LOS ANGELES — The seven grisly murders carried out by Charles Manson’s disciples during the summer of 1969 did more than turn the hippie cult leader into the leering face of evil on front pages across America.
To many, the bloodbath exposed the scary underside of the counterculture movement and seemed to mark the end of the peace-and-love era that burst upon the country just two years earlier during San Francisco’s Summer of Love.
“The ‘Summer of Love’ was more a media event than anything else,” Todd Gitlin, one of the nation’s foremost historians of the 1960s, told The Associated Press in an email Wednesday. “But if hippie paradise was a myth, it was a myth that a lot of people believed in. Manson damaged it gravely.”
On Wednesday, Manson, now 82, lay hospitalized with an undisclosed illness after being taken from California’s Corcoran State Prison, where he was serving a life sentence, according to news reports that correction officials would not confirm, citing privacy laws.
His reappearance in the news conjured a turbulent period in U.S. history when the country seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
A petty criminal who had been in and out of jail since childhood, Manson reinvented himself during the Summer of Love as a long-haired, Christlike guru spouting Bible verses and Beatles lyrics.
After attracting a few dozen followers, many of them young women, runaways or other lost souls, he took them to an old movie ranch on the edge of Los Angeles that he transformed into a commune of sex, drugs and music.
On Aug. 9 and 10, 1969, he sent some of his devotees out on a murderous mission to two of Los Angeles’ wealthiest neighborhoods, where they killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate, several of her society friends and others.
Authorities would learn that Manson had hoped the killings would touch off a race war. He had apparently gotten the idea from a twisted reading of the hard-rocking Beatles song “Helter Skelter.”
The killings — along with a deadly stabbing in December 1969 at a free concert headlined by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco — contributed to the sense that the era of peace and love that seemed to reach a high point at Woodstock in the summer of 1969 was over, the dream turned into a nightmare.
