From Road to Residence

After leaving Harvard, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert took their psychedelic enterprise on the road with former students and other followers. The International Federation for Internal Freedom moved from Cambridge to Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where the government expelled the group under pressure from U.S. authorities; a brief relocation to Dominica ended in another expulsion. Millbrook, New York, was their eventual destination.

The Mansion and Its Circle

The group settled for several raucous years in a sixty-four-room mansion owned by wealthy patron Billy Hitchcock. The house offered a fixed address to a movement that had already been displaced across borders, while Leary’s followers and former students formed part of the traveling circle around him. In the book’s account, Millbrook is not simply a stop on a route: it is the place where that itinerant enterprise found a home for a time.

Legal Trouble and Later Recollection

Millbrook also entered Leary’s legal history. G. Gordon Liddy, then assistant district attorney for Dutchess County, busted Leary there; years later the two appeared together on the college lecture circuit, an unlikely pairing that the narrative presents as part of Leary’s improbable post-1960s career. The location thus holds two aspects of his story at once: a period of residence amid the psychedelic movement and an encounter with the law that resurfaced in a later, unexpected partnership.