Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211)

by O'Neill, Tom; Piepenbring, Dan (CON)

  It’s a confusing story to tell because it involves two Smiths, and they ran in the same circles—both were drug researchers with a sociological interest in the Haight-Ashbury youth scene. On top of Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer, there was David Smith, no relation, the charismatic creator of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.

  You wouldn’t think that Manson, a chary ex-con who disdained conventional power structures, would spend a lot of time at a government-funded clinic, no matter how groovy its trappings. But Manson and the girls were at the HAFMC a lot. When they moved from the disused school bus into a proper apartment, he chose one right around the corner from the clinic. His involvement with the place, and the extent to which it dovetails with both of the Smiths, has been serially unexplored in popular writing on him. Because Bugliosi seemed to have no use for the Smiths, no one else did, either. But having seen how crucial Roger was to Manson’s development, I knew I had to dive into David’s history, too.

  Dr. Dave

  David Elvin Smith grew up in the dusty farm community of Bakersfield, California, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. When he moved to the Bay Area in 1960 to study at UC Berkeley, Smith was, by his own admission, a hick. He’d never traveled much beyond his backwoods town, and he lacked the political and intellectual curiosity that animated Berkeley’s sophisticated, international student body. Had it not been for his pushy peers, always scolding him for missing their sit-ins and marches, Smith probably wouldn’t have noticed the dawn of the Free Speech movement on his own campus. Later, he liked to remember a teaching assistant who canceled class so he and the other students could head to a protest downtown. Smith refused to join. He wanted to study for an upcoming test. The TA told him he’d never get an A if he didn’t go.

  Smith has been open about his louche behavior in this period: an inveterate womanizer and a binge drinker, he disappeared for days at a time on benders, nevertheless graduating at the top of his class. At the end of 1965, a debilitating blackout and a messy breakup led him to give up alcohol. By then, Smith, a raffish, good-looking man of twenty-six, was a postdoctoral student at UC San Francisco and the chief of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Screening Unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Later he remembered his curiosity flaring as his research collided with the city’s cultural upheaval. “I was injecting white rats with LSD in the lab,” he said, “and then I’d walk home past the Haight, where I’d see kids who were high on the same substance.”

  He began to experiment with psychedelics himself, and he liked them. The lifestyle brought new friends and new politics. He and his friends tracked the burgeoning counterculture in the Haight, where some were predicting an influx of 100,000 young people in the coming year. Smith, who felt that health care was a right, wondered where the newcomers would receive medical attention, and how they would afford it. He moved to Haight-Ashbury himself with plans to found a free clinic.

  When it opened at 558 Clayton Street in June 1967, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC) was an immediate sensation. Staffed entirely by volunteers and unauthorized by the city health department, it treated hundreds of patients a day, offering nonjudgmental care for those suffering from bad trips, overdoses, sexually transmitted diseases, and malnourishment, or for those who just needed a kind ear. Lines at the HAFMC sometimes stretched around the block with hippies waiting to ascend the creaky wooden stairs to its second-floor office. Inside, loitering was encouraged. The clinic did everything it could to advertise its psychedelic affinities. Exam rooms were painted in aqua and Day-Glo orange; one of them was wallpapered with a vibrant collage of peace signs, naked bodies, and hypnotic swirls. Even as Smith struggled to pay the rent and keep the cops at bay, he reveled in his creation. Few things so perfectly encapsulated the utopian ideals of the summer of love.

  As faces filed in and out of the clinic that summer, Smith and his colleagues befriended the repeat visitors, and the HAFMC became a scene within a scene. It could be hard to tell the hippies apart, with their long, beflowered hair, their upstart communes, their shifting legions of followers and leaders. But decades later, no one at the clinic had any trouble remembering Charlie Manson and his girls.

  Negate Your Ego

  In 1971, David Smith published Love Needs Care, a memoir of the HAFMC’s germinal years. I found it rife with details about Manson and the Family, and about the very period that Bugliosi had omitted from Helter Skelter: the summer of love, when Manson, apparently at his most charismatic, began to attract followers and ensure their unconditional devotion. Better still, Love Needs Care had a few contributions from Roger Smith, offering his own appraisal of Manson.

  As invaluable as these portraits are, though, I called them into question when my reporting led me to doubt both of the Smiths. The more I reread certain passages, the more they seemed like gingerly public-relations efforts. The Smiths had to make it clear that they knew Manson well, and that they’d felt some sympathy toward him—there could be no denying that, given how often they’d been seen together. But the book came two years after the murders, when both men had an interest in distancing themselves from that Manson, the murderous one, the metaphor for evil. Love Needs Care attempts the delicate task of elucidating the Smiths’ relationships to Manson while making it seem as if they had no idea that he and his followers would someday erupt into unconscionable violence.

  David Smith described the Family’s frequent trips to the HAFMC, where “Charlie’s girls,” as they were known around the halls, were treated for sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. The girls tended to Manson’s every need, never speaking unless spoken to. They referred to him as Christ, or “J.C.”

  When the Family moved to an apartment on Cole Street, Manson began in earnest to “reprogram” his followers. David had an elaborate sense of Manson’s tactics, although he never explained where he got it. Using a combination of LSD and mind games, Manson forced his followers to submit to “unconventional sexual practices,” Smith wrote; he would invoke mysticism and pop psychology as the acid took hold, saying, “You have to negate your ego.” Treating the girls “like objects,” he eroded their independence, turning them “into self-acknowledged ‘computers,’ empty vessels that would accept almost anything he poured in.” Before long, they obeyed him unquestioningly.

  Acid was unmistakably essential to the process. Manson’s insistence on it sometimes put him at odds with trends in the Haight, David thought. Typically, hippies who dropped a lot of acid eventually moved on to speed. A schism grew in the scene. The “acid heads” (a phrase David claims to have coined) favored nonviolence, whereas the “speed freaks” (ditto) caused the rash of violence that destroyed the Haight’s live-and-let-live ethos. But Manson had an aversion to needles; he wouldn’t use amphetamines. The Family’s drug pattern was effectively reversed, with Manson urging his disciples to relinquish speed and embrace acid. Weaning his recruits from amphetamines reduced the chance of interference with his induction process.

  Speed became a part of the Family’s lifestyle only later, David told me, when it came time to kill in Los Angeles. He’d heard this from Susan Atkins herself, when she asked him to assess her mental health for a parole hearing in 1978. “When they went to the south, they got very deeply involved in speed,” he said. They got it from the Hells Angels. “They were trading sex for speed, and [Atkins] thinks that Helter Skelter and the ultimate crime was a paranoid speed delusion.”

  Bugliosi kept any mention of the Family’s speed use out of the trial. David thought he understood why—it risked presenting “mitigating circumstances” for the prosecution. And the defense wouldn’t want it coming up, either; no one wants his or her clients to look like addicts.

  Both the Smiths have said that Manson’s fear of needles made speed a nonissue, but obviously speed can be taken orally or snorted. Over the years, a smattering of evidence and firsthand recollections has suggested that the Family used amphetamines more often than was suggested at the time. In a 200
9 documentary, Linda Kasabian claimed that she and her companions each swallowed a “capsule” of speed before leaving for Cielo Drive on the night of Sharon Tate’s murder. (At the trial, she testified that she hadn’t taken any drugs around the time of the murders.) In books and at parole hearings, Susan Atkins also later copped to taking speed before the Tate murders. Tex Watson wrote that he frequently snorted it with the group, and that he, too, took it on both nights of the murders. Others added that the Family kept an abundance of speed at the Spahn Ranch toward the end of their time there, and that Manson himself wasn’t above taking it, especially as he grew more paranoid. He would use it to stay up for days at a time, brooding on his delusions.

  Remember, Manson lived in the Haight because Roger Smith sent him there, thinking its “vibes” would assuage the ex-con’s hostility. And make no mistake: Roger did believe that Manson was hostile. In a short essay for Life magazine published months after the murders, Roger offered his first-ever insights about Manson. (“He speaks of Manson here out of his extensive unofficial contact with him,” the magazine noted, without describing the nature of that contact or any potential conflict with Smith’s parole duties.) “Charlie was the most hostile parolee I’ve ever come across,” Roger wrote. “He told me right off there was no way he could keep the terms of his parole. He was headed back to the joint and there was no way out of it.”

  Roger would seldom write or speak about Manson again, wanting to distance himself from his most infamous client; when I first spoke to him, in 2001, I was only the third reporter to do so. But his remark about Manson’s hostility always stayed with me. I’d already seen, after all, how he’d characterized Manson in official parole documents as a well-behaved guy making “excellent progress.” The disparity suggested that Roger had been willing to sweep Manson’s “hostility” under the rug.

  In a passage he contributed to Love Needs Care, Roger did his best to support the idea that the bizarreries of the Haight suited an ex-con like Manson. Daily LSD trips made him mellower, more thoughtful. He still had the slick duplicitousness of a con man, and he was still a master manipulator, but he was suddenly fond of vacuous self-help bromides like “If you love everything, you don’t need to think about what bothers you.”

  Roger Smith couldn’t seem too credulous, so he made sure to note the “messianic” tilt of Manson’s acid days—an oblique acknowledgment of Charlie’s growing megalomania. David Smith mirrored the sentiment, writing that Manson’s LSD trips replaced his “underlying depression with a manic smile” that sometimes betrayed darker philosophies. David admitted that Manson “began to develop a number of delusions as his involvement with LSD progressed.” He fantasized about the Beatles ordaining him their musical equal; he imagined a Judgment Day when blacks would slaughter whites.

  Some of Roger’s familiars, including his wife, couldn’t understand his affinity for Manson. Roger was “pretty much in awe of Charlie’s ability to draw these women to him,” one said. Another thought that he “was always kind of fascinated” with “the charming charismatic sociopath.”

  After Manson’s role in the Tate–LaBianca murders came out, Roger allowed that “he had made an error” in bringing him to the Haight. But at the time, the Family enjoyed a remarkable kinship with Roger. They “swarmed over [Roger] Smith and often filled the [clinic] reception room,” David Smith wrote, “bringing operations to a standstill.” Roger didn’t mind the adulation, in part, David claimed, because “Charlie frequently offered him the services of his harem.” (Roger declined this offer.)

  Among the HAFMC alumni I spoke to, the understanding was Manson had visited the clinic on many occasions to see Roger for their mandatory parole meetings. Roger himself would later claim that the Family simply came by out of the blue, for no particular reason, and that they didn’t begin seeing him there until after his duties as Manson’s parole officer had ended. In either case, something about the arrangement didn’t sit well with me. One reason the HAFMC was free, after all, was that David, Roger, and their colleagues had received private and federal grants to conduct drug research there. The Smiths were both studying amphetamines and LSD, the latter being the crucial component in Manson’s “reprogramming” process. How had an uneducated ex-con—someone who, months ago, had never taken acid and maybe never even heard of it—come to use the drug to such sophisticated ends? And wasn’t it suspicious, at least, that he was coming to the HAFMC to see two people who were studying that very phenomenon, the use of drugs to control and change behavior?

  At least one friend of Roger’s had foreseen that it would be “a conflict of interest”: “I always thought there would be problems.” Another noted, “Roger had really made a career at that point in trying to help Manson… He was going to soothe the savage beast.” Instead, the beast grew more savage than ever.

  “Frenzied Attacks of Unrelenting Rage”

  When he launched the HAFMC, David Smith left a loose end dangling in his past: he’d never actually received his PhD in pharmacology. He’d completed a two-year research project on amphetamines and their effects on groups of confined mice, but he never finished his dissertation. Although he shrugged off the lapse—he’d already completed medical school, after all, and he’d taken quickly to his new life in the Haight—it surprised many of his closest friends, and in our interviews, he was reluctant to admit it. It wasn’t like him to leave something undone.

  Even in its unpublished form, Smith’s research on mice defined him, creating the larger-than-life personality who would eventually be known as “Dr. Dave.” In my obsessive way, I found as much of this research as I could. I saw that Smith had published a brief article based on his study in the HAFMC’s own house organ, the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, in 1969. It wasn’t nearly as robust as his full thesis would’ve been, but it gave me something to go on.

  Before long, I was noticing parallels between Smith’s mice and the Family. At first I was inclined to disregard these as the product of my more speculative side—I saw no purpose in linking the behavior of mice in a controlled experiment to the behavior of people in the world at large. But I took another look when I saw that Smith himself had made such a connection. He spoke of his mice as proxies for human beings.

  His research started with sixteen albino mice. With the assistance of other researchers, he separated these into two groups of eight in “aggregate” settings—small, closely confined communities intended to simulate crowding. Then he injected the mice with amphetamines. Over the next twenty-four hours, they transformed from docile animals into frantic combatants, fighting one another until they died either from injuries, self-inflicted wounds from overgrooming, or simple exhaustion. The violence was unremitting; Smith described “frenzied attacks of unrelenting rage.” Afterward, all that remained in the blood-spattered cages were scattered, dismembered body parts. Simply by confining the animals in close quarters, he’d increased the toxicity of the amphetamines more than four times.

  In another attempt, some of the mice were dosed with other chemicals—mescaline, chlorpromazine, or reserpine—before they received amphetamine injections. The extra drugs sometimes had a sorting effect, segregating the mice that would kill from the mice that wouldn’t. Or they had a soothing effect, all but eliminating the violent tendencies.

  Smith told me he’d started his research having foreseen an influx of amphetamine abusers in San Francisco. He didn’t say how he’d predicted that influx, but he was right. In the summer of ’67, as he opened his clinic, amphetamines exploded in popularity in the Haight.

  “When the speed scene hit, it was a total shock to everybody,” he told me. “Suddenly, what I’d learned in pharmacology relative to amphetamines was applicable [to people].”

  Throughout Love Needs Care, Smith draws parallels between the rodents he’d studied and the speed-addled hippies in the Haight. The mice on speed, he wrote, “become inordinately aggressive and assaultive… [turning] upon one another with unexpected savagery. Their violent behav
ior is probably intensified by confinement for it is strikingly similar to that observed in amphetamine abusers who consume the drugs in crowded atmospheres.”

  In the Haight, Smith watched as people living cheek by jowl took huge doses of speed, inspiring paranoia and hallucinations. Once peaceful and well-adjusted, the “speed freaks” of San Francisco now “lashed out with murderous rage at any real or imagined intrusion,” assaulting, raping, or torturing to relieve the paranoid tension. “Cut off from the straight world, crammed together in inhuman conditions, and controlled by chemicals,” Smith concluded, “they behaved, quite naturally, like rats in a cage.”

  But when I spoke to Smith, he was quick to discount these parallels. “I happened to study amphetamines before they hit the Haight,” he said. “The Haight didn’t give me the idea. It’s kind of like a historical accident… I was studying LSD before LSD hit the Haight [too].”

  In fact, according to Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, who participated in a portion of Smith’s rat research in 1965, LSD was an integral component of the project. Smith and his colleagues would inject the rats with acid in hopes of making them more suggestible before he gave them amphetamines. Suggestibility was among the most prized effects of LSD from a clinical perspective. And yet Smith kept LSD out of the official documentation of his research. The article he published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs never mentioned acid.