“It looked like a battlefield up there,” a Los Angeles Police Department officer told the Los Angeles Times on the weekend of August 9-10, 1969. ABC News broadcast footage of the home in question, 10500 Cielo Drive, that was shot from a helicopter, its grainy, jittery quality not unlike the images that were becoming a collective visual memory of the Vietnam War. The night after what it called “the Bel Air massacre,” CBS told its viewers that there were two more murders, this time in the Los Feliz neighborhood of the city, and that the word “war” had been carved into the abdomen of one of the victims.
These were the second and third of what are now called the Manson murders, which technically denote nine murders: of Gary Hinman, a Ph.D. student and music teacher, on July 27th; the actress Sharon Tate (at the time the partner of the director Roman Polanski) and four houseguests on August 9th; Leno and Rosemary LaBianca on August 10th; and on August 26th Donald Shea, who worked on the ranch where Charles Manson and his countercultural “family” lived. Conventionally, however, the Manson murders bracket the less sensational Hinman and Shea homicides to appear simply as “Tate-LaBianca,” and initially were known only as the Tate murders because, as CBS put it, “despite the similarities, [the police] do not believe the crimes are linked.” The Tate murders became the Manson murders, and the Manson murders mostly the murders of August 9th and 10th, after the LAPD, on December 1, 1969, identified the Manson family as its prime suspects for Tate-LaBianca. After an astonishing trial, on March 29, 1971, a jury sentenced Manson and his three codefendants to death.
On that same day, Lieutenant William Calley of the U.S. Army was convicted for his participation in the 1968 My Lai Massacre. My Lai is what Americans called a sub-hamlet of the village of Son My on the coast of central Vietnam. They also called it “Pinkville,” because the area was pink on U.S. military maps and was a stronghold of the Viet Cong, the communist or “pinko” National Liberation Front. On the evening of March 15th, less than two months after the surprise North Vietnamese Tet Offensive on American forces, Task Force Barker Captain Ernest Medina told the men of Charlie Company that the next morning they would go to My Lai and engage the Viet Cong’s 48th Battalion, a force known to have been responsible for Tet as well as recent casualties suffered by Charlie Company.
Upon entering My Lai, however, Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, which was led by Calley, encountered no Viet Cong. The only people in My Lai that morning were old men, women and children, and they offered no resistance. Most of them, between three hundred and five hundred people, were nonetheless killed. Some also suffered rape or mutilation; a “C”—for Charlie—was carved into the chest of an old man. The army covered up the massacre with a fake news story that collapsed only when Vietnam veteran Ronald Ridenhour wrote to members of the U.S. political class about “something very black indeed” that had happened in My Lai. His tip eventually led to an investigation, which then led to charges against several officers. Most of these were eventually dropped, but on March 29, 1971, a court martial found Calley guilty of “premeditated murder … of an unknown number, no less than twenty.”
The massacre at My Lai took place on March 16, 1968, nearly a year and a half before the Manson murders. Strictly speaking, the events were not concurrent. However, the story of the massacre, which was first reported by Seymour Hersh for the Dispatch News Service, broke on November 13, 1969, with additional coverage featuring photographs of the massacre taken by U.S. combat photographer Ronald Haeberle published on November 20th in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer and on December 5th in Life magazine. The massacre thus “happened” to America—if one may put it that way about an event that, in fact, happened to Vietnamese civilians—three months after the Tate-LaBianca murders, and two to three weeks before America first met the Manson family. The cases intersected in 1969, went to trial simultaneously in 1970, then concluded in early 1971, with the death sentences and guilty verdicts of both appearing side by side on the front pages of American newspapers. It was this convergence that made it so obvious, and so culturally confrontational, that Manson and My Lai shared gruesome content and form.
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In both cases, so-called ordinary Americans committed extraordinary acts of violence against innocents whom they did not know. Indeed, the most innocent, because the My Lai and Manson perpetrators were, in the language of the time, “baby killers.” Sharon Tate was full term, and although she was not stabbed in the abdomen, her baby could not survive her murder. At My Lai, the fact that babies had been killed surfaced most confrontationally in “And babies,” an anti-war poster published by the Art Workers’ Coalition on December 26, 1969. It imposed over one of Haeberle’s photographs text taken from a CBS interview between Mike Wallace and My Lai veteran Paul Meadlo:
Q: Started pushing them off into the
ravine?
A: Off into the ravine. It was a ditch.
And so we started pushing them
off and we started shooting them,
so altogether we just pushed them
all off, and just started using auto-
matics on them. And then—
Q: Again—men, women and children?
A: Men, women and children.
Q: And babies?
A: And babies.
Publicizing Haeberle’s photographs—whether in the Plain Dealer and Life or as anti-war art—was obviously controversial, but it is noteworthy that the visuals of Tate-LaBianca victims were taboo. The only available images were the whited-out ones included in Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, by the prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi, which was published in 1974, five years after the murders. The uncensored images didn’t become public until the 2000s, when the LAPD’s crime-scene photographs somehow found their way onto the internet.
Perhaps the truly terrible aspect of Manson and My Lai violence was the lack of any apparent separation between the murderous and the mundane. This was most evident in details showing that killing went on quite comfortably alongside eating, that the perpetrators could unproblematically switch back and forth between these two activities, with Captain Medina calling a lunch break around 11 a.m., and Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten helping themselves to cheese and chocolate milk from the LaBianca fridge in between killing their victims and then turning back to mutilate one of them. To account for this awful commingling of the ordinary and the extraordinary, during Calley’s court martial as well as the Tate-LaBianca trial, the question of drugs was raised, and of insanity, however temporary. But neither explanation gained traction, as it was shown that really no one was high and decided that truly no one was crazy.
The perpetrators in both cases exhibited remorselessness: “Sorry is only a five-letter word,” Van Houten stated during the penalty phase of the Tate-LaBianca trial, and Calley only managed an apology in 2009. If this affectless indifference had been the only traceable sentiment during and after these events, the perpetrators might have still registered as something short of anthropologically horrifying. But it wasn’t. Vietnam veteran James Bergthold told the makers of “Interviews with My Lai Veterans” (1970) that soldiers at My Lai “looked like they were having … a good time.” One of those soldiers, Varnado Simpson, noted: “Well, they was mutilating bodies and everything, you know. They would hang ’em, or something like this, or scalp ’em, anything. They enjoyed it, they really enjoyed it.” Statements to the effect that stabbing Sharon Tate made Susan Atkins orgasm were most likely provocations, not least because Atkins never stabbed Tate. But according to Sandra Good, Krenwinkel did say that “each stab was herself coming closer to death till she felt nothing but total peace when it was done.” According to Dianne Lake, both Watson and Van Houten described the Tate-LaBianca murders as “fun.”
Both cases were engulfed by media frenzies, and it was asked if the unprecedented levels of pretrial publicity might not impede a fair trial. “Outrageous publicity. Unbelievably bad,” said ex-president of the California bar Joseph Ball about the Manson coverage. “I don’t think that there has ever been a case that has received worse publicity than that which Mr. Manson has received.” Which was precisely what others thought about Calley. The directors of the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union concluded that “it is now impossible for Lt Calley to receive a fair trial.” The excessive publicity for these cases was in fact so obviously problematic that humorist Art Buchwald could cheekily opine that the U.S. should just get rid of the court, an institution that “in today’s world of speedy communication” had become obsolete: “If the public already knows if they are innocent or guilty, why do the people need a trial?” During the trials and appeals that followed, lawyers in both cases filed motions to have the judges declare mistrials for excessive and prejudicial pretrial publicity. All were rejected.
President Richard Nixon unduly intervened in both judicial processes. During a press conference, with the Tate-LaBianca trial still ongoing, Nixon castigated the media for glamorizing criminals, and then referred to the glamorous Manson as “a man who is guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders”—forgetting to add, as he later said he had intended to do, the word “alleged.” The next day in court, Manson held up the August 4, 1970, issue of the LA Times featuring the headline “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares,” with his codefendants later chanting “in chorus”: “Your Honor, the President said we are guilty, so why go on with the trial?” Once again, the defense team filed a motion for a mistrial. Once again, that motion was denied.
In Calley’s case, the public backlash against the verdict was so enormous that in 1971 Nixon intervened on the side of the “Free Calley” movement, ordering the lieutenant released from prison and placed under house arrest, where he remained for only four years. “It gets to the question of whether this man is a criminal who should be treated like Manson,” Nixon opined to White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, in what may be filed as evidence that comparisons between the cases went as high as the presidency. For Nixon, “the answer is no.”
Beneath all of this was the most critical convergence, one centered on culpability and chain of command. In both cases, the perpetrators were said to have been following orders. “I felt like I was ordered to do it,” Paul Meadlo told Mike Wallace about Calley, who in turn would go on to say that he had been ordered to do it too. Susan Atkins was quoted saying in the LA Times, “That night Charlie instructed us … Actually, he instructed us in the details through Tex [Watson]. He just told me to do everything Tex said to do.” Who in this case should—and could—be held accountable? Calley’s defense lawyer, George Latimer, argued that the lieutenant had followed orders issued by his superiors—first and foremost Captain Medina, but perhaps all the way up—and that not following orders was unthinkable. The prosecution, led by Aubrey Daniel, argued that the rules of law obligated Calley to “make moral decisions” and “to think and act like a reasonable person,” so that even if Medina had ordered him to kill women and children, following this order would have been both immoral and illegal.
In the Manson case, the situation was a bit more convoluted: because Manson had not himself participated in the Tate-LaBianca murders, the prosecution had to prove that Manson, in his role as family leader, had ordered his followers to commit the murders. Yet it also had to prove that the female defendants, despite being the followers of an authoritarian leader, could still “make moral decisions” and “think and act like [reasonable persons],” for otherwise they could not be convicted of first-degree murder. Meanwhile, the defense team could have taken a Calley approach for the women: they were following orders and it would have been unthinkable for them to defy Manson. But that would have meant sacrificing Manson, which was impossible because Manson and the women insisted on a common defense.
That did not mean, however, that the Calley trial did not impact the defense and the defendants during Tate-LaBianca trial. Correspondences were pointed out as early as December 8, 1969, in two mainstream venues, both triggering immediate and incensed responses, albeit from different political positions. KNBC-TV’s Evening News broadcast an editorial segment by Piers Anderton, who, speaking as a liberal subject, said, “The Benedict Canyon massacre is the inevitable end product of the ‘hippie culture.’” He then drew a parallel with military culture, which suggested that My Lai, too, had been inevitable: “There are other ways of losing your individuality and humanity. You can become so overdisciplined that you are willing to obey orders to enter a village and kill everyone there.”
Sensitive to the mainstream’s use of Manson to shut down the counterculture, Lawrence Lipton at the Los Angeles Free Press (Freep) took quite extraordinary offense at this segment, characterizing Anderton’s comparison between under- and overdisciplined people as “about the shittiest piece of snide, cynical, foul-mouthed innuendo that I have heard from a television newscaster in years of listening to twisted and slanted newscasts.” He ridiculed Anderton’s grasp of hippie culture and, moreover, rejected the idea that Manson was a representative hippie: “Do Charles Manson’s hair and beard and his cock-eyed Rasputin-like stare look to you like the typical picture of a hippie guru, like, say, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, or a Yippie like Abbie Hoffman?”
On the whole, as Jeffrey Melnick has shown in his cultural history of the Manson Family, with the initial exception of the Freep, the left situated Manson outside the counterculture and saw him as a thoroughly institutionalized creature; not under- but, like Calley, overdisciplined. This is also why Yippie Stew Albert could argue, in San Francisco’s Good Times, that Calley and Manson both were orphaned children of American institutions—military and penal—and that “Calley” was in a sense responsible for Manson: “I don’t want to hear pious holy bemoanings of Charles Manson’s nihilism from refined PhD candidates … because Lt. Calley was never a guard outside your cell.”
The second comparison between the cases made on December 8th was more interesting. “Maybe it’s only my sense of the macabre and makes no sense to other people,” the columnist Art Seidenbaum wrote in the LA Times, “but there seem to be some gruesome parallels below the gore of last week’s headlines.” Seidenbaum read both events as indiscriminate killings of dehumanized categories of people, with “a whole crowd” that became “gooks” in My Lai, and “a whole class” that became “pigs” in Benedict Canyon. He noted that the motive in each case was principally revenge, but with the victims as “tragic stand-ins for the real targets,” villagers for the Viet Cong, Tate for the previous tenants at Cielo Drive, against whom Manson was said to have held a grudge. Seidenbaum concluded by underlining “the business of obedience.” In each case, all those who had carried out the violence were “henchmen” who were “following orders,” “blindly obeying” and had “no minds, no wills of their own.”
Seidenbaum was insightful, but apparently did not make sense to other people. One year later, when he revisited the topic after the two verdicts came in, he noted that after his first editorial “indignant people wrote back to say there is an awesome difference between acts of war and acts of unprovoked savagery.” Still, in asserting this difference, and in expressing preference for one over the other, people nonetheless automatically paired the two: “Even the tragedy of My Lai paled in comparison,” wrote one reader in response to Life magazine’s Manson issue. Besides, Seidenbaum’s problem was precisely that Manson-My Lai had exposed the contingency of the order that insists on this difference: “But was My Lai really an act of war or a gratuitous exercise in barbarism? And were the Tate-LaBianca killings so much savagery or a loony declaration of war between the family of man and the family of Manson?” Seidenbaum was not convinced his readers were right, nor should one be convinced today that Seidenbaum was stretching, or that his was a lone mind lingering on the macabre, because he was not the only one to compare the cases. He was, however, the only one following both cases who really put his finger on what was so horrible about the historical coincidence of the Manson murders and the My Lai massacre: “I’m most haunted,” he wrote, “by the realization that I can’t separate kinds of killing anymore.”
It is this very haunting that would eventually inform Tom Veitch and Greg Irons’s The Legion of Charlies. The comic starts off with a prologue that includes a juxtaposition in which Calley is awarded a silver star for “snuff[ing] the lives of 400 gook women” and Manson is electrocuted for murdering “America’s movie stars” and “corrupt[ing] our daughters.”
The main story, however, focuses on Calley’s hallucinogenic transformation “from a sad Viet vet to a dedicated follower of the word of Charlie,” who along with “hundreds of other vets” and a gaggle of girls eventually, in a riff on Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), make up a cannibalistic “legion of Charlies.” They end up eating Vice President Spiro Agnew, for one, but also Mao Zedong, the Pope and all “the most powerful people in the world.”
Story aside, one thing The Legion of Charlies causes one to immediately remember is that there really were a lot of Charlies around in this moment: Charlie Manson, Charlie Company and Charlie Viet Cong (“Charlie” being short for “Victor Charlie,” the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet’s code for VC, Viet Cong). One wonders: Which of these Charlies was the real problem, the real enemy, so to say? What did it mean for Charlie (Manson) to resound as Charlie (Viet Cong)? For Charlie (Company) to be operating as Charlie (Viet Cong) allegedly already did? And after the famous “Charlie Don’t Surf” line from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) was printed on a t-shirt over Manson’s face, for Charlie (Viet Cong) to become Charlie (Manson)?
Which of these Charlies was or was not allowed to kill, and why?
●
The reaction to My Lai delivered a huge blow to Americans’ self-image of virtuous exceptionalism. “But the thought that goes through your mind is,” Mike Wallace told Paul Meadlo in the CBS interview, “we’ve raised such a dickens about what the Nazis did, or what the Japanese did … It’s hard for a good many Americans to understand that young, capable American boys could line up old men, women and children and babies and shoot them down in cold blood.” That was a politic way of putting what one woman interviewed by the Wall Street Journal stated more bluntly: “I didn’t know we were like the Germans in World War II.”
The pity that the American public initially felt for the victims quickly shifted to fear for the perpetrators, a category that grew ever larger and ever more abstract until it became impossible to call to account. Veterans and political conservatives spearheaded the movement in defense of Calley, but the opinion that My Lai was not attributable to one man or one company, that blame should be shouldered much more broadly—by the military, government and nation—was widespread. The sense of collective guilt that blanketed the American population was real. It united Oklahoma City housewife Mrs. Kay Hobbs, who told Life that “They [the soldiers] are guilty, but no more than every person in the United States who allows our government to carry on the war,” with Jaakov Kohn, a New Yorker writing in the countercultural newspaper the East Village Other:
isn’t it sort of ridiculous to heap it all on First Lieutenant William Calley Jr., redneck that he is? … we’re all parts
all functioning parts of a genocidal monster.
All of us. You and I and everyone else were right there in Song My killing Gooks.
To make visible the political sense that “We are all Calley,” the Art Workers’ Coalition—the same group that had created the “And babies” poster—made thousands of Calley masks to be worn by protesters at an anti-war march. Problematically, however, the not-so-implicit implication of this line of argument was that if all were guilty, none were, which is why Kendrick Oliver, in his book on the My Lai massacre, diagnosed collective guilt as one of the symptoms of a culture in the process of “dispersing culpability.” Representative of this culture was something the editors of Esquire said about their astonishing November 1970 cover, which showed a smiling Calley hugging four Vietnamese children.
According to Esquire, John Sack, who had spent months with Calley in order to write the three-part “Confessions,” called the cover “the first honest photo” he’d seen of Calley: “He’s kind, he’s considerate, he’s compassionate, and when he sees little children, he wants to hug them. I hope the American people study it. And say, He isn’t a murderer. And ask, Well, who is the murderer, then? And answer, It’s us.”
This essay has been adapted from Claudia Verhoeven’s forthcoming history of the Manson murders, Love and Terror, to be published by Verso Books in 2026. Used by permission of the publisher.
Art credit: Art Workers’ Coalition, Q. And babies? A. And babies., 1970. Offset lithograph on paper, 25 × 38 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Jon Hendricks. ©1970 Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks and Frazer Dougherty.
“It looked like a battlefield up there,” a Los Angeles Police Department officer told the Los Angeles Times on the weekend of August 9-10, 1969. ABC News broadcast footage of the home in question, 10500 Cielo Drive, that was shot from a helicopter, its grainy, jittery quality not unlike the images that were becoming a collective visual memory of the Vietnam War. The night after what it called “the Bel Air massacre,” CBS told its viewers that there were two more murders, this time in the Los Feliz neighborhood of the city, and that the word “war” had been carved into the abdomen of one of the victims.
These were the second and third of what are now called the Manson murders, which technically denote nine murders: of Gary Hinman, a Ph.D. student and music teacher, on July 27th; the actress Sharon Tate (at the time the partner of the director Roman Polanski) and four houseguests on August 9th; Leno and Rosemary LaBianca on August 10th; and on August 26th Donald Shea, who worked on the ranch where Charles Manson and his countercultural “family” lived. Conventionally, however, the Manson murders bracket the less sensational Hinman and Shea homicides to appear simply as “Tate-LaBianca,” and initially were known only as the Tate murders because, as CBS put it, “despite the similarities, [the police] do not believe the crimes are linked.” The Tate murders became the Manson murders, and the Manson murders mostly the murders of August 9th and 10th, after the LAPD, on December 1, 1969, identified the Manson family as its prime suspects for Tate-LaBianca. After an astonishing trial, on March 29, 1971, a jury sentenced Manson and his three codefendants to death.
On that same day, Lieutenant William Calley of the U.S. Army was convicted for his participation in the 1968 My Lai Massacre. My Lai is what Americans called a sub-hamlet of the village of Son My on the coast of central Vietnam. They also called it “Pinkville,” because the area was pink on U.S. military maps and was a stronghold of the Viet Cong, the communist or “pinko” National Liberation Front. On the evening of March 15th, less than two months after the surprise North Vietnamese Tet Offensive on American forces, Task Force Barker Captain Ernest Medina told the men of Charlie Company that the next morning they would go to My Lai and engage the Viet Cong’s 48th Battalion, a force known to have been responsible for Tet as well as recent casualties suffered by Charlie Company.
Upon entering My Lai, however, Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, which was led by Calley, encountered no Viet Cong. The only people in My Lai that morning were old men, women and children, and they offered no resistance. Most of them, between three hundred and five hundred people, were nonetheless killed. Some also suffered rape or mutilation; a “C”—for Charlie—was carved into the chest of an old man. The army covered up the massacre with a fake news story that collapsed only when Vietnam veteran Ronald Ridenhour wrote to members of the U.S. political class about “something very black indeed” that had happened in My Lai. His tip eventually led to an investigation, which then led to charges against several officers. Most of these were eventually dropped, but on March 29, 1971, a court martial found Calley guilty of “premeditated murder … of an unknown number, no less than twenty.”
The massacre at My Lai took place on March 16, 1968, nearly a year and a half before the Manson murders. Strictly speaking, the events were not concurrent. However, the story of the massacre, which was first reported by Seymour Hersh for the Dispatch News Service, broke on November 13, 1969, with additional coverage featuring photographs of the massacre taken by U.S. combat photographer Ronald Haeberle published on November 20th in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer and on December 5th in Life magazine. The massacre thus “happened” to America—if one may put it that way about an event that, in fact, happened to Vietnamese civilians—three months after the Tate-LaBianca murders, and two to three weeks before America first met the Manson family. The cases intersected in 1969, went to trial simultaneously in 1970, then concluded in early 1971, with the death sentences and guilty verdicts of both appearing side by side on the front pages of American newspapers. It was this convergence that made it so obvious, and so culturally confrontational, that Manson and My Lai shared gruesome content and form.
●
In both cases, so-called ordinary Americans committed extraordinary acts of violence against innocents whom they did not know. Indeed, the most innocent, because the My Lai and Manson perpetrators were, in the language of the time, “baby killers.” Sharon Tate was full term, and although she was not stabbed in the abdomen, her baby could not survive her murder. At My Lai, the fact that babies had been killed surfaced most confrontationally in “And babies,” an anti-war poster published by the Art Workers’ Coalition on December 26, 1969. It imposed over one of Haeberle’s photographs text taken from a CBS interview between Mike Wallace and My Lai veteran Paul Meadlo:
Publicizing Haeberle’s photographs—whether in the Plain Dealer and Life or as anti-war art—was obviously controversial, but it is noteworthy that the visuals of Tate-LaBianca victims were taboo. The only available images were the whited-out ones included in Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, by the prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi, which was published in 1974, five years after the murders. The uncensored images didn’t become public until the 2000s, when the LAPD’s crime-scene photographs somehow found their way onto the internet.
Perhaps the truly terrible aspect of Manson and My Lai violence was the lack of any apparent separation between the murderous and the mundane. This was most evident in details showing that killing went on quite comfortably alongside eating, that the perpetrators could unproblematically switch back and forth between these two activities, with Captain Medina calling a lunch break around 11 a.m., and Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten helping themselves to cheese and chocolate milk from the LaBianca fridge in between killing their victims and then turning back to mutilate one of them. To account for this awful commingling of the ordinary and the extraordinary, during Calley’s court martial as well as the Tate-LaBianca trial, the question of drugs was raised, and of insanity, however temporary. But neither explanation gained traction, as it was shown that really no one was high and decided that truly no one was crazy.
The perpetrators in both cases exhibited remorselessness: “Sorry is only a five-letter word,” Van Houten stated during the penalty phase of the Tate-LaBianca trial, and Calley only managed an apology in 2009. If this affectless indifference had been the only traceable sentiment during and after these events, the perpetrators might have still registered as something short of anthropologically horrifying. But it wasn’t. Vietnam veteran James Bergthold told the makers of “Interviews with My Lai Veterans” (1970) that soldiers at My Lai “looked like they were having … a good time.” One of those soldiers, Varnado Simpson, noted: “Well, they was mutilating bodies and everything, you know. They would hang ’em, or something like this, or scalp ’em, anything. They enjoyed it, they really enjoyed it.” Statements to the effect that stabbing Sharon Tate made Susan Atkins orgasm were most likely provocations, not least because Atkins never stabbed Tate. But according to Sandra Good, Krenwinkel did say that “each stab was herself coming closer to death till she felt nothing but total peace when it was done.” According to Dianne Lake, both Watson and Van Houten described the Tate-LaBianca murders as “fun.”
Both cases were engulfed by media frenzies, and it was asked if the unprecedented levels of pretrial publicity might not impede a fair trial. “Outrageous publicity. Unbelievably bad,” said ex-president of the California bar Joseph Ball about the Manson coverage. “I don’t think that there has ever been a case that has received worse publicity than that which Mr. Manson has received.” Which was precisely what others thought about Calley. The directors of the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union concluded that “it is now impossible for Lt Calley to receive a fair trial.” The excessive publicity for these cases was in fact so obviously problematic that humorist Art Buchwald could cheekily opine that the U.S. should just get rid of the court, an institution that “in today’s world of speedy communication” had become obsolete: “If the public already knows if they are innocent or guilty, why do the people need a trial?” During the trials and appeals that followed, lawyers in both cases filed motions to have the judges declare mistrials for excessive and prejudicial pretrial publicity. All were rejected.
President Richard Nixon unduly intervened in both judicial processes. During a press conference, with the Tate-LaBianca trial still ongoing, Nixon castigated the media for glamorizing criminals, and then referred to the glamorous Manson as “a man who is guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders”—forgetting to add, as he later said he had intended to do, the word “alleged.” The next day in court, Manson held up the August 4, 1970, issue of the LA Times featuring the headline “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares,” with his codefendants later chanting “in chorus”: “Your Honor, the President said we are guilty, so why go on with the trial?” Once again, the defense team filed a motion for a mistrial. Once again, that motion was denied.
In Calley’s case, the public backlash against the verdict was so enormous that in 1971 Nixon intervened on the side of the “Free Calley” movement, ordering the lieutenant released from prison and placed under house arrest, where he remained for only four years. “It gets to the question of whether this man is a criminal who should be treated like Manson,” Nixon opined to White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, in what may be filed as evidence that comparisons between the cases went as high as the presidency. For Nixon, “the answer is no.”
Beneath all of this was the most critical convergence, one centered on culpability and chain of command. In both cases, the perpetrators were said to have been following orders. “I felt like I was ordered to do it,” Paul Meadlo told Mike Wallace about Calley, who in turn would go on to say that he had been ordered to do it too. Susan Atkins was quoted saying in the LA Times, “That night Charlie instructed us … Actually, he instructed us in the details through Tex [Watson]. He just told me to do everything Tex said to do.” Who in this case should—and could—be held accountable? Calley’s defense lawyer, George Latimer, argued that the lieutenant had followed orders issued by his superiors—first and foremost Captain Medina, but perhaps all the way up—and that not following orders was unthinkable. The prosecution, led by Aubrey Daniel, argued that the rules of law obligated Calley to “make moral decisions” and “to think and act like a reasonable person,” so that even if Medina had ordered him to kill women and children, following this order would have been both immoral and illegal.
In the Manson case, the situation was a bit more convoluted: because Manson had not himself participated in the Tate-LaBianca murders, the prosecution had to prove that Manson, in his role as family leader, had ordered his followers to commit the murders. Yet it also had to prove that the female defendants, despite being the followers of an authoritarian leader, could still “make moral decisions” and “think and act like [reasonable persons],” for otherwise they could not be convicted of first-degree murder. Meanwhile, the defense team could have taken a Calley approach for the women: they were following orders and it would have been unthinkable for them to defy Manson. But that would have meant sacrificing Manson, which was impossible because Manson and the women insisted on a common defense.
That did not mean, however, that the Calley trial did not impact the defense and the defendants during Tate-LaBianca trial. Correspondences were pointed out as early as December 8, 1969, in two mainstream venues, both triggering immediate and incensed responses, albeit from different political positions. KNBC-TV’s Evening News broadcast an editorial segment by Piers Anderton, who, speaking as a liberal subject, said, “The Benedict Canyon massacre is the inevitable end product of the ‘hippie culture.’” He then drew a parallel with military culture, which suggested that My Lai, too, had been inevitable: “There are other ways of losing your individuality and humanity. You can become so overdisciplined that you are willing to obey orders to enter a village and kill everyone there.”
Sensitive to the mainstream’s use of Manson to shut down the counterculture, Lawrence Lipton at the Los Angeles Free Press (Freep) took quite extraordinary offense at this segment, characterizing Anderton’s comparison between under- and overdisciplined people as “about the shittiest piece of snide, cynical, foul-mouthed innuendo that I have heard from a television newscaster in years of listening to twisted and slanted newscasts.” He ridiculed Anderton’s grasp of hippie culture and, moreover, rejected the idea that Manson was a representative hippie: “Do Charles Manson’s hair and beard and his cock-eyed Rasputin-like stare look to you like the typical picture of a hippie guru, like, say, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, or a Yippie like Abbie Hoffman?”
On the whole, as Jeffrey Melnick has shown in his cultural history of the Manson Family, with the initial exception of the Freep, the left situated Manson outside the counterculture and saw him as a thoroughly institutionalized creature; not under- but, like Calley, overdisciplined. This is also why Yippie Stew Albert could argue, in San Francisco’s Good Times, that Calley and Manson both were orphaned children of American institutions—military and penal—and that “Calley” was in a sense responsible for Manson: “I don’t want to hear pious holy bemoanings of Charles Manson’s nihilism from refined PhD candidates … because Lt. Calley was never a guard outside your cell.”
The second comparison between the cases made on December 8th was more interesting. “Maybe it’s only my sense of the macabre and makes no sense to other people,” the columnist Art Seidenbaum wrote in the LA Times, “but there seem to be some gruesome parallels below the gore of last week’s headlines.” Seidenbaum read both events as indiscriminate killings of dehumanized categories of people, with “a whole crowd” that became “gooks” in My Lai, and “a whole class” that became “pigs” in Benedict Canyon. He noted that the motive in each case was principally revenge, but with the victims as “tragic stand-ins for the real targets,” villagers for the Viet Cong, Tate for the previous tenants at Cielo Drive, against whom Manson was said to have held a grudge. Seidenbaum concluded by underlining “the business of obedience.” In each case, all those who had carried out the violence were “henchmen” who were “following orders,” “blindly obeying” and had “no minds, no wills of their own.”
Seidenbaum was insightful, but apparently did not make sense to other people. One year later, when he revisited the topic after the two verdicts came in, he noted that after his first editorial “indignant people wrote back to say there is an awesome difference between acts of war and acts of unprovoked savagery.” Still, in asserting this difference, and in expressing preference for one over the other, people nonetheless automatically paired the two: “Even the tragedy of My Lai paled in comparison,” wrote one reader in response to Life magazine’s Manson issue. Besides, Seidenbaum’s problem was precisely that Manson-My Lai had exposed the contingency of the order that insists on this difference: “But was My Lai really an act of war or a gratuitous exercise in barbarism? And were the Tate-LaBianca killings so much savagery or a loony declaration of war between the family of man and the family of Manson?” Seidenbaum was not convinced his readers were right, nor should one be convinced today that Seidenbaum was stretching, or that his was a lone mind lingering on the macabre, because he was not the only one to compare the cases. He was, however, the only one following both cases who really put his finger on what was so horrible about the historical coincidence of the Manson murders and the My Lai massacre: “I’m most haunted,” he wrote, “by the realization that I can’t separate kinds of killing anymore.”
It is this very haunting that would eventually inform Tom Veitch and Greg Irons’s The Legion of Charlies. The comic starts off with a prologue that includes a juxtaposition in which Calley is awarded a silver star for “snuff[ing] the lives of 400 gook women” and Manson is electrocuted for murdering “America’s movie stars” and “corrupt[ing] our daughters.”
The main story, however, focuses on Calley’s hallucinogenic transformation “from a sad Viet vet to a dedicated follower of the word of Charlie,” who along with “hundreds of other vets” and a gaggle of girls eventually, in a riff on Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), make up a cannibalistic “legion of Charlies.” They end up eating Vice President Spiro Agnew, for one, but also Mao Zedong, the Pope and all “the most powerful people in the world.”
Story aside, one thing The Legion of Charlies causes one to immediately remember is that there really were a lot of Charlies around in this moment: Charlie Manson, Charlie Company and Charlie Viet Cong (“Charlie” being short for “Victor Charlie,” the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet’s code for VC, Viet Cong). One wonders: Which of these Charlies was the real problem, the real enemy, so to say? What did it mean for Charlie (Manson) to resound as Charlie (Viet Cong)? For Charlie (Company) to be operating as Charlie (Viet Cong) allegedly already did? And after the famous “Charlie Don’t Surf” line from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) was printed on a t-shirt over Manson’s face, for Charlie (Viet Cong) to become Charlie (Manson)?
Which of these Charlies was or was not allowed to kill, and why?
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The reaction to My Lai delivered a huge blow to Americans’ self-image of virtuous exceptionalism. “But the thought that goes through your mind is,” Mike Wallace told Paul Meadlo in the CBS interview, “we’ve raised such a dickens about what the Nazis did, or what the Japanese did … It’s hard for a good many Americans to understand that young, capable American boys could line up old men, women and children and babies and shoot them down in cold blood.” That was a politic way of putting what one woman interviewed by the Wall Street Journal stated more bluntly: “I didn’t know we were like the Germans in World War II.”
The pity that the American public initially felt for the victims quickly shifted to fear for the perpetrators, a category that grew ever larger and ever more abstract until it became impossible to call to account. Veterans and political conservatives spearheaded the movement in defense of Calley, but the opinion that My Lai was not attributable to one man or one company, that blame should be shouldered much more broadly—by the military, government and nation—was widespread. The sense of collective guilt that blanketed the American population was real. It united Oklahoma City housewife Mrs. Kay Hobbs, who told Life that “They [the soldiers] are guilty, but no more than every person in the United States who allows our government to carry on the war,” with Jaakov Kohn, a New Yorker writing in the countercultural newspaper the East Village Other:
To make visible the political sense that “We are all Calley,” the Art Workers’ Coalition—the same group that had created the “And babies” poster—made thousands of Calley masks to be worn by protesters at an anti-war march. Problematically, however, the not-so-implicit implication of this line of argument was that if all were guilty, none were, which is why Kendrick Oliver, in his book on the My Lai massacre, diagnosed collective guilt as one of the symptoms of a culture in the process of “dispersing culpability.” Representative of this culture was something the editors of Esquire said about their astonishing November 1970 cover, which showed a smiling Calley hugging four Vietnamese children.
According to Esquire, John Sack, who had spent months with Calley in order to write the three-part “Confessions,” called the cover “the first honest photo” he’d seen of Calley: “He’s kind, he’s considerate, he’s compassionate, and when he sees little children, he wants to hug them. I hope the American people study it. And say, He isn’t a murderer. And ask, Well, who is the murderer, then? And answer, It’s us.”
This essay has been adapted from Claudia Verhoeven’s forthcoming history of the Manson murders, Love and Terror, to be published by Verso Books in 2026. Used by permission of the publisher.
Art credit: Art Workers’ Coalition, Q. And babies? A. And babies., 1970. Offset lithograph on paper, 25 × 38 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Jon Hendricks. ©1970 Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks and Frazer Dougherty.
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