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

by Tom O'Neill

I agreed to file five thousand words in three months. Afterward, I thought, maybe I could move back to New York. Twenty years later, the piece isn’t finished, the magazine no longer exists, and I’m still in L.A.

“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson replied, kicking Frykowski in the head.

(Sebring wasn’t his given name; he was born Thomas Kummer and renamed himself after a racetrack in Florida he liked.)

I realized just how flimsy the Helter Skelter motive was. Its unforgettable grandiosity may have hidden a more prosaic truth: that a few rich guys had gotten in over their heads with an unstable ex-con.

I was floored. We’d barely begun, and already he was threatening to sue. The threats, as I was beginning to understand by then, were almost always a good thing. They didn’t happen unless you were onto something.

I knew that Jim Meigs, the magazine’s editor in chief, shared my obsession. He started leaving the due date blank on the contracts I had to sign every month: a reporter’s dream come true, until it wasn’t.

the summer of ’69.

Nice.

The fifty-five parole documents turned over to me (later sixty-nine, after exhaustive FOIA appeals)

Nice.