Vincent Bugliosi - More radical than you'd expect

[Tom Scully]

Well then it failed miserably, as Bugliosi was the loon spreading lies.

"We all need someone we can lean on, and if you want to, you can lean on..." "The Bug".

'Here are twelve lyin' jurors who all say they never heard of me or Sharon Tate or the murders -- you believe that? They've made up their mind. I'm the one they're going to send to the gas chamber; with my long hair I'm a perfect scapegoat.'" - Charles Manson

https://www.straight.com/arts/1283716/extended-interview-50-years-after-manson-murders-tom-oneills-disturbing-new-book-chaos
Extended interview: 50 years after the Manson murders, Tom O'Neill's disturbing new book CHAOS seeks to dismantle the myths of Helter Skelter

by Adrian Mack on August 9th, 2019
...Maybe it was all of those things, but whatever the reason: the Helter Skelter motive, in total, looks very much to its skeptics like a cover-up orchestrated by Bugliosi, presumably at the behest of the same people or organizations that inexplicably protected and then jettisoned the Manson Family. In CHAOS, O’Neill’s seriocomic dance with the former prosecutor reads like a mothballed Coen brothers script, as the vainglorious Bugliosi alternately cajoles, deflects, lectures, defames, threatens, and otherwise buzzes around the author in an effort to defend both Helter Skelter and his reputation. It becomes clear that he was rattled enough to keep a quiet tab on O’Neill’s research. So who or what was this guy?

“That’s the question,” replies O’Neill, with a laugh. “He was compromised, ya know, before he even got the assignment to do the Tate-LaBianca murders. The D.A.’s office should have fired him, and he should have been disbarred when they found out what he had done in the milkman case in ’68. So, if anybody was ever easy to be leveraged, it was him.”

The “milkman case” became public when Bugliosi ran for L.A. district attorney in ’72. Convinced that his wife Gail had been impregnated by their milkman, it emerged that he’d used his status and public resources to terrorize the innocent man and his family. An exasperated Gail, O’Neill writes, assured them her esteemed husband had “mental problems”.

When he ran again in ’74, a much darker episode surfaced. Allegedly, Bugliosi had beaten his own pregnant mistress so badly that she miscarried, and he used his influence inside the criminal-justice system to make the problem disappear. After his last heated interview with Bugliosi in 2006, O’Neill was unsurprised when an onslaught of verbose, defamatory letters arrived at the offices of his first publisher, Penguin.

The author sounds genuinely pained when he mentions what he and his eventual collaborator Dan Piepenbring had to cut from CHAOS for reasons of length, including a chapter on Bugliosi’s quixotic effort to support the Warren Commission findings with his 2007 book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Mirroring O’Neill’s journey, it consumed Bugliosi for two decades, the chief difference being that he was trying to reinforce, not dismantle, what many believe to be a government-stamped cover up.

“I don’t like to speculate,” offers O’Neill, “but some pretty serious researchers—and there are serious assassination researchers out there—are convinced that Bugliosi was, let’s just say, obligated to certain federal agencies, or had been for his entire career, to write a book like Reclaiming History, and to present a false narrative like he did in Helter Skelter.”

In the end, that’s what CHAOS is really about: false narratives, handed to the public in neat packages and bestowed, in O’Neill’s excellent phrase, with “the aura of finality”. The effect is such that the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood has prompted every hack with a byline to proclaim once again that Charles Manson killed the ’60s.

Except he didn’t, anymore than Hitler or Genghis Khan did. It was infinitely more complex than that, and what we think we know, with such sublime certainty, merely fixes us in an ideological position that benefits those who maybe did, actually, kill the ’60s. Maybe Helter Skelter provided cover for a unique kind of American fascism that was field-testing its tech, branding the nightmare event for future generations.

With a sigh, O’Neill mentions that his research could have yielded a chapter on a contemporaneous event also covered in the fingerprints of the CIA and its clandestine mind surgeons: the killing of Robert Kennedy and subsequent conviction of a man with no memory of his role, Sirhan Sirhan. And he has a different take these days on the weaponized term “conspiracy theory”.

“I don’t use it as much as I used to,” he says, wryly. “I do have more respect for people who research these kinds of alternative histories. I’m a lot less naive. I’m a lot less trusting. Which is sad in a way, but you have to become what you become. I always questioned authority, I’m pretty liberal in my politics, and didn’t really completely trust government and law enforcement. But now I’m so skeptical about everything I see reported about a crime, or anything. It’s just pretty disheartening to know how people can lie so easily and cavalierly. It shocked me.”

What isn’t easy, for the decent among us, is to consider our own programming, whether it's applied explicitly through the hard vectors of state and corporate propaganda or the softer channels of entertainment. But it is necessary. Why do we think what we think?

O’Neill has another great phrase to describe the way consensus reality gels around myth. He calls it “inert history”. With CHAOS, the author has unearthed dozens of leads Vincent Bugliosi and his sponsors fought hard for five decades to keep hidden, and he ardently hopes that others will now follow up on what he spent two of those decades coaxing out of a sealed record. In this sense, history becomes dynamic again...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS
Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was a Central Intelligence Agency domestic espionage project targeting the American people from 1967 to 1974, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson and expanded under President Richard Nixon, whose mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on domestic race, anti-war and other protest movements. The operation was launched under Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms by chief of counter-intelligence James Jesus Angleton, and headed by Richard Ober.[1][2] The "MH" designation is to signify the program had a worldwide area of operations.[3] ...

...and Richard Ober just happened to be friends, since boyhood in Scarsdale, NY, with James Kelsey Cogswell, III.
See - https://www.jfkassassinationforum.com/index.php/topic,2851.msg108179.html#msg108179

[Matthew Finch]

Just (finally) finished Marr's updated Crossfire and wouldn't mind adding Bugliosi's tome to my collection. Any recommendations on where to purchase? (UK resident). Cheers.

[Charles Collins]

Just (finally) finished Marr's updated Crossfire and wouldn't mind adding Bugliosi's tome to my collection. Any recommendations on where to purchase? (UK resident). Cheers.

I would suggest getting the Kindle version from Amazon (particularly for the search feature). Even more for the price difference compared to a hard copy. And the Kindle version is currently on sale for $29 US (normally $49). If you really want the hard copy, I can sell you mine (gently used) for half the current price ($125) at Amazon. However you would need to also pay the freight to UK from the US. PM me if interested.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Just (finally) finished Marr's updated Crossfire and wouldn't mind adding Bugliosi's tome to my collection. Any recommendations on where to purchase? (UK resident). Cheers.

Try eBay. I got a used copy for, I think, under or about $30 and it included the CD with the end notes. It was in excellent condition.

They (US version) currently have several for under $25. Not sure about the shipping charges and you'll probably have trouble finding ones that ship to the UK. I do think you'll want the CD so the Kindle version won't do.

[Michael Walton]

I think Bugliosi conjured up the "Helter Skelter" business in the Manson case to provide a narrative for that crime for the jury.  It had little to do with his race war theory.   Manson was attempting to cover up a drug-related murder by one of his associates by making it appear that the person responsible was still on the loose and committing similar crimes while his associate was in jail.  The messages left at the crime scene were intended to make the police believe the crimes were all linked.  Instead Bugs used them literally as a motive for the crime.  My only criticism of his analysis of the JFK assassination is that he allows the CTers to drag the discussion down into the gutter.  It is understandable to become frustrated at the lack of logic and insanity applied to the basic evidence in that case, but in the context of writing a book on the subject it makes him sometimes come off as petty when ranting against those nutty claims.

Wow! Never thought I'd say this but you're spot on with this, Richard, about the bullshit narrative Vince came up with about Manson. As you say, it was much simpler. And as well, Manson had a dream to be a singer and wanted to get revenge on Doris Day's son when he was turned down. Melcher had been staying at Cielo so he thought he was still there. And he had already crashed into Cielo weeks before the murders where he came across Tate and a photographer outside in broad daylight. And what few people realize is he had already cased the LaBianca home because he attended a party that the backyard of faced the LaBianca home.

But old Vince spinned his fantastical Helter Skelter take over the world yarn. Talk about a conspiracy theorist!