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  For Donna, and for Shelley, for everything

  I’m not interested in having a biography of any kind published about me or any mention of my childhood. Anything written about me should be about the things I’ve done and the skills and talents I have and not, “He grew up here, he went to this school, he was in trouble there,” and all that bullshit. Because that’s the way you create celebrityhood and I’m not into being a celebrity. I don’t give a shit.

  —Augustus Owsley Stanley III, aka Bear, January 31, 2007

  There’s nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less brain cells wouldn’t cure.

  —Jerry Garcia

  Prologue

  The Muir Beach Acid Test

  Amid all the swirling madness being created by Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters in the Muir Beach Lodge on Saturday, December 11, 1965, one thing is eminently clear. The guy who supplied all the high-octane rocket fuel powering this event is definitely freaking out. Everyone knows this because for what feels like hours but has only been about ten or fifteen minutes, he has been making the most horrible screeching and scraping noises imaginable by dragging an old wooden chair back and forth across the floor.

  Had he been doing this at one of the wedding receptions that regularly take place here in this hundred-foot log cabin, someone would already have long since asked him to stop. Because this is an Acid Test where everyone is tripping on LSD and there are no rules, no one is about to do anything about it even though the sound is driving everybody up the proverbial wall.

  On every level imaginable, the guy has already had himself quite an evening. Having never before taken acid with the Pranksters, he has seen the Grateful Dead perform for the first time. Accompanied by a flashing strobe, a light machine, and a home movie that was being shown by two projectors at once, the sound of Jerry Garcia’s lead guitar wrapped itself around the guy’s mind like the claws of a tiger.

  Initially terrified, he then had the stunning revelation that would shape the rest of his life. The Grateful Dead are not just good. They are fantastic. Someday, they are going to be even bigger than the Beatles. Although the guy has no idea how he can help them accomplish this goal, what he wants to do now is to hitch a ride with the most amazing group he has ever seen and somehow make a positive contribution to their future.

  While all this might already have been more than enough for anyone else, the LSD he has taken combined with the weirdness of the Pranksters’ current sound interval suddenly mesh to send him off somewhere that he has never before been. Losing all control of his body, he finds himself trapped in an endless spiral of utterly fantastic scenes.

  As Tom Wolfe will later write in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, this guy has now been transported back to the eighteenth century, where he sees himself as an “alchemist, seer, magician, master of precognition, forecaster of lotteries” stuck in a dank dungeon in the Bastille, which itself then shatters into fragments as he loses all of his skin and then his entire skeleton as well. With “his whole substance dissolving into gaseous nothingness,” he becomes a single cell. “One human cell: his; that was all that was left of the entire known world and if he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left. The world would be, like, over.”

  Making the guy’s current plight yet even more dire, one of the Pranksters geometrically increases his paranoia by pointing out some conventionally dressed guests who might well be the police. Although LSD is still legal in California, the guy is holding so much of it at the moment that he decides the time has come for him to split the scene and get the hell out of here just as fast as he possibly can.

  Running out the door, he leaps behind the wheel of his car and begins driving madly along the narrow, winding road leading away from the Muir Beach Lodge. In no condition to drive, much less do anything else, he promptly runs his car into a ditch. Abandoning the vehicle, he charges back into the lodge and does something that is completely unthinkable on every level imaginable by confronting the unbelievably powerful and incredibly charismatic Ken Kesey about what is going on here tonight.

  In no uncertain terms, the guy tells the noted author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who is also the peerless and unchallenged leader of the Merry Pranksters, that he and his cohorts are messing around with something they do not understand. Taking LSD in this kind of wildly out-of-control group situation in order to awaken the part of the unconscious mind that used to be defined as containing all of the angels and devils is extremely dangerous. And since it is the guy’s LSD that made all this happen, he is going to ensure that tonight’s Acid Test will be the last one ever held by cutting off their supply.

  Laughing off everything that the guy is saying to him, Kesey responds to the diatribe by pinning a badge on the guy’s shirt. Precisely why Kesey has chosen to do this, no one knows. Offended by the act, the guy’s girlfriend promptly removes the badge, only to have Kesey take it away from her. In true Prankster fashion, Kesey says, “No, no. He gets to decide if he wants to wear it or not.” And then puts the badge right back on the guy’s shirt.

  Due to the overwhelming popularity of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s account of this freak-out soon becomes the stuff of legend. In the book, Wolfe, who himself had never taken LSD, somehow manages to convey the all-out careening madness that acid can sometimes induce even in the mind of not just the most experienced user but also someone whom Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh will later describe as “the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.”

  As the man in question, born Augustus Owsley Stanley III but then known to one and all simply as Owsley, will later say, “The Pranksters were playing around with Wolfe and he didn’t have a clue. He didn’t realize who and what they were. Nothing about me in that book was accurate. It was what other people said about me. I never met Wolfe and the man never talked to me. So it was all his fantasy about it or someone else’s fantasy about it.”

  But then in the world according to Augustus Owsley Stanley III, only he was ever right all the time.

  1

  Bluegrass Roots

  In a state where politics was right up there with Thoroughbred horse racing as the sport of choice, and extremely colorful and vitriolic campaigns for local political office always seemed to be going on, if only to provide Kentuckians with “an excellent excuse for having community picnics, fried chicken dinners, and fish fries,” Augustus Owsley Stanley was an authentically larger-than-life figure whom his grandson would later describe as “the last of the great silver throated Southern orators.”

  Born on May 21, 1867, in Shelbyville, Kentucky, Nuddicut Owsley Stanley was ten years old when he persuaded his parents to change his given name to Augustus after his maternal grandmother, Augusta Stanley, so that he would never be referred as No Stanley. For wildly different reasons, one hundred years later Augustus Owsley Stanley III would follow in his grandfathe
r’s footsteps by also changing his name to suit his particular needs.

  On both sides of his family, A. O. Stanley’s lineage was impressive. During the Civil War, his father, William Stanley, had served as a captain in the Orphan Brigade of the Confederate Army, a unit commanded by Major General John C. Breckinridge, who had been the youngest vice president in US history. After having worked as the associate editor of the Shelby Sentinel, William Stanley became a Campbellite minister. A. O. Stanley’s mother, Amanda Rodes Owsley, was the niece of former Kentucky governor William Owsley, after whom the state’s Owsley County was named.

  In 1885, A. O. Stanley entered the Kentucky Agricultural and Mechanical College in Lexington. After graduating from Centre College in 1887, he served as chair of belles lettres at Christian College in Hustonville, and then as the principal of Marion Academy in Bradfordsville and Mackville Academy in Mackville, while studying law at night. Admitted to the state bar in 1894, he began practicing in Flemingsburg, where his father served as the minister of a local church.

  Moving to Henderson with less than $100 in his pocket, A. O. Stanley established a thriving law practice and began campaigning for Democratic candidates in local elections. In 1900, he was named an elector for William Jennings Bryan, who was then defeated in the presidential election by William McKinley.

  Two years later at the age of thirty-five, A. O. Stanley was elected to Congress from Kentucky’s Second District. He then married Susan Soaper, whose father was a prominent figure in the state’s tobacco industry. A laissez-faire progressive and a disciple of Thomas Jefferson, A. O. Stanley fought to end the federal tax on tobacco. After President William Howard Taft called a special session of Congress to repeal the tariff, what became known as the Stanley Bill was passed into law.

  While serving as chairman of the congressional commission charged with trust busting, Stanley sponsored and then conducted an investigation into the monopolistic business practices of the US Steel Corporation and introduced three antitrust bills that eventually led to the passage of the Clayton Act. After he had been reelected to Congress in 1912, Stanley entered the Kentucky senatorial campaign on a pro-liquor platform, but was defeated in the Democratic primary.

  In 1915, he ran for governor against Republican Edwin P. Morrow. Appearing together day after day throughout the state during the campaign, the two men attacked one another relentlessly in public but soon became good friends who often drank together after having debated one another. Indicating that he may have had a bit too much fondness for Kentucky bourbon, A. O. Stanley got to his feet to speak one day after his opponent had already addressed the crowd only to stagger to the back of the stage so he could throw up. Returning to the stand, he said, “Gentlemen, I beg you to forgive me. Every time I hear Ed Morrow speak, it makes me sick to my stomach.” A. O. Stanley won the election by 471 votes.

  As governor of Kentucky, Stanley vetoed a bill designed to prohibit the teaching of German in Kentucky schools during World War I while saying, “We are at war with an armed despotism, not a language.” He also enacted the state’s first workman’s compensation law, passed antitrust statutes, and improved Kentucky’s charitable, penal, and educational institutions.

  In January 1917, Stanley made national news by preventing the lynching of a black prisoner, a circuit court judge, and a Commonwealth of Kentucky attorney in Murray, Kentucky. Before boarding the night train to travel there from Lexington, the state capital, he boldly proclaimed, “I shall give the mob a chance to lynch the governor of Kentucky first.” He then defused the situation by going to where the judge and the Commonwealth attorney were being held hostage and daring to mob to kill him.

  In 1918, Stanley was elected as the junior senator from the state of Kentucky. A strong supporter of women’s suffrage and the League of Nations, he consistently denounced laws that limited individual freedom and was once quoted as saying, “You cannot milk a cow in America without a federal inspector at your heels.” He was also frequently mentioned as a Democratic candidate to succeed Woodrow Wilson as president.

  Throughout his political career in a state that considered itself the birthplace of bourbon whiskey, A. O. Stanley had always been dogged by his pro-liquor position. At a time when Prohibition was seen by many Americans as the only cure for a wide variety of social problems, Kentucky voters had narrowly approved a state constitutional amendment banning the sale and distribution of alcohol two months before the Volstead Act established Prohibition as the law of the land in 1920.

  Unable to counter the powerful opposition mounted against him by the Anti-Saloon League as well as the Ku Klux Klan, A. O. Stanley was defeated in his bid for reelection to the Senate in 1924 by more than twenty-four thousand votes. Despite his progressive views on a wide variety of issues, his career as an elected official came to a sudden halt, primarily because of his stance on a substance that was now illegal in America. In time, his grandson would suffer far harsher consequences for synthesizing and distributing a far more powerful substance that also allowed individuals to alter their consciousness.

  After leaving office, A. O. Stanley resumed his law practice in Washington, DC, and Louisville. In 1930, he was appointed by President Herbert Hoover to the International Joint Commission. During his twenty-four years of service on the commission, A. O. Stanley ardently supported the creation of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. After a period of declining health, he died at the age of ninety-one in 1958. After his flag-draped casket had laid in state in the Capitol Rotunda, A. O. Stanley was buried in Frankfort Cemetery near other former governors of Kentucky.

  Born on July 1, 1904, his son Augustus Owsley Stanley Jr. was eleven years old when his father was elected governor. At the age of fourteen, A. O. Stanley Jr. moved with his family to Washington, DC. Three years later, he served as a clerk to his father at a salary of $1,500 a year. A. O. Stanley Jr. then entered the Naval Academy.

  As his son would later say, “He did not graduate. He flaked out in his plebe year because he had a bad sinus condition, which I think was as much psychosomatic as anything else. I think he was a fragile personality and was too proud to go back and do his plebe year all over again because he had only completed one full semester. After the Naval Academy, he went to engineering school, but he didn’t finish that either.”

  Apparently seeking some sort of career that would allow him to emerge from the shadow of his father’s outsized personality, A. O. Stanley Jr. went to work as a surveyor for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. In his son’s words, “Then the Depression came along and they stopped maintaining the rails and began laying off staff. About that time, he met my mother and got married.”

  On June 24, 1933, A. O. Stanley Jr. married Lella Lane Ray of Richmond, Virginia, in Henderson, Kentucky. Taking up residence in Washington, DC, the couple enjoyed an active social life centered around high-level Democratic Party functions as well as festive gatherings sponsored by the Kentucky Society.

  A. O. Stanley Jr. then began working as a clerk in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a federal agency founded in 1932 to provide aid to state and local governments while also making loans to banks, railroads, and mortgage associations. After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the agency’s funding and powers were greatly expanded as part of the New Deal and A. O. Stanley Jr. was most likely hired by the agency during this period.

  It also seems likely that his father’s long-standing friendship with Stanley Forman Reed, a well-known lawyer who had served in the Kentucky General Assembly before representing the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and was then serving as general counsel of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, made it possible for A. O. Stanley Jr. to obtain both of these jobs with those organizations. Reed, who became a Supreme Court justice in 1938, was also the godfather of Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

  After having attended Colombus Law School, A. O. Stanley Jr. was granted a legal degree. In 1936, he was admitted without examination to the Kentucky State bar. As his son wou
ld later say, “He transferred into the legal department of the Reconstruction Finance department and continued working there through all of its changes for the next thirty-three or thirty-four years until after it turned into the Small Business Administration.”

  Despite being thirty-seven years old when the United States entered World War II in 1941, A. O. Stanley Jr. enlisted in the Navy. As his son would later say, “What happened was that with his one year at the Naval Academy, they sent him to Officer Candidate School and he got commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was working in intelligence and he was very good at it, but he wanted to go fight, so he finagled a transfer to the Pacific and wound up being attached to an admiral’s staff. The admiral was on the USS Lexington during the Battle of the Coral Sea, and the Lexington was literally blown up from underneath them.”

  Intent on capturing Port Moresby in New Guinea, the last Allied base between Japan and Australia, three Japanese fleets comprised of two large aircraft carriers, a smaller carrier, two heavy cruisers, as well as supporting craft set sail for New Guinea and the Solomon Islands during the first week in May 1942. After having been alerted to the operation by radio intercepts, three large groups of US Navy vessels moved to oppose the Japanese fleets. The resulting battle was the first naval engagement in history in which the opposing ships neither saw nor ever fired directly upon one another.

  At 1113 hours on May 8, 1942, the USS Lexington, one of the US Navy’s oldest aircraft carriers, was attacked by Japanese Nakajima B5N torpedo bombers. At 1120 hours, the first torpedo hit the ship and exploded near the port forward gun gallery. A minute later, another torpedo struck near the bridge. A one-thousand-pound bomb dropped by an Aichi D3A dive bomber then hit the ready-ammunition locker close to Admiral Aubrey Fitch’s cabin. The Lexington was then hit by two more bombs, injuring and killing crew members who were manning the ship’s machine guns and aft signal station.