What's Past Is Prologue

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Charles Manson died the other day, and I have struggled with my thoughts about that.

He was, after all, 83. He was in his mid–30s when his "Family" committed the 1969 Tate–LaBianca murders on his behalf, not quite 40 when he was convicted and sentenced to death, only to have his sentence commuted to life in prison when the death penalty was abolished in California.

Clearly he lived a lot longer than he probably expected when his conviction was handed down.

And he was the notorious mastermind of murders that shook the nation then but would hardly merit a passing glance from today's media.

There is no reason to mourn his passing. And yet I am conflicted.

In the past I haven't regretted feeling no sorrow over the deaths of those who were responsible for much suffering and showed no remorse for it. Haven't regretted it at all.

I even sympathized with those who celebrated when Ted Bundy was executed or Jeffrey Dahmer was killed by a fellow inmate or the Night Stalker died of apparently natural causes.

But it's a problem for me. It goes against my upbringing to rejoice when a fellow human being dies. I guess I was able to rationalize it better when I was younger. Not so much now.

I'm sure that when he died, Manson was no better than he was when he terrorized Southern California. Every time that I heard a comment he had made from prison, he seemed just as twisted as ever — and I suppose he will always be a textbook case for the argument that some criminals are completely irredeemable — and thus, there is no real point behind incarcerating them for a lifetime.

Except to preserve a life.

I understand the need some people have for revenge, and I don't want to minimize that. There is something to be said for an eye for an eye. I could even support it if I felt it guaranteed closure for the survivors. But it doesn't — not always, maybe not even a majority of the time.

And as Gandhi said, an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.

The Anniversary of the 'In Cold Blood' Killings

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"Now, on this final day of her life, Mrs. Clutter hung in the closet the calico house dress she had been wearing and put on one of her trailing nightgowns and a fresh set of white socks. Then, before retiring, she exchanged her ordinary glasses for a pair of reading spectacles. Though she subscribed to several periodicals (the Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, Reader's Digest and Together: Midmonth Magazine for Methodist Families), none of these rested on the bedside table — only a Bible. A bookmark lay between its pages, a stiff piece of watered silk upon which an admonition had been embroidered: 'Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.'"

Truman Capote
In Cold Blood

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They happened before I was born, but the murders of the Clutter family 55 years ago today in Holcomb, Kansas, still have the power to grip people.

I re–read Truman Capote's riveting account of those murders, "In Cold Blood," about a year ago. I was just as engrossed by it as I was when I first read it in college. As a reading experience, it reminded me of Vincent Bugliosi's account of the Manson Family murders, "Helter Skelter."

Capote did a lot of writing in his life, but "In Cold Blood" was the book he was born to write. It seems almost like the kind of book that would write itself, that all it needed was a person to be the go–between. But writers are a funny sort, and my understanding is that Capote agonized over aspects of his book. Some writers are like that. The creative process makes impossible demands on them.

So writing "In Cold Blood" may have been a very emotionally trying experience for Capote. It may have been unimaginably wrenching to try to put everything on paper. I know it took awhile for him to finish it. Some writers find it very difficult to achieve the level of detachment that is necessary to write about unpleasant things. It is often essential, I have observed, to be detached in the news business. You must express in print the shock and revulsion people feel upon hearing about such things — without letting those things affect you personally. It is why many talented writers don't make it as news writers.

Such a level of detachment must have been necessary for the local officials who investigated the murders. In a small town like Holcomb (which, more than half a century later, has a population that barely exceeds 2,000), everyone knows everyone else, and Herb Clutter, the family patriarch, was a pillar of the community. He was a farmer, he hired people to work on his farm, and, by all accounts, he treated them well. He was rumored to be very wealthy — after all, he didn't drink or smoke. Had no vices of any kind, as far as anyone could tell. He was also rumored to keep all his money in a safe in his home.

At least, that is what one fellow in particular had heard. This fellow had worked for Clutter about 10 years earlier and told a jailhouse cellmate about him and the money he supposedly had in his remote country farmhouse. Truth was, Herb Clutter didn't have a fortune in his home. He didn't have a safe, either. This cellmate didn't know that, though, and he started planning to rob this farmer as soon as he and another buddy of his were released.

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Fifty–five years ago, they were both free, and they made their way to Holcomb, where they intended to rob the Clutters. When they discovered that there was no safe and no fortune, they could have left and, in all probability, never been charged with a crime. Instead, they killed each member of the family so there would be no witnesses and left with $42 in cash, a radio and a pair of binoculars.

The crime shocked America, which was a more innocent place (at least, it seems so in hindsight) in the 1950s than many people today realize — even with all the jokes that are made about the simplicity of that decade. It's my opinion, though, that the difference between that time and today is the level of technology. I doubt that shocking crimes happened any less frequently then than they do today; people just didn't hear about them as much.

Nearly two years earlier, the nation was transfixed by the murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the inspiration for "Natural Born Killers." It must have taken a lot to transfix the nation in those days. TVs were not fixtures in every American home in those days — maybe 60% would be my guess. Cable didn't exist, nor did the internet. The primary sources for news and information probably were newspapers and radio.

Those same news sources must have been the primary sources for most Americans when the Clutter family was killed, and the word spread so far that it reached Truman Capote via the New York Times — and he and his lifelong friend, Harper Lee (author of "To Kill a Mockingbird"), traveled to Holcomb to do research for a book on the case.

What is often lost in the telling of the murders is the fear that the victims must have experienced in those early morning hours. They did what people are usually told to do if they are abducted — cooperate with your abductor, do whatever you must to stay alive. Yet, they did not live through the night.

Their deaths led to Capote's book and at least two movies of which I am aware. For Capote, of course, it was a career–defining book — which has been criticized frequently since its publication for fabricating conversations and scenes it described. Sometimes that was obviously necessary, given that it described conversations and/or scenes that no living person could verify. But sometimes Capote appears to have deliberately misquoted some people whose versions of events did not support his narrative.

Sometimes that wasn't terribly important to the story; other times, though, it was. That seems to be how it is with the new journalism, the nonfiction novel.

One fact cannot be changed or fabricated. The Clutter family has been dead for 55 years.

Helter Skelter

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When I was in high school, I remember reading a dog–eared paperback of Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Manson family murders in the summer of '69, "Helter Skelter."

No telling how many people read that copy before I did, but it was in great shape, no matter how many people had read it. No one had marked on any of the pages, and none of the pages was torn. Only the cover was tattered — "dog–eared," as I said before.

The first page of the book had one sentence in the middle of an otherwise blank page on which people could have written or drawn things — but didn't. Perhaps it was an indication of how respectful people were of the story the book told: "The book you are about to read will scare the hell out of you."

And it did.

I slept with a baseball bat under my bed for weeks. I was convinced that, at some point, someone would come into my room when I was sleeping, and that person would probably have a perfectly legitimate reason for being there, but I would be roused from my slumber by an unfamiliar and unexpected noise and reach under my bed for the bat — and use it without asking any questions.

Fortunately, that didn't happen.

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America has had a lot of exposure to cults in the years since the Manson murders terrorized southern California — and, really, the rest of the nation — so the story of that deadly weekend may seem tame to modern readers.

But it was still comparatively rare in 1969 — and it was frightening for average Americans.

And I'll bet Bugliosi's book still packs a powerful punch for unprepared readers. (Here's a tip: Don't watch the TV movie that was based on Bugliosi's book. The book kept me up at night. The movie almost put me to sleep. It's a strong story. It deserves better.)

Charles Manson's group consisted of a bunch of displaced young people. He had been predicting a race war between whites and blacks in America for a long time, but the Beatles' "White Album" provided justification for his predictions — according to his interpretations of songs from the album.

The song "Helter Skelter" was a direct reference to such a war, Manson told his followers. He saw all sorts of symbolism in certain songs — "Blackbird," "Revolution," "Piggies" as well as "Helter Skelter" — but he saw modest messages in all the other songs on the album, too. He had spoken of hidden meanings in individual Beatles songs in the past, but this was the first time that every song on an entire album — and a double album, at that — was cited.

"Every single song on the White Album," former follower Catherine Share said in a 2009 documentary, "[Manson] felt that they were singing about us."

Manson drew parallels between the songs and verses from the Book of Revelation. He always cast himself as the prime beneficiary, the one to whom both races would turn for guidance following "Helter Skelter" — the apocalyptic race war of which he warned his followers.

Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson, explained it all in chilling detail in his book on the case. I know I was an impressionable teenager at the time I read it, but I'm pretty sure it was vivid enough to horrify the most hardened reader.

If there had been a checklist of the things that really scared people in the late '60s and early '70s, it would have included all the things that people saw in the Manson family — young, unkempt people living in a rural commune (hippies in the language of the times) under the direction of an older, manipulative, self–appointed messiah.

In the years to come, Americans became familiar with the tactics used by cult leaders to manipulate their followers. Jim Jones' followers committed suicide for him in 1978. So, too, did the members of Marshall Applewhite's religious cult, Heaven's Gate, in 1997. David Koresh and more than 80 of his followers in the Branch Davidians cult died fiery deaths in the siege in Waco, Texas, in 1993.

But in August 1969, people weren't prepared for what they about to witness.

Forty years ago today, Manson sent out four members of his family with the instruction to "totally destroy everyone" in the house he knew as the home of record producer Terry Melcher (Doris Day's son), but Melcher was no longer the tenant. Neither Manson nor his followers knew the current tenants, director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate. Polanski was out of the country 40 years ago tonight, but Tate, who was pregnant, was there, along with three friends.

All four, along with an 18–year–old man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were killed. Well, truthfully, they were slaughtered. Manson encouraged them to be "as gruesome as you can be," and they were. Most of the victims were carved up, and code words from Beatles lyrics that were intended to incite Manson's race war were written in blood.

The same thing was done the next night when Manson sent half a dozen of his followers into the night. This time he went along "to show them how to do it." The chaos of the previous evening had disappointed him.

They went to the home of a supermarket executive and his wife, where much the same sort of scene unfolded as happened the previous night. Things were done in a more orderly fashion, though — no one had to be chased down and stabbed to death on the lawn this time.

More words were written in blood.

Needless to say, Manson's race war never happened. But Manson and the six who did his bidding were imprisoned and sentenced to death — sentences that were commuted to life when the death penalty was suspended by the Supreme Court in 1972. The death penalty was reinstated in 1976, but the sentences were not changed.

One of Manson's followers, Susan Atkins, who participated in both killing sprees, died in prison nearly five years ago. The rest are still there.

Fifty Years Since the Freedom Summer Murders

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"Mississippi seems almost too small a state to torment the conscience of the nation so deeply. Two little communities live there, entirely separated, hating and fearing each other in a condition of total lawlessness and immorality. ... [F]or three centuries, they have had only animal relations with each other, and all politics, all decision, is magnetized by the primordial fact of race hatred."

Theodore H. White
"The Making of the President 1964"

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In 1964, Ole Miss history professor James Silver labeled Mississippi the "closed society," and, as historian William Manchester observed, "it became clear as the 1960s progressed that an astonishing number of its people, white and black, were actually unaware of the civil rights movement. There were no attacks on the freedom riders there because the state police did not allow them the freedom of movement necessary to be mobbed."

As hard as it may be for most 21st–century people, even those living in Mississippi, to understand, Mississippi seemed to exist under a huge bubble in those days. If they weren't aware of the civil rights movement before, though, Mississippians started to become aware of it 50 years ago tomorrow.

It was on that day in 1964 that three civil rights activists — two Northern white men and a Mississippi black man — went missing in Neshoba County, Miss. After training in Ohio for what was being called "Freedom Summer" — and being given explicit instructions for what to do if they encountered any local resistance — more than 200 volunteers departed for the South on June 19 and arrived on June 21.

"Almost immediately," wrote Manchester, "three of them were reported missing."

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In hindsight, the scenarios that were suggested while the three were officially missing — their bodies were found about six weeks after their disappearance — may seem outlandish, but, at the time, they probably seemed thoroughly plausible to white Southerners who were openly fearful of intervention by "outside agitators."

While the search went on, as lakes and rivers were being dragged and helicopters were doing aerial reconnaissance, rumors were spread that the three had actually gone to Cuba or Chicago, where they were laughing at all the fuss their "disappearance" had caused.

If only that had been true.

In reality, what had happened was that the three were taken into custody that afternoon for allegedly speeding. They were held for about six hours while the execution squad was assembled, then they were released after reportedly paying a fine. They were never seen alive again.

Here is what happened, according to the story that emerged after their bodies were found.

Shortly after their release, the men were stopped by the execution squad. They were taken to a remote location and shot at point–blank range; the black man was savagely beaten before he was shot. Their bodies were buried near the base of a dam and not found for weeks; their car was burned and left on an abandoned logging road. It was found the day after the three disappeared.

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In the early weeks of the search for the three missing civil rights workers, the prevailing opinion among white Mississippians, Manchester wrote, was that the searchers "had no expectation of finding the youths. They were there ... to win Negro votes for President Johnson" in his campaign against Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater.

(That wouldn't help in Mississippi. Comparatively few blacks voted in Mississippi in those days — but, since Mississippi gave Goldwater more than 87% of its vote, Johnson probably didn't expect to carry Mississippi, anyway.)

Eventually the searchers did find the bodies after the case had drawn national attention. In the account of the killings that emerged, the deputy sheriff addressed the men after the bodies were buried. "You've struck a blow for the white man," he said. "Mississippi can be proud of you." Then he warned them all to remain silent — or risk certain death.

Three years later, the case led to the conviction in federal court of seven members of the execution squad for depriving the men of their rights.

It was the first successful prosecution of a civil rights case in Mississippi.

If you're one of the so–called "millennials," that might not seem so special. But let's put it into some perspective.

When America was founded, the Founding Fathers wanted the states to have most of the say over how things were done within their state boundaries. Thus, most criminal charges, like homicide and theft, were — and still are — state charges. The federal courts get involved only when an alleged crime involves a federal law or cases reach the federal level in the appeals process.

These murders were committed at a time when juries in Mississippi — and most of the South, for that matter — routinely acquitted white defendants charged with killing blacks.

Federal authorities knew this so they used the strategy of prosecuting in federal court with the strongest charge in their arsenal — depriving the victims of their civil rights.

Compared to depriving someone of life, that may not seem like much, but it was that or nothing. Prosecutors operated on the belief that something was better than nothing.

The Death of Harvey Milk

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"If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door in the country."

Harvey Milk
Nov. 18, 1977

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Since his murder 35 years ago today, I sometimes wonder if Harvey Milk anticipated the changes that have occurred for homosexuals not only in California, where he became the first openly gay individual to serve on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but in the nation as a whole.

A lot of things that were true then are hard for people of the 21st century to comprehend, but at the time of Milk's death, San Francisco did not have the reputation for being a haven for homosexuals that it has today. Many gay people had migrated to San Francisco during and after the counterculture days of the 1960s, but the demographic group really had yet to flex its political muscle.

I'm not homosexual, but I have friends who are, which has made me more sensitive to the gay community's issues and icons than I once was. In 1978, I paid little, if any, attention.

I remember hearing about the slaying at the time, but the victims and the killer were just names to me. I lived two time zones away, and the story didn't really resonate with me beyond the few minutes I heard about it on the evening news.

And, I must admit, from the vantage point of one living in Arkansas and hearing San Francisco mentioned in connection with the story, it was hard to differentiate between that news event and the story that broke a week earlier about mass suicides in Guyana — since many of those who died in Guyana came from San Francisco, as did the congressman who was killed at the same time. I'm sure it was different for people living on the West Coast, but that was kind of a vague reference point for me.

At the time, I suppose I reasoned that the two events were connected in some way. I may even have assumed that Milk's sexuality (if I even knew about it then, and I probably didn't) was the reason for what happened — in San Francisco, anyway.

In fact, there was a connection between Guyana and San Francisco of which I remember hearing nothing at the time. Milk was a big supporter of Jim Jones when Milk was a rising local political star and Jones was a prominent community activist. Reporters might have quoted Milk at the time on what had happened when Jones was in San Francisco, but I honestly don't remember anything like that.

Milk didn't start out in politics. In fact, his political career turned out to be very brief.

As a young man, he served in the Navy during the Korean War and attempted several occupations after his discharge. A native of New York, Milk came to San Francisco when he was 42 and opened a camera shop, but he gravitated to politics and followed a path that eventually made him the first openly gay politician to hold office in California.

In 1978, only a few months before his death and long before Bill Clinton was recognized as "the man from Hope," Milk delivered what has come to be known as his "Hope Speech," urging gays to come out of the closet.

"We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions," he said. "We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it."

Around the time that Milk was settling in San Francisco, Dan White, a native San Franciscan who had been working in Alaska as a high school security guard, returned to his hometown to work as a police officer. After that, he was in the city fire department.

In 1977, White was elected city supervisor and took office in January 1978 with Milk. I've heard that they had a cordial relationship at first, but things clearly went sour somewhere.

I gather that things began to go irretrievably awry between them over a proposal by the Catholic church to establish a rehab facility for young offenders in White's district. White was against it, and Milk was for it.

But I also gather that White had problems with others in city hall, not just Milk. And, by November 1978, he had reached the end of his rope. He resigned his seat early in the month, citing corruption in city politics and his limited income potential as his reasons. As a city supervisor, he was prohibited from holding a job as a policeman or a fireman at the same time. The law allowed no one to hold two jobs with the city simultaneously.

A few days later, White changed his mind and went to see Mayor George Moscone about being re–appointed to his old job. Moscone was agreeable at first but reversed himself after conferring with Milk and others.

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Then, on this day in 1978, White went to city hall with a gun, climbed in through a window to avoid the metal detectors that had been installed recently and went first to Moscone's office, where he tried once again to get his job back and shot Moscone twice in the head when the mayor refused.

Then White reloaded, went to Milk's office and shot Milk five times, the last two fired at Milk's head at close range. He fled the building.

The task of announcing to the public what had happened fell to future Sen. Dianne Feinstein, then president of the Board of Supervisors, who identified the bodies and was so shaken by what she had seen she needed to be supported by the police chief while she spoke in front of a shocked audience and numerous TV cameras.

That night, tens of thousands gathered for a candlelight march to the steps of city hall. Appropriately, a candlelight march is planned in San Francisco later today to commemorate the Milk and Moscone assassinations.

"[T]he time has come," writes Andy Towle, "to make their vision of a city of hope come alive."