Helter Skelter by Bugliosi: Manson as a Historical Figure

Introduction: Bugliosi as Prosecutor and Author

The strengths and deficiencies of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi's account of Charles Manson, his followers, and his trial and subsequent conviction, both stem from one single fact about the author: Bugliosi was the prosecutor who tried the state's case against Manson — a trial which he ultimately won. We must also recollect that Manson remains in prison in California for a number of murders that he himself did not actually commit. In the courtroom, Bugliosi was required to paint the picture so that Manson could be tried for criminal conspiracy, and he succeeded. He intends to do the same thing in Helter Skelter. This essay examines Bugliosi's book as a way of considering Manson as a historical figure.

Manson and Nixon: A Parallel of Paranoia and Power

This emphasis on Manson's criminality as a conspirator leads the reader to an uneasy awareness of Manson's relevance to the larger American history of his lifetime. In some sense, Manson was like an eerie prefiguration of President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate affair. Nixon did not personally burgle the offices of the Democratic National Committee any more than Manson stuck a knife in Sharon Tate, and as a result the legal case in each instance had to be built upon conspiracy. Both Manson and Nixon were dangerously paranoid men who commanded a core of ruthless followers — it is almost a toss-up as to whether the fanaticism these men could inspire is better exemplified by G. Gordon Liddy holding the palm of his hand over a lit candle flame to demonstrate his will, or by Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme taking a potshot at Nixon's successor, President Gerald R. Ford.

Both Manson and Nixon commanded a tightly knit hierarchical structure, with a sort of chief lieutenant — H. R. Haldeman or Tex Watson — to whom most of the dirty work was delegated by the chief. And both men had an ambitious plan to exploit the racial divisions emerging in America in the late 1960s in order to establish an almost monarchical rule over the country.

In Manson's case, the plot — called "Helter Skelter" — involved listening to "Blackbird" from the Beatles' White Album under the influence of LSD and finding in Paul McCartney's lyrics a prediction that racial uprisings would devastate American society, leaving Manson and the members of his "Family" at the Spahn Ranch as the only surviving white people in, and the de facto rulers of, North America. In Nixon's case, the plot — called "the Southern Strategy" — entailed courting the political bloc of racist white Southerners by promising to advance their repressive social agenda against Black Americans, thereby reversing the Civil Rights movement and cementing white political dominance across the country.

It is perhaps no accident that the Manson Family's murder spree took place in the same year, 1969, that Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority, an analysis of Nixon's 1968 election victory and a blueprint for the Southern Strategy that now reads as more surreal than listening to "Piggies" on acid.

Political Violence and the Limits of Conspiracy

Of course this comparison can only be extended so far. When it comes to the scale of violence, the Manson Family's 1969 killing spree at the Tate and LaBianca houses, which claimed the lives of nine innocent people, was nothing compared to Nixon's extralegal carpet-bombing of Cambodia in 1969–1970, which killed an estimated 40,000 to 150,000 citizens of a neutral nation. Nevertheless, there is a real seriousness of purpose to drawing connections between Charles Manson and Richard Nixon, because Manson's vision of "Helter Skelter" is quite clearly a response to large-scale trends in American society in the late 1960s.

At the scene of the murder of Gary Hinman — ordered by Manson before the Tate–LaBianca murders — family members drew the symbol of the Black Panther Party in blood on the apartment wall and wrote the words "Political Piggy." (Those interested in the history of notorious crimes will note a parallel: at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders in London, the so-called "Goulston Street Graffito" appeared to be a public incitement to blame the killings on London's Jewish population.) Similarly, Manson gave orders claiming that the millennial "Helter Skelter" he predicted would be hastened by provoking an armed standoff between the police and the Black community — staging the murders to look like a politically motivated, insurrectionary act.

Manson's fundamental insincerity as a political ideologue, however, is demonstrated by the fact that the real motive for Hinman's murder was money. Manson had heard, incorrectly, that Hinman had inherited twenty-one thousand dollars, and Hinman was therefore kept captive for two days while family members tried to force him to hand over a non-existent inheritance.

Conclusion: The Case for a Fuller History

This sort of historical context — comparison of other people perceived to be threats, or cult leaders, at the same time — is not provided by Bugliosi because he is a historical actor writing a memoir, not an actual historian. The larger lesson of the book is that people's interpretations of historical events are in a constant state of flux. This is not to suggest that Manson might someday be rehabilitated and redescribed as an insurrectionary whose critique of American society was valid, in the manner of Daniel Shays. But the case deserves a better historical view than Bugliosi gives it.

Obviously, history is never going to produce a revisionist reading of Charles Manson suggesting he was innocent of the charges he was convicted on, or that the greatness of his "Helter Skelter" vision has been unfairly denied by an uncomprehending public. But what we could have — and what Bugliosi, for obvious reasons, does not provide — is the full historical context. The events of 1969 seem less strange, and more legible, when considered together as part of an interrelated pattern of disruptions in American social and political life. Understanding COINTELPRO, the Southern Strategy, and the broader atmosphere of racial crisis that year does not excuse Manson; it explains the soil in which his delusions grew. That is a story Bugliosi, as the man who put Manson away, was structurally unable to tell.