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He was just twenty-six, but counting reform schools he had already been in some form of custody or on probation for almost fourteen years. Except
Carnegie’s focus was on changing the perceptions of other people; Hubbard taught how to change yourself. He advocated “auditing,” confronting traumatic events in the past to move beyond them, becoming free of old fears and restraints and moving toward a “clear” or theta state where the mind is able to embrace spiritual freedom without negativity.
he had with Dale Carnegie, Charlie adopted those aspects of Hubbard’s teachings that lent themselves to manipulating others.
Charlie had no use for relationships from which he didn’t benefit.
One of the most popular novels among the literate cons was Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
As he would with the Bible, Dale Carnegie, and Scientology, Charlie later incorporated elements of Stranger in a Strange Land into a beguiling, hybrid pseudophilosophy.
the end of January 1964 Bobby Vinton’s “There! I’ve Said It Again” was blasted from the top of the charts by The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Dale Carnegie’s advice that the best way to win any argument was to avoid it altogether,
Kaufman discovered that Charlie only associated with other people for whatever he thought he could get out of them,
He might be almost illiterate but he sure wasn’t stupid.
Charlie believed that all blacks were genetically inferior and most of them were dumb as rocks, but give enough angry ones guns and they could probably wipe out much of the white race.
As student rebellion exploded in America, Berkeley was Ground Zero.
At the conclusion of World War II, about 1.67 million or 10 percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four were in college. In 1967, that number had swelled to seven million, or 32 percent, and it was mushrooming every year.
SDS members’ ambitious agenda included the eradication of war, racial discrimination, and economic inequality.
birth control pills, first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960,
LSD, was first synthesized by Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland in 1938.
In September 1965 the San Francisco Examiner published a prominent story about the regeneration of the neighborhood. Its headline described the Haight as “A New Haven for Beatniks,” but in the body of the story, Haight residents were collectively identified as hippies. The kids embraced the term.
One estimate had 75,000 more descending on a neighborhood with a residential capacity of perhaps a tenth of that number. It was “The Summer of Love.”
Charlie arrived at the Haight in April 1967
The street philosophy Charlie initially spouted was a hybrid, cobbled together from Beatles song lyrics, biblical passages, Scientology, and the Dale Carnegie technique of presenting everything dramatically.
Charlie was a masterful orator, letting his voice fall so his listeners needed to lean in to hear, then roaring so that they had to pull back a little, building a singsong rhythm and smiling and gesturing
The term charisma was just coming into wide use and Charlie had it.
Bigger than the Beatles, equal to or maybe even the reincarnation of Jesus—Charlie didn’t aim low.
“The way out of a room is not through the door; just don’t want out, and you’re free.”
All over America it was a traumatic summer. Thirty-three race riots in major cities
Hippies Not Welcome” signs on bridges leading into San Francisco.
utilizing the Dale Carnegie technique of figuring out what the other person wanted and demonstrating how he could provide it.
Charlie seemed more than ever to be an unoriginal con artist taking advantage of middle-class girls who had problems with their parents and thought living “off the land, so to speak” was an exciting adventure.
officers were on the streets to enforce the law, not to make friends. All street personnel were rotated on a frequent basis to prevent them being influenced by civilian acquaintances.
terribly hot night of August 11, 1965, it did.
The Watts riot lasted six days and resulted in thirty-four dead, more than one thousand injured, four thousand arrests, and $40 million in property damage.
Charlie’s prime money catch was teenaged Didi Lansbury, daughter of actress Angela Lansbury.
like many teenagers in the mid-1960s,
became sexually active early
Hayden would conclude more than forty years later that there may never have been twelve months in national history when so many cataclysmic events occurred in such rapid succession as in 1968.
his summer guests had cost him at least $100,000. It had to stop.
three dozen members in his flock,
“Never Learn Not to Love,” his reworking of Charlie’s “Cease to Exist,”
By January 1969, youthful rebellion was a worldwide phenomenon. There were rallies and riots everywhere, but nowhere was greater generational rage being expressed than in America.
“It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die.”
he warned that responsible, law-abiding citizens should “bar [the] doors, buy a police dog, call us when we’re available, and pray.”
The great interest in the L.A. murders was interrupted for four days beginning on August 15. Four hundred thousand people, most of them young and long-haired, gathered on an upstate New York farm for the Woodstock music festival.
The Weathermen launched their Days of Rage assault on Chicago’s upper-class Gold Coast businesses and residences on October 8. The
For a change, a portion of a major American city was being torn apart by whites, not blacks.
On October 15, marchers jammed America’s streets—fifty thousand in New York, 100,000 in Boston, twenty thousand in Washington; in all, more than one million demonstrators participated in what organizers identified as a National Moratorium against the still undeclared but very real war in Vietnam.
March 1968, Lt. William Calley allegedly directed the slaughter of over three hundred defenseless women, children, and old men while searching out North Vietnamese soldiers in the South Vietnam hamlet of My Lai.
domestic terrorist bombings around the nation continued to escalate. The government estimated there was now an average of forty per week.
that there was no market, underground or otherwise, for a Charlie Manson album.
He and his attorneys discussed calling the Beatles individually as witnesses, since Charlie believed they would, under oath, support him. But letters to the Beatles’ office received no reply, and the lawyers were unable to find their home addresses.
Protests sparked by the six deaths erupted at schools across the nation; the National Guard was called in to restore order on twenty-one campuses, and some 350 colleges and universities were temporarily closed by administration order or student strike. About seventy-five remained shut for the remainder of the semester. There was considerable public backlash against the protesters. A Gallup poll indicated that 58 percent of respondents blamed the Kent State students for bringing about their own deaths.
