Chapter 3.

Personal Revolution

Computers as Human Augmentation—LSD as Human Augmentation—Bob

Kaufman: Black, Communist, Beat—Ken Kesey and Other CIA
Experiments

As so often happens on frontiers, land filled up fast in Silicon Valley, and

settlers became workers. The Santa Clara County of the 1960s was heavily
dependent on the federal government, and electronics industry fortunes rose
and fell with defense spending like a small boat riding big waves. Scientists
and engineers who felt so secure in the early days of the space settlers were
tossed into the ocean of unemployment: 30,000 California engineers were
laid off in 1963–64. As the Vietnam War wound toward its close, the
engineer unemployment rate quadrupled.1 These workers, many of whom
hadn’t wanted to encumber themselves with a labor union, faced uncertain
prospects.
Colleagues they left behind started to feel dwarfed by massive machines,
anonymous parts in the public-private defense bureaucracy. “By the end of
the 1960s,” writes economist Harry Braverman in his study of postwar
shifts in the composition of the labor force, “rising rates of unemployment
among ‘professionals’ of various kinds once more brought home to them
that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to
‘associate themselves’ with one or another corporation, but truly part of a
labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.”2 The newest
inventions and advances were for unused missiles. Making missiles and
database systems was, if not morally repugnant, at least boring and
pointless. Journalist Steven Levy writes that computers were “loathed by
millions of common, patriotic citizens” who saw them as a “dehumanizing
factor in society.”i3 The dull technophile engineer with a new stereo became
a stereotype, and the Japanese commodity-electronics industry threatened
from across the Pacific.
Information technology was meant for more, and a line of theorist-
administrators saw it coming together, starting with Vannevar Bush. In a
1945 article for the Atlantic with the clever futurist title “As We May
Think,” Bush described a possible synthesis of technologies that would
allow individual professionals to store all their printed matter on a
microfilm hard drive built into a desk, where it could be recalled and
projected onto slanted translucent screens. “Trails” between documents
would be easy to encode, leading to new ways to organize information:

The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of
his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and
authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued
patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The
physician, puzzled by its patient’s reactions, strikes the trail
established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly
through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics
for the pertinent anatomy and histology.4

He called this invention the memex, and despite Bush’s influence it

stayed speculative and his Raytheon didn’t pursue it. But the vision of a
desktop knowledge machine marched on. In 1960, betweeded and horn-
rimmed, the former SAGE staffer and MIT professor J. C. R. Licklider
published “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” a paper predicting that soon the
labor elite would outsource their rote tasks to “computers” (at the time a
sketchy enough term to warrant putting it in quotation marks)—machines
that would complete the tasks just as SAGE calculated trajectories and
suggested responses to operators.5
The computer scene centered at MIT, but Fred Terman prepared the
West Coast to compete. Radar was the first system that gathered
complicated information from the world and automatically displayed it for a
human operator to use, and that experience prompted the young technicians
to imagine further uses for the human-information interface apparatus. One
of those technicians was a young man named Doug Engelbart, who, with
perfect timing, enlisted in the navy and qualified for elite radio training only
to see the war end as soon as he deployed, shipping out to the Philippines
on V-J Day. No matter; he was a good investment for the military
regardless. He spent his short tour in Manila Bay, and on the way there he
happened to read Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article reprinted in Life
magazine.
In 1950, Engelbart was twenty-five and working for NACA (soon to be
NASA) at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Airfield in unincorporated
Santa Clara County as an electrical engineer when he decided to decide
what to do with the rest of his life. He had a sense of himself as an
important, complex, expensive tool, which is exactly what the military built
him to be, the human half of a hybrid man-machine radar apparatus. He was
like an especially quick colt at the Palo Alto Stock Farm who halts his trot
to think: What do I want to be when I grow up? A tractor? A fire truck? A
cannon? He was good: but for what? He had three flashes of insight. First,
the world’s problems were increasing in difficulty faster than the human
ability to solve them; second, improving mankind’s ability to solve
problems is a worthwhile activity; and third, a vision of himself, sitting at a
screen, operating what we now know as a general-purpose computer. He
saw men sharing information in new ways—in theaters, watching a big-
screen presentation together, or in offices, sending data to and from their
own screens. Information could move as fast as they needed it to. Text and
graphics would combine to represent anything and everything, infinitely
adaptable to the needs of a protean world. Pretty much everyone he told
about it thought he was nuts. He quit his job and enrolled in a Berkeley PhD
program.
Even his fellow Berkeley grad students thought Engelbart’s idea, which
he was calling “human augmentation,” was wacky, so he kept his head
down and got his degree without making too many waves. After he
graduated, he got himself recruited to SRI, where he eventually got a small
grant from the air force to draft a report on “augmenting human intellect.”
The report he returned in 1962 included the future possibility of “the digital
computer as a tool for the personal use of an individual.”6 This caught the
attention of Licklider (whom he cited a couple of times) and Bob Taylor, a
Licklider protégé at NACA. Licklider gave Engelbart some funds from the
new Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), where he was helping
direct computer research money. With his focus on MIT, Licklider didn’t
have a lot of faith in this guy out in Palo Alto, but “he’s using the right
words, so we’re sort of honor-bound to fund him,” Licklider allegedly told a
friend.7 Taylor directed funding to Engelbart so he could create a computer
pointing tool—a contest won by a device that became known as the mouse
—and when Taylor joined the Information Processing Techniques Office at
ARPA, he buried Engelbart in more acronyms and money, setting him up
with the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at SRI.8 America hadn’t yet
reached the moon, but already this group of powerful men at the academic-
military nexus was looking to the next frontier.
In retrospect, the ARC has a magical aura, but at the beginning it was
the black sheep of SRI. During the early days of NACA’s support for the
center, Engelbart’s manager made clear to Taylor that he could back the
crackpot if he wanted, but otherwise the institute couldn’t afford to feed
him. A straitlaced adopted son of a Methodist minister, the Texan Taylor
came to engineering through psychology, and from there he jumped into the
growing aerospace industry. Though he later objected to and even tried to
obstruct the hippie turn in computing, the pipe-smoking former basketball
coach shared the augmentation dream, and in 1968, when Engelbart wanted
to show off his first attempt to the public, Taylor awarded the ARC another
blank check. The center spent $175,000 in 1968 dollars on the single day’s
demo—$1.5 million in 2022 money.9 But Taylor got his money’s worth.
The oNLine System (NLS) was a leap forward in computing technology,
and if you watch a video of the charismatic Engelbart wielding it at the
“Mother of All Demos,” you’ll see that it’s still a somewhat recognizable
interface today.10 The mouse moved freely in two dimensions; there were
windows and linked hypertext. Engelbart gave the demo on a keyboard-
mouse-screen terminal in San Francisco, wirelessly connected to the
computer itself at the ARC, in Menlo Park, via microwave transmission. He
video-chatted live with the team at SRI, and the audience was riveted.
The next step was to transform the performance into a prototype, but
that wasn’t on the philosopher Engelbart’s agenda. Meanwhile, Bob Taylor
left ARPA after funding cuts and a disillusioning trip to Vietnam to try to
coordinate the war’s chaotic information streams.11 He went to the
University of Utah in 1969, where his ARPA munificence funded one of the
nation’s top computer science programs, but the next year, when corporate
copy giant Xerox invited him to help build out the Computer Science Lab
(CSL) at the company’s new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he headed
for the coast. Xerox wanted Taylor for his contacts—as the Santa Claus of
computer research at ARPA, he knew the best recruits and how to get them
on the phone. And not only did everyone in the field know him, they all
owed him, too. Taylor raided Engelbart’s lab for lead engineer Bill English,
and the small, struggling Berkeley Computer Company for another half
dozen top talents.12 He didn’t have his own PhD, but the ex-general Taylor
did have an army of top scientists and engineers, and he led them to the
promised land of the first personal computer.
Xerox PARC gets conflated with the CSL and the CSL with Taylor, a set
of impressions Taylor worked hard to deliver and that drove his coworkers
nuts. That said, the CSL’s accomplishments are impressive: Within five
years of the Engelbart demo, PARC had its Alto, a stand-alone personal
computer system with a screen, a mouse, and a body that fit under a desk. It
had Ethernet networking and a laser printer and a friendly graphical user
interface. PARC did it, and then Xerox fumbled the ball. That’s the
traditional business-history story. Xerox had the future in its hands at
PARC, but the large firm was too bloated to act fast, and the various Alto
innovations slipped through its fat corporate fingers. There’s some truth to
that, and Xerox didn’t cash in on PCs or networking, but the laser printer
did so well for the company that it more than covered the whole pricey R &
D effort. Merely making money is only a problem by Silicon Valley
standards, and Xerox is from Rochester. Still, Licklider and Engelbart
couldn’t help feeling like there was something about the work that their
eastern bosses didn’t get.
In his conceptual framework for augmenting human intellect, Doug
Engelbart posed the question of whom to augment first. His unsurprising
conclusion was that computer programmers should be at the head of the line
—specifically, those working on human augmentation, because the more
they self-augmented, the faster they could produce further augmentations.
They are “developing better tools for a class to which they themselves
belong,” he wrote.13 (Engelbart saw this cycle as obviously virtuous, but
today’s reader can detect other possibilities.) Xerox as a company was
doing the same thing, and when executives finally commercialized the Alto
in 1981 with the Star system, they had themselves in mind. It was an office
workstation—high-powered, very big, and so expensive that a large
employer had to pick up the tab. It flopped. The personal computer wasn’t
just for work; it was also for a whole person, and if computer executives
weren’t turned on to the personal revolution, they would never understand
their industry. If only they had listened to Myron.
At forty years old, Myron Stolaroff was the senior employee at the
familiar Silicon Valley electronics company Ampex. Drafted out of
Stanford, he was Poniatoff’s first full-time hire. But now it was 1960, and
Stolaroff had a plan to launch his firm into the future by augmenting the
creativity of his fellow engineers. Like Engelbart, he saw how important
individuals were becoming to innovation. In the electronics industry, getting
the right person to see from the right perspective at the right time could
mean year-size jumps in technology and millions or billions of dollars in
monopoly profits. Stolaroff’s solution wasn’t to give them computers; he
wanted to give them LSD. The rest of the management committee at
Ampex did not think dosing their top men with a powerful and ill-
understood psychedelic was a good plan, but Myron was a true believer,
and he had plenty of success in casual settings turning on friends from the
informal but powerful Stanford engineering fraternity, including employees
from HP and SRI as well as Stanford professor Willis Harman. Wealthy
enough by then to go at it alone, Stolaroff left Ampex to found the
International Foundation for Advanced Studies in Palo Alto, where he
“augmented” the engineering elite with LSD.14
During the first half of the 1960s, the foundation guided hundreds of
subjects through personal LSD trips at $500 a pop (around $5,000 in 2022
money), and the reviews were raves.15 Palo Alto was the glowing center of
the bourgeois acid scene, a vindication of drug pioneers such as Timothy
Leary, who imagined a trickle-down liberation of the American mind. A
team including Stolaroff’s deputies Harman and James Fadiman (of
Engelbart’s augmentation center at SRI) published their preliminary
findings a few years later, summarizing the experiences of professional men
who took acid and tried to solve work problems. In addition to the LSD
effects we now take for granted (a broadening of context, access to the
subconscious, increased empathy), they reported slightly improved work
performance across a number of categories.16 One engineer described the
experience thusly: “I began to see an image of the circuit. The gates
themselves were little silver cones linked together by lines. I watched this
circuit flipping through its paces.” An architect found himself with a perfect
design: “I drew the property lines.… Suddenly I saw the finished project. I
did some quick calculations.… it would fit on the property and not only
that.… it would meet the cost and income requirements.… it would park
enough cars.… it met all the requirements.” The foundation was at the edge
of a breakthrough—a planned visit from some high-placed federal officials
—when the politics of LSD shifted, and in 1966 Stolaroff found his clinical
research abruptly shut down.
Luckily, Palo Alto contained plenty of other well-funded nooks and
crannies. Harman got a placement at SRI, too, and he quietly resumed the
acid experiments under the auspices of the Alternative Futures Project.17
Fadiman has continued the work into the present, and his 2011 book, The
Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys,
inspired a surge of interest in “microdosing,” now a popular performance-
enhancing method in Silicon Valley tech circles that involves taking tiny
amounts of LSD before work, a practice first proposed by Fadiman that’s
sometimes imagined as a twenty-first-century off-label use of the drug.18
But acid was marketed to Bay Area knowledge workers as a productivity
aid from the beginning.
The personal revolutions in computers and consciousness weren’t just
concurrent; they were also overlapping.ii Aided by LSD (directly and
environmentally), technologists were going out on limbs too slight for even
California’s big corporations to follow, and the government’s support
peaked, then declined. Silicon Valley’s defense dependence posed a real
risk: The electronics industry always relied on America’s military and its
big corporate contractors. Who the hell else would buy a computer? Who
else could? Some California drug freaks were convinced that the answer
was soon to be “everyone,” including individual households. Whereas
selling to the military was a relatively simple case of “know-who” among
sophisticated technocrats, making the case for the home computer to the
public required a salesmanship that was not yet a big part of the Palo Alto
package. But the hype around computers and LSD was similar: People were
either haves or have-nots—those who were “turned on” and those who were
still off; the augmented and the rest. Marketer turned poet impresario Allen
Ginsberg turned on to acid under the observation of Palo Alto’s Mental
Research Institute a few years after he piqued America’s interest with his
claim to know the best minds of his generation and where to find them.19 A
Stanford creative-writing hotshot named Ken Kesey was turning on around
the same time, right down the road.20 It was all so characteristically binary,
and it appealed to the cultural elites in a rising generation, one with an
ambivalent relationship to conventional success.

Beat
On March 31, 1973, at the Palo Alto Culture Center, the poet Bob Kaufman
recited a speech from T. S. Eliot’s verse drama Murder in the Cathedral.21
Insofar as Kaufman was known at all, it was for his extemporaneous public
readings, so the recitation wouldn’t have been surprising except that he had
barely spoken in a decade. There’s some controversy regarding the
circumstances of his silence—whether it was in response to the JFK
assassination, Buddhism, or the Vietnam War—and whether the vow really
kept him from asking people for speed and money. Regardless, there’s
consensus that Kaufman was in bad shape. He had chronic injuries from a
lifetime of abuse: being hung from his thumbs overnight as a child by a
lynch mob in Louisiana; a later beating that knocked out some teeth and
permanently ruined his hearing.22 He was also an addict. Kaufman received
electroshock treatment at Bellevue Hospital in New York, lived on the
streets of San Francisco, and in Paris they called him “the black American
Rimbaud.”23
Americans are coming to recognize Kaufman as a central figure in the
development of Beat poetry and the larger aesthetic. San Francisco
mainstay publisher City Lights put out his collected poems posthumously,
in 2019; he’s the subject of the 2015 documentary And When I Die, I Won’t
Stay Dead, directed by the great California talent Billy Woodberry; and it’s
not like Kaufman never got any attention while he lived.iii But it was other
people who made sure the work got out, who made it possible for him to
win a National Endowment for the Arts award in the last years of his life,
who kept him alive to the age of sixty. As pretty much any poem of his will
tell you, Kaufman was moribund; his central creative notes were defeat and
self-destruction. “My face is covered with maps of dead nations,” he
writes.24 When you look at pictures of him, it’s hard to disagree. He writes
under the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, standing on
unmarked Indian graves. History knocked Kaufman around, and he knows
it when he sees it:

Alien winds sweeping the highway

fling the dust of medicine men,
long dead,
in the california afternoon

Into the floating eyes

of spitting gadget salesmen,
eating murdered hot dogs,
in the california afternoon.25

There’s nothing of the personal revolution in Kaufman’s poetry, no sense

that something better is on its way. He is from a different tradition, one that
doesn’t overlap much with gadget salesmen. Kaufman joined the merchant
marine at around seventeen, a classic outlet for restless young men, and he
spent World War II shipping American goods (including arms) around the
world. Within a couple of years, barely out of his teens, Kaufman was
organizing with the National Maritime Union (NMU), a radical seamen’s
association affiliated with the CIO. In 1945 he represented the NMU as part
of a delegation to Congress in support of anti-discrimination rules and led a
sound-truck campaign to tell the public about the union’s wage drive.26
Stories about Kaufman organizing in the Deep South line up with the CIO’s
Operation Dixie, during which union organizers (including those from the
NMU) went to sign up shops in the low-wage nonunion South at great
personal risk.27 But white reactionaries took control of the NMU in the late
1940s. Its vice president, Ferdinand Smith, the highest-ranking black labor
leader in New York City, was expelled from the union and deported to
Jamaica.28
Was Bob Kaufman a communist? The FBI sure thought so. As they did a
lot of black labor leaders in the early years of the Cold War, the feds kept a
close watch on Kaufman. They tracked his movements and activities and
harassed his family and associates.29 They were convinced he was recruited
into the CPUSA in 1946 and advanced quickly. Informants told the FBI that
the next year Kaufman became a member of the executive committee of the
CP’s Waterfront Section in New York. After Smith was kicked out of the
NMU but before his deportation, he founded the Harlem Trade Union
Council (allegedly at the urging of the CP), and the FBI has Kaufman as an
employee in 1949, working with youth.iv In 1950, the feds believed he
attended Communist Party “leadership training school.” But Kaufman, in
his mid-twenties, got involved in the Harlem drug scene and was expelled
from the Party in January of 1951 after admitting he “took the needle”
himself. The FBI followed him to Los Angeles, but in 1956 they were
convinced he was done with politics and closed the file. That’s when
Kaufman moved to San Francisco to check out the poetry.
It’s tempting to see Kaufman as a one-of-a-kind poetic consciousness,
the “best of the Beats” as some have it. So Beat he could barely get through
the day, but throwing off gems as he staggered. A street poet for the canon,
a black Beat. But Kaufman was also part of a working-class lifeworld torn
asunder by postwar anticommunism.30 “[W]e were outnumbered because
the anti-[c]ommunist thing became a banner—a tent under which… racist
elements could assemble and cover their flanks,” recounts fellow NMU
organizer Jack O’Dell of the South during Operation Dixie. “[Union
officials] teamed up with the police and the Klan… to run blacks out of the
Union hall. It was almost like a Reconstruction thing you read about—how
they overthrew the government, the blacks are forced to flee, and so forth. It
was that kind of atmosphere they were able to create.”31 After the Korean
War began, the Cold War division went national, especially in industrial
unions dependent on military spending.32 Communists in the NMU
(suspected and actual) had trouble shipping out, and O’Dell moved on to
advise Martin Luther King Jr. before he was publicly red-baited out of the
civil rights movement, too. Kaufman was among the youngest members of
the Old Left—he was born the same year as Malcolm X—but he
represented a whole population.
“Why do winos lie so much?” Richard Pryor jokes in his 1986 semi-
autobiographical comedy, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. “You give
him a bottle of wine and talk to him a little bit, and he start lyin’: ‘I was
with the FBI’; ‘Me and another black man started the merchant marines’;
‘Shit, I’ve been around the world, swam the equator twice.’” These were
those guys, and they had good reasons, both to drink and to lie, just in case
someone was listening too closely.v And behind the booze and tall tales
were big, sad stories from real history. Many of them had been around the
world—and some of them no doubt did inform on their coworkers to the
FBI. There was Henry Thomas, fellow seaman and Spanish Civil War
veteran, who got drunk all day at a bar near the San Francisco docks and
sang “The Internationale.”33 There was Joe Overstreet, a Bay Area kid who
joined the NMU, learned politics from Kaufman, and became a bohemian
painter in Harlem.vi And there was Kaufman’s friend Jimmy Carter (of no
apparent relation to the ex-president), another black communist sailor who
was red-baited out of UCLA and became a renowned San Francisco jazz
drummer. Carter was a poet, too, and a model for Kaufman, but he
purposely never wrote anything down.34 It’s from this beaten black political
milieu that the Beats got their sense of what it meant to lose.vii
The radical labor movement was defiantly interracial—in certain ports,
NMU sailors were known for integrating bars by force—and with its
national defeat, segregation shaped the Bay Area’s culture.viii We can’t
know how America would have been different if Popular Front culture had
held its ground, but there are some indications. Instead of coworkers and
comrades, the period’s dominant white artists approached black people as
material or inspiration, as symbols rather than humans. The internment and
expulsion of the California Japanese also influenced the scene in ways it’s
hard to see now. The most famous artist-entertainer to grow up in Palo Alto
during the interwar period was Paul Wing, an American-born Chinese tap
dancer who graduated from Palo Alto High in 1932. The Wings were one of
Palo Alto’s founding families: Paul’s parents ran a laundry and a women’s
clothing store on Emerson Street in the downtown area that seem to have
been financed by his father’s uncle Ah Wing (“Mr. Wing”), Jane Stanford’s
longtime cook, who after being cleared of her murder received the $1,000
earmarked for him in her will—over $30,000 in 2022 dollars.35ix Paul’s
well-educated mother, Rose Tong Jew, who was born in San Francisco’s
Chinatown and raised bilingually fluent and literate, was the nexus between
Palo Alto’s white community and its early Chinese population. The Wings
were almost certainly the first Chinese-American family to buy property in
town.
Touched by the dawn of Hollywood’s golden age, Paul loved showbiz
from his early years, training himself in tap despite skepticism from his
parents about their eldest son’s vocation. But Paul had an uncle who found
some success in vaudeville (as well as a bunch of younger siblings for his
parents to worry about), and he vigorously pursued a dance career despite
the paucity of Chinese-Americans in the industry. He teamed up with a
young Los Angeles–raised performer named Dorothy Toy, whose Russian
ballet instructor traded meals at the Toy family Chinese restaurant in
exchange for lessons. (Paul Wing dined there with his uncle as well, when
he was in town.) The duo branded themselves as Toy & Wing and hit the
road, winning plaudits for his quick feet, her Russian-inspired kick moves,
and their natural chemistry. Fans called them the Chinese Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers, and they signed with the top-shelf William Morris Agency
in New York, making it all the way to Broadway. Hollywood was feeling
them out, too, and they performed in the 1937 punny film short Deviled
Ham, about an infernal revue.x Toy & Wing were supporting Chico Marx
on tour and planning to shoot their first feature film when they got the
news: Someone had snitched out Dorothy Toy, whose birth name was
Takahashi. The Chinese Ginger Rogers was really the Japanese Ginger
Rogers; they couldn’t go back to California. Dorothy and Paul stayed in
New York while her parents were interned in Utah. They never made it to
the movies, and American culture suffered for it.36
Embracing white supremacy and segregation meant sacrificing a certain
amount of nonwhite talent. This is what horrified the racialist Lewis
Terman, who spent so much time trying to locate exceptional youngsters,
about Japanese internment and expulsion. Considering its human capital
goals, it’s hard to account for what the state wasted, the degree to which
California retarded itself in the process. Once again, there are some
indications. For example, the sculptor Ruth Asawa was born to small
farmers in Southern California in 1926, and she became a major influence
on public art in San Francisco, but not before a long detour. First her family
was interned with other Japanese-Americans, and as a young adult she
remained formally excluded from California and was instead resettled in
Wisconsin. Unable to pursue teaching because she was an American of
Japanese ancestry, she found a home in the avant-garde at Black Mountain
College in North Carolina via the communist art scene in Mexico City,
where she learned weaving practices that inspired her signature wire
forms.37 At a time when the Bay Area’s artists began toying with Japanese
ideas and forms, artists of Japanese heritage were banned from the state.
Asawa didn’t regret her path, but she ended up on the artistically fertile
margins because of her race, and she had to do it while segregated out of
her home state. Meanwhile, urban redevelopment in Oakland and San
Francisco refashioned the cities into destinations for suburban consumer
spending and investment capital, wrecking communities in the process and
leaving the city’s experienced working-class organizers fighting for survival
just as moderates pushed them out of the unions. The personal revolution
became a spatial movement as well, as white homeowners bailed on cities
and took their tax dollars with them, undermining urban public life. The
hippies wanted out, too, going “back to the land,” or at least taking some
really long road trips. In the process they rebranded what it meant to be
down and out.
Surrounded by so much historical unfairness and noble defeat, how did
white suburban winners in Palo Alto come to convince themselves and a
surprising segment of the world that they were the real loser rebels? The
case of Ken Kesey is illustrative. A college wrestling champion at Oregon,
Kesey polarized the creative-writing community as a Stanford graduate
student in the late 1950s. Program director Wallace Stegner thought the
charismatic and rebellious Kesey a clown, but other faculty spied promise,
including novelist Malcolm Cowley. When a friend told Kesey that the
veterans’ hospital was paying local volunteers to take exciting new drugs,
he signed up, had his mind blown, and got a job at the Menlo Park VA,
where he had unfettered access to experimental narcotics. Kesey started
bringing drugs home, where he gathered a scene about him.38 His 1962
debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was an instant hit,
romanticizing the patients Kesey saw at work as exemplars of independent
consciousness. The men in Cuckoo’s Nest are not insane—they’re mentally
subjugated, and the Kesey character, Randle McMurphy, is there to liberate
his fellow patients with swaggering masculine megalomania. Kesey’s
success allowed him to assume the McMurphy character (without having to
continually wheedle people out of money, as McMurphy does in the novel),
and Kesey started throwing large drug-fueled parties that, ever the jock, he
made competitive and styled as acid “tests.”
Outside the various electronics and tech industries, excluding the
political ideologies of Jordan, Hoover, Terman, and the rest, Kesey is
probably Palo Alto’s most important twentieth-century cultural product.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a distillation of hippie thought and it
became a sensation. Kesey drew a distinct opposition between individual
consciousness and a system of social control, which he called (in a
throwback to Leland Stanford) the Combine. The word computer doesn’t
occur in the book, but a whirring mainframe was part of the evil Nurse
Ratched’s apparatus of domination.xi It’s man against machine, but the
novel is politically clueless. Whereas the rebels are alienated white men
(and one mute Indian), the proverbial Man is an overbearing nurse, backed
up by her black “boy” orderlies. McMurphy’s uprising is about the men
reclaiming their masculinity in the face of a castrating state authority. Like
Steinbeck before him, Kesey sublimates the era’s struggles into existential
melodrama, one in which his stand-in is the tragic protagonist. If rebellion
was a matter of a man’s individual mind frame, then it was perfectly
compatible with augmentation, though not IBM mainframes. Like Chief
Bromden at the end of the story, the new rebels smashed the punch-card
machine and escaped through the window of individualism, a dynamic
image Silicon Valley would use to represent itself to the world in the years
to come.
But unlike Bob Kaufman, Kesey wasn’t a patient.xii He worked there.
What, exactly, does a champion wrestler do at a psychiatric hospital? And
why did those disabled veterans need all that LSD, anyway?

Evil in the Basement

There were a lot of LSD experiments in Palo Alto in the 1950s and ’60s,
and in a lot of institutions. The town was a, if not the, national epicenter of
psychoactive research, with the possible exceptions of Cambridge, Los
Angeles, and a mansion in Millbrook, New York, where Timothy Leary
hung out. While the psychedelic explorers at SRI and the International
Foundation for Advanced Studies dosed their engineer buddies to get them
thinking outside the box, stodgier scientists used the same drugs to break
down prisoners and replicate schizophrenia. Kesey wandered into one of
those latter kinds of experiments as a student volunteer and liked it so much
that he stuck around backstage. But the drugs he got his hands on at the VA
mostly weren’t for him; they were for testing on the patients. In the real
Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy doesn’t hand out the LSD—Nurse Ratched does.
But if acid is liberating, why would the government administer it to the
people it locked up in jails and hospitals? The short answer is that the CIA
wanted to see what happened. MK-Ultra was a suite of 183 subprojects
financed by the CIA and conducted across North America by contractors at
civilian institutions between 1953 and 1973.xiii 39 It’s often referred to as a
mind control program because some of the projects focused on using drugs
to break down the mental defenses of enemy prisoners during interrogation,
but they had a wide range of objectives, from research on blood types to
building a miniature lie detector, and those are just a couple of the
experiments conducted at Stanford that we know about.xiv
When Stanford turned itself over to Frederick Terman for a
transformation, he remade it into the archetypal Cold War university. That
meant a reversal of the school’s fortunes, driven in large part by a flood of
defense and defense-affiliated spending. He shaped Stanford to attract
outside funds, and in the decades that followed state priorities drove the
evolution of Palo Alto as a whole. That meant weapons research at the
industrial park and missile building at Lockheed, as I’ve said. But Terman
pushed other parts of the school to replicate the successes in engineering. In
1955, Stanford ceded 87.5 acres to the federal government so it could build
a veterans’ hospital on campus.40 We could interpret this as a charitable
gesture of a university in a country that spent most of the preceding decade
at war, but it’s also in line with the Terman strategy to maximize
opportunities for outside support. The VA was spending twice as much per
patient as state hospitals were, and patients were an experimental resource,
as were students.41 The Cold War required novel techniques, and the
development of novel techniques required test subjects. Without the
administration’s approval, and sometimes apparently without the
knowledge of the researchers themselves, the CIA spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars supporting Stanford faculty working on MK-Ultra
subprojects in the 1950s and early 1960s.xv
The doctor who oversaw Kesey’s first dose was named Leo Hollister,
and he played an important role in Palo Alto history. Trained at the VA in
San Francisco under the auspices of the navy and then recalled during the
Korean War, Hollister decided that, if the United States was going to have
so many wars, he’d be better off making a career in the VA than in private
practice. He became an internist at the Menlo Park VA hospital and had a
breakthrough in the early 1950s using a hypertension drug to treat
schizophrenia. By 1959, when he attended a CIA-funded conference on
LSD, Hollister was medical director at Menlo Park and a leader in
psychopharmacology. When presenters suggested that LSD ingestion
mimicked the schizophrenic state, Hollister was skeptical. The CIA was
happy to pay him to check it out.42 That’s how Kesey ended up trying every
drug in the government’s medicine cabinet, from LSD to psilocybin to
mescaline to morning glory seeds. Kesey was free to consent and consent
and consent—as a Stanford student with an outside shot at the 1960
Olympics, he was a solid specimen by any bodily standard. Not all
Hollister’s patients were in the same boat. After Stanford opened its campus
VA site, Hollister moved there, where he managed research. This is how he
later described the (then brand-new) hospital: “Barbaric, by today’s
standards; we had patients in the Palo Alto VA who had been [in the VA
system] for fifty years, since World War I, never left the hospital, stayed
there until they died. We had about a thousand patients and most of them
were very, very quiet.”43 Like criminals with long sentences and prisoners
of war, catatonic patients were good subjects for sketchy experiments.
Whom could they tell?
MK-Ultra gets a lot of buzz in large part because of how outlandish and
methodologically suspect the work was, but it wasn’t so different from a lot
of the other federally financed research going on at Stanford at the same
time. The destroyed evidence makes it difficult to see where the rogue CIA
program ended and regular university business began; Leo Hollister’s
experiments, for example, do not seem to have been grouped under the
program, though they were funded by the agency and are often discussed as
part of MK-Ultra. It’s hard to say what exactly was the CIA, anyway.
During this period the agency worked through dozens of front and pass-
through organizations with innocuous names such as the Knickerbocker
Foundation, the Michigan Fund, and the Munich Institute.44 Stanford kept
its fingers in everyone’s pies as a landlord; the CIA was a customer. The
agency sent a team to check out Xerox PARC—the CIA being a valued
Xerox client—and after Engelbart and English visited CIA headquarters at
Langley, a man with no name came (with a contract) to SRI to be briefed on
the augmentation center’s work.45
 And then there was Al Hubbard, the LSD pioneer behind the LSD
pioneers. A conservative Catholic, Hubbard was an alcohol runner turned
prohibition agent, a weapons smuggler for the CIA’s predecessor OSS
during the early days of World War II. Hubbard was a drug “researcher”
with lax distribution standards and a bankroll that made him Sandoz
Pharmaceuticals’ best acid customer, flying around on his own plane with a
black bag full of premium quality LSD. He was, as one history of the era
puts it, “not a CIA operative per se.”xvi Instead he operated in a gray area
between industry, organized crime, and the security state—no wonder he
ended up in Palo Alto. Hubbard lurked behind Stolaroff’s International
Foundation for Advanced Studies, and when that shut down, Willis Harman
hired him for “security” at SRI’s Alternative Futures Project. He ran LSD
trips and gathered opposition data about the student New Left, a job
description about as bizarre as Hubbard’s uniform: khakis, gold badge,
pistol, and a belt strung with bullets.46
And yet Stanford’s most disastrous government experiment didn’t even
involve the CIA. The money for social psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s
infamous six-day research project in the summer of 1971 came from
Stanford’s dear old friends at the Office of Naval Research.47 After the
Holocaust, the field of social psychology rose to consider and explore
questions of discipline, conformity, and obedience—the most famous being
Stanley Milgram’s electroshock trials in which participants were supposed
to have believed themselves to be shocking another volunteer on the orders
of the experimenter. These experiments tended toward the theatrical, with
experimenters assuming the role of the (implicitly Nazi) state. Zimbardo’s
study was about the dynamics between prisoners and guards, so he recruited
some young men from the Palo Alto community and built a small jail in the
basement of Jordan Hall. He flipped coins to assign participants as
prisoners or guards, while Zimbardo was the superintendent. To maintain
realism, he had the Palo Alto police pick up the “prisoners” at their homes,
handcuff them, and bring them to the basement jail, where guards looked
after them. Much of the experiment was captured on video, and you can
watch the interviews with the young men, who all seem like chill dudes in
that California ’70s way, though less so after they were arrested without
warning on a Sunday morning.48
At the jail, the abuse began immediately. It did not occur to the guards
that their job involved anything but tormenting the prisoners, and they
quickly invented psychological punishments: numbers for names, forced
push-ups, food control, sleep disruption, withheld bedding, interminable
repeat-after-me drills, mock rape. The prisoners started breaking down on
Monday. When one of them demanded to be let out, Zimbardo refused to
leave his superintendent role, suggesting that the young man could become
his informant instead. On “visitor’s day,” when a prisoner’s parents
complained that their son looked to be in bad shape already, on day two,
Zimbardo consciously appealed to the father’s masculine pride: “Don’t you
think that your son can take it?”49 Guards forced prisoners to write happy
form letters to their visitors, and it was only Wednesday.50 When Zimbardo
brought his girlfriend, Stanford psychology grad student Christina Maslach,
to the jail, she saw what was going on and prevailed on him to shut it down
on Friday morning, eight days before the planned end.
In his recollections of the experiment, Zimbardo leans toward infernal
metaphors. His bestselling book about the experience didn’t come out until
2007, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal and the
subsequent trial, in which Zimbardo testified as an expert for the defense.
He called the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People
Turn Evil; for some the walk into Jordan Hall was a “descent into Hell”;51
he considers what happened in that Stanford jail to have been an experiment
in the “psychology of evil.” But for a guy who “accidentally” summoned
Satan into his office basement and did the Dark Lord’s bidding for a week,
Zimbardo is not particularly apologetic. He takes clear pride in how
influential his little play has become, and he was certainly rewarded,
including with Lewis Terman’s old chairmanship of the American
Psychological Association. If you think of this situational evil as a kind of
demonic possession, it makes sense not to feel too bad about being a host,
but Zimbardo created the situation, or at least part of it. The Stanford Prison
Experiment is supposed to be a lesson about a species (humans) rather than
a place, but generalizing from the behavior of young men in Palo Alto is
unscientific. Part of the play’s drama comes from the contrast: Look at these
nice college boys and how quickly they turn to monsters! But the
experiment was in Jordan Hall. From the perspective of the state, college
boys were an essential national resource; they were already doing war
work. So was Zimbardo.xvii The situation was broader than Zimbardo
understood it to be, even in retrospect, with decades of distance. Turned
into jailers, led by a Stanford scientist, those young men behaved exactly as
California’s white settlers usually have: with a useful excess of sadism.
A professor in a hastily constructed basement jail taking notes while he
pays out of the defense budget for one group of college students to torture
another was a natural result of the Terman postwar plan for Stanford. So
was a campus hospital full of 1,000 very, very quiet veterans swallowing
whatever they were given. So was the personal computer. And all of it was
war work in the global struggle against communism.

Footnotes
i As you’ll read, the hatred was even stronger among non-patriotic citizens.
ii Celebrated books like What the Dormouse Said and From Counterculture to Cyberculture have
drawn different versions of this Venn diagram, but Stanford and the Palo Alto community are
always smack in the middle.
iii The poet Steve Abbott recalls a night in North Beach in 1975: “The club seemed full of basket
cases and I wasn’t surprised when a thin ragged Black man wandered in, took a swig from a bottle,
and jumped up on stage spouting some haunting words that were barely audible to most of the
audience. The MC, an attractive blond wearing a medieval pageboy costume, then took the
microphone. ‘That was Bob Kaufman, founder and greatest poet of the Beats.’” Steve Abbott,
Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019), 200. Asked about poets of the
Beat community, artist Joe Overstreet recalled, “The poets were Bob Kaufman. I didn’t believe
anybody else could ever be a poet but Bob Kaufman.” Oral history interview with Joe Overstreet,
March 17–18, 2010, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
iv The FBI believed the CP instigated the founding of the HTUC to counter the influence of A. Philip
Randolph’s anticommunist Negro American Labor Council. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “A.
Philip Randolph, File No. 100-56616,” n.d., 78.
v Pryor spent most of 1971 in Berkeley and around the East Bay’s black political-artistic-intellectual
scene. See Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, 2014).
vi “I came out of a society in San Francisco and in California of where I was with the Merchant
Marines and they had taken our union—you know, and they had—we were mess boys and cooks
anyway. So they had taken that and taken it from us and put us in jail and called us communists.”
Oral history interview with Joe Overstreet, March 17–18, 2010, Archives of American Art,
 Smithsonian Institution.
vii Allen Ginsberg was a red diaper baby and describes the American overthrow of the Mossaddegh
(Iran) and Arbenz (Guatemala) governments in the early ’50s as important for his consciousness,
but he characterized himself as “neutral” in the Cold War, against Eastern Bloc authoritarianism
and homophobia. In Ginsberg’s diary he recounts a dream I read as particularly meaningful:
“Emerging up from 3rd class to First on great oceanliner—up the staircase to the deck—First thing
I meet, huge faded negro Paul Robeson—in officer’s uniform—I salute him introducing myself
which doesn’t mean much to him—he bows—I begin scheming immediately—Being a big officer
Communist negro all these years perhaps he could get me a book in the NMU so I can ship out? I
see he’s working on an open deck hole with a lift truck & wire lift placing faded 2nd hand turkish
rugs in the hold—Old communist, I notice I am amazed at his calm—he is folding the dead in to
carry that way (Won’t they not smell up the exported carpets?)—I see one corpse in the hold lying
face up on rug, he’s getting a layer of carpet to cover that. The corpse is a middle-aged man dead-
faced & slightly rotten lying on a rug drest in a blue business suit. I wonder if I have the guts to
face corpses like that negro communist.” Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties
(Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007), 177–78.
viii The Maryland NMU chief recounts going into waterfront bars with an interracial group of sailors,
and if the owner objected that the business was segregated, he would throw a beer glass through
the bar’s mirror: “There, you’ve just been integrated.” Gerald Horne, Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith
and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (NYU Press, 2009), 141.
ix Jane’s maid Bertha Berner allegedly accused Wing, who after her death worked to preserve the
Stanford family’s memory at the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum until it was destroyed in the 1906
earthquake. This failed scapegoating attempt by Berner strikes me as one of the strongest pieces of
circumstantial evidence against her.
x The Internet Movie Database and the Library of Congress both have the short’s title recorded as the
plural Deviled Hams, which though it is perhaps more clever and descriptive is nonetheless
incorrect, as evidenced by the title card.
xi “Everything the guys think and say and do is all worked out months in advance, based on the little
notes the nurse makes during the day. This is typed and fed into the machine I hear humming
behind the steel door in the rear of the Nurses’ Station. A number of Order Daily Cards are
returned, punched with a pattern of little square holes.” Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s
Nest (Penguin Books, 2016), 28.
xii For all his big talk, when confronted with an actual mental patient who was also an artistic genius,
Kesey missed it. In 1976, Kesey told the poet Tony Seymour that he had a run-in with Kaufman’s
drive-by poetry on the street in the ’60s, but that he “didn’t really appreciate him as a poet until
much more recently, within the last four or five years. In rereading his stuff I could trace back and
 see how—‘Yeah, yeah! That’s where Ginsberg got that riff, here’s where Kerouac picked up that
thing, and that’s where Cassady picked up…’” quoted in Steve Abbott, “Bob Kaufman: Hidden
Master of the Beats,” Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019), 201.
xiii The program was preceded by “Project Artichoke,” which was a similar but more vicious
program conducted at American bases in West Germany, France, Japan, and Korea. Stephen
Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Henry Holt and
Company, 2019), 56.
xiv The public only found out about MK-Ultra because a couple boxes of files were misplaced and
then discovered, saving them from a document purge. In 1977, when the CIA notified Stanford
president Richard Lyman of the secret research, he released the records. Central Intelligence
Agency, “Project MKULTRA Collection” (Stanford Digital Repository, 1977),
https://purl.stanford.edu/xf259xw8228.
xv Appalled to find out they’d been working for the intelligence agency, two Stanford neurology
researchers told the press that they were sure their colleague Wallace Chan was the CIA liaison,
and reporting seemed to bear it out. Chan later became a vice provost at UC Davis. Bob Beyers,
“Stanford Reveals CIA Links,” New Scientist, October 13, 1977, 81; “New Vice Chancellor at
Davis U.C. Named,” Daily Independent Journal—San Rafael, September 14, 1962, 21.
xvi Apparently he was pissed off that they never paid him money he was owed from the OSS. Martin
A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (Grove Press,
1985), 52.
xvii The ONR funding gets a single half-sentence in The Lucifer Effect, here.