Photos of the days events and share with friends and family on how wonderful this can be remembered to silence your phones. If you havent bought the book, todays featured book, feel free to do so. You can do so now or right afterwards because both of the authors will be happy to sign your book. And with that, we can get started. In 1971, Timothy Leary was dubbed the high priest of lsd who had run for governor against ronald reagan. This put him in prison and set off a dynamic change in events involving groups such as the Weather Underground in the black panthers and president nixon. That was all too wild to believe, but true they were and itsall chronicled in todays featured book , the most dangerous man of america. Authors bill minutaglio and Stephen Davis combined research of previously known events with just recently uncovered sources which im sure they will tell us about that and in person interviews. The results are a fun, fast 50 historical thriller that spans time, politics and counterculture america. This is definitely a page turner and as i told them when i first met them, its begging to be a movie or a tv series. I dont think they intended that when they wrote it, but it sure could be. Its a page turner and bill is an awardwinning author who has written several books including dallas 1963. He has also written for the New York Times and Washington Post among others and stephen is the president of the Texas Institute of letters and has written four books on iconoclasts including dallas 1963 with bill and with that, hold onto your seats, get ready for the ride and please welcome to book passage bill and stephen. [applause] thank you so much paula. I can hear myself, you can hear me too . Bill and i got on a plane in austin this morning, i was up at 4 00 which is three hours earlier than i normally would be. I like to know what im seeing and but you didnt have any trouble waking up thismorning. Im nottechnically awake. I just thought we would stay up all night. I think the extra hour. Well, its great to see you all. Thanks for coming out today. As you notice, we dont actually have a moderator you ask us open questions we will do the best we can. And im going to start by asking bill to tell us about meeting Timothy Leary. I should ask has anyone here met tim . I spent a lot of time as part of his world. I got to talk and publish an interview after the book, if you see any mistakes, they will pointed out to us publicly. Yes, i met tim in the early 1980s. It was actually a somewhat similar data what we are doing right now. He hadwritten a book called flashbacks. It was his autobiography. Passing through houston on his tour and you know, it was one of those things. Slow day at the newspaper where i was working, the east chronicle and an editor said would anybody like to interview Timothy Leary and i knocked over everybody in my path and said yes, absolutely. Unequivocally, let me do it. And he was an extraordinarily memorable person. I spent the afternoon with him, several hours in the oldest bar, actually the oldest building that happened howthe oldest bar in the city of houston. It was raining outside and we just talked for hours and hours and at the end of the conversation, he said that some what mysteriously, lets stay in touch. And i didnt know if you meant telepathically or whatever, but he gave me his phone number to be serious and i had. I had in my rolodex for a long time. It was a letter on the rolodex, after we organize and i like just looking at it. I call him once in a while over the years and he was very gracious to just talk with me and i like to say that steve, ill have him wail in on all this but in the conversations that i had with him, he was predicting certain things that are familiar to us now like the internet, i know. Is al gores still being credited with investing it. But tim thought a lot about you how humans would be connected in ways through portable computers. And a lot of the things that we take for granted now, tim was very visionary in, thats the kind of stuff we would talk about. I didnt understand but my fascination with him kind of lingered and then when stephen and i became friends we Work Together on a book that was mentioned earlier that was kind of a heavyweight book in the sense of it being kind of grinding. It was about the prelude to the assassination of president kennedy. We decided we would Work Together again. We said we should work on something that on occasion is happy but at the same time might have some comic absurdity and thatshow we wound up working on this book. Him talk to you about this period in his life and you heard about what this book is about. You had been running against Robert Gibbons for governor of california. He had Campaign Song written forhim , did anybody know about that song that john lennon wrote for him, come together, join the party which the beatles of course recorded as come together and he got busted for having two joints, having his family Station Wagon and he basically got the maximum sentence. It was in the california mens colony, up to a 10 year sentence. He was on the cusp of turning 50 years old and decided to break out of prison and our book chronicles this story, plus the ensuing 28 month global manhunt for tim leary by an increasingly obsessed Richard Nixon and thats what i wanted to ask you about because him talk to you about that period in his life. This is the early 80s, he was trying to figure what had happened in his life and it wasnt as a consequence, the easy joke well he had done too many drugs, therefore he couldnt remember. Our book takes a look at the fact that he was hunting. Richard nixon really turned him into a poster child and why would he do that . The time period in which we were writing, 1970 to 1973 , nixons Approval Ratings were swooning. The war in vietnam was obviously causing a lot of consternation. In some simplistic way of framing it but the countrywas in turmoil. Some cities work aflame. And nixon, we came across what we thought was a cool find. We were listening to the secrets Richard Nixonwhite house tapes. And. In the states, nixon was the only person who knew that these states were being made. His age, officers had no idea. Super double secret but in one of the nixon comes in and basically says to haldeman, ehrlichman and the other infamous members of the inner circle of the Nixon Administration, what can we do, boys . You know, and not being treated fairly by the media. Theres a lot of fake news out there about me in the administration. What can we do . And ifyou listen to the tapes youll see this in the book. That they basically decided what they needed to do was diver attention away a lot of the big headline issues. The war and thedraft. The assistant to the draft, student revolution, black panther movements and they declared a war on drugs and they thought that might really resonate out of the american heartland, people would go a greater enemy , thats something you really should be afraid of. And the clever thinking was we need to demonize someone. I dont know if this sounds familiar in todays political environment, that we need to demonize him one. We need to find someone americans seem to like, we can find someone wearing a black hat, a billing. They decided that oleary, and in the opening pages of the book, not to give too much away illustrate that nixon with his aides began chortling with greater excitement that they identified the poster child, chanting Timothy Leary nixon yells out we got room in the prisons for him so thats really how, we call it an adventure story begins. When we set out to write this book, we both were interested in tim leary. We both read robert greenfields biography which has a negative slant on him as a person but had this one mall really intriguing chapter about this episode in tims life and we both been around stories. Theres really something more there that hasnt been told and so thats when we talked about tim and we still point said the New York Public Library acquired the very archives that was 600 boxes of material. They had just been catalogued and available to researchers who were able to take advantage of that. And of course, all those nixon eight, most of them, many of them had been digitized and are available to listen to and i still remember when bill had headphones on and heard that white house take and call me up immediately to tell me what he has found because we went into this and really wanted to tell the story about the Weather Underground breaking him out of prison. We would see what we can find on that in his life on the land, what Eldridge Cleaver and the white panthers in algeria. You guys may know that the algerian government in those years did not recognize Richard Nixon as a representative of the American People and instead, they recognize the black Panther Party as legitimate representative to United States so the black panthers were getting their own very opulent embassy in algiers. And Eldridge Cleaver set up kind of a government exiled to plot the revolution against babylon youre back home. So so little was known about that and even about the panthers themselves and algeria during those years and these archives were just extraordinary for us to get into. Cleavers papers, uc berkeley, stanford and theres even a strange little collection of black panther material at texas a and m university. A great conservative, wellknown conservative school in texas that had this archive and what we found in the archive that was fascinating is this really gives you a window into this time and place where these people were living to moment. What we found there is Eldridge Cleavers wife at that time, you guys know who that was, she was pretty famous icon. Kathleen cleaver. There is a famous photograph of her wearing a miniskirt and brandishing a rifle in this era and she was seen as a strong feminist and everything but with what we found looking at the black panthers papers, it was a story about how kathleen was treated and how women in the counterculture were treated at this time and this is the beginning of the movement of feminism and in kathleens case, eldridge would discipline her for misbehavior and one of his punishments was to require kathleen to write down every single thing she did every day in the black Panther Embassy report with her husband and kathleen was an orderly person, relatively welleducated, the only panther was in french and algerian. Hes the one that dealt with the government ministers, irate landlords allotting back payments on rent black panther apartments and things like that and in these papers, you see this extraordinarily detailed daytoday accounting of whats going on inside the embassy while they are dealing with this crazy existential threat of having an lst professor Timothy Leary show up at their doorstep begging for asylum but what i wanted to get to is that when we set out to tell the story, we wanted to follow tim leary this adventure until he eventually got recaptured after by the unwitting law enforcement. J edgar hoover said, 10 billion when he first heard of the breakout and we just doubled into thisamazing nixon component. Which was really extraordinary. In the acknowledgments section of our book, the thank you section of the book, the first line says thank you to tim leary for leading an interesting life and that the height of an understatement. He, we already wrote a book about him and he led an extraordinarily fascinating life. A lot of it selfdirected, a lot of it visited upon him and when you have the president of the United States in a little room just outside the oval office basically declaring war on you, your life becomes interesting for good or bad. In this case, for bad reasons but he was an extraordinarily intelligent guy, and incredibly charismatic guy, and influential person in some of this might be lost to the prism of history but he was on the cover of every major magazine and polarizing i suppose in a way, as some people viewed him as the devil incarnate, other people saw him as a guru or a mentor, someone who can make the world a better place, simply put so i was describing them really as a court in a raging river. He sort of led out into life and things happen to him and like clerk would get submerged a little bit and he popped right back up. But not to give too much away, we hope you would buy my books. But we begin with him being brought to heel basically, brought to prison in the then book marches forward chronologically, following his escapades that he wasmentioned in this , and in our Generous International heritage. He busted out of prison, he was anextremely unlikely person to bust out of a well guarded california prison. There were other people there might have been on the shortlist i had of him and he was quite dramatic and when he did with the assistance. The joint forces, if you will of the most important people in the underground. The domestic revolutionaries of the time, the Weather Underground, literally the black panthers and then a really Fascinating Group that some of you might have heard of called the brotherhood of eternal love. Who were discredited by the nixonadministration as being the biggest drug cartel in american history. Others these are just a bunch of Southern California worker dudes who like to bring in a little pot inside their surfboards that are howled out. There was a gaggle of people in laguna beach and down south who had really believed in tim leary and helped to fund his estate, gave money to some of the revolutionaries and help bring him. And then we were on, i was on National Public radio talking about tim and i referred to him as a mister magoo on lsd. I almost like a real thatback in a sense. People dont even remember who mister magoo is but he was, mister magoo was a visionary, enlightened and moving at work speed in terms of his surroundings and the people around him and you have tim leary but what i meant is that when tim would open a door and step through it, he would open doors out of curiosity. And it involved a lot of his experimentation with lsd. He would jump through that door. Other people would walk through it tentatively but he would jump through it and the way i described it on the radio is he would plummet. He would go zooming way down into the darkness but he had a trampoline and vault up to the floor, about the one in which he had first entered the door. And thats the way his life was led and you know, as steve said, we took a look at tim leary and said this was a really unique american cultural icon. How can we write about him in a way that different and relevant. There had been a full dress biography, a couple of attempts but we really thought this 28 month training when he was identified by nixon as public enemy number one, they literally were comparing them to our own. And you know, he decided lets start from there, until hes finally captured 28 months later because in that time, we could understand his personality and the way america was changing. Kind of the birth of this demonization in politics or the paranoid politics. Also just simply as a yarn. Just this riproaring inventor of the guy who actually was able to stay the head of Richard Nixon. It was not an insubstantial foe. He was an amazing feathe went undercover after getting out of prison. He was spirited out of the country. Things that would just not happen today , he went to algeria. Had to actually we algeria for reasons that we are outlined in our book area he really thought perhaps you would be killed there. But at the minimum, he was being held hostage. Being held prisoner yet again. By the black panthers. So he escaped from there, goes to your and start running into andy warhol. Trying to communicate with keith richards. Is totally gone down to a secret mailbox drop off where john lennon is sending him letters with 5000 in them. Head of the law, have nixon. So we kept leading a more interesting life, culminating again, not getting too much away with his going to afghanistan which i think might strike you as an unlikely place to seek refuge, especially today back then, tim thought it would be a safe. But i wont give away the ending. The last part of the book does take place in afghanistan. At least the collating part of the book. And while tim is getting ahead of nixon during these years, its at the same time where nixon is really beginning to sort of just lose control of his sanity in the white house. He becomes increasingly paranoid and obsessed with enemies and of course, theres as you mentioned, theres the age of paranoia. Nixon ordered that secret white house taping Equipment Installed in february 1971. Also in algeria in february 1971, thats when Eldridge Cleaver ordered secret taping Equipment Installed in embassy thoughit was one of those crazytimes in america and in the world. That was really , a lot of the great writing on this book isrecapturing that manic spirit. It was sort of a wild ride for a lot of people at the time and had its ups and downs, but it was interesting time to say the least. And what we really found to, the more we followed this case is seeing the amazing levels of frustration that Richard Nixon and his administration exerted on the foreign governments that were offering asylum to tim leary. So you talk about tim, falling out of a nine story window and having a trampoline and landing on a 10 story window. When he fled from the back black panthers after their calling out in algeria , a few days later he was like in this billionaires house, lake geneva with being served by all kinds of sermons an