Huntley, sans Brinkley, reporting in 1970 on the troubled Apollo 13 mission, which was salvaged in part because of an MIT hippie lost to history.
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This telling segment July 31, 1971 Huntley-Brinkley Report (which was Chet Huntley’s final broadcast) is a pretty tremendous capsule of ’60s youth culture run aground, as there are accounts of rock festivals cancelled, the Manson Family murder trial in progress and Berkeley police attempting to shutter communes. Young reporter Tom Brokaw handles the Berkeley story.
The opening of the December 19, 1969 Life report about the Manson murders: “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 only 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 Charlie Manson seem to be the very encapsulation of truth about revolt and violence by the young.”
Tags: Charles Manson, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Tom Brokaaw
"He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had."
In his provocative new Atlantic article, “The Brain on Trial,” David Eagleman investigates whether brain injuries and illnesses are sometimes the driving force behind criminality. In the piece, Eagleman raises the case of Charles Whitman, a heavily armed 25-year-old student who killed 16 people from his vantage point on a University of Texas observation tower on a blistering August day in 1966. Whitman, who kept killing until he himself was killed by police, left a note revealing his suspicions that his brain had somehow changed, causing his violent impulses–and he may have been right. An excerpt:
“Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.
For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had.
I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.
Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, the researchers Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms, including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage often neglected or physically abused their infants. In humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening faces, are put into frightening situations, or experience social phobias. Whitman’s intuition about himself—that something in his brain was changing his behavior—was spot-on.”
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“The typed letter related Whitman’s headaches.”