Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill

The sixties youth movement was born on May 13, 1960, when hundreds of demonstrators, most of them UC Berkeley students, began a two-day protest at San Francisco’s City Hall. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) had convened a series of hearings there, and students were chagrined to learn that they were barred from the proceedings. A riot broke out as police turned firehoses on the protesters, the intense pressure forcing them down the building’s imposing marble stairway. Police clubbed protesters and made sixty-one arrests, including more than thirty students. “Black Friday,” as it came to be known, marked the end of the fifties, the dawn of a new age of dissent. The following day, the demonstrators returned undeterred, this time totaling more than five thousand. The HCUA was cowed—never again did it conduct hearings beyond the Capitol. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, couldn’t believe the left had such strength in numbers. He was convinced that foreign Communists sponsored the movement. Thus began a pitched battle between federal law enforcement and young “subversives.” In the midsixties, with the war in Vietnam escalating, Berkeley became a hotbed of antiwar activity. Sit-ins were staged on campus; rallies were held throughout the Bay Area, each growing in size and fervor. Late in 1964, some fifteen hundred students crowded into Berkeley’s Sproul Hall to protest the university’s mistreatment of campus activists. More than seven hundred of them we...