Thoughts on Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

I’m not into the true crime genre at all. I find it to be perverse and makes me very uncomfortable. For me, I just don’t think I should know that amount of detail in someone dying. I bring all of this up to say that my knowledge of Charles Manson and the crimes his family committed is pretty close to zero. 

The things that interested me the most from an outside view was the idea that Manson was a CIA asset. Also, it was recommended to me by one of the smartest people I know and I trust him implicitly. Regardless, I brought the book with me on a plane trip and gave it a shot. 

Then I read this book for the entirety of a flight from New York to Las Vegas. 

The first thing that struck me is that author Tom O’Neill doesn’t seem all that interested in the crime spree that Manson and his family were responsible for. I mean that he doesn’t often go into gritty detail about the final words of victims or anything that gives me that usual sort of gross feeling knowing that I have to carry that info for the rest of my life. Very quickly the scope broadens, and never stops broadening, to reach people like Dennis Wilson as O’Neill is looking for how someone like Manson was able to operate the way he did for so long. 

The segment that really sticks with me is that long before Manson moved up to Spahn Ranch he lived in Haight-Ashbury and spent a lot of time up in the free clinic in that area.  This was an independently funded clinic, read funded by the CIA, that was primarily focused on the relationship between common amphetamines and hallucinogens. More so the way those drugs make the brain very malleable to influence. 

Now that would seem like an interesting place to hangout for a person trying to start this “family” that he was even at that time ranting and raving about. 

Look, I can just throw these segments of the book at you or you can go read it and see how all of these pieces combine to make one of the best pieces of non-fiction i’ve ever read. If you have any interest in reading about how the CIA and FBI definitely don’t operate on American soil I implore you to read this. 

Thanks for reading.