Richard Alpert

Born Richard Alpert, he returned from a trip to India as a bushy-bearded, barefoot, white-robed guru and wrote more than a dozen inspirational books. He epitomized the 1960s of legend by popularizing psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary, a fellow Harvard academic, before finding spiritual inspiration in India, died on Sunday December 22 2019 at his home on Maui. He was 88. The first of his books, “Be Here Now” (1971), sold more than two million copies, and established him as an exuberant exponent of finding salvation through helping others. He started a foundation to combat blindness in India and Nepal, supported reforestation in Latin America, and developed health education programs for American Indians in South Dakota. In 1997 Ram Dass suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that left him partly paralyzed, unable to speak and needing a wheelchair. From his home in Maui, Hawaii, he learned to “surf the silence” at first, he said, but over time and painstakingly he reacquired a halting form of speech and was able to lecture on the internet and make tapes. Richard Alpert was born in Boston on April 6, 1931. His father, George, a lawyer, was a founder of Brandeis University and president of the New Haven Railroad. Richard had a bar mitzvah, but said he had no religious convictions as a youth. He graduated from Tufts University as a psychology major in 1952 and studied for a master’s degree in the subject at Wesleyan, only to flunk the oral exam. Nevertheless, Mr. Alpert, as he was known then, was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford and earned his doctorate, staying on afterward to teach. That was followed by twin appointments, in psychology and education, at Harvard. It was at Harvard where he crossed paths with Timothy Leary, who was lecturing there in clinical psychology. They became drinking buddies. Mr. Alpert admired Mr. Leary’s iconoclasm, telling Tufts University Magazine in 2006 that Mr. Leary was “the only person on the faculty who wasn’t impressed with Harvard.” In May 1963, both Mr. Leary and Mr. Alpert were fired — Mr. Alpert for giving drugs to an undergraduate, and Mr. Leary for abandoning his classes. As the drug experience deteriorated, tensions between Mr. Leary and Mr. Alpert rose. One issue was Mr. Alpert’s acknowledged bisexuality. Mr. Leary accused Mr. Alpert of trying to seduce his 15-year-old son, Jack, whom Mr. Alpert often took care of while Mr. Leary, a single parent, traveled. By the 1980s, Ram Dass had a change of mind and image. He shaved off the beard but left a neatly trimmed mustache. He tried to drop his Indian name — he no longer wanted to be a cult figure — but his publisher vetoed the idea. He said that he had never intended to be a guru and that Harvard had been right to throw him out. In 2010, he received a letter from a man, a stranger, saying that Ram Dass might be the father of the man’s brother. DNA tests proved that Peter Reichard, a 53-year-old banker in North Carolina, was indeed Ram Dass’s son, the offspring of a liaison with a Stanford graduate student.