to care about knowledge. Like many shy children, Tim fantasized about being a hero in the adventure tales he read. He was fascinated with Indians, and then became obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. He had few close friends apart from cousins spread around the county. When Tim played outside, hunting rabbits in the woods with a BB gun, fishing from the banks of a stream, or constructing a makeshift raft to emulate Huck Finn, he was usually alone. He became less solitary as he grew into early adolescence. He attended summer camp in the Berkshire Mountains northeast of Springfield. He and the other boys swam, played ballgames, and learned outdoor skills like orienteering and building a fire. They woke up when a cannon fired at dawn and went to sleep when a bugle played Taps at dusk. Tote hoped that his bookish only son would grow up to be a soldier, and approved of this regimen. During the rest of the year, however, Tim attended parochial school. He became an altar boy, and Abigail dared to dream that he would become a priest.

Tote’s addiction to the bottle rendered him unreliable and doomed his practice. Dennis paid his son’s debts, just to keep the dental office open, but in vain. He had similarly bailed out his other children over the years. When the patriarch and patron passed away at the age of ninety-two in December 1933, his children anticipated a substantial inheritance. But the crash of 1929, the ongoing Depression, and his lifelong largesse toward his children had depleted Dennis’s capital. There were still bequests, even after the taxes and legal fees, but the reduced sums distributed were disappointing. The Leary siblings squabbled over their proper shares. The older sister Sara inherited the home in which Tote and his family had been living rent-free for years. A dissolute and discontented Tote abandoned Abigail and Tim. Sara took compassion on Abigail and signed the house over to her. May Ferris, still unmarried, now moved in with her sister and nephew.

Six months after his father left town, Tim entered Springfield Central High School as a freshman. It was a public school with a reputation for academic excellence. The school’s strong record of placing top graduates in the Ivy League was based largely on the personal contacts its Principal William Hill had cultivated among the admissions officers at those prestigious institutions. Two years after Tim arrived, in 1936, the city reorganized the school district and Central became Classical, a name that seemed to confirm its privileged status. Tim, now in his junior year, had also been transformed. The solitary, shy child had blossomed into an outgoing young man who had plenty of friends and inspired the admiration of his peers. He played intramural baseball and basketball. He joined the forensic society, the glee club, the riding club, and the golf team. He served as lieutenant on the traffic squad, class dues collector, member of the assembly committee, and ultimately president of the student senate. Tim the reader now showed some talent as a writer. He was sports editor of the student newspaper, The Recorder. The June 4, 1937, edition announced that he had been named editor-in-chief for his senior year. The unnamed author noted that, in addition to being an able sports reporter, Tim had contributed some of the “best editorials” of the past year and was clearly destined to become a small-town editor. Among numerous appearances in Classical’s yearbook, The Blue and White, Tim was photographed on the dance floor partnered with an attractive young woman listed as the school’s “best dancer.” Tim himself is identified as the “cutest boy” in the class of 1938.

As Tim entered his senior year, it was clear that he had inherited his father’s admiration for the military rather than his mother’s enthusiasm for religion. In addition to suggesting that Tim was likely destined for a life in journalism, the Recorder noted that he hoped to go to West Point. It was inside information, apparently leaked to the Recorder. Tim had confided to his best friend, Bill Scanlon, that he intended to attend the academy if he could get the necessary grades and pass his college boards. The signs were not encouraging, however. Tim was obviously bright. He had measured 127 on the Terman intelligence scale, which meant that at age 17, he exhibited a mental age closer to 22. Yet, it was apparent that Tim had imbibed his father’s free spirit as well as his martial interests. He became obsessed with sex and had an active dating life. He missed more classes than any other student during his senior year. He earned As in history and physical education, but received Cs or even Ds in Latin, French, and math. This was no foundation for an appointment to West Point. Tim might make it into an Ivy, even with this record, if he had Hill’s blessing. It was unlikely to be forthcoming. He had repeatedly annoyed the principal by playing pranks at school. He had reveled in undermining Hill on the editorial pages of The Recorder. The Principal would not reward a rebel with a recommendation to Harvard or any other top school. Ultimately, it probably made no difference. Tim graduated 165th out of his class of 305.

Abigail was disappointed in her son’s poor performance, but it did not daunt her ambition for him. Less than sixty miles from Springfield, in Worcester, stood the College of the Holy Cross, a private, Jesuit-led liberal arts institution. Established in 1843, it was the oldest Catholic college in New England. She reached out to Ferris-family friends and allies, especially Uncle Michael, who before studying in Rome for the priesthood had graduated first in his class at Holy Cross. It worked. In September 1938, Tim took up the first-year core curriculum, which included Greek, Latin, Rhetoric, and Religion. Worse, students were required to attend mass daily at 7 AM. Tim continued to demonstrate that his temperament (and taste) was closer to Tote’s than Abigail’s. He drank and chased women. One night while walking the streets of Worcester with Holy Cross friends, Tim threw a brick through a liquor store window and stole several bottles of beer for them to drink back at the dorm. Despite such episodes, Tim really did begin to apply himself to his studies, mostly because he did not intend to remain at Holy Cross. He still hoped that he could eventually transfer to West Point, or maybe the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Finally recognizing her son’s reckless disregard of propriety, Abigail accepted that the military might be his best career option after all. Drill masters would teach him self-discipline where she and the Jesuits had failed. Once again, she used her influence with her uncle. He contacted one of his closest friends, the former Massachusetts Governor and current US Senator David Walsh. They had been Holy Cross classmates. Senator Walsh agreed to support an appointment to a military academy if Tim met the qualifications. Tim studied, scored well on the application exams, and was accepted at both West Point and Annapolis.

When Tim arrived at West Point in June 1940, he was starting over. His Holy Cross coursework would not transfer to the Academy, and he was on the same footing as the rest of the first-year cadets. He was 19 years old, nearly two years older than most of his class of 1944.

Tim found an institution very much steeped in tradition but subtly different from the place Tote had stepped onto two decades earlier. Some of this was due to MacArthur (who retired from active service in 1937, but continued in his last post as a military advisor to the Philippines). His emphasis on academics in addition to military sciences had set the stage for West Point’s first accreditation in 1925. In 1933, the Academy began conferring Bachelor of Science degrees on its graduates along with commissions. Yet, other things were all too recognizable. Newly arrived students were not called “freshmen.” Officially, they were fourth-class cadets; colloquially, they would be known as “plebes.” And MacArthur had not succeeded in eliminating hazing. Tim was older than some of the upperclassmen too, but that fact would not protect him from their daily harassment during his summer in the “Beast Barracks,” the grueling six weeks of basic training all new cadets completed before they started their first academic term. Plebes promptly rose from and properly made their beds at 5:20 AM. They spent long days marching on and running around the post (sometimes with and sometimes without packs), climbing up and rappelling down walls and cliffs, and performing dozens of push-ups at a time at the shouted command of the supervising cadets. In addition to hard physical exercise, the plebes learned basic soldiering skills, such as how to disassemble, clean, and reassemble their small arms and rifles, and how to fire them accurately. They spent countless hours polishing boots, buttons, belts, and buckles until they gleamed. Plebes also studied the history, folklore, and regulations of West Point, and would recite this information on demand, without errors.

Upper-class cadets would find fault (or pretend to find it) with everything they did, which inevitably led to more shouted abuse, and usually more push-ups. By tradition, the plebe would respond to an upperclassman in one of only four ways: “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” “Sir, I do not understand,” or (after being called out for falling short) “No excuse, sir.”

Defenders of these traditions argued that, despite the curricular innovations by MacArthur or his successors, West Point’s fundamental purpose had not changed; to this group, the Academy existed to develop leaders. The constant mental stress and physical strain, and specifically the experiences of subordination, discipline, and punishment, were all necessary to prepare cadets for their future roles as young infantry officers responsible for leading men into battle. They would be called upon both to follow a superior officer’s orders instantly without question, and to expect strict obedience in turn from the men they led. Frankly, the rigors of “Beast Barracks” had long acted as a proving ground for commitment. Each year, at least a few of the incoming cadets decided during the training that after all, they did not really belong at West Point.

Tim disliked the hazing but survived the gauntlet. Even so, there were already troubling signs that he was not destined for success as an officer. He received a high number of demerits, some for poor academic performance, but many more for his lack of attention to regulations and the customs of the corps of cadets. He was cited for appearing in an improperly pressed tunic or unbuttoned uniform, for wearing un-shined shoes, and for allowing dust to accumulate on the bookshelves in his room. Tim excelled in sharpshooting with the M-1 rifle, but earned demerits for smudged sights. The upperclassmen were also troubled by the fact that he failed to report infractions by other cadets he was assigned to supervise. One accounting of demerits handed out during this first term placed him 535th out of the 546 cadets in the class of 1944. This was embarrassing, but no threat to Tim’s future in the Army. He soon faced genuine trouble.

On Saturday, November 30, 1940, the rival Army and Navy football teams met in Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium for their annual grudge match. After the Army lost to the midshipmen, 14-0, hundreds of disappointed cadets immediately filed from the stadium and boarded buses that soon delivered them to the railway station. Somewhere between leaving the grandstands and embarking on his train, Tim bought two pint-bottles of whiskey. He was not the only cadet to take the opportunity away from the Academy to stock up. During the journey back to West Point, upperclassmen convened in a lavatory and passed around their own liquor. Off the post, especially on a special occasion like the Army-Navy weekend, discipline and class divisions were slightly relaxed. After they had emptied their own bottles, some seniors invited Tim to bring his whiskey and join them. He had a wonderful time with these great guys. But when a classmate tried to shake him awake before sunrise on Sunday morning, Tim mumbled that he was “dying and would never be able to make reveille again in his whole life.” He rolled over and went back to sleep. Tim missed morning muster and failed to report to the Chapel for compulsory services. When he finally recovered from his hangover, just barely, at least enough to face his company commander without falling over, Tim readily admitted that he had been invited to a party on the train and had consumed liquor with upperclassmen. Yes, sir, he agreed with his CC that his judgment and conduct in this matter failed to meet the high standards of the corps of cadets.

Tim fully expected to be disciplined for his drunkenness, and to receive additional demerits for missing Chapel. He did not expect the honor committee to show an interest. A cadet who ran afoul of regulations – such as leaving the barracks after taps – faced basic discipline, but those infractions were not regarded as honor violations. Under the system MacArthur had formalized in 1922, the West Pointer “will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” In practice, this meant that any cadet who had reason to believe that another cadet had violated the code was expected to report it to the committee within 24 hours. But as gossip about Tim’s whiskey-soaked party with the upperclassmen circulated, cadets who knew some of the details worried about his sense of honor. Specifically, they believed he was violating the code if he sought to avoid discipline by denying to his CC that he had brought liquor onto the train in the first place. Tim was called before the committee, and denied that he had lied. The company commander had not asked him how the whiskey had come to be on the train, he said. Tim had simply not volunteered the detail. If Tim had been training to be a lawyer, this basic principle of fairness – that he could not be expected to incriminate himself – might have carried some weight. But the committee members viewed this situation from a different point of view. He was training to be an officer and a gentleman. Fairness was not the issue. If they accepted Tim’s version of events, this was an instance of lying by omission. If they rejected his story, then he had already lied to the CC and was now lying to them. Any one of these actions would be dishonorable.

Following custom, the committee asked Tim if he would resign voluntarily. If he did not resign, he would be formally charged with violating the honor code. Tim was shocked at the question. The committee was surprised when he asked for a day to think about his options. Tim slept on it, and notified the panel that he would not resign. He requested a full hearing, comparable to a court-martial. The committee considered his refusal to leave quickly and quietly to be an act of deliberate defiance, a rejection of the Academy’s culture of instant obedience, and a threat to the good order of the corps of cadets. They punished Cadet Leary immediately with “silencing.”

While he was waiting for his hearing, he attended classes and participated in training, but no one spoke to him unless required to do so by official duties. He was physically shunned as well. If he sat at a table in the mess hall, or walked into a social event, other cadets would leave. Tim was effectively a ghost at West Point. In February 1941, Tim had his hearing. Some of those on the panel were honor committee members, others had been randomly chosen from the corps. If a majority concluded that he violated the code, he would be expelled. Representatives from the committee repeated their view that whatever else may have occurred, Cadet Leary had not been candid with the company commander. Tim stuck to his own story: he could not deny, or lie about, something that he had not been asked. His defense strategy included some strange rationalizations concerning his state of mind. He called his drinking companions as witnesses, and they agreed that they had badgered him into giving them his liquor. Yes, they had invited the lowly plebe to join them only after he complied with their demand for his bottles. A cadet then described Tim’s hangover as a “175-and-a-half howitzer.” These witnesses probably did not help Tim’s case, but they apparently did not hurt it, either. The panel deliberated for a few minutes and acquitted him.

Other cadets who had been implicated in the widespread post-game revelry on the train were punished to some extent for breaching regulations. Only Tim had faced expulsion for violating the honor code. Backed into that corner, it was reasonable for him to force the committee to conduct the hearing. Unfortunately, Tim’s acquittal did not end the matter. The committee did not lift the silencing. Members quietly encouraged upperclassmen to continue to harass Cadet Leary with inspection and demerits. Experiencing month after month of hazing on one hand, and enforced solitude on the other had begun to damage Tim’s mental and physical health. He was restless at night. When he was able to sleep at all, he experienced bad dreams. He suffered persistent head colds. He began chain-smoking. This ostracism did not teach Tim contrition. To the contrary, casting his imagination back to his childhood and his love of literature, he viewed himself as the hero (he was not yet sure whether it was a tragedy or a comedy). He used the isolation creatively. He began to read and write for himself, not just for academic assignments. He learned that the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that the main currents of the Enlightenment were mistaken, and contended that the universe was not a rational place. Tim began work on an original manuscript based on this thought.

Tim began meeting frequently with the Catholic chaplain, Father Murdoch, who was not bound by the cadet’s code. Even so, they often met under cover of confession. Tim eventually learned that the superintendent, General Robert Eichelberger (Academy class of 1909), was also an ally. Like MacArthur before him, Eichelberger was instituting unpopular but far-reaching reforms. He cut back on traditional training that he regarded as outmoded, such as horsemanship and close order drill. He expanded the combat exercises in which cadets trained alongside National Guard units. He acquired nearby Stewart Field, which gave interested cadets an opportunity to qualify as pilots while still at West Point. Eichelberger opposed silencing but would not countermand an honor committee’s decision. Instead, he called Cadet Leary to his office weekly to hear his reports. These soon became friendly chats about Tim’s well-being. Although Tim tended to avoid the worst details when he wrote home, Abigail was in contact with Father Murdoch and was well aware of her son’s ordeal. As it became clear that the punishment was intended to continue for the rest of Tim’s time at the Academy, Abigail directly contacted Senator Walsh (a Democrat) and US Representative Charles R. Clason (a Republican). Walsh was the Chair of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, but he was perfectly willing to investigate the Army’s academy on behalf of his old friend’s family. Clason had served as a federal district attorney for nearly twenty years before being elected to Congress, and he had a strong respect for due process. The inquiries, even if unofficial, led to the dismissal of many of the demerits on Tim’s record.

Still, the silencing continued. West Point’s commencement exercises, when graduating cadets received their degrees and commissions as second lieutenants, occurred in June. But June also meant the day of “recognition,” one of the most anticipated moments in a cadet’s career. This signals a plebe’s elevation to the level of fully accepted member of the corps of cadets. Plebes in their Full-Dress Gray formed a line. Upper-class cadets, also in resplendent uniforms but with their gloves removed from their right hand, filed past and shook the hand of each plebe. They introduced themselves by first names, a mark of familiarity that confirmed new camaraderie between formerly hostile actors. Although Tim was allowed to line up with his class, none of the upperclassmen shook his hand. He was frozen out of the festivities that followed. It was all symbolic, but the symbols were now weapons. As he listened to the sounds of fellowship from outside the ballroom, he wept, all alone. In his letters home that summer, Tim admitted to his mother that he was wavering. Abigail was not. She advised her son to stay the course: silenced or not, he would graduate with his degree, receive his commission, and enjoy a distinguished career serving his country, just as he had dreamed. And because the next term would mean the appointment of a new committee, Tim allowed himself to hope that his torment would end. He even looked forward to the extended bivouac of summer exercises. He expected to share a tent and taste a bit of the camaraderie of training. However, unlike the other second-year cadets in his class, Tim was assigned a tent to himself. The new committee members apparently shared the previous committee’s conviction that Tim had to lose, or else West Point’s culture would suffer a serious blow. The goal was to get rid of Tim, not to rehabilitate him.

The new class of plebes were encamped nearby, completing their “Beast Barracks.” A few of them occasionally spoke to Tim. He did not know whether they dared to defy the ban out of a mischievous turn or did so from mere ignorance, but did not care. Others noticed the contact. The appearance of cracks in the wall of silence demonstrated that the situation was untenable. Two senior cadets – one a battalion commander, the other a regimental captain, and neither a member of the honor committee – defied the ban. They approached Tim one evening to discuss this “deplorable” situation. They said that many upperclassmen recognized that the committee had made mistakes in this case. Many worried that the stalemate was damaging morale. They asked if Tim would be willing to make a deal. Tim replied that he would resign “voluntarily,” if the honor committee read a statement in the mess hall proclaiming that he was innocent of the charge of lying. Two days passed before the officers brought Tim the news that the committee agreed to his terms.

Tim typed a brief note to the superintendent. It read: “I am ill adapted to a military career. I am not satisfied in my present environment and I feel that it would be to the best interest of both myself and the government if I were permitted to resign and pursue another career.”

General Eichelberger was surprised at Tim’s change of heart. Abigail was in regular communication with the superintendent as well, and her own conviction had remained so strong. Eichelberger called Tim to his office to confirm that his decision was truly voluntary. Tim convinced the General that it was time for him to leave West Point. When representatives of the honor committee stepped up to read the statement during lunch, some cadets cheered, and a few congratulated Tim with a significant handshake. Several sat in stunned silence, trying to process the meaning of this unanticipated conclusion to nine months of drama.

West Pointers have a term for those who attended the Academy but failed to graduate: the “immortals.” The list includes the poet Edgar Allan Poe (dismissed for disobedience in 1831) and the painter James Whistler (dismissed by Superintendent Colonel Robert E. Lee in 1854). Tim joined this distinguished company on August 18, 1941, the day his resignation became effective. His decision to leave West Point had to follow the chain of command, of course. Cadet Leary did not receive official notice of his honorable discharge until September 23.

Abigail saw the West Point affair as “a disappointment but not a total disgrace.” She insisted that Tim return to college – any college – as soon as possible. He responded by applying to one public university in each of the 48 states, in alphabetical order. The University of Alabama was the first to offer admission, and Tim began packing his bags for Tuscaloosa. His Aunt May and a few other relatives were distressed that Tim would be moving to the American South (a foreign land to them, after all) and attending a co-educational school better known for social life than academic rigor. After the monastic experience at both Holy Cross and West Point, Tim decided that this was exactly what he needed. In August 1941, Tim boarded the train to Birmingham, then took a bus to Tuscaloosa.

Registration took place in the gymnasium. Tables were arranged alphabetically by academic department. Tim planned to major in philosophy and joined the line at the “P” sign. He was so looking forward to enrolling in blessed electives, classes that simply interested him, because for the first time in his three-year collegiate career he was free from Jesuitical regimens and Army regulations. At the next table over sat Donald Ramsdell, the chair of psychology. He had earned his doctorate at Harvard three years earlier and had been hired by Alabama specifically to build the department. One of his methods of boosting enrollment was to encourage obviously bored students to switch from the longer queues to his table. Tim was a little flattered when the older man called him over, dismissed philosophy as unchallenging, and suggested that the field for a bright young man like himself was psychology. Tim switched lines. Ramsdell soon proved to be a charismatic teacher who conducted lively seminars in his own living room. He was a dedicated mentor who invited promising students to dinner, where they could talk about whatever might interest them, personal or academic. Tim soon joined “Dr. Dee’s” circle. He and the professor discussed academic subjects, but also personal matters, such as Tim’s experience at West Point and what he had learned from the trauma. They talked about Ramsdell’s more-or-less obvious homosexuality. Tim was astonished when his professor shared “intimate steamy confidences.” Tim was amazed to learn that several of his favorite professors, transplanted Northerners like Ramsdell, were member of an underground gay network at Alabama.

For his part, Tim enthusiastically participated in the sort of heterosexual social life that was not available at West Point or Holy Cross. At the age of 21, he pledged with the Theta Chi fraternity, which allowed him to attend parties. He earned good grades but resumed his habit of skipping classes. By April 1942, he had been reported absent a dozen times. H.H. Mitchell, the assistant dean of men at Alabama, eventually warned Abigail in a letter that “we believe [Tim’s] work will suffer materially if he is lax in meeting his classes.” Abigail wrote to her son, noting that “It does not make me feel good to have a letter like this.” Perhaps the timely rebuke was effective. Tim focused on his courses, and was not disciplined for his absenteeism.

But given this unprecedented opportunity to pursue women, he pursued women. By the fall of 1942, Tim and his Theta Chi brother Don Sherwood were dating two women who lived at the university’s female-only dormitory, Tutwiler Hall. The quartet would come together for country drives on Saturday afternoons, stop to drink beer and dance at one of the roadhouses along the way, and sometimes find a discreet spot for sex. Tim was overjoyed to be dating the “wildest, sexiest girl” on campus. The fact that she was the daughter of a high-ranking Army officer may have added to the sexual frisson. On the night of November 21, 1942, Tim had to flirt with his girlfriend through a window after she had been confined to her room for violating curfew. He soon pulled the screen loose, and climbed into the room. Sherwood had come along to visit his own girlfriend and followed suit at the next window. Both men spent the night in the dorm.

The next morning, the dean of men at the University of Alabama, J.H. Newman, called Tim to his office. Sherwood exited the office as Tim arrived. He shot his friend a tormented look. Tim could not stop to talk, because Dean Newman was standing there and waved for him to enter. Newman was already fully aware that the fraternity brothers had slept overnight in Tutwiler Hall. He asked a few perfunctory questions before remarking angrily that they had both “sullied the honor of southern womanhood.” The Dean informed Tim that he and his friend were both expelled. Tim called at the women’s dorm to commiserate with his girlfriend. He learned that she and Sherwood’s girlfriend were also expelled and were already on their way home.

Once again, Abigail had ample reason to be disappointed in her son. Although West Point was tuition-free, she had paid his costs at both Holy Cross and Alabama. She announced that she was cutting Tim off after his expulsion from Alabama. Tim’s mentor Ramsdell sought to place the blame on the bad influence of the Greek system. Writing to Abigail in early December, the professor noted that Tim had chosen to associate with “a particular group of students who are really very foreign to his own nature.” Ramsdell told Abigail that he had advised Tim the week before the dormitory incident that nothing could be gained by maintaining those friendships and added that Tim had agreed to stop spending time with them. Of course, at 22-years-old, Tim was older and more experienced than his Theta Chi brothers. He was far more likely to be leading than to be led astray. Abigail also received a letter from Dean Newman. Like Ramsdell’s note, it was an awkward attempt to offer comfort at a difficult time. He wrote that, although Tim was in the wrong, he could live down his mistake and prosper. He added that Tim “is a person of fine sensibilities, and I am hoping that he will conduct himself in accordance with the teachings you have given him and the ideals you have set for him.”

Meanwhile, Tim frantically applied to the psychology department at the University of Illinois, where Dr. Ramsdell had some influence. Unfortunately, Sherwood spoiled the plan by making a clumsy attempt to spin the story in his own application to the university. Writing to Tim to deny his admission, Illinois officials let him know that they knew the reason for his attempt to switch colleges in the middle of an academic year. The authors of the rejection letter sourly noted that “if one of our own students had committed a similar offense here, we would have dropped him, and not allowed him reentrance at so early a date.”

America had been at war with Imperial Japan since the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The disaster in Hawaii was followed by General MacArthur’s retreat from the Philippines to Australia. The military expanded rapidly to meet the emergency. General Eichelberger left the Academy to take a command and won renown leading successful campaigns to recapture Japanese-held islands. West Point was placed on a war footing when the Congress authorized a 25% increase in the corps of cadets, to a total of 2,496. The class of 1943 graduated six months early in January, and the subsequent four classes graduated in three years. If Tim had remained at West Point, he might have been commissioned as a second lieutenant as early as June 1943. Instead, after his summary expulsion from Alabama, and his inability to enroll elsewhere, he lost his student deferment. He registered with the draft board in May 1942, and was placed on the inactive list. Even so, he soon received a draft notice, which conveniently came with a government voucher to travel by train to Washington DC.

On January 4, 1943, Tim reported for basic training at Fort Eustis, a Coast Artillery Replacement Training Center in Newport News, Virginia. Because he had gone through comparable training at West Point, Tim found the next few weeks all too familiar. He found that his prior experience had tangible benefits. His mastery of the manual of arms, the ceremonial flash with his M1 rifle, impressed instructors, and he landed a relatively easy assignment guarding headquarters. But he also trained with heavy anti-aircraft artillery, which fired yard-long ninety-millimeter shells. The volume of the big guns, or else his chronic bronchitis (aggravated by the post’s swampy climate), or perhaps a combination of these two factors, impaired Tim’s hearing in one ear.

Tim was recommended for officer’s candidate school, based on his status as a former West Pointer (even if slightly tarnished) and his combined five years of college (although he was far from graduating anywhere). But he learned that the Army desperately needed psychologists. He turned down the chance to finally earn officer’s bars and enrolled in the Army Specialized Training Program. He studied psychology for three months at Georgetown University, spent another six months at Ohio State University, and finished the program at a winter session in Miami Beach. In the summer of 1944, private first-class Leary was assigned as a psychological consultant to the Second Combat Cargo Group at Syracuse Army Air Base, from Mattydale, New York. Rumors circulated that the unit’s upcoming mission included ferrying cargo and paratroops around the Pacific in unarmed aircraft, and eventually to fly and release gliders towards the Japanese home islands. Tim regarded this as a suicide mission.

Fortunately for PFC Leary’s prospects for survival, Dr. Ramsdell had also joined the war. He had become the chief psychologist at the Army Medical Corps’ Deshon General Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania. Originally built in the 1930s as a state hospital for tuberculosis patients, the Army converted the facility into a general hospital at the beginning of the war. In November 1943, Deshon opened a center for soldiers with hearing impairments, one of only three such facilities in the United States, where hearing-damaged soldiers received special treatment to prepare them for return to duty or to civilian life. As a pioneer in the assessment and treatment of psychological issues in individuals who suffered hearing loss after having had normal hearing in adult life (in contrast to the experience of a congenitally deaf person), Ramsdell was a natural choice to lead the program. While on leave from his base in Syracuse, Tim met with his former mentor in Buffalo. Ramsdell once again regaled his former student with tales of his love affairs. More important, he listened to Tim’s concern about the upcoming mission to the South Pacific. When he returned to Pennsylvania, Ramsdell arranged to have Private First Class Leary promoted to corporal and transferred to Deshon Hospital.

Tim took the train to central Pennsylvania. He joined Ramsdell’s staff as a psychometrician in the audio clinic. When he walked into the clinic on his first day on the job, Tim met an audio technician named Marianne Busch. She thought the corporal was a new patient and Tim did not correct the attractive brunette tech’s mistaken impression. Marianne administered a standard hearing exam, which revealed the full extent of Tim’s hearing loss. While Marianne was fitting him for a hearing aid, he admitted that he was a new staff member. He invited her to lunch. He learned that she had grown up in Oregon and was the daughter of a furniture store owner. She was Catholic, which did not matter to Tim but would matter very much to his mother.

Marianne was twenty-three and had a master’s degree from Northwestern University. Tim asked her to have a drink after work, and then took her to dinner. Tin spent the night. Within a few weeks they were living together. Tim and Marianne were married in a Catholic ceremony at the post chapel on April 14, 1945. The best man was Tim’s old friend Bill Scanlon, who after graduating from Classical High School had trained to become a Passionate Father. The bride and groom honeymooned lavishly at the Hotel St. Moritz in Manhattan.

Marianne convinced Tim to appeal his expulsion from the University of Alabama. On October 4, 1944, he received a letter confirming that the University had changed his academic status from “dismissed for conduct” to “suspended for conduct,” which was the first step to reinstatement. Tim completed several correspondence courses over the next year, asked Alabama to accept his transfer credits from Army courses at Ohio State and elsewhere, and finally graduated with a bachelor’s degree on August 23, 1945, one week after V-J Day and the end of World War II. Five months later, in January 1946, Tim was honorably discharged at the rank of sergeant. He had received such standard decorations as the American Defense Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. It may have surprised his long-suffering family members in Springfield that he also earned the Good Conduct Medal. Tim demobilized at Fort Indiantown Gap, in central Pennsylvania. He and Marianne boarded a train for Oregon. It was a the four-day journey. In Oregon City, Tim met Marianne’s parents, John and Mildred Busch. They wondered if their only child had brought home a husband who could join the family business, which had prospered during the war years. But Tim, confused and confounded for so long, knew one thing. He was not interested in selling furniture under the watchful eye of his father-in-law.

Sources:

Testimony of Timothy Francis Leary, Jr., United States v. Leary, transcript. NARA-SWA: RG 21, Laredo Criminal Docket, 1964-1966, Box 725, “Appeal” folder.

Timothy Leary, Flashbacks: An Autobiography (Los Angeles CA: J.P. Tarcher, 1983).

Timothy Leary, Changing My Mind, Among Others: Lifetime Writings, Selected and Introduced By the Author(Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982).

John Bryan, Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary: An Unauthorized Autobiography (San Francisco CA: Renaissance Press, 1980).

Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography (Boston MA: Mariner Books, 2007).

“Giants.” Esquire (October 1967).

Mikal Gilmore, “Timothy Leary 1920-1996.” Rolling Stone (July 11-25, 1996).

Michael Horowitz, Karen Walls, and Billy Smith, An Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary (Hamden CN: Archon Books of The Shoe String Press, 1988).

Richard Jerome and John Hannah, “Traveling Man.” People (45:24; June 17, 1996).

Bill Kauffman, “The West Point Story.” The American Enterprise (1:4; July/August 1999).

Anthony J. Kuzniewski, Thy Honored Name: A History of the College of the Holy Cross (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999).

Drew Taylor, “Timothy Leary at 100: How the counterculture icon got kicked out of the University of Alabama,” CBS42 News, Birmingham AL (posted: October 22, 2020). Online at: https://www.cbs42.com/news/local/timothy-leary-at-100-how-the-counterculture-icon-got-kicked-out-of-the-university-of-alabama/.

Edward H. Truex Jr., “The Rehabilitation Service for the Hard of Hearing at Deshon General Hospital, Butler, Pennsylvania,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 16 (1944), 71-74. Online at: https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1916267.

Peter O. Whitmer, with Bruce van Wyngarden, Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America (New York NY: MacMillan, 1987).

As you will learn next week, Timothy Leary spent the 1950s establishing his career in clinical psychology and earning a reputation as a pioneer in personality assessment. He could not help but be aware that colleagues around the world were investigating the potential therapeutic uses for mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD — they were being talked about at all of the professional conferences and written about by lay reporters as well — but he stayed away from the exotic pharmaceuticals. Let others wade into the unknown, while he stuck to his questionnaires and interpersonal diagrams.

But the psychedelic currents were swirling all around him. This is a true fish story.

In March 1964, a reporter from Sports Illustrated wrote a profile of Howard Loeb, a senior aquatic biologist for the New York State Conservation Department. Dr. Loeb clearly took it seriously that he worked at the Fish Laboratory in Livingston Manor. He was not afraid to try unusual solutions to the challenges of the job, what he called “the fun stuff—the thing that nobody knows anything about.” For example, he built the electrified pond-shocker that his conservation staff used to obtain fish samples. He and an associate were working on long-lasting dyes for marking trout. Perhaps most important, he was attempting to stop the spread of carp, an invasive “trash” species that competed with the prized game-fish in the rivers and lakes in New York and surrounding states. He wanted to find a poison that would only affect carp, while leaving the game-fish, other animals, insects, and aquatic foliage unharmed.

A few years before the reporter showed interest, the carp project had come to the attention of Harold A. Abramson, the Director of Psychiatric Research at the South Oaks Psychiatric Hospital in Amityville, on Long Island. Dr. Abramson suggested that Loeb might try LSD-25, a drug that he was investigating in the hopes of developing a new treatment for the mentally ill patients in his care. The substance caused powerful hallucinations similar to those experienced by schizophrenics. He operated under the theory that this condition was caused by a chemical imbalance. If LSD could simulate schizophrenia, perhaps he and his colleagues could discover a different chemical that could restore balance. He sensed that they were making steady progress. Psychiatrists could stimulate psychotic episodes and then end them in a few minutes with another drug, such as chlorpromazine (Thorazine). Abramson had experimented with patients and volunteers (including his secretary) for a decade, and was recognized as one of the leading researchers in America. He had published dozens of papers on the effect of LSD on intellectual functions, handwriting, interpersonal communication, manual and verbal reaction time, hand-eye coordination, attention span, and tolerance.

He had been among several prominent doctors interviewed by Time Magazine for an article entitled “Artificial Psychoses.” At the time, in 1955, Abramson was working at the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory. The Time reporter described a “prize example” of his successes: a 35-year-old woman who had been making good progress in dealing with dreams and fantasies (revealed during psychoanalysis) that indicated a latent homosexuality. But she could not face this issue and “work it through” until a dose of LSD left her with enhanced self-understanding. According to Time, Abramson viewed the drug as an important but dangerous tool, to be “used only under strictest medical supervision.” Yet, this supervision was obviously in the eye of the beholder. The article revealed that Dr. Abramson sometimes ended his dinner parties by serving each of his guests a liqueur glass containing a healthy 40 micrograms of liquid LSD. He claimed that it helped them “to recall and relive — in each other’s presence — experiences and emotions of childhood that previously had been too painful to face.”

But why did Abramson approach Loeb?

In addition to his human subjects, Abramson also experimented with laboratory animals, and one of his favorites was Betta splendens, the Siamese fighting fish. The colorful species was extremely popular among home-aquarium hobbyists, so it was cheap and easy to find. More importantly, it seemed to be nearly as sensitive to LSD as humans. The experiments showed that very small amounts of LSD-25 (as little as 0.01 mcg, sometime as a solution of the drug released into the tank, and other times directly injected into individuals) could produce noticeable behavioral effects in the “subjects.” Among the characteristic responses of Bettas were: swimming backward; remaining still while pointing the body at an angle of about 40° near the surface; the “Cartesian diver” move, sinking or rising without visible movement except by pectoral fins; the “barrel-roll” along the body’s axis; and, the “trance.” Movements of a treated fish were slow and deliberate compared to the typical swift and sudden movements of normal fighting fish. Finally, the fish’s body color would often darken. Since the early 1950s, Abramson had also published a dozen papers gauging changes in his finned subjects’ aggressiveness, perception, and what can only be considered the personality.

Loeb was willing to try. As a former paratrooper, he was not afraid to take a leap of faith. He had larger fish-management facilities than Abramson could command. If a chemical could bring all fish in a given body of water to surface for several hours — without killing them — then the undesirable specimens could be picked out and the valuable fish left to prosper. Moreover, a chemical like that would enable his staff to make a more accurate census. Indeed, a “low-flying plane could photograph a treated body of water, and biologists, interpreting the pictures, could get a count of species and populations.” Loeb began trials with LSD-25, then other compounds of d-lysergic acid. As Dr. Loeb told SI: “My idea in experimenting with these drugs is to find out which ones bring the fish up the best with a modest dose and then become nontoxic the quickest.” He tested some 40 drugs on carp, goldfish, golden and common shiners, yellow perch, blacknose dace, pumpkinseed sunfish, white suckers, bullheads, brook trout, and brown trout. With the exception of the trout and bullheads — which tended to swim to the surface nearly as usual — the treated fish rose, swam backward, and fell into a temporary stupor. The opportunities would be unlimited for the regulatory authorities, conservationists, and sportsmen. And for commercial fisheries, as well. “I can see the day,” he said, “when you back your freezer truck up to the dock and the fish just march right out of the water and fillet themselves.”

In 1962, Dr. Loeb published the “Effect of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) on the surfacing behavior of laboratory carp" in the New York Fish & Game Journal.

Dr. Abramson applauded his friend’s progress. “Loeb is doing real pioneering,” he told Sports Illustrated. “He has the foresight to explore the unknown. He’s doing important work in experimental biology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in studying fish he came up with a contribution of definite value for our work on mental illness.” Abramson had benefited from their collaboration. In 1963, he had completed yet another paper on this interesting subject for the Journal of Psychology, “Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25): XXXIV. Comparison with Effect of Psilocybin on the Siamese Fighting Fish.” In a footnote, he wrote that the work had been “supported, in part, by a grant from the Sport Fishing Institute.”

The footnote concealed a fascinating fact: Abramson really did appreciate the fishing institute’s money. The same year, his main patron had cancelled the funding that had supported much of his work since at least 1953. Although the public did not become aware of it until the 1970s, his patron was the American Central Intelligence Agency, and the research program was MK-ULTRA, which among other activities sought to develop espionage and military applications for LSD. Over ten years, Dr. Abramson received $85,000 from the CIA for his consulting and research services.

We will certainly hear more about Dr. Abramson. But that is a tale for another time.

Harold A. Abramson, 1970s

Sources:

Harold A. Abramson and Llewellyn T. Evans, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD 25): II. Psychobiological Effects on the Siamese Fighting Fish.” Science(120:3128; 1954), pp. 990-991.

Harold A. Abramson, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25): III. As an Adjunct to Psychotherapy with Elimination of Fear of Homosexuality,” The Journal of Psychology (39; 1955), pp. 127-155.

Harold A. Abramson (ed.), The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy: Transactions of a Conference on D-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25), Princeton, NJ, April 1959 (New York NY: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1960).

H.A. Abramson, H.H. Gettner, A. Rolo and G. Dean, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25): XXXIV. Comparison with Effect of Psilocybin on the Siamese Fighting Fish.” The Journal of Psychology (56:2; 1963), 363-374.

Robert H. Boyle, “A Dreamy New Era For Fish.” Sports Illustrated (March 30, 1964), 50-55.

Joan Cook, “Dr. Harold A. Abramson Is Dead; Authority on Allergy and Asthma.” The New York Times (October 1, 1980), Section M, Page 5. Online at: https://www.nytimes.com/1980/10/01/archives/dr-harold-a-abramson-is-dead-authority-on-allergy-and-asthma-the.html.

Loeb, H. A. Effect of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) on the surfacing behavior of laboratory carp. N.Y. Fish & Game J., 1962, 9, 127-132.

John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate:” The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Times Books, 1979).

“Medicine: Artificial Psychoses.” Time Magazine (December 19, 1955). Online at: https://time.com/archive/6799227/medicine-artificial-psychoses/.

Robert Polner, “P&S prof conducted LSD tests.” Columbia Spectator (May 16,1979), pp. 1, 11, 23.

Stephen Siff, Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

To answer this, I will trace the strange career of Dr. Timothy F. Leary (1920-1996).

Dr. Leary (not Dr. Wilson)

In March 1966 (sixty years ago this month), Dr. Leary was convicted for marijuana crimes in a federal courtroom in Laredo, Texas, and was sentenced to thirty years. He appealed, and kept appealing. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed his conviction in 1969. Leary’s legal troubles did not end with his victory in U.S. v. Leary. More busts, convictions, even a prison break and international manhunt would follow. By then, the fifty-year-old clinical psychologist and former Harvard researcher was the gray-haired hero of a mass countercultural movement that purportedly would not trust anyone over 30. Yet many in the younger generation had embraced his controversial view that the use of drugs like LSD could expand consciousness and promote a religious, social, and political awakening. One only had to Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out. The question is: how did THAT happen? To misappropriate a famous novelist, it happened gradually, and then all at once.

Leary’s court battles are key to understanding this story, yet they receive the least attention and space (often none at all) in other accounts of his role in the rise and fall of the psychedelic counterculture. To my knowledge, High Crimes will be the first detailed study of Leary’s legal legacy and its impact on the Drug War.

I hope that you will find this story as dramatic, surprising, and delightful as I do. This is a narrative history project, which will present key moments in the history of psychedelic research and government regulation in the order they happened. As far as practicable, I won’t cast too forward ahead and spoil the ending for you. Flashbacks will be rare as well, appearing only when the additional context will serve your understanding of key events.

Of course, some of you may be able to recall the 1960s and 1970s firsthand. If so, welcome back and I hope you will enjoy taking the trip again. But I promise that, even if you are familiar with Leary’s life and career, there will be surprises. If on the other hand, you are a member of our current era’s younger generation, you may be wondering “Leary who?” You are also welcome to High Crimes: this will explain why it is that the “legal” product your friends bought in one place can get you arrested in another. How is it that the psychedelic-assisted therapy helping a relative deal with trauma or substance abuse is not readily available everywhere?

I hope you will visit High Crimes to find out how we got here, and will stay to learn what might happen next. If you would like to get started, please enjoy my opening post: “Introducing the 60-Year-Old Weed Case that Created the “Timothy Leary” We Know and Lit the War on Drugs We Regret.”

Welcome to High Crimes!

This Substack is a companion to my book project of the same name. Both will offer a narrative history of American drug-control policies beginning in the mid-twentieth century, just before the commencement of the War on Drugs, until the still-evolving present, when we may be seeing the last days of that sticky, stubborn set of policies. Although opiates and other dangerous drugs, including alcohol, will figure into this history, my primary subjects will be laws, regulations, decisions, and actions relating to marijuana and psychedelics. The through-line of the story I will tell is the career of noted and notorious consciousness-expansion advocate, Timothy Leary (1920-1996).

There are four reasons for this focus.

First, public opinion about and the politics concerning these specific substances have shifted dramatically in recent years.

After nearly a century of general prohibition, the sale and use of marijuana has been substantially de-criminalized in almost half of the states, and federal prosecutors have de-emphasized marijuana enforcement nationally. Meanwhile, research exploring the potential use of psychedelic drugs for psychotherapeutic purposes has seen a revival after fifty years of disfavor among medical professionals and governmental regulators alike. Long regarded by most Americans as dangerous and even depraved, use of these mind-altering drugs have been de-stigmatized in a remarkably short period of time.

Second, despite the developments just mentioned, more than half of the states have not lifted prohibitions on marijuana, and Americans now face a patchwork of laws.

Also, despite excitement expressed in press accounts of a “Psychedelic Renaissance,” these drugs remain highly restricted under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the major federal statute regulating both “street” drugs and commercial pharmaceuticals since 1970. Both marijuana and psychedelics are listed in Schedule I, a classification that indicates that they are considered to have high potential for abuse, no accepted protocols for safe use even under medical supervision, and no currently recognized medical applications. As a consequence, over-eager researchers may be conducting clinical trials with unapproved drugs. Individuals engaging in a presumably “legal” commerce in cannabis risk prosecution if presidential priorities change. Users may inadvertently transgress laws simply by crossing from one jurisdiction to another.

Third, although Leary’s name will eventually appear in most of the countless books, articles, and websites that discuss the 1960s, the War on Drugs, or psychedelic drug research old and new, critical aspects of his historical role are often overlooked.

Among the lost facts is that the 45-year-old clinical psychologist’s rise to prominence as a charismatic champion of the youth-centered counterculture was contingent upon his desperate efforts to stay out of prison. In March 1966, sixty years ago this spring, Leary was tried in a federal courtroom in Laredo, Texas, convicted for possession of a few ounces of marijuana, and sentenced to 30 years’ incarceration. It was only after his legal troubles began that he testified about LSD and juvenile delinquency in the U.S. Senate, addressed 30,000 “flower children” at the Human Be-In in San Francisco, and most important, gave hundreds of speeches on college campuses. These appearances lay the foundation of Leary’s legend, and most were staged to raise money for his legal defense fund. He and his allies celebrated when he prevailed at the Supreme Court in 1969. Yet, his victory in United States v. Leary turned to ashes when the U.S. Congress responded to the landmark decision by passing the CSA in 1970, relegating marijuana and psychedelics to Schedule I, and setting the stage for the decades-long moratorium on research employing them.

Fourth, this will be a really good Trip: A Stranger-than-Fiction story full of true but “You Have Got to be Kidding Me” moments.

Over the course of a single decade, Dr. Timothy Leary was, successively, a reputable and rising social scientist, a controversial researcher, a convicted felon and tenacious appellant, a psychedelic prophet, and a fugitive radical who reportedly earned a place on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list. High Crimes readers will be shown how and why Leary became one of the most famous and indeed infamous figures of the 1960s, a villain to some, and a hero to others. I will not necessarily argue on behalf of either of these two views (you are encouraged to make their own judgments), but I will definitely take Leary’s ideas and actions seriously, using evidence from biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, monographs, histories, archives, and news accounts.

High Crimes will show how Leary evolved from a well-regarded social scientist into the famous (or infamous) High Priest of LSD, and demonstrate that his hard-fought court battles 60 years ago still matters to our understanding of the long War on Drugs.

Timothy Leary, Ph.D, in early 1966

As a historian, I am interested in the questions, “why and how did we get here?” As a Substacker, I want to provide the answer to “why does it matter now?” As a storyteller, I need to provide an intriguing beginning, a dramatic middle, and a satisfying end.

Here is a summary of how I propose to accomplish these goals.

Part I: You say “middle-class liberal intellectual robot” like that’s a bad thing

Timothy Leary was one of the most influential and controversial public figures of the late 1960s, but he is less well-known now than he once was. For this reason, the first task of High Crimes will be to sketch Leary’s early biography to show how he became an advocate of psychedelic drug experimentation. This first “act” of High Crimes will also try to recover the contributions of many players in this drama that have been overshadowed by Leary’s fame. Why did he become the face of psychedelic research, when he was a “late adopter” of mind-altering substances? What was his role in the regulation of psychedelics around this time, which choked off research projects even before the substances were formally prohibited? Was the coming backlash inevitable, or was Leary the critical character?

Part II: Federal Felon and Politician of Ecstasy

The second section of High Crimes will show how the major cultural, political, and legal currents that informed the CSA in 1970 flowed from Leary’s marijuana bust just before Christmas in 1965, when Leary was vacationing with his young girlfriend, his teenaged son and daughter, and a male colleague. I am convinced that these courtroom battles are key to understanding Leary’s character, yet curiously, they receive the least space (and often none at all) in other accounts of Leary’s role in the counterculture. This is another reason High Crimes will be timely. To the best of my knowledge this will be the first detailed study of Leary’s legal legacy and its impact on the Drug War.

Part III: From Man on the Run to Renaissance Man

The third section of High Crimes will consider how Leary’s legacy continues to have impacts on the present-day. Leary was living as a hunted man in exile, but his name and crimes were frequently invoked as the committees met to design what became the Controlled Substances Act. The original scheduling decisions had remained essentially unmodified, although year after year, activists lobbied for reform. The CSA remains a powerful tool to enact drug-control agendas.

The Streets of Laredo, Early 1960s

Just before midnight on December 22, 1965, U.S. Customs Agent Rey Hatch marched the three men and two women in his custody a few blocks through the dark streets of Laredo, Texas. The obvious leader of the strange troupe was a tall, slim, dark-haired but slightly graying forty-five-year-old clinical psychologist named Timothy Leary. He was walking alongside his eighteen-year-old daughter Susan and sixteen-year-old son Jackie. The other detainees were Leary’s girlfriend Rosemary Woodruff (30, brunette and beautiful), and his electronic and light effects designer, Charles Rene Jaeger (26, bearded and shaggy). Leary had been driving them from his home in New York State to Yucatan, Mexico, when they had run into trouble at the border.

They arrived at the office of the local U.S. Commissioner, Jacob “Jack” G. Hornberger. Agent Hatch presented his five detainees and handed a document to Hornberger. It was Hatch’s signed complaint, outlining enough of the supporting evidence to satisfy the Commissioner that there had been probable cause for this arrest and listing the charges he was recommending. Hornberger quickly reviewed the paper, looked up at the individuals arrayed before him, and explained their rights under the Constitution. He asked each person in turn if they understood had him. They did. He suggested that he could give them more time if they needed to hire lawyers before continuing. Leary was standing first in the line on the commissioner’s right, and answered first. No, he thought he could handle this situation himself. Down the queue, and each agreed that they did not require an attorney at this time. Hornberger noticed that before they answered, each detainee seemed to look over at “the doctor” for approval.

Hornberger took up the complaint again and read it aloud to the group. Agent Hatch alleged that they were engaged in a conspiracy to smuggle marijuana. If an individual was found guilty under the federal Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act, that person faced between 5- and 20-years’ imprisonment, and a fine up to $20,000. Hornberger asked if they had understood the charge in the complaint. When it appeared that “the doctor” intended to answer for everyone, the Commissioner cautioned Leary to stop. Again, he asked each individually. They all agreed that they understood the charge.

Hornberger swore Agent Hatch to tell the truth and asked him to describe the circumstances of the arrest. He informed the detainees that they could cross-examine the witness if they chose to do so. None did. Based on Hatch’s testimony, Hornberger found that the government’s case had sufficient merit to pass the complaint to a grand jury. He would now consider releasing the detainees from custody, and needed to ask a series of questions in order to determine the dollar amount to set for each of them. He reminded the group that beyond identifying themselves for the record, none of them were required to answer his questions or make any statements at all; they could choose to answer some or none. They should remember, however, that anything they did say could be used against them if the case went to trial. Hornberger went down the line again and he asked each of the five detainees to confirm their age, residence, and marital status. He also asked them individually if they used marijuana.

Leary admitted that he smoked marijuana and added, “You can’t study consciousness unless you do.” Rosemary looked first to Leary, then to Hornberger, and answered yes, she also used marijuana. Susan refused to say. Although he had just stated that they all had a right to remain silent, Hornberger now told her she must answer. Susan said she did not use marijuana. Jack said no. Rene also denied that he smoked the drug.

Leary was very tired and impatient with the proceedings. He stared at Hornberger across the desk and finally blurted out that he did not understand why the government was insisting on holding Miss Woodruff and Mr. Jaeger, who were after all just guests on this trip. For that matter, he told the now astonished Commissioner that he did not know why he was being bothered, either. As a leading “pharmapsychologist,” Leary continued, he studied the effects of certain drugs on consciousness. He explained that marijuana was a necessary part of the scientific and religious research he conducted at his organization in New York, the Castalia Foundation. As he described this work, he used the word “psychedelic” several times. The Commissioner confessed that he was not familiar with the term. Nor was Hornberger much impressed or persuaded by the outburst. He set release bonds of $2,500 each for Susan and Jack, $5,000 each for Rosemary and Rene, and $10,000 for Dr. Leary himself.

It was now long past midnight, and Leary was not able to find a bail-bondsman open in Laredo. A U.S. marshal delivered the five to the Webb County jail, where they spent the rest of the night. In the morning, Leary hired Laredo attorneys Tom Goodwin and John Fitzgibbons. Goodwin contacted Hornberger and arranged for a second hearing that afternoon, where they could discuss reducing bond. Unfortunately, neither lawyer was available that day to represent the new clients. As a consequence, the group once again appeared before the Commissioner without counsel. But the press was present. Robert Garcia, a reporter for the Laredo Times, reviewed the complaint and wondered if this could actually be the same Timothy Leary he had read about in Time magazine.

Hornberger opened the hearing by asking if anyone wanted to make a statement. He once again warned the five defendants that anything they said could be used against them. As they had done during the first hearing, the group looked to Leary to be their spokesperson. If he had received any advice from his new attorneys about practicing discretion or striking a conciliatory tone, he did not accept the coaching. Leary began by proclaiming that he did not understand – in fact was “rather put out by” – the high bond. How could Hornberger justify setting the bond at $25,000 total when there was such a small amount of marijuana involved, just a few partially smoked cigarettes?

Leary proceeded to tell the Commissioner his version of yesterday’s events.

He explained the due to a bureaucratic misunderstanding across the international bridge, the group had not actually entered Mexico the previous day. They had been turned away in Nuevo Laredo and told to return in the morning. Obviously, they had nothing to declare at the inspection station on the American side of the river. As a matter of logic it was erroneous for customs agents to accuse them of engaging in a conspiracy to smuggle marijuana. Next, Leary reasserted his own expertise regarding these matters. He had published “more books than anyone else on drug effects on the human body.” Based on this work, he believed that laws that prohibited marijuana use were wrong and should be changed. Furthermore, these specific charges against him were “consciously, scientifically, and spiritually” contrary to his constitutional rights.

The Commissioner sat still, quietly amazed as Leary spun out his idiosyncratic views of the situation he found himself in. Then he grew concerned that the defendant was on the verge of admitting outright that he was plainly guilty. Finally, he interrupted. Hornberger noted that he did not care to listen to what Leary believed about the law. He asked if Leary understood the charge. “I find it incomprehensible,” he declared. Hornberger repeated the question. Leary answered: “I understand the wording.”

Leary resumed his lecture about the necessity of using psychedelic drugs, including marijuana, to achieve expanded consciousness. Garcia, the reporter, would later quote the exasperated Commissioner as saying, “Doctor … be careful what you say because you’re admitting yourself right into the penitentiary.” Hornberger himself recalled being harsher than that: “Doctor, you had better shut up.” However he had phrased the message, Hornberger’s tone finally communicated the seriousness of the issue.

“Well, I guess so,” Leary said. “And I guess I had better leave this up to my lawyer.”

Leary failed to convince Hornberger to dismiss the complaint, which was not within the Commissioner’s authority anyway. He also failed to convince him to reduce the $25,000 bond. Leary found a bondsman and arranged to pay for the group. They left the court and drove to New York, barely 24 hours after they had arrived in Laredo.

Robert Garcia may have been the only person present who had been pleased with the proceedings. He left the hearing room convinced that the indignant individual who had been taken into federal custody was indeed that Timothy Leary. Even so, he was careful to report only that this outspoken marijuana defendant was “apparently the same Dr. Leary who caused international headlines when the Mexican government banned his earlier experimenting with mushrooms which caused hallucinations.”

Sources:

Testimony of Jacob G. Hornberger, United States v. Leary, transcript, part I, section 2, pp. 188-195. NARA-SWA: RG 21, Laredo Criminal Docket, 1964-1966, Box 725, “Appeal” folder.

Testimony of Timothy Leary, United States v. Leary, transcript, part II, section 1, pp. 346-347. NARA-SWA: RG 21, Laredo Criminal Docket, 1964-1966, Box 725, “Appeal” folder.

N.A., “Ex-Harvard Prof, Children and Friends Nabbed on Weed Charge,” Laredo Times, December 23, 1965, p. 1.

Robert Garcia, “Ex-Harvard Professor Declares Marihuana Okay, Five Released on Bond After Facing Charges,” Laredo Times, December 24, 1965, p. 4.

(UPI, dateline Laredo, Tex., December 23, 1965), “Ousted Lecturer Jailed in Laredo on Drug Charge,” New York Times, December 24, 1965, p. 15.

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United States District Court, Southern District of Texas (Laredo Division)

Opening statement of JOEL JAY FINER:

May it please the Court. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. This is an unusual case. Some of our defenses are ordinary, legal defenses; some of them will be constitutional defenses; that is, defenses under the highest law of the land. The defendant will show the following in defense of the charges against him:

First, he will show that he obtained the marihuana in New York; that he planned a vacation trip to Mexico where he was also going to write a book; that he drove with the children through the United States and through Laredo, across the international bridge and arrived at Mexican customs; that at the Mexican customs station the officials told him that he could not enter Mexico, that he had to return to the United States, and that he should return to Mexico the next morning at 8:00 AM.

We will submit that if these facts are so, he could not be guilty of smuggling under Count One.

Two. The defendant will establish that he is not guilty of acting willfully and with intent to defraud under count one and that he is not guilty of acting with intent to defraud under Count One and that he is not guilty of acting with intent to defraud under Counts Two and Three.

We will show that the defendant attempted to dispose of all of the marihuana at the Mexican customs station. That at the time he crossed into the United States he believed there was no marihuana in the car or on any person in the automobile and that he did not realize that Susan Leary possessed marihuana on her person until they were immediately before the US Customs.

We will show that Dr. Leary took the marihuana into the United States as a result of an accident, inadvertent, or no more than mere negligence – not willfully and not with intent to defraud the United States.

We will also show that Dr. Leary could not have willfully or have intended to defraud because he honestly and sincerely believed that he had a constitutional right to carry and use marihuana;

That Dr. Leary is a man of deep religious belief – in fact, a member of the Hindu sect that uses marihuana to obtain religious experience, to obtain communion with infinite and divine forces and the Dr. Leary uses marihuana in pursuit of his religious values.

We will also show that Dr. Leary, as a result of his studies, his reading and his research, honestly and sincerely believes and does now believe that marihuana is relatively harmless – far less harmless, for example, than alcohol – and that the government – he believes that the government may not prevent its possession, transportation and use for religious purposes.

Dr. Timothy F. Leary, Defendant

We will also show that Dr. Leary used marihuana as an essential part of his work as a psychologist and in his scientific investigations of the relationship between drugs, the mind and religious values, and that Dr. Leary honestly and sincerely believed that he had a constitutional right to do so.

We will also show that Dr. Leary used marihuana as part of his family life, that from time to time and under certain conditions he believe that the use of marihuana in the family setting was an important part of his duty and right as a parent to bring up the children in accordance with his most deeply held values.

We will also show that Dr. Leary honestly and sincerely believed that he was entitles to go though the United States customs without declaring that he had marihuana because his believed that in requiring him to declare it would be requiring him to incriminate himself in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

We will submit that since Dr. Leary has these honest and sincere beliefs about his constitutional rights, he is not guilty of acting willfully or acting with intent to defraud the United States.

These are out legal defenses. The more unusual defenses in this case are our constitutional defenses. They are unusual because Dr. Leary is an unusual man. …

We will show that Dr. Leary exercises his religion and engages in scientific practices and research and raises his family in ways that very few people practice.

We will show that Dr. Leary is a man of great learning and wisdom, practices his deepest religious beliefs through the use of marihuana and other mind-expanding substances.

You will hear the word “psychedelic” uses throughout our defense. That is a synonym for mind-expanding or consciousness-expanding drugs. …

We will show that the core and essence of the life of Dr. Leary had been the pursuit of religious values through drugs;

That he had studied widely in the religions in the eastern part of the world; that he has read and absorbed the classic writings about mystical experiences and that he had dedicated his life to finding communion with his idea of God through psychedelic drugs;

That Dr. Leary, in his travels in India in 1963, became a member of the Hindu sect that seeks communion with divine forces through the use of marihuana;

That Dr. Leary now uses marihuana as an integrated part of his religious life;

That with it, he transcends his ego, transcends worldliness, resolves the difference between man and his fellow man, self and his non-self, mind and matter and man and the universe;

That his experience under these drugs provides him with a set of morals and ethics by which he finds eventual harmony with his fellow man.

You will be asked to only consider whether Dr. Leary is honest and sincere in his religious beliefs and whether the activities charged in the indictment are closely related to an are a part of his religious life.

We will also establish – this is the final point – that Dr. Leary is one of the foremost authorities in the field of behavioral sciences, particularly clinical psychology;

That he is one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of psychedelic drugs;

That he has published many books and articles about these drugs and that he uses these drugs in the pursuit of science and furtherance of the cause of science;

That he was going to Mexico to write a book about marihuana and other psychedelic substances.

We will submit that if Dr. Leary honestly and sincerely believes that the use of marihuana played a significant part in his scientific studies, you must acquit him on all counts. That is all.

Joel Jay Finer, Defense Attorney

Source: United States v. Leary, et al., Crim. No. 66-L-37 (S.D.Tex., 1966), Laredo Division; National Archives and Records Administration-Southwest Regional Archives (NARA-SWA), Fort Worth, Texas: Record Group (RG) 21, Laredo Criminal Docket, 1964-1966, Boxes 724-725, transcript, part I, section 2, pp. 208-217.

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THE GRAND JURY CHARGES:

Count One

That on or about December 22, 1965, in the Laredo Division of the Southern District of Texas, and within the Jurisdiction of this Court, one TIMOTHY LEARY and one SUSAN LEARY did unlawfully, knowingly, and willfully, with intent to defraud the United States, smuggle and clandestinely introduce into the United States, a quantity of Marihuana which should have been Invoiced, to-wit: approximately three (3) ounces of Marihuana (Cannabis Sativa) without having such Marihuana invoiced, contrary to and in violation of Section 176(a), Title 21, United States Code.

Count Two

That on or about December 22, 1965, in the Laredo Division of the Southern District of Texas, and within the Jurisdiction of this Court, one TIMOTHY LEARY and one SUSAN LEARY, hereinafter called defendants, with intent to defraud the United States, did unlawfully and knowingly transport and facilitate the transportation and concealment of three (3) ounces of Marihuana (Cannabis Sativa), more or less, after importation, and the defendants then and there knew the said Marihuana to have been imported into the United States contrary to Law, in violation of Section 176(a), Title 21, United states Code.

Count Three

That on or about December 22, 1965, in the Laredo Division of the Southern District of Texas, and within the Jurisdiction of this Court, one TIMOTHY LEARY and one SUSAN LEARY, transferees, required to pay the transfer tax imposed by the Internal Revenue Code, did unlawfully and knowingly transport, conceal and facilitate the transportation and concealment of a quantity of Marihuana, to-wit: approximately three (3) ounces of Marihuana (Cannabis Sativa) without having paid the transfer tax imposed by said code, in violation of Section 4744(a)(2), Title 26, United States Code.

A TRUE BILL

Source: Transcript of testimony and court documents of United States v. Leary, et al., Crim. No. 66-L-37 (S.D.Tex., 1966), Laredo Division. These files are preserved in the National Archives and Records Administration-Southwest Regional Archives (NARA-SWA), Fort Worth, Texas: Record Group (RG) 21, Laredo Criminal Docket, 1964-1966, Boxes 724-725.

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We may be seeing the end of the War of Drugs. What’s Next?

High Crimes tells an origin story of the War on Drugs. It examines the reasons that its foundation, the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970, has endured essentially unchanged for more than a half-century. Only in the last few years has anyone serving in the U.S. Congress proposed revisiting the CSA, and only a few months ago the HHS recommend rescheduling a number of older drugs to facilitate mental health research, including psilocybin and cannabis. I believe that the launch of this Substack, and my ongoing work on the associated book, are very timely because, after a fifty-year gap, there is now serious discussion about the truth and consequences of this law.

Yet …

The CSA represented the U.S. government’s first attempt to regulate a broad range of drugs in a comprehensive way - both “street” drugs and commercial pharmaceuticals. Scholars have discussed the statute not only as a reflection of public concerns about rising drug use across the nation, but also as evidence of President Richard Nixon’s personal animosity towards 1960s counterculture, protesters of the war in Vietnam in particular, and especially the individual activists he held responsible for the general chaos of the era. In this telling, the CSA handed Nixon a powerful weapon he needed to punish his enemies, and he did. High Crimes will not challenge this story, but will attempt to deepen your understanding of relevant legal and political undercurrents by revealing and reexamining important aspects of history that have been overlooked.

The Times They Are A’ Changing

Public opinion about marijuana and psychedelic substances have shifted dramatically in recent years. After nearly a century of general prohibition, the possession, sale, and personal use of marijuana has been substantially de-criminalized in almost half of the states, and federal prosecutors have de-emphasized marijuana enforcement nationally. Meanwhile, research exploring the potential use of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes has seen a revival after fifty years. Recent actions by government legislators and regulators aim to resolve the tension between state and federal laws, and the aims of the scientific community. Consider the following:

In 2023, the HHS recommended that the DEA list marijuana under Schedule III of the CSA, which would recognize that the substance had an accepted medical use, posed a lesser potential for abuse than drugs in higher schedules, and (in the event of abuse) had a potential for moderate or low physical or high psychological dependence.

In 2024, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives offered the first substantive bill aimed at revising or even repealing the CSA. Others have followed. Yet, to date, none of these proposals has made it out of committee.

In 2025, the White House declared psychedelic drug research to be a national priority. President Trump also signed an executive order directing FDA regulators to expedite shifting marijuana to Schedule III, which would not only recognize its medical value but also presumably allow cannabis-based businesses to claim federal tax benefits and access credit and other financial services. This was a major political development, but the action fell short of federal legalization. The threshold has been lowered, but the door is still closed to the general public. The 1970 CSA endures as a significant hurdle to research and individual progress.

The evidence shows that the War on Drugs has not ended. It has stalled.

Sixty years ago this spring, in March 1966, clinical psychologist and former Harvard lecturer Timothy Leary Ph.D. was convicted in a federal courtroom in Laredo, Texas, for smuggling and transporting marijuana. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed his conviction and declared that the law at the foundation of his original indictment, the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, was unconstitutional. By then, the gray-haired forty-nine-year-old Dr. Leary was the face of a youth-driven movement that had embraced his controversial view that the use of consciousness-expanding drugs like LSD could promote religious, social, and political awakening. Apart from his “advanced” age at a time many young people purportedly would not trust anyone over 30, Leary’s stature with the counterculture was unlikely because he was a latecomer to these substances. Throughout the 1950s, while others were investigating the potential therapeutic applications of such new pharmaceuticals as mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD, Leary’s research had been focused on personality assessment and later, behavior change. Well before he had his initial experience with so-called “magic” mushrooms in Mexico in the summer of 1960, promising results of psychedelic drug research had already been published in prestigious science journals and given positive coverage in mass media organs like Time, Look, and Newsweek.

Timothy Leary was also a latecomer to marijuana use. He had avoided the weed - and forbade his graduate students to use it in his home - because it was illegal, unlike the experimental psychedelic drugs they were using in their research. In an ironic reversal of marijuana’s reputed role as a “gateway” to more dangerous drugs, Leary had taken hundreds of psilocybin and LSD trips before he had ever smoked a joint in August or September 1964. Yet, it was a few ounces of marijuana that led to his legal troubles, his notoriety, and arguably, the collapse of many careers in psychedelic drug research, including his own. Leary’s court victory was briefly celebrated by his countercultural friends and allies. However, he was quickly re-tried and re-convicted under narcotics laws that were unaffected by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, the defunct tax act and most of the other federal drug statutes were replaced by the comprehensive Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The 1970 law not only re-criminalized marijuana possession, but also listed it along with psilocybin and LSD under “Schedule I.” It was a formal declaration, contrary to much of the scientific opinion, that these particular drugs carried high physical risks and offered no medical utility. Research continued a few more years, but projects with these drugs eventually ended (or went underground).

Leary himself spent time underground. He had escaped from prison and was living in exile alongside political revolutionaries like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen. He was hunted across Africa, Europe, and Asia before being re-captured by agents of a brand new arm of federal law enforcement, the DEA. When he finally emerged from prison in 1976, his reputation was in tatters. It was whispered that he had cooperated with the authorities to earn a lighter sentence. It had been revealed in the press and confirmed in Congress that the CIA had been behind LSD all along. Leary had been transformed from the charismatic hero of the 1960s counterculture into a convenient scapegoat for that movement’s failure in the 1970s. Among the charges: his writings and media appearances - staged to fund his selfish, pyrrhic legal battles - had just inflamed the government’s overreaction; and his defeat of the Tax Act had simply enabled the CSA. If Leary had remained quiet, perhaps the War on Drugs could have been avoided. At least, it might have taken a different form. Instead, the War on Drugs has never ended. Millions have been jailed, and medical research has been stifled.

Timothy Leary in the custody of DEA Special Agents (1973)

High Crimes will reveal and reexamine important aspects of Timothy Leary’s story that have been overlooked, and will demonstrate how the backlash narrative ignores key issues. First, Leary was just one of many figures in his era who achieved fame and influence by promoting the transformative power of these substances, and as already mentioned, he was late to the scene. Also, by the time he emerged as a public player in this field, psychedelic drug researchers were already under increasing scrutiny by the government, due to events that had nothing whatsoever to do with either Leary’s ideas or his actions. In 1962, well before Leary had been profiled in Time, Look, or Playboy, Americans were reading about a drug-caused tragedy in Europe. A new, allegedly safe sedative called Thalidomide was linked to hundreds of shocking birth defects. Due to the intervention of an FDA reviewer (over the objections of her supervisors), this drug affected only a small number of American children. But that near-miss had been luck rather than policy. The US Congress quickly passed a statute regulating experimental drugs, defined as substances that had not yet proven their safety and efficacy through extensive lab trials. This impacted LSD and other psychedelic researchers, who even after a dozen years were puzzled to name a true medical application. The same year, even before Thalidomide made the headlines, the FDA began investigating doctors in the Los Angeles area who were reportedly distributing LSD to anyone who would pay for the privilege. High Crimes will demonstrate that the writing was on the wall for psychedelic drugs before Leary was much known outside Harvard, and that he has been blamed unfairly for their fall from grace and subsequent near prohibition.

High Crimes will also show that people have been blaming Timothy Leary for the wrong thing, and will discuss why his legal case still matters sixty years later. Like most of the thousands of people caught carrying a small quantity of drugs across the US-Mexico border, Leary faced a double-digit sentence and a five-figure fine. So did his teenaged daughter, Susan, who had been discovered with the marijuana. In nearly every case of this kind, a defendant was faced with a three-part indictment: importing marijuana; transporting the same; and failing to declare and pay the required transfer tax on it. The first two charges described violations of federal narcotics statutes, and a conviction on either carried a mandatory prison sentence of five to twenty years and a fine up to $20,000. The third charge was based on the 1937 Act, which was the primary federal regulation concerning cannabis. Strictly speaking, marijuana possession was not prohibited. But unless a person registered with the goverment and had a license to possess marijuana, the tax was set at a very high $100 per ounce (equivalent to $1000 in 2026), which limited interest in legitimate research. The penalty for conviction on the “tax count” was two to ten years and a possible $20,000 fine. Leary’s legal situation was not quite as grim as it appeared, however. No one working in the border courts - not the defense attorney, nor the prosecutors, and especially not the judges - wanted to take these cases to trial, and the tax count was their bargaining chip.

The judge could not suspend sentences or grant probation for the narcotics crimes, but could do so for a violation of the internal revenue code. Court records show that in the federal district courts on the southern border, nearly all first-time offenders pled guilty to the tax count, the judge dismissed both narcotics counts on the prosecutor’s recommendation, and the defendant went home that same day with just one year of probation. (Amazingly, a variation on this bargain was also offered to accused heroin smugglers.) The system was born of hard-nosed practicality rather than compassion, and it was particular to conditions on the border. Drug smuggling was rampant and busts were frequent. There were too many cases for too few judges, prosecutors, and advocates. Because staging full-blown trials in these cases would have crashed the docket, the pragmatic professionals openly colluded to avoid them. The beneficiaries included young and old, black, white, and brown defendants, college students and ranch hands, and dealers as well as causal users. Everyone was ready to make a deal.

Everyone except Timothy Leary. When his local lawyer advised him to plead guilty to the tax count, he hired a law professor who agreed to argue for his constitutional right to use marijuana as he wished. Leary believed that as a scientist - and as a free human being - he had the right to “alter his own consciousness” by using psychedelic drugs. This included smoking marijuana, which he regarded as a lesser religious sacrament (LSD was the greater sacrament). At the end of the three-day trial and after less than an hour of jury deliberation, he was convicted, fined $40,000, and sentenced to thirty years. But at the last minute, Susan was allowed to plead guilty to the tax count. Her two narcotics charges were dismissed and she received probation. Her father now had to work hard to avoid incarceration. It was only after his conviction that Leary began to offer Baby Boomers his famous advice to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” In order to promote what he called the Politics of Ecstasy (and also to raise money for his legal defense fund), he called press conferences, delivered lectures from theater stages, and sat for interviews with print and television journalists. More importantly, he spoke on dozens of college campuses. These appearances raised his profile to the point that he was seen as a true prophet by many and as an obvious public menace by many others. Leary’s cultural influence and its perceived threat had both diminished by the time he was released from prison. Although his fame has also dimmed over time, he still has many defenders and detractors three decades after his death in 1996.

High Crimes will show that Timothy Leary’s impact on American drug control has proven to be more stable than his reputation. In place of a tax count, for example, the CSA introduced the concept that a certain minimum weight of drugs indicated an “intent to distribute.” This gave prosecutors the power to manipulate the quantity to be charged and to offer deals that traded guilty pleas for reduced penalties. There were bargains to be made to avoid a trial, but there was no longer much incentive for a prosecutor to drop charges altogether. By forcing the government to take him to trial, appealing his conviction, and (partially and temporarily) winning his case at the Supreme Court, Leary created the conditions that brought about the end of the plea system at the border that had kept thousands of people out of prison, including his own daughter. And although the 1970 statute has been updated to account for new pharmaceuticals, the scheduling scheme has remained essentially unmodified.