The Time and Life Acid Trip: How Henry R. Luce and Clare Boothe Luce helped turn America on to LSD. (archived)
I accidentally came across this when I was looking into Henry Luce, some more. It doesn’t mention Luce’s ties to the CIA, i.e. Operation Mockingbird. The notes are from another project that I’ve been slowly working on. That one I won’t be publicizing until I’m finished with it.
Related & Notes:
Stephen Siff: Henry Luce’s Strange Trip: Coverage of LSD in Time and Life, 1954-68
Acid Hype by Stephen Siff (Chapter 5: Luce, Leary, and LSD, 1963–1965)
Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture (The CIA Turned Me On to LSD) by Abbie Hoffman (student of Herbert Marcuse, Counterculture of the 1960s, Flower power)
The Function of the Compatible Left Seen in Its Attacks on the Venezuelan Revolution (archived)
The CIA funded “Western Marxism,” a non-communist left and helped it grow in stature. Herbert Marcuse, who worked with the Office of Strategic Services, and later the State Department, may be the most renowned of this group. The Frankfurt School was another, also CIA supported.
Isn’t Marcuse Still Right? (CFP) | Society for US Intellectual History
Marcuse’s writings on Marx, including his 1958 book Soviet Marxism which was commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of US intelligence and foundation efforts to project non-communist but radical images and ideas. I will extend this analysis to think about how Marcuse used Marx in his analysis of American culture, especially in One-Dimensional Man and also in his 1972 reflections on Nixon’s America, Counterrevolution and Revolt. There is an irony here that Mark Greif has noticed in his recent book, The Age of the Crisis of Man. That is, Marcuse was commissioned to study Marx in order to prove that Marx was the progenitor of totalitarianism, but in the end those who commissioned Marcuse got more than they bargained for when he turned his analysis of totalitarianism on his adopted country.
Herbert Marcuse: The Ideologue as Paid Agent of U.S. Imperialism
R. Gordon Wasson (J.P. Morgan & Co, CIA, MKUltra)
Sidney Cohen is perhaps most well-known in popular culture for LSD experiments he conducted with Keith Ditman, Betty Eisner and Gerald Heard, based on correspondence with Humphrey Osmond, in the mid-1950s. Cohen also conducted a number of very loosely-controlled experiments with LSD, resulting in descriptions of LSD experiences. Cohen provided LSD to Clare Boothe Luce and Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, among numerous others. After becoming convinced that use of LSD could be dangerous, particularly if unsupervised, Cohen maintained a public anti-LSD stance and sometimes testy discourse with Timothy Leary.
Cohen also provided the LSD used by Aldous Huxley in his deathbed experience and advocated LSD research, particularly for the terminally ill, until his own death in 1987.
Leary: “Drugs A Way To God” Cohen: “Don’t Kid Yourself”
Bill W, co-founder of A.A., promoted psychedelics for alcohol addiction
Bill Wilson, LSD and the Secret Psychedelic History of Alcoholics Anonymous
Andrew Heiskell (President of CIA-funded Inter American Press Association, People magazine)
Embedded Journalism, Media Manipulation, CIA Operation Mockingbird, & Apathy (Henry Luce, Operation Mockingbird)

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