42 pages • 1 hour read
Vincent Bugliosi, Curt GentryHelter Skelter
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
The End of the 1960s
In America, any mention of the 1960s evokes a multitude of attitudes, ideologies, and styles, each unique to the decade. Among the most important changes of the decade were political. It was a decade in which the legal defense of free speech was championed as never before, in which people of color won important victories in the ongoing fight for justice and equality, and in which women found a voice in culture and politics. It was also a decade defined by violent and retributive reaction to those political changes.
Richard Nixon, voted into office in 1968 on a conservative campaign, evoked a “silent majority” of Americans who quietly went to work, paid their taxes, didn’t want any trouble, and voted for Richard Nixon. In doing so, he simultaneously evoked an unspoken “loud minority,” a mass of elite journalists and nonconformists who spoke up, caused trouble, and did not vote for Richard Nixon. This was an attitude that did not distinguish between Walter Cronkite, the beloved nightly news anchor who declared the Vietnam War unwinnable, and Abbie Hoffman, the “yippie” activist who claimed that he would telekinetically levitate the Pentagon through mass action.
It was an attitude that did not distinguish between Martin Luther King Jr.’s stirring oratory and black separatist ideology, nor between the hard-headed and meticulous reporting around The Pentagon Papers and Watergate and mimeographed, street-level pamphlets urging wholesale revolution. More to the point, it was an attitude that did not distinguish the violent right-wing Manson from the nonviolent protesters who amassed on college campuses against the Vietnam War. This confluence of antiauthoritarian strains, some of which are necessary for the functioning of a democracy, became the defining characteristic of politics after the 1960s.
The Heroic Prosecutor
It may seem strange to modern readers that Bugliosi begins by defending himself and his role as prosecutor. After all, since the release of the book, television and media are saturated with stories of heroic prosecutors who work together with police to make sure criminals receive justice. Bugliosi, by introducing himself, suggests a reversal of this idea was dominant in the 1960s: “For far too many years the stereotyped image of the prosecutor has been that of a right-wing, law-and-order type intent on winning convictions at any cost, or a stumbling, bumbling Hamilton Burger, forever trying innocent people, who, fortunately, are saved at the last possible minute by the foxy maneuverings of a Perry Mason,” he writes (166).
This suggests that there once was a public fear of the overreach of state prosecutorial power, especially during the Cold War, when other countries such as the Soviet Union put on elaborate public show trials in which the guilt of the defendant was predetermined. Fictional characters like Perry Mason took the side of the innocently accused and reminded viewers that such a thing could never happen in America. Attitudes changed in the 1960s, however, and especially after the Manson case. Fear of strange men with murderous ideas took hold of the media. Additionally, Bugliosi took great pains to depict the defense team as bumbling and underhanded, with his greatest ire going toward the obstructionist Kanarek.
Criminal Conspiracy and the Case for “Helter Skelter”
Public perspective of Manson, of those who condemn him and those contrary few who admire him, has been framed by Bugliosi’s account; to wit, that Manson was a criminal mastermind with hypnotic powers beyond what ordinary people possess. Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter argument rested on this interpretation, and his own professional reputation depended on this bias. Arguments based on criminal conspiracy have a fraught prosecutorial history, as in the 19th century when anarchists were executed for the Haymarket Square bombing they plainly did not commit, or in the 1950s, when homosexuals were charged en masse for congregating at known homosexual hangouts. Criminal conspiracy, in other words, requires a jury primed with a strong narrative account and an inclination to condemn the alleged conspirator.
Viewed from another perspective, Manson had a strange, bloody-minded, and evil personality. He was also, by many accounts, functionally illiterate, unable to hold down work, and deeply paranoid; not so much a genius as a person with alarming mental illness. In spite of this, he was allowed to mount his own defense when he was clearly not in his right mind to do so, to hire and fire his less-than-capable defense team as he willed, to coordinate with the rest of the defendants to unwittingly spectacularize the very case the prosecution was bringing against him, and even to make a spectacle of self-harm and self-abasement before the jury, as when he carved an “X” into his own forehead.
Bugliosi admits from the start that his case against Manson—the title of the book—was weak. As he said to his defense team, “[I]t wouldn’t take me two seconds to dump the whole Helter Skelter theory if he could find another motive in the evidence” (294). He never did. A competent defense team might have better advocated for Manson, who was never physically tied to any of the murders, and for the three defendants he was tried with. However, the trial might never have made a spectacle of Manson’s mental illness to prove its point. Such a spectacle did harm in the public eye to the mentally ill, who are overwhelmingly statistically more likely to have crimes committed against them than to commit them.
