All the good stuff Helter Skelter had to leave out

Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS chronicles a twenty year odyssey to make sense of the Manson Familiy murders. The author’s journey began with a simple assignment to write a 5,000 word retrospective on how the killings changed Hollywood. That story would fall by the wayside as his research led him on a long and winding road: unanswered questions, Hollywood secrets, the power of The Narrative, and proprietorial misconduct.

O’Neill had surprisingly good instincts for a guy who profiled celebrities and covered the entertainment industry. When he read Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter he quickly spotted the gaps in logic and weak factual underpinnings of the prosecutor’s case. As he interviewed friends of the victims and pored over documents he ended up with more questions than answers.

So he kept digging. But what really drove him onward were his interviews with Bugliosi himself. The ex-prosecutor was thin-skinned, arrogant, defensive, and eventually threatening.

Like a good journalist in a movie O’Neill had to find out what Bugliosi was hiding.

Because life is seldom like a movie, O’Neill never finds his ANSWER -- the single simple explanation for why an ex-con who had gathered in a bunch of young runaways and throwaways decided to launch a murder spree. (Almost no one, not O’Neill, not the cops, not even Bugliosi, really believed the Beatle/race war/apocalypse scenario presented at the trial.)

In the course of his research, he went down many, many rabbit holes. These often led him to undisclosed and under-reported facts. But none of them led him to a neat, simple explanation.

Perhaps he came close to an answer early on in his investigation:

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.

This calls to mind Steve Sailer’s recent observation about Manson and Hollywood:

Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was much appreciated within the entertainment industry for portraying Manson as an LSD-crazed apocalyptic avenger. Bugliosi’s masterful job of making Manson seem like the ultimate outsider sidetracked the question of why a lowlife jailbird like Manson had become something of an insider at the best parties in the Hollywood Hills.

Why exactly did Manson know so many important people in showbiz? The answer was the same as for why Jeffrey Epstein knew so many important people in politics: He had access to jailbait girls.

Without all the Helter Skelter stuff, Manson would seem less like the Antichrist and more like an ambitious pimp, an ex-con who was adept at chatting up runaway girls fresh off the Greyhound bus.

In the end, O’Neill sees connection between Manson and all the conventional boogie men of the left-wing Cold War narrative: COINTELPRO, MK/ULTRA, CHAOS, PHOENIX. He accepts even the most far-fetched variations of the Conspiracy Theorist view of the JFK assassination. This makes CHAOS a intensely interesting book which is ultimately unsatisfying. Ironically, his own attempt at a Grand Unifying Theory suffers from the same weaknesses he found in Helter Skelter.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Related:

Sometimes history isn't forgotten -- it's buried

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