On The State Of the Secretary General

By Mark Howell

Peter Anderson, 67, is fighting a battle against cancer.

The Secretary of General the Conch Republic

recently returned from the Anderson clinic in Dallas where he was treated with advanced proton radiation therapy for stage-four lung cancer.

Taking care of Peter at his Key West home are Judith Anderson and their daughter, Mikaela, with help from Hospice plus the support of numerous friends.

Peter Anderson is is founder of the Conch Republic Days celebration that with, its annual parade and great sea battle, has brought millions of dollars to Key West. Always a controversial figure, he is also renowned for his Conch Republic passports and tireless efforts to preserve the spirit and integrity of the Keys.

It was in April 1982, when Border Patrol set up a roadblock on U.S. 1 to search vehicles for narcotics and illegal immigrants, that Anderson began the biggest chapter in his already remarkable life.

Responding to the roadblock, then-Mayor Dennis Wardlow and his cohorts announced the Keys’ secession from the mainland. It was Anderson who came up with the slogans and policies that identified the Conch Republic as a “Sovereign State of Mind,” seeking only to bring more “humor, warmth and respect to a world in sore need of all three.”

Since the mock-secession and thanks largely to the efforts of the Secretary General, Conch Republic officials have actually been invited to the Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994 and the1995 Florida Jubilee. And most dramatically that year, when the 478th Civil Affairs Battalion of the U.S. Army attempted to simulate an invasion of a foreign island by advancing a convoy down U.S. 1 and into Key West, the Conch Republic was mobilized and succeeded in dive-bombing the convoy until the 478th issued an apology submitted to a surrender ceremony.

In recent weeks, Peter Anderson has been sharing his life’s adventures with Konk Life. This week, we begin the story as told in his words to this writer. These opening chapters include Peter’s marriage to Joanna Leary, ex of the LSD guru, with Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy as best man.

In the Beginning…

I was born the 12th of January 1947, in Gaylord Hospital, Washington, D.C., which later burned down (the two events unrelated).

My father was the first president of Atlantic Aviation after the war. My mother raised four children, of whom I was the oldest; my sister, Hannah, died in 1993; my brother Jack lives in New York City; my sister, Tish, lives in Maryland.

I went to grade school in Maryland and attended boarding school at St. Andrews in Delaware. I bombed out of there and went to Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda and flunked out of that. Finally, I went to West Washington Academy, the oldest boarding school in the United States and, at 16, I discovered the joy of learning for the first time.

During my sophomore year at Fairleigh Dickinson University, my father died. There was no support for me to continue there and in 1968 we moved to Big Sur near Carmel, Calif.

Perfect! There I discovered the infinity of the 1960s. And it was there that I became a builder, designing, constructing and furnishing houses all over the place for the next 25 years. I built David (“Kung Fu”) Carradine’s home in Laurel Canyon.

But to me the world increasingly seemed a place where people were choosing to live by conflict and domination rather than abundance and sustainability.

In 1980, between President Carter and President Reagan, no one was talking about space. Meanwhile here on Earth, in an era of a dwindling pie, more and more people wanted a slice and a share of a planet that was poisoned, raped, plundered beyond recognition and unable to sustain the demand put upon it.

This was on the eve of the shuttle program, at a time when we knew, for example, that the only place possessing more aluminum than we did was the Moon, born in the asteroid belt.  So I decided to convince each presidential campaign to make the space issue a priority.

I had some success with the media. Ben Bova, the editor of Omni magazine, convinced his publisher Bob Guccione to frame all three presidential campaigns in a forum (not debate) on space. NASA would be involved.

Jimmy Carter said yes. Reagan asked that it be held just before the election. But the forum did not come off, despite my best efforts.

So I found myself sitting on the Big Sur coast, meditating.

Who is Reagan? He is an actor. Actors need scripts; without them they have nothing to do. So let’s write an actor a script for his role in history.

I told Ben Bover that we lived in an era of unlimited abundance for all the world. In fact, Penthouse Magazine already had an office devoted to government affairs, involving 100 or more organizations, including Arthur C. Clarke’s L5, a society promoting space colonization.

Bover agreed to produce a prospectus for Space Research and Development for Reagan. This was just before the first space shuttle flight of Columbia in April. The presentation committee inviting Reagan to bring the world its future would include Bob Hope, Carol Burnett and Barry Goldwater.

Just before the launch, Guccione’s wife Kathy Keaton received a call that I must fly to the West Coast in order to attend a Rand Institute discussion on L5’s project’s effect on national security. There, I walked into a room at Rand’s San Francisco Center where I was told that everybody was now working on a plan to convince Reagan to build the so-called Star Wars system — in other words, to militarize space for the defense of the United States rather than develop outer space for all mankind.

Here I was, Peter Anderson, in the very heart of the beast, being told that I was putting national security at risk. I turned on them and said that I was not aware that our nation’s security relied on defense alone. Rather it depended on our economic strength and how the world viewed us. This was the quintessential point at the center of the notion of abundance for all. For example, I told them, a solar-powered satellite over the bauxite deposits in Nigeria could end up providing washing machines for all in that part of Africa. So, at least I got to tell those people, in the most wired room in the world in terms of surveillance, how screwed up they were.

I reported all this to Bob Guccione and Kathy Keaton and they decided that we’d go ahead with the publication in their magazine, Omni, of the prospectus for harnessing the abundance of space. But, one week before the shuttle flew, a crazed kid put a bullet in President Reagan and he was no longer available to receive the document before the flight of the shuttle.

He did get to see it in November, but with little fanfare. And it was a grim experience for me, one year later, to hear Reagan quote two whole sentences verbatim from it, even as Congress was busy justifying the Star Wars program, the very thing I abhorred.

But my philosophy is that if you come up with a good idea, the only sin is not to act on it. You must have the courage to act on your good ideas.

So let’s keep trying.

Among the eminent U. S. futurists working on the prospectus was Barbara Marx Hubbard. She offered me lodging at her stone mansion in Rock Creek Park neighboring D.C., where we typed the final draft in late March. We got to her house and she set me up with a suite of rooms and everything I needed.

She hosted a dinner party the very day that I arrived, whose guests included Newt Gingrich and Bryan Duff, the head of public relations for NASA, plus a whole host of other characters (the dining table sat 30). The special guest Joanna Harcourt Smith aka Joanna Leary. I was introduced to her in the library, an oak-paneled room with a huge, walk-in fireplace. She was holding a glass of scotch and was radiant, electrically beautiful. She captured my heart in an instant.

Barbara Marx, having just succeeded in completing the sauce for her signature tarragon chicken, came in and introduced me to Joanna, with her genius for putting together prospective mates. Joanna and I looked at each other and my world changed; I was never to be the same again. She leaned her unbelievable face into mine and said, “Are you rich?”

Joanna was café-society French. She grew up in Paris and on the Côte d’Azur. She was the black sheep of one of the wealthiest families in Europe and one of the richest women I’ve ever met. It took her days to realize that I had no money. We sat together after dinner and from that day to this we have been family to each other, like one.

When I returned to Philadelphia, Joanna came with me. She had just lost one of the loves of her life in an air crash in St. Barts, on top of losing Timothy Leary as her husband, and her son to a predatory gay man. Leary, the guru of LSD, had just come out of prison and, drinking heavily and having impregnated her, left her crumpled on a sidewalk after she had spent three years getting him out of jail. Now, here she was, in Philadelphia, utterly enthralled with me, a basket case, 34 years sober and a hard-working builder.

So, we went to Tahiti and came back to spend the next 3½ years gallivanting around the café society in Maryland. My purpose was to serve her life with unrelenting love in the face of every evil she could produce and her heavy drinking.

Our marriage in Reno, Nev. — at the Heart-O-Reno Chapel (I can’t make this up) — was attended by Timothy Leary and the best man was G. Gordon Liddy, who happened to be the prosecutor in Westchester County, N.Y., and who’d busted Leary on drug charges at Millbrook. The one thing I discovered, meeting Tim and Gordon in Reno, was that if you were in a bar with Tim, he’d do anything to get you into a fight and then step back, while Gordon would do anything to avoid a fight and would have your back if any trouble started.

Ultimately, Joanna decided she did want to live and take care of her own life. So, she left me for rehab.

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