Dad Tips Book Club: Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the 60s

I knew there was a guy named Charles Manson. I knew he orchestrated murders in the late 60s. I knew every few years he would get a parole hearing that made him seem the bat-shittiest of the bat shit crazy. I did not know much else contained within Tom O’Neill’s book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the 60s.

What I found within the pages was fascinating, and only a small amount of what I learned was specific to Charles Manson.

• Charles Manson was much more connected to mainstream 60’s Hollywood than I’d ever heard, which is both disturbing and believable given pictures I’ve seen of Hollywood at that time. The shirts were dangerously unbuttoned and everyone was covered in 2-3 inches of cocaine residue.
• Tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists that pass along ridiculous stories about the CIA/FBI, deep state and the men in a smoke-filled room planning devlish schemes against the American public are…wise to be concerned based on some of the reporting in this book:
  • MK Ultra
  • Widespread FBI/CIA misconduct and the Church Commission
  • Military mind control experiments using LSD
  • Experimenting on prisoners as a violence research tool
• Writing a throughly research non-fiction book is kind of tough – It took more Tom O’Neill over a decade to piece this narrative together and it doesn’t appear he stopped researching and weriting that entire time.

If you have any interest in the above topics or just life in America in the 60s more generally, this book is worth a read.  I also find it fascinating that, in being a prisoner of our own times, we feel that the American populace has never been more at each other’s throats / Never in our past was there so much division, never so much vitriol coloring the conversation. What I read in Chaos was that we don’t need to look very far into the past to see examples of a near civil war between factions. If there was such a thing as social media in the 60s, I wouldn’t have bet against that civil war actually happening. 

Now I think one side of that war were all pacifists, so maybe it would have been a short war, but don’t let your dad/grandpa tell you how much more aligned we all used to be. If it felt more aligned, it was only because voices weren’t amplified by the internet and marganlized voices didn’t get to tell their stories in any meaningful way.

In any event, as a “period piece” and portrait of a time and place and a means to learn more about a fascinating, horrifying “Crime of the Century,” all by means of a topic-straddling narrative, this one is fun. I’d definitely recommend this book.