It struck me that the Tate–LaBianca murders had been so often invoked as the death knell of the sixties. Arguably, they did more than any other event to turn the public opinion against hippies, recasting the peace-and-love flower-power ethos as a thing of latent, drug-addled criminality. As the writer Todd Gitlin noted, “For the mass media, the acid-head Charles Manson was readymade as the monster lurking in the heart of every longhair.” Wasn’t this the goal of CHAOS and COINTELPRO?
