No, Richard Nixon did not call Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America”

At least there’s no evidence that he did.

Here we go again.

Showtime just released My Psychedelic Love Story, an engaging documentary about Joanna Harcourt-Smith, the rich and beautiful young girlfriend of Timothy Leary, who tripped around the world with the irrepressible Leary after he was smuggled out of a a minimum-security prison in California in 1970.

For those of you too young to remember, Leary was a Harvard psychology professor who became a hero of the 1960s counterculture and an evangelist for LSD who exhorted his followers to “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

There’s lots more to say about Leary, but best left unsaid is claim that President Richard M. Nixon called him “the most dangerous man in America.” There’s no evidence that Nixon ever said it.

Predictably, though, critics and reporters reviewing the film in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fast Company and The San Francisco Chronicle pulled out the quote as a shorthand way to describe Leary. It’s mentioned a couple of times in the film. It was…