1972: The Year That Made 2018 Seem Sane

Richard Nixon’s battle with Timothy Leary puts today’s culture wars to shame.

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Journalist-historians Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis are not deliberately trying to deliver a message about historical perspective. But in their thrilling The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD, they show how bad things got in a nation truly troubled by vicious culture wars, wracked by violent ideological conflict, and ruled by a near-lunatic abusing his power to pursue personal and political grudges.

Timothy Leary was a Harvard professor–turned–psychedelic advocate, a leader of the “head” faction that was rebelling against the establishment. He had been a voice for personal liberation and for “dropping out” of a stultifying culture, not a politically motivated leftist revolutionary. The U.S. government helped change that.

The war on the trouble-making psychologist is in progress as the book’s narrative begins in May 1970…

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Read the Reason Book Review HERE

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The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD, by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, Twelve Books, 384 pages, $30

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Book cover photo: Twelve Books