The man who helped mastermind the murders of:
died of natural causes at age 83. “Sentenced to death for the crime, Manson escaped execution when the state Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional at the time.” Manson got to live because five liberal justices struck down the death penalty in all cases in Furman vs. Georgia in 1972.
Edited to add: Among a notable strata of California’s hard left, Charles Manson was still admired even after being convicted of multiple murders.
At their infamous Flint, Michigan, War Party at the end of 1969, the Weathermen hoisted a “Charles Manson Power” banner and spelled out pregnant victim Sharon Tate’s name in bullets. Trust-fund revolutionaries Diana Oughton and Kathy Boudin, the former obliterated by a bomb she hoped to explode at a soldier’s dance and the latter convicted of murder in the 1980s, idolized the Manson Family so much that they nicknamed their Weatherman cadre “The Fork” in homage to the eating utensil shoved into deceased victim Leno LaBianca’s stomach by Patricia Krenwinkel.
The charismatic Bernardine Dohrn, later a friend of Barack and Michelle Obama, feverishly told Weatherman followers: “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”
When I asked Weatherman Mark Rudd why his otherwise intelligent friends paid homage to Manson, he told me: “We wanted to be bad.”
Like Dohrn, Rolling Stone later went on to enjoy mainstream respectability despite publishing bizarre views on one of the twentieth century’s most notorious serial killers. Whereas Manson looked every bit the madman on the cover of Life, he appeared as a visionary on the front page of Rolling Stone. Therein, the magazine depicted Manson’s refusal to offer an insanity plea as a principled stand and characterized his criticism of the legal system as “obviously accurate in many ways.” In calling him Charlie, a first-name-basis intimacy later reserved for Madonna, Prince, Bruce, and other singing celebrities, the magazine actively sought to humanize the man who dehumanized so many.
Other underground newspapers went further. The Los Angeles-based Tuesday’s Child proclaimed, “Manson: Man of the Year” on one cover and depicted Manson as Jesus Christ dying on the cross under the tag “Hippie” on another. The Los Angeles Free Press ran a weekly column penned by Manson. The Other, playing off controversial remarks made by the president, headlined an issue “Manson Declares Nixon Guilty.” Upon the release of an album of Manson’s music, several underground newspapers provided advertising for it gratis.
Nearly a half century after the murders, the Manson Family still strikes as surreal. So, too, does the contemporaneous admiration of the murderer from radical journalists and leaders.
A sampling of the Los Angeles Free Press‘s Mansonphilia can be found here.
Tags: California, Charles Manson, death penalty, Hippies, Obituary, Weather Underground
Welcome to the abandoned land
Come on in child, take my hand
Here there’s no work or play
Only one bill to pay
.
There’s just five words to say
As you go down, down, down
.
You’re gonna burn in hell
Oh, burn in hell
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