The conservative connection: the chairman of the board took LSD before Timothy Leary.

William C. Mullendore took LSD-25 three more times during the next four years, each experience binding him closer in his intellectual apprenticeship to the English-born novelist, lecturer, and philosopher Gerald Heard. Acting as master to novice, Heard introduced Mullendore to LSD as he would later introduce Henry and Clare Boothe Luce and other business leaders, Hollywood celebrities, and artists to the drug. Recent observers of American culture have usually emphasized the seminal roles of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and Carlos Castaneda in popularizing the drug culture of the 1960s, and a discussion of conservatives and hallucinogenic drugs may even seem to be a contradiction in terms. But earlier assumptions about the influence of drugs in modern American society have been dramatically altered by revelations about experiments conducted by the Department of Defense and