What sparked the ideal of peace, love and understanding of the 1960s? In The Last Great Dream, Dennis McNally, the longtime publicist of the Grateful Dead, explores the roots of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury hippies. It’s the “fourth and last instalment” of McNally’s work documenting the history of the counterculture, following books about Jack Kerouac and the Beats; the Grateful Dead; and the relationship between Black music and white culture.
McNally traces the precursors of hippie culture to 1942, and the first meeting between Bay area poets Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, who would “become the nucleus of a remarkably powerful gathering of poets over the next decade”. Artists began to question societal values during the war, prompted by the internment of Japanese Americans, the threat of atomic annihilation and the McCarthyism that followed. While the GI Bill’s provision of financial and educational benefits for veterans bolstered the pursuit of the American dream, the Beats espoused what McNally calls the “bohemian code”: that “a life of art and spirituality was preferable to money and the pursuit of power”.
The Last Great Dream is an encyclopedic survey, with music acting as the glue between various art forms. McNally does a good job of showing the web of connections between artists from different disciplines. Unfortunately, completism can come at the expense of readability. Although he conducted some 60 interviews for the project, the book reads more like a compendium of Wikipedia entries than first-person accounts of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
While bohemian scenes blossomed in tandem in New York, LA and London, “San Franciscans went further and deeper”, McNally argues. By 1967, a new vision of freedom and sexuality was in place but the “catalyst” of the counterculture, McNally writes, was LSD. At the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park that year, Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned acid evangelist, led the crowd in chanting his mantra: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Ample ink has been spilled on the megalomaniacal Leary but the story of his fourth wife and fellow fugitive Rosemary Woodruff tails off after their split. Susannah Cahalan, a journalist with an interest in altered states since being diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis (the subject of her bestselling 2012 memoir, Brain on Fire), wrote The Acid Queen to prevent Woodruff from fading into a footnote in Leary’s legacy.
A high-school dropout, Woodruff arrived in New York from the Midwest in 1953. Twice divorced by 21, once from a jazz accordionist, she worked as a model and stewardess (an industry “harder to get into than Harvard”, writes Cahalan), until she aged out of the skies at 30. Fleeing an abusive relationship, she met Leary, 15 years her senior, at his psychedelic commune upstate in 1965.

Cahalan makes a case for Woodruff’s contribution to the psychedelic movement during her seven-year relationship with Leary. She spoke to the press, fundraised, edited his books and wrote his speeches, including for a failed gubernatorial run in California against Ronald Reagan. She also cared for his two children, who had lost their mother, Marianne Busch, to suicide. The well-worn phrase “if you can remember the 1960s, then you weren’t really there” luckily doesn’t apply to Woodruff, who at least took good notes. Her archives include diary entries, letters, trip reports and a posthumously published memoir, which Cahalan rounds out with interviews with those who knew her.

It’s a colourful story, involving love triangles, drug busts and the dramatic jailbreak of Leary, who was serving a 20-year sentence for marijuana possession. The couple fled to Algeria, became wards of the Black Panthers and were then sheltered by an arms dealer in Switzerland. Woodruff’s life underground — once Leary was caught in Afghanistan and returned to the US in 1973 — had her hiding in Italy, Colombia and the Caribbean before living under an assumed name in Cape Cod, unable to afford the “mouthful of fillings” she had needed since their escape.
Well researched, The Acid Queen paints an unflattering portrait of Leary. While Cahalan gives him credit for his contribution to the early days of psychedelic research, his lack of political engagement became increasingly dangerous as “dropping out” left young men susceptible to the draft. He was a neglectful father and didn’t visit Woodruff in jail when she served time for refusing to testify against him in a grand jury. His values were not particularly progressive: he treated women as free domestic labour and never accepted the bisexuality of his former colleague Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass).
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Leary was disavowed by the psychedelic community for co-operating with the Feds to reduce his sentence, after which he lived a life of debauched semi-celebrity until his death, aged 75, in 1996, with his ashes blasted into space. Woodruff, meanwhile, remained undercover for more than 20 years, until a judge threw out the charges against her in 1994. Despite Leary trying to entice her out of hiding to save himself, they reconciled: she was the executor of his estate. Woodruff died in 2002, at 66, of congestive heart failure.
Taken together, The Last Great Dream and The Acid Queen raise the question of the legacy of the 1960s. Despite the consciousness-raising potential of psychedelics, Cahalan warns that today’s renewed interest carries the same risks of “evangelism and hubris”. While hippies may not have succeeded in changing politics, they have had a lasting impact on the culture, McNally holds, including organic food, yoga, LGBTQ rights and computing. “The dream died,” he concludes, “but the dreaming continues.”
The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties by Dennis McNally Hachette £28, 461 pages
The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary by Susannah Cahalan Canongate £22, 384 pages
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