Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211)
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98 On June 12, Barrett: Samuel Barrett, letter to Charles Manson, June 12, 1969.
99 The next letters came: Angus D. McEachen, letter to Joseph Shore (Attn.: James Jones), Aug. 7, 1968.
100 hosted Manson at their home: Author interview with C. Smith; author interview with R. Smith.
101 The National Institute of Mental Health funded: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 36.
102 used by the CIA as a funding front: Edwin M. Long Jr., Deputy Director, Scientific and Public Information, NIMH, letter to Joseph J. Petrillo and Timothy Sullivan, Sept. 30, 1976, National Security Archives, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
103 “way in which violence”: Roger Smith, “The Marketplace of Speed: Violence and Compulsive Methamphetamine Abuse” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1969), 5.
104 “asking me to help them with the law”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 36.
105 Hiding in a “deviant group”: Smith, “The Marketplace of Speed.”
106 anonymity in all reports: Ibid., 136.
107 opened the previous summer: When it finally received funding in May 1968, ARP was moved to the clinic’s “annex,” one block away (Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 36).
108 why not just meet: Smith was vague in his interviews with me (as were David Smith and Luce in their book) about when his professional relationship with Manson ended and the personal one began. Smith told Ed Sanders, for instance, that he stopped being a parole officer in January 1968, when he began work at the clinic (Sanders, The Family, 460–61), but in a résumé Smith shared with me, he lists the date of his departure from the probation office as May 1968. David Smith and Luce put the start of Roger’s work at the HAFMC as January 1968 (36) but other sources told me it was the fall of 1967 (author interviews with Rose, Sadalla, and Ernest Dernburg). Whatever the case, Manson was visiting Roger Smith at the clinic in some capacity in the spring of ’68, as Smith and Luce report Roger saying in their book: “I ceased being his parole officer in 1968, when I started working at the Medical Section, so [Manson] had no real reason to spend so much time with me. But he came anyway, preaching about love” (257).
109 Soon Manson became a mainstay: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 36, 255–62.
10. The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic
1 David Elvin Smith grew up: This section relies primarily on Smith’s writing in Love Needs Care (cowritten by John Luce; Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) and in his self-published Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. A biography of Smith by Clark S. Sturges, Dr. Dave: A Profile of David E. Smith, M.D., Founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Devil Mountain Books, 1993), was also heavily resourced.
2 “high on the same substance”: Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, “Volunteer Doctor, The Free Clinic at 33: How a Radical Idea Became a Model Institution,” Diversion, April 2000.
3 “Charlie’s girls,” as they were known: Author interview with Robert Conrich.
4 They referred to him as Christ, or “J.C.”: Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New York: Norton, 1994), 315.
5 “reprogram” his followers: The information about Manson’s methods of “reprogramming” his followers during the Haight period is from Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 259–63, unless otherwise noted.
6 a phrase David claims to have coined: Author interview with David Smith.
7 But Manson had an aversion: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 258–59.
8 “mitigating circumstances”: Ibid.
9 a “capsule” of speed: Manson, Cineplex Productions, 2009.
10 In books and at parole hearings, Susan Atkins: Susan Atkins with Bob Slosser, Child of Satan, Child of God (Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1977), 135; Susan Atkins, Subsequent Parole Consideration Hearing, State of California Board of Prison Terms, in the Matter of the Life Term Parole Consideration Hearing of Susan Atkins, CDC Inmate W-08340, June 1, 2005, multiple references.
11 both nights of the murders: Tex Watson and Chaplain Ray, Will You Die for Me? (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1978), 131, 141.
12 brooding on his delusions: Susan Atkins-Whitehouse, The Myth of Helter Skelter, (San Juan Capistrano, Calif.: Menelorelin Dorenay, 2012), 63.
13 a short essay for Life magazine: Roger Smith and David Smith, “A Doctor and a Parole Officer Remember Manson,” Life, Dec. 1, 1969, 26.
14 only the third reporter: Not counting his December 1969 Life essay and his interview for 1971’s Love Needs Care, Roger Smith spoke to Ed Sanders for The Family in 1971 (but his quotes weren’t attributed to him until Sanders’s 2002 update, 460–61) and the cable channel A&E for its documentary Charles Manson: Journey into Evil (1995).
15 “If you love everything, you don’t”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 257–58.
16 “Charlie’s ability to draw”: Author interview with Alan Rose.
17 “was always kind of fascinated”: Author interview with Carol Smith.
18 “he had made an error”: Author interview with Ernest Dernburg.
19 “bringing operations to a standstill”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 260.
20 One reason the HAFMC was free: Much of Love Needs Care recounts David Smith’s never-ending battle to keep the clinic open in the first few years. Although he told me in interviews that it never received federal grants, he clearly states in the book (36) that Roger Smith’s ARP was funded by a $37,000 grant from the NIMH in May 1968, and several papers published by Smith and his colleagues at the HAFMC acknowledge the NIMH for funding.
21 “I always thought there would be problems”: Author interview with Lyle Grosjean.
22 “He was going to soothe the savage beast”: Author interview with Dernburg.
23 never actually received his PhD: Author interview with D. Smith.
24 published a brief article: The story is an almost word-for-word copy of the thesis of Charles M. Fischer, one of the four researchers, who received his master’s in pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1968. I obtained a copy of the thesis from the university. Smith told me that it was originally his PhD dissertation; he “gave” it to Fischer when he realized he wasn’t going to finish his doctorate. Fischer denied Smith’s assertion. Fischer’s name—along with those of Smith, Eugene Schoenfeld, and Charles H. Hine—appeared on the paper when it was published the following year in the HAFMC’s Journal of Psychedelic Drugs under the same title, “Behavioral Mediators in the Polyphasic Mortality Curve of Aggregate Amphetamine Toxicity” (vol. 2 [Spring 1969]: 55–72). A revised version of the article was published in a bound collection of Journal articles in 1973.
25 sixteen albino mice: The information in this section comes from interviews with David Smith and Schoenfeld and Fischer, Smith’s coresearchers in the mice study. (Hine died in 1991.) The scientific data is taken directly from version of the paper published in 1969 in Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, except where specified. The similarities of Smith’s animal research to the formation of the Manson Family were first reported by Carol Greene (a pseudonym) in a German book published by the right-wing Lyndon LaRouche Organization, Der Fall Charles Manson: Mörder aus der Retorte (n.p.: E.I.R., 1992). I was able to obtain an English translation (The Test Tube Murders; no publication data available) and speak to “Greene” in 2003. Some of her findings were substantiated during my independent investigation and expanded on (others were impossible to corroborate). “Greene” told me she’d severed ties with the LaRouche organization and no longer had her research files. She didn’t interview anyone for her book and relied mostly on Smith’s articles and Love Needs Care, from which she drew her theories.
26 “frenzied attacks of unrelenting rage”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 16. See also author interview with D. Smith.
27 dismembered body parts: Fischer, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at the time, had to check on the mice in eight-hour intervals, often in the middle of the night. “It was brutal,” he told me of the carnage
he’d encounter. “There was no rhyme or reason—it was just helter skelter.”
28 “consume the drugs in crowded atmospheres”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 16.
29 “lashed out with murderous rage”: Ibid., 19.
30 “like rats in a cage”: Ibid., 222.
31 Suggestibility was among: According to the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs article, the objective of research was twofold: to discover which drugs would “modify” the violence of the animals caused by amphetamine and aggregation and, more important, what existing “behavioral” factors made some animals violent enough to kill, and to isolate those factors. See Fischer et al., “Behavioral Mediators,” 56.
32 they’re rats: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, multiple references; David Smith and Donald R. Wesson, eds., Uppers and Downers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974), 47.
33 Schoenfeld insisted that he’d worked with rats: Author interview with Eugene Schoenfeld. Fischer asked me whether David Smith was on “drugs” when he told me the research was on rats. “I’m surprised that David wouldn’t remember that,” he said during our interview, “they were Balt-C. I was the one who ordered those damn mice and I was the one who shot them up.”
34 David Smith’s research was funded: D. E. Smith, C. M. Fischer, and C. H. Hine, “Effects of Chlorpromazine, Phenobarbital, and Iproniazid on the Polyphasic Mortality Curve of Aggregate Amphetamine,” from “Abstracts of Papers for the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Society of Toxicology, Atlanta, Georgia, March 23–25, 1967,” Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology 10 (1967): 378–411. The abstract contains this notation on p. 403: “Supported in part by U.S. Public Service Toxicology Training Grant No. 5 TO1 GM01304-02.”
35 rape, murder, cannibalism, and infanticide: The information in this section is from Calhoun’s paper, unless otherwise noted: John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology,” Scientific American 206, no. 2 (Feb. 1962): 139–49.
36 “that can be found within [the] group”: Ibid., 144.
37 “a lasting impact on the individual’s personality”: William McGlothlin, Sidney Cohen, and Marcella McGlothlin, “Long Lasting Effects of LSD on Normals,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 3, no. 1 (Sept. 1970): 20–31 (reprinted from Archives of General Psychiatry 17, no. 5 [Nov. 1967]: 521–32).
38 feelings of “frustrated anger” led people: Kay Blacker, “Chronic Users of LSD: The ‘Acidheads,’” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 3, no. 1 (Sept. 1970): 32.
39 “the psychedelic syndrome”: According to a paper he later wrote, Smith first presented this theory in a lecture at the University of California, San Francisco, between the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968. See David E. Smith, “Changing Patterns of Drug Abuse in Haight-Ashbury,” California Medicine, Feb. 1969.
40 “the emergence of a dramatic orientation”: David E. Smith, “LSD and the Psychedelic Syndrome,” Clinical Toxicology 2, no. 1 (Mar. 1969): 69–73.
41 “Charlie could probably be diagnosed”: R. Smith and D. Smith, “A Doctor and a Parole Officer Remember Manson,” 26.
42 a criminology paper: Roger Smith, “Status Politics and the Image of the Addict,” Issues in Criminology, Fall 1966. All of the information in this section is taken directly from Smith’s article.
43 But as Grogan wrote: Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 290.
44 Rose was a friend of Roger: Author interview with Rose.
45 A former rabbinical student: The information about Rose comes primarily from Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, and from interviews with Rose, David Smith, Roger Smith, Gail Sadalla, and others who worked alongside him at the clinic.
46 Rose and David went on to coauthor three studies of the Haight’s drug culture in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs: “LSD: Its Use, Abuse, and Suggested Treatment,” vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1967–68): 117–28; “Incidents Involving the Haight-Ashbury Population and Some Uncommonly Used Drugs,” vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1967–68), cowritten with Frederick Meyers; and “The Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study,” vol. 3, no. 1 (Sept. 1970): 115–19.
47 probably on Manson’s orders: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 263; author interview with Rose; author interview with D. Smith; author interview with Sadalla.
48 until Manson summoned them: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 263; author interview with Rose.
49 he was living on money funneled: Author interview with Rose; author interview with D. Smith.
50 he stayed with them: Ibid. (both); Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 263.
51 “in the strange communal phenomenon”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 263.
52 one’s subjects broke the law: Roger Smith, “The Marketplace of Speed: Violence and Compulsive Methamphetamine Abuse” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1969), 3, 136.
53 The first was Roger’s ARP dissertation: author interview with Rose.
54 the first-ever scholarly study: Smith and Rose, “The Group Marriage Commune,” 115–19.
55 a January 1970 interview: “M.D. on Manson’s Sex Life: Psychologist Who Lived with Manson Family Tells About Commune,” The Berkeley Barb, Jan. 16–22, 1970.
56 a point they’d finesse later: Smith and Rose, “The Group Marriage Commune,” 115–16.
57 the others moved into Rose’s home: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 256–64.
58 He didn’t interview any: author interviews with D. Smith, R. Smith, Rose, and Vincent Bugliosi. Rose isn’t mentioned in Helter Skelter.
59 as if Bugliosi had actually spoken to him: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 225.
60 “sex, not drugs, was the common denominator”: Ibid., 226.
61 to prove “domination”: Ibid., 287.
62 ran their front-page stories: The Los Angeles Free Press, sister publication to the Barb, ran the identical story a week later (Jan. 23–29, 1970).
63 “the dictatorial leader of the Family”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 413.
64 “served as absolute ruler”: Smith and Rose, “The Group Marriage Commune,” 116.
65 if they were acting under their own free will: Bugliosi addressed the quandary in Helter Skelter, writing: “I was giving the attorneys for the three girls a ready-made defense. In the penalty phase of the trial they could argue that since Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten were totally under Manson’s domination, they were not nearly as culpable as he” (Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 415).
66 to “modify” their behavior: Fischer et al., “Behavioral Mediators,” 28.
67 “long-term psychological tendencies”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 16.
68 Some made reference to a forthcoming paper: In Charles Fischer’s own master’s thesis, a footnote refers to D. E. Smith, C. M. Fischer, A. J. Rose, and F. M. Meyers, “Patterns of Amphetamine Toxicity in the Haight-Ashbury,” which is forthcoming from the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs; and a footnote in Smith, “Changing Drug Patterns in the Haight-Ashbury,” refers to D. E. Smith, C. M. Fischer, and R. Smith, “Toxicity of High Dose Methamphetamine Abuse,” which is then “in press” at the same journal.
69 both Roger Smith and Alan Rose: David E. Smith and Charles M. Fischer, “Acute Amphetamine Toxicity,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 2, no. 2 (Spring 1969).
70 the government had been notified: The two documents are: Manson, Charles Willis [sic], Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, Sacramento, “Crime Report,” Case no. 25544, “Date and Time Reported to Department: 7-28-1967, 01:00 PM”; and Manson, Charles Milles, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (Rap Sheet), Record no. 643 369 A, Apr. 30, 1968, 5.
71 “the federal guys didn’t mess up”: Author interview with Richard Wood.
72 “comply willingly with any probationary conditions”: David Mandel, “Probation Officer’s Report and Recommendation, Sadie Mae Glutz aka Susan Denise Atkins,” Superior Court of the State of California, in and for the County of Mendocino, Case no. 4503-C, Dept. 2, Aug. 30, 1968,
4. I was able to finally show Roger Smith his probation recommendations for Atkins and Brunner at our last meeting in 2008. He said he had no recollection of making the statements attributed to him and added they didn’t “sound” like him, anyway. “I would never say ‘unconventional lifestyle,’” he told me.
11. Mind Control
1 Born in Brooklyn in 1924: Two invaluable books I relied on for West’s biographical information are Anthony Kales, Chester M. Pierce, and Milton Greenblatt, eds. The Mosaic of Contemporary Psychiatry in Perspective (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992) and John West, The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2009). The latter is a memoir by one of West’s three children, recalling life with his father and the decision he made to assist both his parents when they chose to end their lives after being diagnosed with terminal illnesses. No one in West’s family would talk to me, but I interviewed dozens of his colleagues and friends, dating all the way back to his time as the head of the psychiatric unit at the Lackland Air Force Base. His archive at the Department of Special Collections at the Charles Young Library at UCLA—hereinafter cited as West Archive—provided me with the clearest picture of the true nature of his research.
2 equal rights for African Americans: Robert S. Pynoos, “Violence, Personality, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Development and Political Perspectives,” in Mosaic of Contemporary Psychiatry, 71–72.
3 suffered an “acute psychotic break”: Hubert Winston Smith, letter to Joe Tonahill, May 11, 1964, West Archive.
4 making him sound unhinged: “Testimony of Jack Ruby,” Warren Commission volumes, 5H208-211, June 7, 1964, 181–213.
5 he prevailed on his son: West, The Last Goodnights.
6 no record of his participation: Douglas McAdam (former director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science at Stanford, after West’s time there), email to author; Julie Schumaker (Center for Advanced Study, researcher), email to author. McAdam and Schumaker said that West never provided a “Statement of Purpose” or “Year End Report,” both required of all participants.