Moments later, he reached the three trees.
CHAPTER 2 The Children Will Grow up Wondering about Their Mother
Timothy Leary’s arrest and imprisonment was not the first time that his love of forbidden substances had got him into trouble. His training at the prestigious West Point military academy in Massachusetts had also ended in such a fashion. On that occasion the substance in question was whisky.
Leary had been excited and a little overawed when, on 1 July 1940, he was accepted into the American armed forces. He was 19 years old, and war was engulfing the globe. West Point was steeped in the pageantry of American military history, and the sense of theatre created by the parades, flags and uniforms really appealed to him. But as soon as the need to conform began to be drilled into him, his doubts started to surface.
The physical side of the army wasn’t a problem. He completed the toughest part of the training without difficulty. This was ‘Beast Barracks’, or army basic training done in half the time to make it twice as hard. What was problematic, however, was the requirement to unthinkingly obey his superior officers. Tim’s interest lay in battlefield strategies and military history, and when he joined the army he had thought that it would be an essentially intellectual career. He hadn’t seemed to realise that he would initially be trained to disengage his intellect and simply do as he was told. With hindsight, it is difficult to see how Tim ever thought that he would be suitable for the army. In later years he would sum up his philosophy with the words, ‘Think for yourself. Question authority’ In the military an attitude such as this could get a soldier and all his squadron killed.
Another problem was the monastic conditions that the new cadets lived in. Opportunities for meeting girls were almost non-existent. Their best chance of doing so was when attending sporting events, because they were allowed a few hours of free time between the end of the event and the return to barracks. On the day that the sporting season came to an end, the cadets knew that they needed to make their last opportunity count. Following the army–navy football game in Philadelphia,1 Leary and a friend managed to find a brothel. Feeling magnificent and indestructible when he left, Tim bought four half-pints of whisky He ended up sharing these with the senior cadets in the toilets on the troop train home. This was a terrific honour, for the strict class system at the academy usually forbade the first years, or ‘plebes’, from speaking to the senior first classmen.
Leary’s involvement in this illicit drinking session was immediately obvious the following day, when he missed the morning reveille formation. Too hung over to attempt anything, he failed to make it out of bed. He readily admitted to the drinking, but did not offer the information that he had supplied the alcohol. When this was discovered, the Honour Committee decided that he had lied to them. They requested his resignation.
How should he respond? Tim knew that resigning from West Point would be a huge disappointment for his mother. But, more importantly, he felt that the Honour Committee was wrong. He had not lied; he had simply not told them the whole truth. Others considered that this was splitting hairs, and that his statement had still infringed the ethical code of the Honour system. Tim, however, was a man who was almost incapable of accepting blame, and he clung to this detail as proof that he had behaved ethically. He announced that he would not be resigning.
A court martial was arranged. The military trial in the elegant, wood-panelled room, with the officers in full dress uniform, their sabres laid on the table, was just the sort of event that had initially attracted Tim to West Point. The court examined all the evidence regarding the forbidden drinking session, and declared that there were no grounds for dismissal of Leary from the service. But he was still guilty of defiance. As punishment, he would be ‘silenced’.
Being silenced, or ‘sent to Coventry’ as it is also known, is a military punishment that effectively turns a recruit into a non-person. The victim is ignored, and the rest of the squadron are forbidden to speak to or acknowledge him. Tim’s roommates were moved into new sleeping quarters and he had to sit alone in the mess hall, surrounded by empty seats. It is a harsh punishment, similar to being jailed in solitary confinement while simultaneously having to undergo the rigours of regular training. Few people can take it for long. To make matters worse, the Honour Committee planned to get rid of him by ‘demeriting’ him. His every action was scrupulously studied for signs of failure. He was written up for ‘untrimmed hairs in nostrils’. A shaving cut was cited as ‘careless injury to government property’.2
It may have been the injustice of his punishment that inflamed Leary’s stubbornness. It may have been a test of personal integrity, or it may have been nothing more than sheer bloody-mindedness, but despite now having no hope of a military career, Tim took this punishment and stayed in the academy. He refused to let it beat him. Months passed.
This was not what was supposed to happen. The point of silencing someone is that they will, sooner or later, break down under the treatment. Cadets are not supposed to be able to keep going, especially when, like Leary, they are in their first year and still have over three and a half years to serve. Leary threw himself into reading and sports. The strain turned him into a chain smoker, but he still won the long-distance run and competed at baseball.
In due course he became a sophomore, a third classman in the West Point system. The new influx of cadets saw him and started asking questions about his treatment. The last thing the military wanted was an influx of recruits who start questioning the system. Senior cadets were starting to speak out, too. As time went on, the judgement of the Honour Committee began to look more and more questionable. In August 1941, after nine months of silencing, Leary was approached by a pair of cadet officers who were acting as unofficial go-betweens for the Honour Committee. They asked him what his terms would be to leave West Point.
Leary replied that he would need a written statement of his innocence from the Honour Committee, and he wanted it read out publicly. After a couple of days, this was agreed to. The Cadet Adjutant called for silence during lunchtime in the mess hall, and read out the brief statement of innocence to an unprepared audience. At first there was a stunned silence, and then applause from some of the braver cadets. After lunch Leary packed his bags and left.
When Tim told this story in later years, he framed it as a terrific victory, a triumph of one innocent man’s will against a seemingly unbeatable bureaucracy. Ultimately, of course, he had been rejected by the army and his peers, and had been forced to resign. Yet he found a perspective on events from which he could view his failure as a personal success. He had rejected the consensus viewpoint of the Honour Committee and instead invested his own point of view with a greater level of importance. He had learnt that it was possible to position a defeat in such a way that it appeared to be a success. There is much in this incident that seems to foreshadow the path his life would take, from the forbidden substance to his willingness to fight authority. But it was his ability to choose the way he viewed the events that was perhaps most indicative of what was to come. That and the realisation that the personal cost of a fight like this could be extremely high.
Forbidden alcohol at West Point had previously played a different, more fundamental role in Tim’s life. He had been conceived on the base following a dance at the West Point Officer’s Club.