That a Brooklyn book festival would promote small presses and their authors isn’t surprising. But the sponsor of OnePage has raised a few eyebrows. As the festival’s press release noted, “The project is made possible with a grant from Amazon.com.”

Yes, much of the literary world is in full-throated revolt against Amazon’s dominance — bookstores fear Amazon will push them out of business, authors worry about deep discounting, and the Department of Justice is considering the major publishers’ challenge over the price of e-books. But amid the public and private rancor, the massive e-retailer is very quietly trying to make friends in the book world. Its strategy is simple and employs a weapon Amazon has in overwhelming supply: Money.

The Brooklyn Book Festival is just one of many recent beneficiaries of Amazon’s largess. According to a list on Amazon’s site, prestigious groups such as the PEN American Center, journals like the Los Angeles Review of Books, One Story, Poets & Writers and Kenyon Review, mentorship programs such as 826 Seattle and Girls Write Now, and associations including the Lambda Literary Foundation, Voice of Witness and Words Without Borders have all received grants.

While the dollar figures are not always announced, according to interviews and press reports, many recipients said they have received between $20,000 and $25,000. With the more than 40 current grants listed on Amazon’s site, this suggests the company distributes approximately $1 million annually to small presses and other literary-minded nonprofits. (Publishing sources confirmed that number, but Amazon would not.)

At a time when independent publishing is struggling to survive, in part due to the influence of Amazon, recipients say that these grants offer crucial — if ironic — life support. Sometimes the grants pad out thin margins of survival, and make it possible for worthy programs to maintain their tiny staffs. And there’s no question the grants support legitimately important work: Literature in translation, international poetry, smart criticism, youth literacy efforts.

If few Amazon customers know anything about the company’s growing charity presence in the world of literary nonprofits, this is by design. Since launching its grant program in 2009, Amazon has kept its efforts low-key. Indeed, Salon’s repeated requests to discuss the grant program with Amazon — or to interview Jon Fine, Amazon’s director of author and publisher relations and the man who distributes the money — were all declined.

That silence cuts both ways. A gift from Amazon is considered the devil’s kiss in many corners of the publishing world, and many grantees are in no rush to blow a ram’s horn announcing their acceptance of money, either. (Many grant recipients interviewed for this story didn’t want to say anything negative or positive about Amazon, concerned either with offending Amazon on one hand, or betraying the anti-Amazon indie ethos on the other.)

Because both sides understand the delicate nature of the dance, the only stipulations attached to Amazon’s grants are a brief acknowledgment tucked away on a back page, and a short press release sent to supporters and members of the project. Those receiving these news releases generally consist of fellow authors, editors and members of America’s indie-publishing ecosystem. In other words, some of the only people left in the world who not only never learned to love Amazon, but actively hate its grinning yellow guts.

So what’s the point of contributions that get little publicity? Does Amazon genuinely want to be a white knight, unconcerned about the credit? Or do the grants represent a kind of blood money? Is the real goal of the grant program to keep friends close and enemies closer, by showering influential, articulate and potentially critical voices in the publishing community with sacks of no-strings cash?

“It’s the bully on the playground handing you a lollipop,” says Shirin Yim Bridges, publisher of Goosebottom Books in San Francisco, which has not received a grant from Amazon. “I mean, what do you do?”

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The pillars of Amazon hatred — recently recapped by the Authors Guild’s Scott Turow on Salon — are arranged like this. Critics allege that the Seattle-based company, led by Jeff Bezos, its ex-Wall Street CEO, engages in predatory pricing. They claim that Amazon bullies small publishers into signing price and promotional contracts that threaten their already slim margins, and doesn’t hesitate to unplug the “Buy” buttons of those who resist. While the company claims a foundational book-loving ethos, some suggest it wages total war against other institutions that sell books and embody book culture.

Amazon is picking up its literary largess during an especially charged season in the company’s relationships with the rest of the book world. For the first time, the “Big Six” publishers — HarperCollins, Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Macmillan — have refused to sign Amazon’s latest annual contract. The main sticking point is exorbitant increases in “co-op promotional fees” for e-books that the publishers see as an illegal gouge by another name. One person familiar with the details of the proposed 2012 contracts that Amazon has submitted to major New York publishers described them as “stupifyingly draconian.” In some cases, he said, Amazon has raised promotional fees by 30 times their 2011 cost. In saying no, the big publishers are following in the footsteps of the Independent Publishing Group, a major indie distributor representing dozens of small presses that refused Amazon’s increases earlier this winter and soon saw the “Buy” buttons on more than 4,000 of their titles promptly delinked.

This standoff comes as the Department of Justice considers the antitrust implications of the Big Six and Apple’s refusal to let Amazon set the price of Kindle titles at $9.99. Then there is Amazon’s bold, long-term gambit to take on publishing houses altogether with them with its in-house Amazon Publishing project.

That adds extra movement to the philanthropic knuckleball of the company’s recent patronage of small publishers. Is the program simply a calculated corporate response to past accusations of stinginess? Is it part of a long-term strategy to divide and conquer the last bastions of Amazon’s critics, while winning over some of the very people Amazon may find useful as it develops its print-on-demand and e-book business?

It depends whom you ask. Of more than a dozen grantees Salon interviewed, some completely disassociated Amazon’s charity from its business practices. Others were more conflicted, but saw nothing to gain by dwelling on the source of the funds or turning their cash-strapped offices into an Ethics 101 seminar. Others saw Amazon’s grant giving as something to be feared: An evolutionary skill developed by a natural and intelligent predator growing ever stronger off the blood of its prey.

“The grants are a blatant attempt to buy goodwill from an industry that they’ve ravaged,” said one veteran indie publisher who asked not to be identified because he’s involved in an Amazon-funded project. “They are a rapacious, horrible company from top to bottom. But they have all this excess capital, so $25,000 here and there is nothing to them. And it’s working. People say, ‘Oh, look, they’re funding a translation prize, what could be wrong with that?’ Yet everything about them is still evil.”

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But the devil’s checks never bounce. The above Amazon hater still took the money. The truth is, there probably aren’t any underfunded indie lit institutions that haven’t, or many that wouldn’t, given the chance. Nor are there many people willing to argue they shouldn’t.

“They’re funding excellent things focused on emerging writers that create new work,” says Jeffrey Lependorf, president of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, an Amazon grantee. “Amazon operates a dangerously large part of the marketplace, and many of us are trepidatious about the power they wield. But they’re not pulling a fast one here. They’re a giant corporation doing what large corporations do, which is sponsorship [with the goal] of gaining the imprimatur of that to which the money is given.”

The tension is plain enough: The same people most familiar with and bitter about the bully’s methods are often the same people most in need of lollipops. Amazon’s grantees tend to be small and broke. They do not receive the kind of government support they would get in many European countries. A sponsored project can keep the lights on, put out the next title or series, and provide financial cushions to educated professionals who have mastered the art of flirting with, and occasionally bedding, the poverty line.

This is especially true of literary translators. Along with its own translated feature series, AmazonCrossing, the company funds several original translation projects, including the PEN Translation Fund and Open Letter’s Best New Translation Award, to the tune of $20,000 annually. The result has been some new friends for the Yellow Giant. “Translators love Amazon,” says Chad Post of Open Letter, an Amazon grantee and publisher of translated fiction at the University of Rochester. “They’re working for maybe $500 a book, books no one wants to touch. Then Amazon comes along and suddenly they’re benefiting from an industry that doesn’t help them, ever. Five thousand dollars is enormous to them. I can understand people are concerned with Amazon’s power in the marketplace, but I have a hard time chastising them when they directly benefit people who struggle their whole lives to do what they think is important.”

Many of Amazon’s grants have a broad trickle-down effect that puts hundreds of dollars in a lot of pockets. Amazon’s $25,000 grant to the Brooklyn Book Festival, for example, is spread out among numerous writers with small presses and associations, including Coffee House Press, Hanging Loose Press, Coach House Books, PM Press, McPherson and Co., Archipelago Books and Poets Wear Prada. Grants targeting writing programs reach the next generation of writers whom Amazon might one day sign up to Amazon Publishing. Recipients include the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Girls Write Now, Asian American Writers Workshop, New York Writers Coalition and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Smart new journals have also received money, such as the recently launched Los Angeles Review of Books, an online book review site. As newspapers have cut back on books coverage, paid outlets for critics have dwindled over the last decade.

“We are thrilled with the grant from Amazon.com, which is going to allow us to pay more writers and editors,” says Los Angeles Review of Books editor Tom Lutz. “These days, if you find money for writers, you take it. It is a drop in the bucket, given all the out-of-work journalists and incredibly shrinking book advances, but it is real money. Yes, Amazon is a controversial company, but this is not a controversial program — no one, as far as I have heard, has said, ‘No, thank you.’”

Nor has anyone yet heard from a Big Six publisher eager to fund a translation award of their own.

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The man who controls Amazon’s purse strings, and is tasked with outreach to the literary community, is a 40-something lawyer named Jon Fine. Fine’s previous positions, listed in biographies and his LinkedIn page, show he’s comfortable with a range of people across the political spectrum, from liberal tastemakers to boardroom insiders. He was a media counsel for King World when they syndicated “Inside Edition” (coinciding with part of Bill O’Reilly’s tenure as anchor) and several reality shows. He moved to NBC as senior media counsel in November 1996, where he worked with late-night shows including “Saturday Night Live” and several news divisions. Before joining Amazon in 2006 as an associate general counsel for media and copyright issues, he spent five years as the vice president and associate general counsel for Random House, where he led the legal affairs division for Alfred A. Knopf and Random House of Canada.

In November 2008, Fine became Amazon’s first director of author and publisher relations and was put in charge of a “community fund” worth, by many estimates, $1 million annually. He has since become a fixture at book fairs and publishing events around the country, where he leads seminars, joins panels and generally hams it up with friends in the business, often seeking tips on grant candidates. (Again, Fine did not return multiple written and phone requests for an interview.)

Most everyone agrees that Fine is a laid-back, likable fellow, especially by Fortune 500 standards. Although he doesn’t pretend to be anything but a company man, he cuts checks with just enough sly and endearing self-awareness. “My job is to make an 800-pound gorilla seem like only a 200-pound gorilla,” he’s known to say. Combined with his background in publishing, the result is an effective go-between for repping Amazon to indie artists, publishers and writing program directors. “He’s a book lover and genuinely cares about books,” says the CLMP’s Lependorf. “Fine has a great eye for great indie causes that don’t get funded otherwise.”

Fine may be a book lover, but he still works for a CEO who famously said, “I get grumpy when I’m forced to read a physical book.” And he himself is no stranger to what some call Amazon’s darker side. Among his specialties is antitrust law, and he is said to remain part of the company’s notoriously demanding legal brain trust. “Jon Fine embodies the two faces of Amazon,” says one of his grantees who asked not to be identified. “I like him a lot and think his heart is in the right place, but he comes from the legal side.”

Even while working a room in indie-press savior mode, Fine can bare his fangs. Dennis Johnson of Melville House Books, who has become something of a legend as a fearless and relentless on-record Amazon critic, remembers Fine approaching him at the 2011 Associated Writing Programs conference. In fall 2010, Johnson had withdrawn Melville House from the Open Letter Translation Award, rather than be associated with an Amazon-funded project. “The first morning of the conference, everybody kept telling me that some guy from Amazon was looking for me,” says Johnson. “Eventually, Jon Fine walks up to me and says, ‘I just wanted to thank you for giving us a world of publicity.’ In other words, ‘We won.’” Johnson says the company has also sent reps to intimidate him into accepting contracts. “These young guys in suits come up and stick their fingers in my chest with a message that amounts to ‘Get with the program or [perish].’ This is the class of Amazon,” he says.

After Johnson pulled Melville House from the Open Letter award, he heard from translators and small publishers around the country. Some were livid. How could he deprive his translators of an all-too-rare chance to make some coin? Others expressed a whispered respect, but said they were in no position to follow suit. As if in confession, some admitted to have recently taken money from Amazon. “One of the reasons they’re finding people so eager to accept their money is they have created a desolate landscape where that money is more necessary than it used to be,” says Johnson. “People are more willing to co-opt their ethics as a result. Not everyone is proud of it. I think a lot of the giving is not known for that reason.”

Johnson’s long crusade against Amazon has for the most part been a lonely one. “I admire Dennis’ rebel spirit,” said one small publisher who declined to go on the record. “It’s very brave. You can’t really speak out publicly against them. They’ll hear. It’s amazing. You say something in a short blog interview, and they know.”

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The fact overshadowing every Amazon debate is the company’s position as the world’s largest seller of books. It is so large that those now teamed up against Amazon in the fight over agency pricing — the right for publishers to set their own prices — is a new alliance of former enemies. In 1994, an association of independent bookstores sued the major publishing companies for discount rates they said favored the chains. The publishers in turn saw chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble as the enemy for putting a squeeze on their margins. “Discussion of terms goes back before Amazon,” says Jim Milliot, a longtime observer of the industry at Publishers Weekly. “What makes this [standoff] with Amazon stark is that they take the ‘Buy’ buttons off the website. To a lot of people, that seems unfair, and it catches a lot of attention. At least the chains always sold the books.”

Publishers large and small are on the same side as Barnes & Noble and Apple in challenging Amazon’s attempt to gain a death grip on the exploding e-book market. Amazon’s success, say its critics, will lower price expectations for physical books to the point where they become untenable for the Big Six’s business model.

The current standoff between the Big Six and Amazon is a game of chicken that will end in some sort of compromise. Amazon is the biggest customer for publishers, and it is entirely possible that Amazon will succeed in making them increasingly irrelevant with Amazon Publishing — signing authors and distributing their books directly to Amazon’s massive customer base. The company has already proven with Kindle singles and other digital exclusives that they can profit by creating content and selling it directly to readers on an Amazon-created device — and without any of the legacy infrastructure costs hobbling big publishers and bookstores.

In the future, publishers large and small may be forced to live in an Amazon world in which the company produces most books and sets whatever prices it wants. Everyone else, meanwhile, will fight for crumbs from one of Amazon’s $25,000 grants. These grants may continue to buy bits of gratitude and goodwill expressed in tight smiles, but it is unlikely to result in genuine affection for its corporate soul.

“The grants give Amazon something to point to, but people don’t see Amazon’s business practices any differently,” says Chad Post. “It’s the same as with any corporation. Money is money. I take money from Citibank, and I fucking hate Citibank.”

OWS is the latest in a long American tradition of encampments and sit-downs. These actions often act as harbingers of larger movements and historic shifts in public opinion. Jacob Coxey’s army of homeless migrants may not have succeeded in occupying Washington in 1894, but his effort marks the beginning of a period of militant labor agitation and public anger over growing wealth inequality. OWS could one day appear to future generations as a similar bookend. Already the literal “occupation” part of OWS is coming to an end, and giving way to something bigger than any city park or bullet-point list of financial industry reforms. The dispersed tent-towns of New York and Oakland, Calif., expanded and sharpened the focus on this country’s ever more disgusting disparity between the rich and the rest, and out of them have grown calls to occupy the food system and occupy the rooftops.

The following gallery is an overview of the American occupation protest tradition.

View the slide show

Kossut had no idea, but in the spring of last year, he was looking for something, anything, that might improve his mental state. In 2008, he was diagnosed with cancer of the tonsils and put on a biweekly chemo and radiation regimen. He quickly lost his appetite, dropped weight and sank into a deep depression. When a friend sent him a news brief about the experimental NYU study, he applied.

Shortly before Kossut’s arrival on the morning of his session, two clinic employees entered a high-security storage room, which just happens to face a painting of a white rabbit. From a massive steel combination safe they removed a bottle containing one gram of synthesized psilocybin, the psychoactive agent animating the 200-member fungus family commonly known as “magic mushrooms.” The duo carefully measured the small container against the previous day’s weight, as if securing a store of weapons-grade plutonium. They then pill-pressed an amount of powder containing 20 milligrams of the molecule, first identified in 1958 by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, most famous for his other psychedelic synthesis, LSD-25.

They delivered the pill to a converted exam room gutted of its dental chair and refitted for comfort with holistic panache: plush pillow-strewn sofa, Persian carpet, Buddha statuettes, books on spirituality and mysticism, a high-performance sound system. Only the ceiling lighting track betrays the former identity of New York City’s federally sanctioned psilocybin room.

Receiving the pill is Dr. Stephen Ross, a 40-year-old assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Medical School and the cancer study’s principal investigator. Ross has a precise scientific manner softened by an upbringing in Southern California, where his mother (also a doctor) took him to hospice centers as a child, sparking an interest in end-of-life issues. Now director of the addiction division at Bellevue, Ross is among the youngest of a new generation of psychedelic researchers. With his cancer study still two years away from publishing results, he is already looking ahead to testing psychedelic treatments for drug addiction and alcoholism.

For now, Ross is fully focused on treating existential anxiety in people like Kossut, who lies on the couch, ready for his initiation into the psychedelic mysteries. In the research jargon, Kossut is “psychedelic naive.” After swallowing the pill Ross presents — in the cap of a ceremonial ceramic mushroom — all he can do is close his eyes, lose himself in the preselected tabla drum and sitar music, and try to remember the advice to not fight it, to move ever deeper into the light, to let go …

“It was absolutely incredible,” remembers Kossut. “The first rush was a little scary as I realized it wasn’t the placebo. That passed and next I was crossing boundaries of time and space and reality. I felt this weightlessness, this sense of being close to an unspeakable beauty that was unlike anything in my experience. For the first time since my diagnosis, I was not afraid of anything. The wall of depression that was building up day by day, the fear that I was going to die soon, that my daughter is only 8 — all those things disappeared. I wanted to stay there. I wanted it to last longer.”

It did. More than one year after his psilocybin session, Kossut reports greatly improved states of emotional and psychological well-being. “I walked out of the session happy, unafraid of death,” he says. “I don’t know why, but a transformation took place after being in that peaceful place. I relaxed. I started enjoying food again and was able to gain weight. The session taught me to be fully in the present. I’m optimistic. Mentally and physically, just better.”

This glowing report — based on a single dose of a naturally occurring, non-addictive, low-toxicity substance — sounds impossible. Surely one pill can’t succeed where months of traditional psychotherapy and antidepressants usually fail. According to science, that’s not how drugs work. It’s foreign to the model. But high success rates in ongoing concurrent studies at NYU and Johns Hopkins strongly suggest that Kossut’s psilocybin-assisted psychological rebound is no fluke. So do the findings of a pilot project conducted by Dr. Charles Grob at UCLA. Between 2004 and 2008, Grob administered psilocybin to 12 cancer patients suffering fear, anxiety and depression. His data, published last year in the Archives of General Psychiatry, showed long-term diminished anxiety and improved mood in every subject. The NYU and Johns Hopkins studies build on Grob’s pilot program with more subjects and higher doses. Midway through the research, their results are just as strong, signaling larger, multi-site trials to come.

“What appears to be going on with the psilocybin studies is a model system for creating ‘quantum change,’” says Dr. Roland Griffiths, the behavioral biologist who oversees the Johns Hopkins study. “We’ve shown we can safely produce replicable effects.”

This is the subdued, clinical language of a psychedelic science renaissance quietly entering its third decade. If its practitioners and advocates avoid the utopian claims and liberationist rhetoric that defined the LSD gospel of the 1960s, this is no accident. A new generation of psychedelic researchers understands that public and official support depends on exorcising the ghost of Timothy Leary, whose democratic acid crusade grew out of and ultimately helped destroy the first wave of psychedelic science in the 1950s and ’60s. Their goal is not to promote the legalization of these drugs or tout their value for everyone, but to revive the once-great and now largely forgotten promise of psychedelic science. And that just might, among other things, change the way we confront and think about death.

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Dosing anxious cancer patients with psychedelics may sound counterintuitive, to put it mildly. The hallmarks of the psychedelic experience — the loss of bearings in time and space, the breaking up and slipping away of the sense of self — can themselves produce acute anxiety and panic. Everyone has heard stories, most of them apocryphal, of psychedelic experiments gone wrong; of kids on acid jumping off of 12-story buildings, or showing up in emergency rooms a twitching, psychotic mess, requiring enough Thorazine to sedate a horse.

But the current studies are not self-experiments. They are carefully designed and professionally guided therapy sessions crafted to minimize anxiety and avoid so-called bad trips. Subjects are screened and prepared before ingesting the psilocybin in a plush environment overseen by two specially trained therapists. Even the dose employed is the result of trial and error: The Johns Hopkins team has identified the golden mean — between 20 and 30 milligrams, roughly equal to a good fistful of strong ‘shrooms — to maximize peak experience while minimizing transitory anxiety.

Which is not to say that subjects don’t sometimes get scared. Clark Martin, a retired psychologist who suffers recurrent kidney cancer, panicked during the onset of his first psilocybin session at Johns Hopkins. “Initially it was like falling off a sailboat,” he remembers. “You turn around, the boat is gone. Then the water’s gone. Then you’re gone. I wanted things to make sense again. My urge was to run outside.”

But his guides calmed him and the anxiety passed. Today what Martin remembers best is what came next.

“Everything became tranquil and calm, and I had the sense that I was floating on a giant bubble,” says Martin, who spent the next several hours in this peaceful place meditating on life, death, the nature of human relationships and consciousness. “I left the session animated and intellectually stimulated. Today I don’t have a sense of death like I used to. I see it as part of the flow of nature. There’s grieving and sadness, of course, but what’s being lost is this false sense of separateness we create. I don’t get too worked up about my illness anymore. My relationship with my daughter is better. I’m also more fully present and empathic when I spend time with my elderly father, who has dementia.”

What’s going on here? How does psilocybin induce states of consciousness capable of dramatically reorienting one’s mental frame? The beginnings of an answer may be found in the morning mists of recorded history. In the ancient world, disparate cultures from the Amazon to Siberia consumed psychedelic mushrooms and plants in sacred rituals they viewed as openings into spirit worlds where mysteries were revealed and ineffable wisdom communicated. Often these rituals were conducted by “medicine men” and focused on themes of disease, death and healing, as in the case of Amazonian cultures where doctors still engage in ritualized use of the “healing plant” Ayahuasca.

No one is claiming that psychedelics cure disease. But around the time Western science discovered psychedelics in the 1890s, psychology of religion scholars began to notice a recurring cross-cultural motif — the psychic salving power of what American psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke called “cosmic consciousness.” To research his landmark 1902 study “Varieties of Religious Experience,” the psychologist and philosopher William James surveyed a vast global record of spiritual literature. Again and again, he encountered reports of death anxiety evaporating upon the direct experience of mystical states of consciousness. The reports of Kristof Kossut and Clark Martin overlay neatly with James’ description of the afterglow provided by mystical consciousness, “of which the central [characteristic] is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though our outer conditions should remain the same.” Throughout history and in every culture, James found, those who experience “the full flood of ecstatic liberation” tend to benefit afterward from “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life … and a temper of peace.”

This insight led James to advocate for experimental mysticism, which helped him treat his own bouts with severe depression. In the 1870s, James began using nitrous oxide (a hallucinogen that shares characteristics with ketamine and PCP) as a shortcut to the experiences cataloged in “Varieties.” He found the practice salutary. Mind-blowingly so. But nitrous is just laughing gas compared to the classical hallucinogens that concerned James’ heir in the annals of chemical mystics.

In the middle of the otherwise staid 1950s, the writer Aldous Huxley emerged as a muscular advocate for psychedelics. His conversion followed his first mescaline trip, immortalized in the slim but influential 1954 work “The Doors of Perception.” Like James, Huxley’s  experiments built on a lifelong interest in mystical states. His cross-cultural examination of mystical testimony, “The Perennial Philosophy,” found the same aspects to the experience as recorded in today’s psilocybin studies: a sense of access to ineffable and intuitive knowledge; a sense of unity, transcendence and sacredness; overwhelming, ecstatic positivity felt as joy, love and peace.

Timothy Leary was the first scientist to test the power of psychedelics to trigger these states. In 1963, his last year at Harvard, Leary supervised an experiment in which psilocybin was administered to 10 seminary students attending the Good Friday sermon at Boston University’s St. Marsh Chapel. Of the 10, eight claimed to experience something like mystical consciousness. Forty years later, Roland Griffiths updated the Marsh Chapel experiment at Johns Hopkins by administering psilocybin to healthy individuals with an interest in spiritual states. As he reported in the journal Psychopharmacology, nearly 80 percent of subjects listed their psilocybin session as among the top-five most meaningful experiences of their lives, and described the experience in language straight out of the mystical literature. Follow-up monitoring by the subjects’ families and friends found sustained positive changes in personality, behavior and mood.

The fact that psychedelics act as shortcuts to mystical states provides only one-half of the logic underlying the psilocybin-cancer studies. The young field of palliative care provides the other half with its research into “good deaths.” The palliative-care literature finds that those with a sense of a transcendental force have less depression and anxiety. This can mean belief in a Judeo-Christian god, or a direct memory of the nameless, overwhelming sense of eternal, cosmic love occasioned by the ingestion of 20 or 30 milligrams of psilocybin.

“Psychedelics are a powerful mechanism for forging a connection to a transcendental force, and people with such a connection are protected against end-of-life distress,” says NYU’s Ross. “We all have cognitive illusions that protect us from the knowledge that we will die, and medicine is failing those who have to deal with this abruptly.”

Psilocybin metabolizes quickly, and follow-up doses are not needed to maintain long-term effects. This means that the psilocybin studies are not really drug studies in the traditional sense. They are more like experiential studies, in which the benefit is derived from the memory of something that isn’t easily explained away by reference to serotonin receptors. “Eternity, a state of awareness outside of time, often described as pulsating with love and life, no longer is an abstract concept,” explains Bill Richards, a therapist with the Johns Hopkins team who has been working with psilocybin since 1963. “Rather [it] is a memory of an experience, perhaps more vivid than the memory of visiting a foreign city on a vacation. Typically fear becomes replaced with curiosity and trust in deeper strata of consciousness.”

Among those who have benefited from a new trust in these deeper strata of consciousness is Janeen Delany, a Phoenix woman who flew to Baltimore for psilocybin therapy in 2008 after a leukemia diagnosis.

“I was struggling emotionally with my fear,” she remembers. “No matter how hard I tried to do the work myself, I couldn’t get to that place of acceptance.” More than two years later, Delaney describes her psilocybin experience as the turning point in coming to terms with her illness. “It changed my frame of mind,” she says. “This disease no longer defines me when I wake up in the morning. I understand myself as part of a greater whole made up of energy and frequencies. It’s impossible to put these insights into words, but they were real; are real. It felt like a thousand pounds lifted off my shoulders. I’m now the person I always wanted to be.”

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Using psychedelics to treat terminal anxiety was popularized in the West in Aldous Huxley’s 1962 utopian novel “Island,” in which the natives of the fictional paradise Pala ingest a psilocybin-like drug called moksha during stages-of-life rituals, including infirmity, sickness and death. Huxley himself would famously request and receive a large intravenous dose of LSD on his own deathbed the following year.

Shortly after Huxley’s passing, Eric Kast of the Chicago Medical School began a four-year study administering LSD to cancer patients in extreme pain. He discovered that along with reorienting the patient’s relationship to death, the psychedelic had an analgesic effect resulting from an “attenuation of anticipation.” Following their LSD treatments, Kast wrote, subjects developed “a peculiar disregard for the gravity of their situations and talked freely about their impending death with an affect considered inappropriate in our Western civilization but most beneficial to their psychic states.”

A former graduate student of Tim Leary’s named Walter Pahnke picked up Kast’s work in 1968 at Spring Grove Hospital in Baltimore. As part of a psychedelic dream team including Stanislav Grof and Bill Richards, Pahnke successfully administered LSD and psilocybin to more than 100 cancer patients between 1968 and 1977. The National Institute of Mental Health funded much of their work.

The cancer anxiety studies of the ‘60s and ‘70s were part of a global postwar flowering of psychedelic science. Researchers published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, with LSD receiving the bulk of the attention. Psychedelic drugs were considered a revolutionary tool, frequently compared to the invention of the telescope or microscope. They were seen as keys to understanding and finding treatments for everything from alcoholism to autism to schizophrenia. This was not a fringe view, but that of respected researchers backed by the Food and Drug Administration and funded by institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation. There were research grants galore and conferences sponsored by the American Psychiatric Association. (We’d later learn that the CIA funded many psychedelic research projects. But that’s another article.)

The golden age of psychedelic studies proved brief. Even before recreational use exploded in the mid-1960s, the government had begun moving toward the view of the military and intelligence establishments that psychedelics were mere “psychotomimetics” (i.e., they mimicked psychosis) holding no scientific use (let alone spiritual or humanistic value). A series of laws throughout the decade steadily restricted and discouraged scientific access to psychedelics culminating in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which grouped psychedelics together with heroin as a Schedule 1 drug. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, created in 1972, Schedule 1 drugs “have a high potential for abuse [and] have no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.”

The closing of the psychedelic mind involved the weaving of a fine-spun stigma and the application of indistinct professional pressure. “A subtle microphysics of power guided scientists away from further work on these compounds,” says Nicolas Langlitz, an anthropologist at the New School who studies psychedelic science. “The allocation of funding, having to guard one’s reputation, approval of research projects, recruitment of test subjects — it all led to a near-total breakdown of academic hallucinogen research.” Before the end of the ’60s, two leading lights in the field would bemoan the fact that interested and capable scientists were “turning their backs on psychedelics for fear of identification with irresponsible researchers.”

Then as now, “irresponsible researchers” was synonymous with Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor turned self-styled laughing leprechaun and high priest of an everybody-must-get-stoned psychedelic revolution. Among the new generation, resentment of Leary’s legacy remains palpable, as is the determination to avoid the mistakes, indeed the tragedy, of the 1960s.

“Leary so undermined credible scientific use of these compounds that it poisoned research for decades,” says Griffiths of Johns Hopkins. “The iconic scientist goes AWOL and promotes unrestricted recreational use. As a result, I don’t know of any other set of scientific questions that have been banned for decades because it was judged too dangerous to study. Maybe germ or chemical warfare. But I doubt those were actually stopped.”

Bill Richards, the avuncular Hopkins therapist who knew Leary and has overseen thousands of psychedelic sessions over 50 years, has learned to take the long view. “One of our sayings during the sessions is ‘Let go,’ which we needed to do,” he says. “The old fires needed to die down. Leary’s ashes needed to get launched into outer space. Now I’m hopeful. The research proceeds with integrity.”

 - – - – - – - – - -

This quickening psychedelic revival was a long time coming. Activists and scientists began laying the groundwork during the second Reagan administration, when their efforts seemed most futile. In 1986, Rick Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies to advocate and educate the public. Not much happened until 1990, when Rick Strassman of the University of New Mexico Medical School broke ground with a study on the affects of DMT, the so-called nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family. Then, early in the first Clinton administration, the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Food and Drug Administration quietly signaled a readiness to approve new psychedelic research. Encouraged by the signs, a group of scientists founded the Heffter Research Institute in 1993 to fund projects and hold them to the highest scientific standards.

The early naughts witnessed a further eroding of the psychedelic research taboo. The big foundations and government agencies maintained their distance, but groups like MAPS, Heffter and the Council on Spiritual Practices stepped in to underwrite medical school studies involving Schedule 1 drugs such as Ketamine, MDMA, marijuana and psilocybin. Mid-decade, Harvard’s John Halpren finally exorcised Tim Leary’s Cambridge ghost when he won approval for a small cancer anxiety study employing MDMA. The data from these and other studies is now beginning to appear in medical journals and on professional association conference agendas. This year, a chapter on psilocybin therapy for cancer patients will appear for the first time in a standard psycho-oncology textbook.

Much of this activity is centered at NYU, where a vibrant community of therapists and scientists has emerged around an ongoing speaker’s series called the Psychedelic Research Group. In 2008, Dr. Jeffrey Guss, a Manhattan therapist and co-investigator on the NYU study, taught “Psychedelics and Psychiatry,” the first course on psychedelic therapy offered at a modern medical school. Guss also directs the university’s 12-week psychedelic psychotherapy training program, the only program of its kind in the country. “We’re establishing a conversation across disciplines — oncology, psychiatry, palliative care — to reintroduce psychedelics into the medical discourse,” says Guss. “The field is emerging as a doable career, and I’ve started to mentor people who want to move exclusively in this direction.”

For political and scientific reasons, cancer anxiety is the research avenue with the most potential to scale up in the near future. Advocates like MAPS’ Doblin optimistically envision a scenario in which the therapy could be more widely available in a decade. Getting there will require larger trials and a full rescheduling review by the DEA and the Department of Health and Human Services. “Getting a drug rescheduled is very difficult,” says Bill Piper, national director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “But by its charter, the DEA is bound to follow the science.”

Establishing psilocybin-assisted therapy as an accepted option for end-of-life care could have some surprising consequences. Among them is a fundamental reorienting of our culture’s relationship to death. It could move discussion on what constitutes a “good death” and how to better provide them. Because Western medicine focuses narrowly on defeating disease with little consideration for how we die, the sick often spend their last weeks and days surrounded by machinery and hospital staff instead of a comfortable hospice setting surrounded by family.

“There is an increasing understanding that there is a paucity of approaches to psycho-spiritual well-being at end of life,” says Anthony Bossis, a palliative-care expert at NYU and co-investigator of the psilocybin study. “Medicine doesn’t talk about how we die. Palliative care brought psycho-spiritual stress into the conversation, and now psychedelic research is enlarging that conversation by exploring the ontological shifts, like that brought about by psilocybin, which can affect one’s outlook on life, death, disease.”

Adds Griffiths of Johns Hopkins: “So much money gets poured into those last few months of life where people are terrified and grasping at anything to prolong life. It’s heartbreaking to see, but our culture has such a disordered relationship to end-of-life issues. Change that, and people will change their utilization of the medical system. They’ll use it more in some ways, less in others. The result would be a huge net decrease in expensive interventional procedures in the final weeks.”

If and when psilocybin enters the larger healthcare debate, it will trigger the mother and possibly deciding battle of the 1960s culture wars. The prospect of Medicare dollars going to psychedelic therapy would send right-wing opportunists into a stomping rage. Sarah Palin would tweet about Hippie Death Panels. The GOP might revive its 1972 battle cry about liberals marching under a banner of “acid, amnesty and abortion.”

But here the history of the medical marijuana movement is instructive. Drug warriors could only deny the medicinal value of marijuana for so long; soon they were forced to beat a retreat before the combined forces of the medical literature, lobbying and advocacy, and the reality of millions of suffering Americans. If the science is solid, it usually wins, if only in fits and starts. This is especially true when the science is accompanied by the moving testimonies of people like Roy, a 52-year-old television news producer and Stage-4 lung-cancer patient who this summer underwent psilocybin treatment at NYU after three years of chemotherapy. Like Krystof Kossut and dozens of others, Roy had grown increasingly anxious and depressed before his revelatory psilocybin session. Today he describes that session as among the most precious and important experiences of his life. His journal is excerpted in a forthcoming chapter in Springer’s textbook, “Psychological Aspects of Cancer,” co-authored by Bossis and Guss of the NYU study and Charles Grob of UCLA.

“From here on love was the only consideration,” Roy writes of his psilocybin session.

Love seemed to emanate from a single point of light. The bliss was indescribable … I took a tour of my lungs. There were nodules but they seemed rather unimportant … I was being told (without words) to not worry about the cancer … it’s minor in the scheme of things, simply an imperfection of your humanity and that the real work to be done is before you. Again, love … [On the day after the session] I felt spectacular … both physically and mentally! It had been a very long time since I’d felt that good … a serene sense of balance … Undoubtedly, my life has changed in ways I may never fully comprehend. I now have an understanding, an awareness that goes beyond intellect, that my life, that every life, and all that is the universe, equals one thing: Love.

It’s true we don’t know much about psychedelic states of consciousness. Are they merely biochemical carnivals producing internal hallucinations, or are they — as people often describe them — “more real than real”? The psychedelic experience has always been just that — the ultimate subjective experience, ineffable and very difficult to account for when over. But those who doubt its power or “reality” might remember that we also have precious little understanding of the neurological basis of “normal” consciousness. And when it comes to bringing comfort to the ill, of giving the gift of “indescribable bliss,” a case can be made for the irrelevance of ultimate metaphysical and scientific questions. The first psychologist to advocate for experimental mysticism also advocated for that most American of thought systems, pragmatism.

Truth, concluded William James, is what works. 

Amazingly, just after the ADL report’s release, Sarah Palin responded to a question about a possible Palin-Beck ticket by refusing to rule out Beck as a running mate. She praised him effusively, describing him as “bold, clever, and very, very, very effective.”

Effective at what, exactly?

Earlier this week, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post detailed several instances in which Beck has welcomed onto his shows guests with ties to groups that traffic in white supremacy, neo-Confederate secession, and anti-Semitism. Stein’s reporting was a good start, but it would take a chalkboard the size of Idaho to fully map out Beck’s racially paranoid guest list.

But Beck insists his critics are imagining things, that he does not engage in racial fear-mongering, that a string of guests with ties to hate groups do not form a meaningful pattern, and that he’s not a racist. It occurred to me the other day that if you really want to know whether Beck and his guests are blowing racial dog-whistles, it’s best to ask a dog.

I decided to reach out to Don Black, the avowed white nationalist who runs the Web site Stormfront.org, the country’s leading “Discussion board for pro-White activists and anyone else interested in White survival.” But Black hung up on me. I next tried to get in touch with David Duke, the former gubernatorial candidate and current head of the European American Unity and Rights Organization. Duke, too, had little interest in talking to me, likely because of my past association with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activities of white supremacist groups.

Unable to get through to the highest-profile spokesmen of the racist grass roots, I took a page from the other side and trawled their Web sites for insight. I scanned Davidduke.com and Stormfront.org to see what they had to say, if anything, about Beck. Admittedly, this method is not scientific, and certainly folks on the left don’t like it when righties cherry-pick an extreme comment from Daily Kos or the Huffington Post and pretend the whole site can be summed up by such extremism.

On the other hand, Stormfront.org isn’t a media organization but a self-described discussion board. And when it comes to Beck, the discussions are fairly positive. On both David Duke’s Web site and Stormfront, Beck’s July 28 claim that President Obama harbors a “deep-seated hatred of white people, or the white culture” was met with attention and appreciation.

Duke was heartened by the discussion it generated, and placed it in a larger context. “A lot of stuff is happening in the world of race relations and little of it points towards a post-racial society,” Duke noted. “Beck is steadily losing advertisers, but his viewers seem to be sticking with him … White desperation is manifesting itself in various forms.”

Beck’s charge that the president hates white people sparked a more expansive discussion at Stormfront.org. Some participants saw Beck as an important ally in the White Nationalist cause. Others were skeptical, viewing him as a clueless conservative version of Lenin’s “useful idiot.” But some of Stormfront’s most active members generally agreed that, whether he was fully conscious or not, Beck was nudging his audience toward an embrace of racial consciousness.

“Glen [sic] Beck can be useful,” said one frequent Stormfront contributor who posts under the name SS_marching. “When Glen beck said ‘Obama Has A Deep-Seated Hatred For White People’ he is able to reach a much wider audience than we can. They will [be] predisposed to the idea and the next time Obama pushes an anti-white policy they will see it as such.”

Stormfront member PowerCommander agreed. Beck, he wrote:

“seems to have ignited a flame under the asses of some folks with similar ideas by pushing the right buttons. It appears as if the current regime [is] directly blaming GB and fox news for throwing a wrench in their machine. Is Beck’s rambling getting America fired up and ready to fight? Has Beck told enough of the truth to start something bigger? Even an engine needs a starter to get fired off and go down the road.”

Thor357, a Stormfront sustaining member who has posted on the site more than 3,500 times, had this to say:

“Glenn Beck and Alex Jones [a controversial conservative media figure who believes 9/11 was an inside job] are the front line in the war of Ideals we grapple with, they are far from perfect and are somewhat compromised. But every person in the last 2 years that I have introduced to the WN [White Nationalist] Philosophy have come largely from Alex Jones, Glen Beck and the Scriptures for America founder Pastor Pete Peters … Baby steps are required for people like these, but the trio Beck, Jones, Peters are the baby food that feeds potential Nationalists… Glenn Beck is not far behind as his Mormon background indicates to me as most Mormons I have met are not friends of Jews like the Church was years ago. Most Mormons I know are arming themselves, with guns, bullets and food.”

Later in the same discussion thread, Thor357 added:

“I have talked to 6 people in two days because Glenn Beck woke them up, it’s amazing how angry they are. They are pissing fire over Obama, this is a good thing. Now I educate them. If out of 100 of the Glen Beckers I keep 20 then I have won 20 more to cover my back side. I never lost the 80 as they never were.”

Carolina Patriot, whose member picture features a kitten aiming an assassin’s rifle, was conflicted but admiring:

“Every now and again when an infomercial takes the place of hunting or fishing, I’ll turn over to Glenn Beck if he’s on and watch his show. Sometimes it is amusing, sometimes it is informed, and sometimes, I think he comes to SF [Stormfront] to steal show idea’s”

UstashaNY offered up an analogy to substance abuse, with Beck as the soft-stuff hook:

“Beck, Dobbs etc. are like gateway drugs. If it wakes up one person to learn something about whats really going on and that person does the research, looks deeper and deeper into WHO and WHAT is behind all of this, then its a win for the movement. NOBODY in the msm is reporting the stuff Beck does, let him keep talking. It will wake people up, believe me… He is more of a help to us then you may think. Until we have a REAL voice in the msm, guys like him and Dobbs are a stepping stone right into our laps. Its only a matter of time…”

Even those who don’t think Beck understands what he’s doing appreciate his instincts. According to WhiteManMarchesOn88:

“There is no doubt that Beck is not a WN [white nationalist], but I have to agree that he does raise a lot of really good questions that do promote White survival. I’m sure he would go a lot farther with a lot of his questions, but ZOG [Zionist Occupied Government] would more than likely kick him off television if he did.”

ZOG or no ZOG, Beck is clearly doing something right from the point of view of the average white nationalist.

“By no means do I think [Beck] is aware of the racial issue, and for the moment that is ok,” wrote Stormfront member QHelios. “He is stirring the pot, and I thank him for that.” 

After his personal and professional meltdown in Houston, Beck found a new job in Baltimore at the city’s leading Top 40 station, WBSB, AKA B104. This time, however, he wanted a partner.

On the recommendation of a friend, he settled on a 27-year-old morning jock named Pat Gray. Although Gray and Beck had worked in Houston at the same time, they had never met. But the new team clicked. As Beck likes to tell it, it was DJ love at first sight, with the two bonding within minutes of meeting at the airport. Beck and Gray were unlikely bosom buddies. Gray was a Mormon who home-schooled his kids; Beck was a bong-ripping nihilist who could barely remember his kids’ names. But they shared a sense of humor and a love of morning-radio mischief. They also shared similar if inchoate politics. After their partnership ended in 1994, both men would go on to pursue careers in conservative talk radio. They now work together on Beck’s nationally broadcast radio show, The Glenn Beck Program.

In 1990, the duo had a once-great Top 40 station to revive. For much of the 1980s, Baltimore’s B104 had been among the best-regarded Top 40 stations in the country. But by end of the decade, a succession of program directors and overactive managers began running the station into the ground. Part of the wipeout included a self-destructive image makeover: from hard-driving and flame-throwing to a mellow adult-contemporary station that ran TV spots featuring former Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer.

When Beck and Gray were hired, some saw them as saviors.

“Glenn and Pat were brought in to restore the morning zoo feel to the station,” says Sean Hall, who read news at B104 during the ’80s and early ’90s. “I vividly remember the program director coming in early the first day, something he never did, and saying, ‘This place really needed this.’”

On Beck and Gray’s first show together, they held a contest that rewarded the first listener to buy 104 Slurpies at a 7-11. “They had obvious chemistry from go,” says Billie Brown, a DJ at the station.

Along with a new partner, Beck wanted a new mascot. He spent two weeks calling veterinarians and pet stores live on the air, getting advice on gerbils. After choosing one, he announced that he was going to train the world’s first bank-tube astronaut. Every day Beck would announce an update, some new detail about the gerbil’s first mission. One day, he made a little cape; the next, he named the animal “Gerry the Gerbil.” Each development was accompanied by a press release. When all the pieces were in place, Beck and Gray visited a local bank and sent the animal to a teller with a known fear of rodents.

“The build-up was amazing, masterful,” says a former director at the station. “PETA was flipping out, picketing the station every day. Beck’s on the local news. He took a stupid stunt and turned it into weeks of compelling high-publicity radio. He always knew how to get attention, how to get people talking about him.”

The undisputed high point of Beck’s tenure in Baltimore was an elaborate prank built around a nonexistent theme park. The idea was to run a promotional campaign for the fictional grand opening of the world’s first air-conditioned underground amusement park, called Magicland. According to Beck and Gray, it was being completed just outside Baltimore. During the build-up, the two created an intricate and convincing radio world of theme-park jingles and promotions, which were rolled out in a slow buildup to the nonexistent park’s grand opening. They then went to Kings Island in Cincinnati to record their voices over the sounds of a real theme park. On the day Magicland was supposed to throw open its air-conditioned doors, Beck and Gray took calls from enraged listeners who tried to find the park and failed. Among the disappointed and enraged was a woman who had canceled a no-refund cruise to attend the event.

“They never told a soul what they were doing,” says Sean Hall, the B104 newsreader. “I didn’t know until the morning it aired. People just drove around in circles on the beltway for hours trying to find the place. And that was exactly what it was supposed to elicit.”

* *

Beck was known at B104 as a pro’s pro in the studio but was becoming increasingly unraveled when not working. “Beck used to get hammered after every show at this little bar-café down the street,” remembers a music programmer who worked with Beck. “At first we thought he was going to get lunch.” The extent to which Beck was struggling to keep it together is highlighted by Beck’s arrest one afternoon just outside Baltimore. He was speeding in his DeLorean with one of the car’s gull-wing doors wide open when the cops pulled him over. According to a former colleague, Beck was “completely out of it” when a B104 manager went down to the station to bail him out. In his 2003 book, “Real America,” Beck refers to himself as a borderline schizophrenic. Whether that statement is matter-of-fact or intended for effect, he has spoken more than once about taking drugs for ADHD, and when he was at B104, Beck’s coworkers believed him to be taking prescription medication for some kind of mental or psychological ills. “He used to complain that his medication made him feel like he was ‘under wet blankets,’” remembers the former music programmer.

Today, when Beck wants to illustrate the jerk he used to be, he tells the story of the time he fired an employee for bringing him the wrong pen during a promotional event. According to former colleagues in Baltimore, Beck didn’t just fire people in fits of rage — he fired them slowly and publicly. “He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just humiliate them in public. He was a sadist, the kind of guy who rips wings off of flies,” remembers a colleague.

Despite their on-air synergy, Beck and Gray were not a ratings smash. They had created Magicland out of thin air, but they couldn’t summon enough ratings magic to revive B104. After a year of struggling personally and professionally, Beck found himself working alone when Gray’s contract was cancelled. When Beck was fired also, the two men spent six months in Baltimore living off of their severance, unemployed and plotting their next move.

The Glenn and Pat Show found second life farther down the radio food chain at the New Haven Top 40 station KC101. Coming from Top 20 Markets like Houston and Baltimore, the southern Connecticut station — barely flirting with the Top 100 — was a sign of serious professional decline. Making matters worse, New Haven was the closest Beck had ever come in geographical terms to his boyhood dream of working in Rockefeller Center. But the Manhattan skyline had never been so far from his grasp as it was in New Haven. Now approaching 30, Beck was no longer a boy wonder destined for greatness. He was staring failure in the face.

“There’s nothing like being 18 years old in the fifth largest market in America, and then spending the next dozen years dropping 97 spots,” Beck later wrote. Even had he wanted to, Beck could not have ignored the daily reminders of failure represented by New Haven’s morning commuter rail service to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan. A New York complex was even woven into KC101′s public identity: A station promo mock-bragged about its outsized 50,000-watt signal, “Five states and the world’s greatest cities — from a dumpy little building in North Haven.”

Beck and Gray arrived at KC101′s dumpy little studio building in early 1992. They were morning-show bounty hunters, brought to town to capture the scalps of the dominant morning team in the market — the “bad boy” duo of Brian Smith and Bruce Barber of WPLR, which had established a lock on the prized 18-to-34 demo. Beck and Gray were famished for the success that had eluded them in Baltimore. A profile for the New Haven Register quoted their new boss, Faith Zila, marveling that the two spent up to eight hours prepping for every show. “I haven’t seen anyone spend that kind of time,” Zila said. “These guys would kill for a ratings win and I’m the same way.”

Shortly after Beck’s arrival in Connecticut in the winter of 1992, KC101 was purchased by Clear Channel. Although it was not immediately obvious, this would prove a momentous development in Beck’s career. At the time, Clear Channel was still a small player in radio, with just 16 radio stations nationally. This began to change the year after Beck’s arrival, when Congress relaxed ownership rules regulating the radio industry. By the year 2000, thanks to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Clear Channel had become a behemoth of 1,200 stations.

In early 1992, Beck was practically in on the ground floor of Clear Channel’s national growth. Clear Channel’s appearance ensured a level of security that was new in Beck’s career. Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays told the New Haven Register that February that he had entered the market as a long-term “broadcasting operator, as opposed to just an investor” and stressed that he had “never sold a station.” As one of the company’s most experienced morning DJs, Beck got to know Mark Mays, who was on his way to becoming the most powerful man in radio.

Along with the purchase of KC101, Clear Channel picked up New Haven’s leading news and talk station, WELI. Having this sister station would prove crucial to Beck’s early start in talk radio. Before the end of the decade, a melding of the two stations’ content would also create what the country would come to know as The Glenn Beck Program.

* *

But if some of the elements that would later lead to the rebirth of Beck’s career were coming into alignment, that professional resurrection was still in the future. And his personal life was a mess. During his first two years in Connecticut, Beck slid further toward the abyss.

He was drinking and mixing recreational and prescription drugs. Once again, he earned a rep among his coworkers for being erratic and moody. “When Beck was not taking certain drugs he was supposed to be taking he could act very bizarre,” remembers Kelly Nash, who managed Beck in New Haven.

“He didn’t want anyone questioning his authority. I remember he fired our consultant and brought in his old friend Jim Sumpter. The two of them created and launched an in-house research project that made absolutely no sense. When I confronted him on the absurdity of his approach, he said, ‘This is above your head.’ Then he locked the door to his office. I thought, ‘This guy is out of control. He’s insane.’”

By 1994, Beck was suicidal. He imagined putting a gun inside his mouth and squeezing the trigger to the music of his fellow Washingtonian, Kurt Cobain, recently killed by his own hand. Everywhere Beck turned, things were falling apart. His marriage was failing. Pat Gray, his best friend and creative partner, was sick of Beck’s drama, and about to move his family to Salt Lake City. (He would later describe the station under Beck as “a pretty cancerous place to be.”) Beck saw his daughters only through a pot haze and in-between blackouts. Twisting the multiple knives in Beck’s gut was the regular humiliation of Top 40 promotional stunts. In a typical KC101 event, Beck dressed up as a banana and dove into a pool full of Styrofoam.

Whatever humiliations he suffered, Orson Welles never dressed up as a banana.

Alone and peering over the ledge, Beck pulled back. In November of 1994 he attended his first AA meeting. That month he became a dry drunk and stopped smoking weed. He chopped off his ponytail. As 1995 opened, a sober Beck began imagining a future outside of Top 40 radio.

After getting sober, Beck went on a spiritual quest. He sought out answers in churches and bookstores. Joe Amarante, a local New Haven reporter, remembers Beck wandering into his Catholic church during Mass looking “puzzled.” A similar confusion is reflected in Beck’s reading list from the period. As Beck has recounted it in his books and stage performances, his first attempt at self-education involved six writers that formed a strange sort of Great Books program. Beck’s curriculum included books by Alan Dershowitz, Pope John Paul II, Adolf Hitler, Billy Graham, Carl Sagan, and Friedrich Nietzsche. As he surrounded himself with this brain trust, his friend and former partner Pat Gray argued in favor of the comprehensive worldview offered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Beck rejected Gray’s overtures, teasingly calling him “freak boy.”

Concurrent with Beck’s mid- and late-’90s spiritual journey was his self-education in talk radio. In early 1995, Time magazine published a cover story tackling one of the questions raised by the previous November’s midterm elections, in which talk radio helped fuel New Gingrich’s GOP insurgency. “Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?” asked the magazine. “Electronic populism threatens to short-circuit representative democracy. Talk radio is only the beginning.” (Earlier this month, 15 years after the Limbaugh story, Time ran a feature entitled, “Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?”)

By then, Beck was already paying attention. “Beck was a close student of talk radio for years,” says Sue Treccase, later his first manager in talk radio. “Before he thought he was ready [to do it himself], Beck paid close attention to successful practitioners of the craft.” After finishing his morning show in New Haven, Beck would often tune into 77 WABC AM broadcasting from Manhattan, the nation’s biggest news and talk station. Along with Rush Limbaugh, Beck listened to Bob Grant, to whom he continues to pay daily homage by greeting listeners as “sick twisted freaks.”

Even before he cleaned up, Beck had waded into local Connecticut politics. Among his and Gray’s favorite early on-air targets was Connecticut’s Independent governor, Lowell Weicker, who had left the Republican Party after losing his Senate seat. Beck went after the liberal Weicker whenever he got the chance. “Governor Weicker had three teeth pulled the other day,” Beck said in a typical bit. “I’d hate to see him in pain. Really excruciating pain.”

One local politician who appreciated Beck’s regular digs at the governor was the man who had defeated Weicker in a bitterly contested 1988 senate race: Democrat Joe Lieberman. Beck and the senator were friendly throughout the ’90s, until they fell out over Lieberman’s refusal to back the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998. But before they parted ways, Lieberman would play a role in Beck’s search for a worldview and identity by helping Beck enroll part-time at Yale in the fall of 1996. The ADHD-diagnosed Beck didn’t last long at Yale. He took one class, “Early Christology,” and dropped out.

In the spring of 1997, a colleague of Beck’s suggested he do some bits with a local music columnist named Vinnie Penn. A fast-talking future stand-up artist with a bit of a goombah shtick, Penn was Beck’s first partner in radio who was more ethnic than Wonder Bread. Beck never clicked with Penn the way he had with Gray, but the two got on well enough to produce four hours of morning radio every day. The two would be on-air partners until Beck made the jump to talk radio in 1999. “When I showed up in ’97 Beck was in a sort of wasteland, looking for a partner,” says Penn.

Beck hadn’t yet given up on making it big in Top 40 radio. Within a month of teaming up with Penn, he began musing about the chances of syndicating their show. “Beck saw the syndication trend coming a mile away, I gotta give it to him,” says Penn. “But he came to realize that talk was the easier route for him and the better fit. When I got there he was already wondering how he was going to sustain a career in Top 40 radio when his heart wasn’t in it. He was like, ‘Where am I headed?’ At one point I remember him talking about joining the ministry.”

Beck wasn’t the only one beginning to chafe under the limits of a morning show based around raffling boy-band concert tickets for teenagers. In 1998, Beck and Penn were getting memos from management urging them to talk more about reality TV and pop culture as a way to attract young listeners. Penn, whom a local paper had dubbed  ”The Connecticut King of All Media,” wanted to do edgier stuff. As his partner began thinking about talk radio, Penn began exploring comedy, eventually landing some guest spots on the Howard Stern Show. Their morning show became a microcosm of these midcareer tensions, with both men straining against the format: Beck talking politics, Penn working blue.

The more Beck dragged politics into the morning show, the more  station managers grew alarmed. They told Penn it was his job to stop Beck from getting too deep with callers. Chastened by orders, Beck and Penn plotted ways to try and make politics entertaining. The attempt failed. By 1998, Beck realized he’d never be able to do what he wanted to do on FM radio, limited to talking fluff in between Britney Spears songs. Out of this failed experiment with Penn was born Beck’s idea of “fusing” morning radio wackiness and political debate.

His talk radio identity still larval, Beck was already displaying the skills that would make him a talk-radio lightning rod. “He always knew how to work people and situations for attention,” says Penn. “He could pick the most pointless story in the news that day and find a way to approach it to get phones lit up. That was his strong point — pissing people off. He was very shrewd on both the business and entertainment sides of radio. He’s built his empire on very calculated button pushing.”

Not that this empire was imaginable back then. Mostly people noticed the button-pushing and wanted nothing to do with it.

“Anyone in Connecticut who says they knew Beck was destined to run an entertainment empire is full of shit,” says one of Beck’s former coworkers in New Haven. “The guy had dozens of enemies. People thought he was an annoying, washed-up has-been. When I see people today bragging that they knew him back then, I’m like, ‘But you fucking hated him!’”

* *

The longer Beck stayed sober, the more his work depressed him. The high-flying zoo days were over, and he had no desire to compete with the new breed of shock jocks inspired by Howard Stern. If there were flashes of comedic brilliance on his show, they were not daily occurrences. With four hours to fill a day, it was mostly the radio equivalent of babysitting.

Beck did what he had to do, but his growing interest in talk radio was no secret to his colleagues and listeners. He wasn’t just talking about talk radio, he was trying to practice it on his morning show, despite Vinnie Penn’s best efforts to reign him in. Among those to spot the problem was Scott Shannon, the legendary zoo DJ who in the late ’90s consulted on morning programs for Clear Channel. Part of Shannon’s beat was monitoring morning programming at Beck’s station, KC101. Whenever he visited the studio, Shannon noticed Beck veering farther away from traditional Top 40 morning radio. By 1999, Beck’s desire to talk politics was seriously impacting his performance as a morning DJ.

“He’d get into these long, opinionated conversations with callers,” says Shannon. “I had to tell him to cut out the long raps, which were not at all appropriate to the format.” Beck acknowledged the problem and on Shannon’s advice cut a deal with Clear Channel. Beck would be allowed to host a weekday talk show on one of Clear Channel’s AM stations. In exchange, Beck promised to get back to bubble-gum-flavored Top 40 morning radio. “We needed to find a way for him to scratch his talk radio itch and do FM mornings at the same time,” says Shannon.

At first, the double-radio career strategy worked. But the more talk radio Beck did, the more he wanted to do. In 1998, he surprised colleagues by linking up with talk radio super-agent George Hiltzik, a Democrat and a heavy hitter with New York’s N.S. Bienstock agency who also repped Matt Drudge. (And whose son, Matt, now handles P.R. for Beck.)

“We were all shocked when he landed this big agent,” remembers Kelly Nash. “It was like, ‘Why is this guy with you?’” With Hiltzik making the phone calls, Beck landed some guest slots on “The Weekend” at New York’s WABC, home to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bob Grant.

Within a decade, Beck would be mentioned in the same breath as the WABC all-stars. But first he needed to take a few trips around the block. He wasn’t going anywhere until he outgrew his talk radio training wheels.

* *

Beck’s first test in real-time topical talk radio came on Aug. 22, 1998, his second show on WABC. The broadcast aired two days after the U.S. launched cruise missiles at suspected terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan. Beck has archived the show on his website, and it is the earliest extant recording in the public domain of Beck doing political “hot talk” radio.

It is not a pretty sound. From start to finish, Beck seems unpolished and green as he limps through an attempt to put current events into context. While the show is technically amateurish, Beck displays, even at this early stage in his crossover period, a surprisingly mature command of being both obstinate and uninformed. Over the course of the show’s first hour, he manages to propagate dangerous myths about the Vietnam War and those who fought it, denigrate a major world religion, mock peace activists and call for displays of air-power against distant lands.

Beck begins with an ironic playing of Cat Steven’s “Peace Train.” With the song playing softly in the background, he moves into a trope made famous by Bob Grant: loudly flipping through that morning’s edition of the New York Post, the Bible of New York conservative talk radio.

But without his booming Top 40 voice, Beck seems lost. His first sentence is inaudible, followed by a mumbling dismissal of what he calls “hate rallies” taking place across the country in protest of Bill Clinton’s cruise missile attacks. Beck recovers from his opening stumble with a long pause. He then riffs on the contents of the Post:

The good news is, partial birth abortion is still legal … Sexual harassment is behind us. As long as they want it. I’m glad to know it’s okay for the most powerful man in the world to prey on a lowly intern … Best news in the Post today: 53 percent of us have come together to support our military tactics … Quotes Arab press claiming bombings were a diversion … Protests all around the United States … Seventy-five losers in San Francisco. Lo-sers.

A story about the missile attacks catches Beck’s attention. He stops to read the dispatch about the terrorist organization targeted by the recent missile strikes. Obviously encountering it for the first time, Beck attempts and fails to pronounce “Osama bin Laden.” Embarrassed, he launches into a kind of loopy scat:

A paper in Pakistan received a letter from the spokesperson from, uh … Asma … Asma Bin-Lay-deen? Is that his name? Bin Lay-deen? Bin Jelly Bean Green Bean? Mr. Clean? I love him. He’s hot. He says he’s ready for war with the U.S. Oh, yes. Thank you, Mr. Baked Bean. Loosen the turban! Mr. Clean, Dig-my-scene. Oh, yes! Look at the latrine …

That settled, Beck introduces himself to his listeners. “I don’t really consider myself a conservative,” he says, echoing Bob Grant’s self-description almost word for word. “I know I don’t consider myself a liberal. I have a brain and I like to use it sometimes.”

With that, Beck is ready to take some calls.

Someone says, “The only message these people in the Middle East get is brute force.” Beck agrees, likening that summer’s African embassy attacks to Pearl Harbor.

Another caller says he doubts Clinton would launch strikes just to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal, considering that action might cost lives. This confuses Beck, who asks, “Lives? We used cruise missiles.” It doesn’t occur to Beck that the caller is referring to the Sudanese working inside the medicine factory destroyed by U.S. missiles.

The next caller supports the military action, adding that he “respects Jews, Catholics and Muslims — everybody the same.” To which Beck responds, “I can’t go with you that far, Alan, but thanks for calling.”

The next caller thinks America needs to “take the fight to the enemy.” Beck agrees. “War has changed, it’s the way we have to fight it.” To drive home the point that “war has changed” and that America has entered a new and dangerous period in its history, Beck then segues to a commercial break with the chorus to “Danger Zone,” the 1986 Kenny Loggins hit and “Top Gun” theme song. Further proving you can take the man out of the 1980s, but not the 1980s out of the man, Beck returns from the break with Toto’s “Hold the Line.”

Back on air, Beck dives back into the subject of dastardly peace protestors. He raises what would become one of his favorite subjects in the coming years: the lessons of Vietnam. “The problem with Vietnam is we didn’t fight to win,” explains Beck. “When you declare a war, there are no rules. Have you learned the lesson of Vietnam that we can’t fight it half-assed? We need to fight it to the last body.”

Beck then goes for the emotional jugular for the first time. The move comes in the form of a story about an unnamed “friend” of Beck’s. This friend returned from Vietnam only to endure the abuse of protesting peaceniks. “He got off the plane from Vietnam and a woman spat in his face and called him ‘baby killer,’” explains Beck. “Then he left his medal of honor in a trash can.”

Whether Beck was aware that he was quoting almost verbatim from Sylvester Stallone’s closing monologue in “First Blood,” it is impossible to say. But whatever its source, the story is dubious. As documented by Jerry Lembcke in his book “The Spitting Image,” stories of Vietnam vets being spit upon didn’t gain currency until the 1980s. So many of those stories dissolved upon closer inspection that even after serious research efforts, not a single case of a Vietnam veteran being spat upon has ever been documented.

Beck’s story about his veteran buddy sounds so pat that even his conservative listeners have to wonder. Within minutes, a caller asks, “About your friend who threw away his medal — did that really happen?” Beck mutters, “Yes, but he regrets it now,” then changes the subject.

A few minutes later, toward the end of the first hour, Beck shifts gears. After expounding on war and peace with the certainty of someone who has spent a life thinking about these things — and not imitating Muppets between Bon Jovi songs — he swivels into a disarming Socratic stance of admitted ignorance. It is a move that would play a large role in his future appeal: the average guy who tells you the way it is, then shrugs innocently and says, “But what do I know?” The transition is obviously unpracticed, and it jars, but for the first time in the show, Beck’s words ring true.

“I don’t have a stinking answer to save my life,” he admits. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

* *

At the end of 1998, Kelly Nash called Beck into his office and informed him that his contract would not be renewed when it expired at the end of the following year. “He just couldn’t function as a Top 40 DJ anymore,” says Nash now. “I told him we’d try and help him get his talk career going, but he was no longer cutting it as a Top 40 morning guy.”

But as he honed his talk radio chops alongside his final year of morning radio work, a new Beck had been coming into focus. In 1998, he started dating Tania, the woman who would become his second wife. After they went on a church tour together, looking for a faith, they settled on Mormonism. In 1999, Pat Gray baptized his old friend a Mormon in an emotional ceremony. That same year, Tania and Beck were married. Toward the end of 1999, Clear Channel’s Atlanta-based director for talk radio programming, Gabe Hobbs, received a phone call from the company’s V.P. for programming in the Northeast. “He told me they had this morning guy in New Haven who wanted to get into talk,” recalls Hobbs. “They asked me to go up there and speak with him.”

Hobbs, who was also a longtime friend of Beck’s agent, George Hiltzik, agreed. During their first conversation, Beck impressed Hobbs with his intelligence and determination. “He told me he had simply outgrown the juvenile nature of Top 40 radio. He said he’d go wherever he had to for a talk show,” he says.

Hobbs immediately thought of Tampa, where liberal talk-radio legend Bob Lassiter was likely approaching the end of his career at 970 WFLA, Tampa Bay’s leading news-talk station. Hobbs passed Beck’s tapes to managers at WFLA, who were impressed enough to fly Beck down for an interview. Beck was torn over the possibility of leaving his young daughters back in Connecticut with his ex-wife Claire, but the chance was too good to pass up. Beck flew down. When the 35-year-old returned from sunny Tampa to a snowy New Haven, he was holding a two-year contract to host an afternoon talk show on WFLA.

“To switch formats like Beck did, and take it immediately to a top 20 market like Tampa, is almost unheard of,” notes Kelly Nash, Beck’s last boss in FM radio.

Not for the last time in talk radio, Beck beat the odds. At 3 p.m. on January 3, 2000, “The Glenn Beck Program” debuted in Tampa Bay.