Those who feared (envied, perhaps) the new freedoms enjoyed by the young people of the 1960s found their counterargument in Charles Manson, a pathetic slip of a man who somehow fashioned himself into a poisonous pied piper capable of leading children to their demise. In the White Album, Joan Didion wrote about the crimes in the broader context of the wide-open Los Angeles of the era, where rumors of horrible occurrences had previously been spoken of only in hushed tones. “Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable,” she wrote, the words bleeding out like a threat. In the aftermath of the horrendous 1969 mass murder carried out by the former bright-eyed children of the Manson Family, Life magazine made the ringleader its cover subject and published a long article by Paul O’Neil about Manson and his minions. The opening:

“Long-haired, bearded little Charlie Manson so disturbed the American millions last week–when he was charged with sending four docile girls and a hairy male acolyte off to slaughter strangers in two Los Angeles houses last August–that the victims of his blithe and gory crimes seemed suddenly to have played secondary roles in the final brutal moments of their own lives. The Los Angeles killings struck innumerable Americans as an inexplicable controversion of everything they wanted to believe about the society and their children–and made Charles Manson seem to be the very encapsulation of truth about revolt and violence by the young.

What failure of the human condition could produce a Charlie Manson? What possible aspects of such a creature’s example could induce sweet-faced young women and a polite Texas college boy to acts of such numbing cruelty–even though they might have abandoned the social and political precepts of their elders like so many other beaded and bell-bottomed mother’s children in 1969? Some of the answers seemed simple enough if one weighed Charlie Manson on the ancient scales of human venality. He attracted and controlled his women through flattery, fear and sexual attention and by loftily granting them a sort of sisterhood of exploitation–methods used by every pimp in history. He sensed something old as tribal blood ritual which most of us deny in ourselves–that humans can feel enormous fulfillment and enormous relief in the act of killing other humans if some medicine man applauds and condones the deed. But Charlie was able to attune his time-encrusted concepts of villainy to the childish yearnings of hippie converts–to their weaknesses, their catchwords, their fragmentary sense of religion and their enchantment with drugs and idleness–and to immerse them in his own ego and idiotic visions of the apocalypse.”