The Time and Life
Acid Trip
How Henry R. Luce and Clare Boothe Luce helped turn
America on to LSD.
Publisher Henry Luce and Clare Boothe Luce, U.S.
ambassador to Italy
By Jack Shafer
June 21 2010 6:52 P
Alan Brinkley's comprehensive new biography of Time magazine co-founder Henry R. Luce, The
Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, has but one
flaw. Then again, this "shortcoming" has more to do with my
obsessions than it does with any inadequacy on Brinkley's part. My
idiosyncratic complaint: Brinkley doesn't spend near enough space on the
proselytizing enthusiasm the mogul and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, had for LSD
and how that enthusiasm bled into Luce's Time and Life.
The Publisher limits its discussion of the
Luces' personal interest in the hallucinogen to about three pages, noting that
Clare's devotion to LSD far exceeded Henry's. He took it just once or maybe
twice compared with Clare's multiple trips—she later claimed it "saved our
marriage." But for a deeper look at how Luce's magazines helped popularize
the drug, we must turn to scholar Stephen Siff's 2008 paper "Henry Luce's
Strange Trip: Coverage of LSD in Time and Life, 1954-68" (PDF).
Siff draws on the favorable coverage of the drug in the
Luce magazines as well as the letters and papers of Clare Boothe Luce to depict
the couple as LSD believers. He writes:
Time and Life were fascinated by LSD. Henry
Luce's magazines discovered LSD in 1954
and remained enthusiastic even as the drug was becoming popular with recreational
users, frequently discussing the experience in an explicitly biblical framework.
Scare stories were balanced with endorsements of LSD by professors,
businessmen, and celebrities, and some articles even read like advertisements. One,
published [in Time in 1966] eight weeks after "Mysticism
in the Lab" [also in Time] began: "What kind of
person is likely to enjoy a trip on LSD? Only the extravert, Alabama
Psychiatrist Patrick H. Linton suggested last week at a regional meeting of the
National Association for Mental Health."
The Luces' role in spreading LSD wasn't lost on 1960s
radical Abbie Hoffman, Siff writes. In his 1980 memoir, Soon To
Be a Major Motion Picture,Hoffman writes, "I've always
maintained that Henry Luce did much more to popularize acid than Timothy Leary.
Years later I met Clare Booth Luce at the Republican convention in Miami. She
did not disagree with this opinion."
Luce's magazines accentuated the potential of LSD and
other hallucinogens over the dangers they posed long before either Henry or
Clare took them. The first Time article, "Dream
Stuff," published in 1954, reported on LSD's use as an adjunct
to psychotherapy. "LSD 25, while it has no direct curative powers, can be
of great benefit to mental patients," the magazine stated. Life magazine
gave J.P. Morgan Vice President R. Gordon Wasson a first-person platform to
describe his positive encounters with Mexican hallucinogenic mushrooms in a
1957 article titled "Seeking
the Magic Mushroom."
Time magazine got to the LSD story before other
magazines, writes Siff, and wrote about it more frequently. Its stories were
longer on average than the pieces run by its competition and were largely
sympathetic, as typified by the 1960 Time piece "The
Psyche in 3-D," about celebrities taking LSD under the
supervision of their doctors; or this Life editorial
from 1966 urging regulation, not prohibition, of LSD; or, from 1968, an early debunking
of the gone-blind-on-LSD urban myth. So intense was the Luces' interest in the
topic that both reviewed the 1963 Life article "The
Chemical Mind-Changers" prior to its publication, writes Siff.
Not every column inch of LSD copy in Time was adulatory or
"balanced." In "An
Epidemic of Acid Heads" from 1966, Time blamed a wave of
psychotic illnesses on the recreational use of LSD. (Siff allows that some of
the sympathetic coverage may have been a result of reporters' over-reliance on
past stories.)
Clare's acid trips, which she recorded in her papers now
at the Library of Congress, were of the garden variety. She sorts mosaic glass
by her swimming pool. She entertains herself looking through a kaleidoscope.
During a March 11, 1959, trip, Richard Nixon telephoned Clare at her Phoenix
home. An active Republican who served in Congress and as an ambassador, Clare
declined to speak to Nixon. How history might have changed if she had shared a
little acid with him!
Both writers reconstruct Henry Luce's maiden trip on LSD,
taken at Clare's urging, from her papers. After Henry took his dose, he lit a
cigarette at his desk and started reading Lionel Trilling's biography of
Matthew Arnold. An hour and a half later, Clare placed some flowers near him
and asked if their color was vivid. "No," said the grounded Henry. A
half-hour later, the acid and not Henry was "in command." An observer
recorded Luce's observations:
Now things are getting sharper, ... I'm beginning to see
what Clare said. The aliveness. ... This perception is wonderful.
The doctor who observed the Luces that day in Phoenix and
took notes was UCLA's Sidney Cohen. Cohen got this favorable write-up
in 1964 in Time upon publication of his book, The
Beyond Within: The LSD Story.
Henry Luce's greatest public testimonial to LSD came in
1964 or thereabouts, when he outed himself as an acid-eater to his colleagues
and peers at a New York hotel banquet, according to former Life publisher
and Time Inc. chairman Andrew
Heiskell. "Without any preamble," Heiskell says in an oral history collected by Columbia University,
Luce "said that he and Clare were taking LSD!"
Heiskell continues:
And two hundred and fifty people fainted. [laughter] And
then he went right on. I don't think he had any notion of what he had said. I
don't know whether he thought all of us took LSD and therefore he would be one
of the boys—maybe that. You know, he was very specific about it. He said,
"Yes, yes, we take LSD. We do it under doctors [sic] supervision."
Luce, writes Siff, "was unembarrassed by his use of
LSD, likely seeing himself as similar to the respectable, traditionally minded
spiritual seekers depicted using the drug in his magazines." Luce's
magazines, which ordinarily tilted right on most social and political issues, largely
used reason and not emotion when thinking about hallucinogens during his time.
Siff credits Time and Life coverage of LSD—justifiably, I
think—with raising "public awareness that a drug with the unique effects
of LSD existed and was possibly desirable."
But please don't call Henry and Clare drug pushers. At worst, they were drug nudgers.
But please don't call Henry and Clare drug pushers. At worst, they were drug nudgers.
Researcher’s Note: These Time Magazine cover’s from 1939 &
1943 should be concerning to every American!
Adolph Hitler, Man of the Year | Jan. 2, 1939
Joseph Stalin, Man of the Year | Jan. 4, 1943
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