Chaos: Charles Manson, The CIA, And The Secret History Of The Sixties Quotes
"I was a freelance journalist who hadn’t worked in four months."
"Manson’s name still served as a kind of shorthand for a very American form of brutal violence."
"If one is patient and keeps trying, eventually all the pieces will fit into place."
"In literature a murder scene is often likened to a picture puzzle."
"Veteran policemen know otherwise... there will be leftover pieces, evidence that just doesn’t fit."
"In the way that historical events do, it all feels somehow remote, settled."
"It’s critical to let yourself feel that shock, which begins to return as the details accumulate."
"Obsessives continue to litigate the smallest discrepancies in the crime scenes."
"This isn’t just history. It’s what Bugliosi called, in his opening statement at the trial, 'a passion for violent death.'"
"The murders are still shrouded in mystery, down to some of their most basic details."
"At 10050 Cielo Drive was a scene of such callous, barbarous devastation that it shook something loose in the national psyche."
"The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969... The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."
"You blind, stupid people. Your children will turn against you."
"I don’t know how many times I stabbed her."
"Death? That’s what you’re all going to get."
"I remember thinking: this will be easy."
"Despite the common conception, the murders are still shrouded in mystery."
"Every experience led the Family to drift further from reality."
"The dancing was different. The drugs were different. The fucking was different."
"That’s the reason why they can kill so matter-of-factly."
"Better lock your doors and watch your own kids."
"You could still smell it… Salty, carnal."
"The facts were unavailable or misreported."
"It was another reason for not answering your door."
"I’d take the next heavy object, whether it’s an iron or a frying pan or a spade out in the yard, and I’d just brain him."
"There was a tremendous sickness when I worked with Sharon."
"He stood there laughing. The dog wouldn’t give up."
"On the phone he was strange with me, cold as ice."
"The shock of the Manson murders began unraveling him."
"I think it’s pretty self-serving to call that period, and what was going on, innocent."
"I was unconscious. I wasn’t sore the next day… not there."
"Don’t be surprised if you never see your kid again."
"It was as if we were kings, just because we were men."
"Go in the bathroom, swallow the gun, and pull the trigger!"
"Be nervous that you may have discovered the truth and you won’t like it."
"The community has looked at this as a settled thing until you started talking to us."
"Your hair is shaped and conditioned to stay natural between visits."
"I may not tell you everything, but I have never lied to you."
"Tell Dennis there are more where this came from."
"It was the first time he’d returned since he left ten years before."
"I don’t think so! Christ, if they wanted to get me, all my doors were wide open that whole summer."
"He had a hard time separating reality from fantasy."
"When I talk to you, I’m talking to myself. When you talk to me, you’re talking to yourself."
"I never once spent one second with these girls, although at one point, when they were in jail, like twenty-five of them said that I was the father of all their children, and that put me in bed for about three weeks. I mean, they were so ugly."
"I have no idea where that second ranch is. I have no idea in the world! It could be in Kuwait."
"All I did was just fill out the card and went on to my next case."
"I do not believe that Terry Melcher was at the Spahn Ranch after the murders. I just don’t believe that."
"I was a Columbia Records producer! I was the biggest Columbia Records producer on the West Coast! I had the Byrds, Paul Revere and the Raiders, all right? I was selling tonnage of product."
"I don’t want them all back out on the street, and I’m worried this will do it!"
"It appeared to me that the raid was more or less staged as an afterthought."
"I believe there was something bigger Manson was working on."
"The activities of all such groups of intelligence interest to this Bureau must be followed on a continuous basis… Efforts of various groups to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents must be frustrated."
"If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement."
"Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’"
"The Los Angeles Division is aware of mutually hostile feelings harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity to capitalize on the situation will be maximized."
"The chief investigative branch of the Federal Government engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest."
"FBI headquarters approved more than 2,300 actions in a campaign to disrupt and discredit American organizations ranging from the Black Panthers to Antioch College."
"We must prevent militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability."
"The entire Manson situation, the Black Panther movement, and probably similar other movements… people like that were discredited by certain things that, according to Reeve, may have been staged or done by government authorities in order to make them look bad."
"What happens in those situations is either he’s giving up somebody bigger than himself or he’s on somebody else’s list as far as a snitch, or he’s ratting out other people."
"He believed there was an operation to destabilize American youth… Russians were bringing drugs in to battle the American system from within."
"Foreign agents, and presumably foreign money, must be to blame."
"The agency shared information with the FBI, the White House, and the Justice Department."
"The true extent of the agency’s domestic activities against dissidents would probably never be known."
"What hardly anyone remembers is that Kasabian wasn’t the first one in the Family to get a deal from the prosecutors."
"The entire narrative put before that grand jury should be reconsidered."
"The group reached a compromise: instead of total immunity, Atkins would be offered a second-degree-murder plea."
"The task of assembling an unbiased jury was suddenly a lot harder."
"Atkins’s byline landed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times."
"The worldwide publication of Atkins’s story was about as blatant a violation of his gag order as one can imagine."
"But if I wanted my book, or even just my proposal for the book, to be more complete than my Premiere piece would’ve been, I had to let the story consume me."
"Whatever that something was, it had worked to Atkins’s benefit before."
"Her sudden infatuation with this ‘Charlie’ meant she might backslide into the recklessness that had gotten her arrested in the first place."
"According to probation records, Atkins phoned her San Francisco probation officer, Mary Yates, that November 10, saying that she’d joined a communal marriage with seven other women."
"Yates had been supervising Atkins for a year, and she was surprised by her charge’s sudden change in character."
"After that disturbing phone call, Yates wrote to the head office in Sacramento to fill them in."
"He told her she couldn’t go; she said she was leaving anyway."
"Then, on January 4, 1968, Judge Jones signed an order terminating Susan Atkins’s probation."
"As long as she stayed on his side, it seemed the rules didn’t apply."
"In Haight-Ashbury, speed was now the drug of choice, and with it came violence, con men, bikers, dope peddlers, and runaways."
"The law afforded special privileges to everyone in Manson’s orbit."
"Atkins and Brunner pleaded guilty to possessing narcotics. In exchange, the charges that they’d furnished drugs to minors were dismissed."
"Once again the pattern held: when it came to women in the orbit of Charles Manson, the court was unusually forgiving, ruling against the wishes of police and prosecutors."
"Manson had been described as 'criminally sophisticated,' but had he been convicted at the state level, he would’ve faced a fraction of the time behind bars."
"Manson, his one and only parole supervisee, would go on to control the collective behavior of a gang through violence and drugs."
"Smith described himself to me as a 'rock-ribbed Republican'—he never struck me as someone with much tolerance for the counterculture."
"The length of your hair said everything about you."
"It was up to Smith to revoke Manson’s parole—it was ultimately his decision. But he never even reported any of his client’s violations to his supervisors."
"When Manson went to wipe his eyes and see, he wasted no time adopting the folkways and postures of the flower children."
"As few as they are, those letters depict an unmanageable parolee at odds with the 'excellent progress' described by Smith a year earlier."
"Manson built the Family right under his federal supervisors’ noses."
"Something in the deepest resources of their soul enabled them to do something that you and I cannot do."
"It has yet to be determined whether amphetamines modify the personality primarily by biochemically altering the central nervous system or by reinforcing or precipitating long-term psychological tendencies."
"What does that show? I think it’s circumstantial evidence that some people have much more homicidal tendencies than others."
"The very chemicals they use will inevitably enervate them as individuals and bleed the energies of the hippie movement to its death."
"He reminded me that San Francisco in the late sixties may as well have been another country, so different were its customs and mores."
"The most important contribution of the drug so far is in producing model mental illnesses."
"The most puzzling question of all was how Manson had turned his docile followers into remorseful killers."
"The possibility of a toxic psychosis could be entertained, but is considered unlikely because of the protected situation."
"He would break his back to do that without asking too many questions."