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

by Tom O'Neill

Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (commonly known as the Black Panther party) had become the bête noire of federal law enforcement. From Hoover on down, the FBI’s ranks saw the group as a threat to the national order rivaled only by communism and nuclear holocaust. Originally, the Panthers served to safeguard Oakland’s black residents from overzealous policing. They promoted lawful, armed self-defense in inner-city neighborhoods, and their social outreach programs brought meals and health care to those who couldn’t afford them. Their Ten-Point Program demanded “power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.” But as the party grew in size and prominence, opening chapters in nearly every major city in the United States and abroad, it embraced more militant action against the long arm of law enforcement, starting in Oakland. In 1967, Newton shot and killed a cop during a traffic stop. In ’68, Eldridge Cleaver, who headed the Panthers’ Ministry of Information, was in a firefight during which he and two cops suffered gunshot wounds and a seventeen-year-old Panther was killed. That same year, the violence found its way to Los Angeles, as gunfights led to four Panther deaths. By 1969, the Panthers had been involved in more than a dozen shoot-outs with police, some the result of ambushes. Fearing infiltration by informants, the party began to implode, purging members and, in one notorious case, torturing and...