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

by Tom O'Neill

participated in lengthy LSD sessions—often stretching over consecutive days,

breaks—during which Manson only pretended to take the drug, or took a much

smaller...

Clearheaded, he manipulated their minds with elaborate word games and sensory techniques he’d developed in the two ye...

Paul Watkins believed that Manson wanted to use LSD “to instill his philosophies, exploit weaknesses and fears, and extract promises and agreements from his followers.” And it worked. Watkins recalled an instance in which Manson told Susan Atkins, “I’d like half a coconut, even if you have to go to Rio de Janeiro to get it.” Atkins “got right up and was on her way out the door

He “took up residence in people’s heads,” leaving them with “no point of reference, nothing to relate back to, no right, no wrong—no roots.” They lived in a “new reality” summoned by LSD, which left them “melt-twisted and free of pretension in timeless spirals of movement.”

was called going “dead in the head,” and it let you incorporate into the collective, sharing “one common brain.”

Despite Manson’s talk about “reprogramming,”

there was no template for one person’s ever having done such a thing

LSD had given him a portal to the most labile parts of the subconscious.

The scientists explained how acid could break down and reconstruct someone’s personality—how a sober “guide,” intended to lead

someone peacefully through the many hours of an acid trip, could abus...

violent ideals and beliefs into their minds. With repetition and reinforcement, these beliefs took roo...

Throw in other coercive techniques like sensory deprivation and hypnosis—both of which Manson embraced—and it w...

moral code such that she acknowledged no such thing a...

Dr. Joel Fort, a research psychiatrist who’d opened the nation’s first LSD treatment center, was one of the defense witnesses. He believed that Manson had used LSD to produce “a new pattern of beh...

He compared it to a government’s ability, through the nebulous powers of patriotism, to condition soldiers to kill on its behalf.

What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal education and so much prison time under his belt, had mastered the ability to control people

this way. Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing or merely intense coercion, the fact remained: ...

In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi grapples with this unfathomable riddle: How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies—among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess—into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year? Bugliosi conceded that he still didn’t have the answer. “All these factors contributed to Manson’s control over others,” he writes, but

when you add them all up, do they equal murder without remorse? Maybe, but I tend to think there is something more,

some missing link that enabled him to so rape and bastardize the minds of his killers that they would go against the most ingrained of all commandments, Thou shalt not kill, and...

has full knowledge of the formula he used. And it worries me that we do not.

“When you take LSD enough times you reach a stage of nothing,” Manson had said in court. “You reach a stage of no thought.” No one wanted to dwell on that. Ingrained evil, teased out of young women by a mastermind—that was something. And something was better than “a stage of nothing.”

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First: Did the victims at the Tate house have something to do with the killers?

Second: Had Terry Melcher known who the killers were immediately after the crimes, and failed to report them to the authorities? Third, and most sensationally: Were the police aware of Manson’s role in the crimes much earlier than it seemed—had they delayed arresting the Family to protect the victims, or Melcher and his circle, from scrutiny?

Just as important is what I didn’t learn—which goes a long way toward explaining how a simple three-month magazine assignment turned into a twenty-year obsession.

“Toilets are flushing all over Beverly Hills; the entire Los Angeles sewer system is stoned.”

Manson might have been more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. “Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”

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Sherlock, “because he snoops everywhere.”

Helter Skelter.

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S&M movies had been filmed at the Tate house, and that a drug dealer had once been tied up and flogged against his will at a party there.

Ed Sanders’s 1971 book The Family, had made the same claims, but Bugliosi had conspicuously omitted the anecdote from Helter Skelter.

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Maybe it was something trifling; maybe it was something he felt he’d had to cover up to protect some celebrities’ reputations.

police fanned out in what would become the largest murder investigation in Los Angeles history.

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throngs of press. The chairman of Paramount Pictures had arranged a suite for Polanski on the studio lot—a place where he could avoid the prying eyes of the press, and the killers, too, if they were out to get him. But before he arrived at Paramount, Polanski had his car stop at a Denny’s parking lot for a hushed conversation with Kaczanowski. Bugliosi never reported this in Helter Skelter. The media never knew about it. To me, it was something to explore.

evening,

LSD,

MDA,

unheard-of sy...

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sixties,