To Dare Even More Boldly; The elusive madness of Charles Manson and Gaming Out Lunatics
In the late 1960s, Vincent Bugliosi, one of modern America’s foremost legal minds, found himself in a very difficult position. He had been assigned to prosecute the Tate-LaBianca murder cases in August 1969, a series of ritualistic slayings in Los Angeles that had terrified the whole of the United States, owing both the frenzy of the murders as well as the seeming randomness of the crimes.
Through good old-fashioned detective work, Bugliosi had rightly fastened upon Charles Manson and his hippie death-cult as the perpetrators; the so-called Family believed that their leader was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. But there was a major practical problem with prosecuting Manson: He had not personally killed anyone. Instead, he had ordered others to do his diabolical bidding.
Why had he done so and why had the Family followed him? Bugliosi knew that if he didn’t address the crucial issue of motive, there was simply no real case against Manson, who was the ringleader of the whole horrendous plot. The good news was that over time Bugliosi hit upon Manson’s reasoning; the bad news was that it seemed--on the surface--so mind-bogglingly crazy that colleagues of the prosecutor urged him to discard it, as no normal person was likely to believe him.
Indeed, when the Los Angeles police were initially made aware of Manson’s philosophy of ‘Helter Skelter,’ they replied as all poor political risk analysts would: ‘Ah, Charlie’s a madman; we’re not interested in that.’ But they should have been. Because of their shared philosophy--no matter how far out--otherwise normal people had been motivated to savagely kill at Manson’s bidding. Helter Skelter provides the crucial link explaining why the murders came about, making sense of what the ancient Greeks would describe as the praxis: the unity of thought and action. Successfully gaming out lunatics requires that analysts suspend their own disbelief and intellectually follow others’ philosophies wherever they lead. For only by doing this can praxis be discovered and sound analytical judgments arrived at.
For Manson, the philosophy of Helter Skelter lay behind his murderous rampage. It was to be the last war on the face of the earth, an end-times racial conflict between African Americans and whites, wherein the African-American minority would rise up and eviscerate formerly dominant white society.
Paul Watkins, a former member of the Family who often acted as Manson’s direct lieutenant, provided Bugliosi with the missing motive of Helter Skelter. The apocalyptic war would arise naturally from the deep racial tensions in late 1960s America, where ghettoes across the country had just recently been on fire, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Weak, decadent white society would be split, in Manson’s view, between liberals calling for restraint and conservatives determined to decisively prosecute the race war. This fatal division would lead African Americans over time to triumph in wiping out the whole white community in America. But Manson, an avowed racist, believed that such a fantastical outcome would redound to his own personal benefit.
The only white Americans to survive would be his Family, who by then would have moved to the inhospitable confines of Death Valley to escape the fighting. As Manson believed that African-Americans were incapable of running anything, after a period of chaos, he prophesied they would turn to him to manage things, with the Family ultimately coming to rule the world. Suffice it to say, you can see why Bugliosi was hesitant to put this fantastical thinking forward as the primary motive for the crimes.
But just because something is outlandish does not mean it is unimportant. The more Bugliosi dug, the more bizarre Manson’s faux religion became. Using the twin planks of the Beatles and the New Testament Book of Revelation as the pillars of his demonic thought, Manson had created a narrative that was compelling enough to allow him to orchestrate the killing of people he had never met before, or with whom he had only the slightest contact.
Looking on the Beatles as the four prophets mentioned in the Book of Revelation (Chapter 9), Manson proclaimed to the Family that ‘The White Album’ (released in December 1968) was in practice a series of coded messages from the Beatles to him, allowing for the fulfilment of a series of biblical prophecies mentioned in the New Testament.
The phrase ‘Helter Skelter’ (a British term for an amusement park slide) was the title of a Beatles song on the album. Manson construed it to signify the coming race war, in which those on top would go down (whites) and those on the bottom would go up (African Americans). Manson believed that the Beatles were sending him another message in the Paul McCartney song ‘Blackbird,’ also on ‘The White Album.’ Manson was convinced that the song was nothing less than an effort by the group to get African Americans to rise up, initiating the coming race war.
But by the summer of 1969, Manson was growing impatient as things weren’t going to plan. Having proclaimed to the Family that Helter Skelter was due to start imminently, little seemed to be happening to confirm the demented prophet’s predictions. Earlier, Manson had pressed his friends in the music business (for a time the cult lived at the house of Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys) to allow him to record an album, which he thought would finish what the Beatles had started, igniting Armageddon. Frustrated by the lack of interest in his musical talents, Manson came to believe that another more direct way had to be found to bring about Helter Skelter.
Bugliosi was convinced that it was only within this barely believable philosophical context that the murders could be assessed. The slayings were a crucial part of Manson’s plan to trigger Helter Skelter. By committing a series of brutal, seemingly senseless crimes against members of white society, the cult leader became convinced that eventually radical African American movements, such as the Black Panthers, would be blamed for the outrage, which would lead to fighting in the streets. Manson confided to Watkins that he had orchestrated the murders to show African Americans that now was the time to start a race war.
Bugliosi contended that Manson ordered the murders and that his way-out philosophy directly led to the killings, as it was designed to start Helter Skelter itself. Looking soberly at the evidence today, as outlandish as it all seems, there can be no doubt that Bugliosi’s analysis was correct. Manson asked his proxy at the Tate killings, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, whether it had been Helter Skelter. After the next night of murders, Patricia Krenwinkel, one of the killers, wrote ‘Healter Skelter (sic)’ in her victims’ blood on the LaBianca refrigerator.
Manson’s sick philosophy, plus his total control over the Family, made them willing participants in his homicidal rampage. Much as was true for the followers of the Old Man of the Mountain, Manson’s adherents were yearning to do anything he asked, however crazy it might seem to modern Western eyes. Of all his former disciples only Paul Watkins seems to have taken the full measure of his former god. ‘Charlie was always preaching love...Charlie had no idea what love was. Death is Charlie’s trip. It really is.’
Because he was unafraid to follow Manson’s twisted philosophy analytically wherever it took him, and because he got beyond the obvious fact that Helter Skelter was patently ‘crazy,’ Vincent Bugliosi discovered the motive that tied mass murderer Charles Manson to his crimes. Despite heavy odds, Bugliosi succeeded in convicting all the defendants of their crimes, crucially including Manson. The first-rate analytical skills of Vincent Bugliosi underline a key point for political risk analysts. Just because a warped ideology seems demented emphatically does not mean that it fails to explain an opponent’s praxis, providing the key link between a person’s thought and their actions.