Tom O'Neill > Quotes

“And so, feeling the line between "researcher" and "conspiracy theorist" blurring before me, I hunkered down in the library to read about the many ways our government has deceived us.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity. Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“I’d come to feel like a prisoner of my own story.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“focused on two secret intelligence operations that were under way in Los Angeles in 1969: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. Their primary objective, according to three congressional committees that investigated them in the midseventies, was to discredit the left-wing movement by any means necessary—an aim that, coincidentally or not, described exactly the effect of the Manson murders.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Technology had destabilized every atom of human nature, and a new class of chemicals with unpronounceable names could reduce people to machines. The human mind, like any other appliance, could be rewired and automated.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“1976, a FOIA request forced NIMH to acknowledge that it had allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a funding front in the sixties.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Black Friday,” as it came to be known, marked the end of the fifties, the dawn of a new age of dissent.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“The Hollywood community knew that the Beach Boys had been wrapped up in Manson’s world, and it turned them into pariahs, for a time; nightclubs where they’d once been welcomed were suddenly turning them away.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Smith, who called Manson “Charlie,” ended up becoming one of the most vital figures in my investigation—more than anyone else, he knew how and why Manson had formed the Family, because he’d watched it happen. And legally, he wielded immense power over Manson. He could’ve sent him back to prison at any time.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“This has been the most exciting thirteen years of my life. There’s nothing like the adrenaline rush of catching these people in lies, and documenting it—knowing that you’ve found something no one else has found.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“After dinner that night, he kept calling to chat, and I took him out for years to come. The restaurants were always fancy; the bills were always mine.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“So many of my sources, even the most reliable, had trouble explaining their feelings and motivations, not just because so much time had passed but because some schism stood between them and the past. It was irreparable—wherever the sixties had come from, they were gone, even in memory.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Manson was often made out as an artful seeker—“an evil Pied Piper,” as one paper put it, with reserves of obscure power.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“The CIA wasn’t even supposed to operate on domestic soil. What could they have been doing messing around with an acid-soaked cult in Los Angeles? And if Whitson had been close enough to the murders to stop them, why didn’t he?”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“The actor Cary Grant, on the advice of his shrink, took some one hundred LSD trips during their weekly meetings in the late fifties, experiencing a “rebirth” and picturing himself “as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Saving America sounded a lot like COINTELPRO, which sounded a lot like CHAOS--they all ran together, in part, it seemed, because they'd all shared notes.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“The committee looked into one of the most notorious COINTELPRO actions in L.A., the framing of Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther and a decorated Vietnam vet. Pratt would be imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a murder the FBI knew he didn’t commit. He was in Oakland at the time of the crime, four hundred miles away, at a Black Panther house that the Bureau had wiretapped. It had transcripts of a call he’d made to the Panther headquarters in Los Angeles just hours before the murder. Still, Bureau agents enlisted a federal informant to lie on the stand about Pratt’s involvement. Even before the frame-up, FBI gunmen had attempted to kill Pratt by shooting at him through the window of his apartment; he survived only because a spine injury he’d sustained in the war made it more comfortable to sleep on the floor. Pratt was serving a life sentence when the Church Committee released its landmark findings, confirming what he’d long suspected: LASO and the LAPD were complicit in the COINTELPRO operation. The committee quoted a report that the FBI’s Los Angeles outpost had sent to Hoover himself, advising that “the Los Angeles [Field] Office [of the FBI] is furnishing on a daily basis information to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office Intelligence Division and the Los Angeles Police Department Intelligence and Criminal Conspiracy Divisions concerning the activities of black nationalist groups in the anticipation that such information might lead to the arrest of the militants.” By the Church Committee’s estimation, this meant that Los Angeles law enforcement was guilty of obstructing justice and hindering prosecution.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“His work as an informant continued under the cloak of his “reporting” for Life magazine, which was later named in a 1977 Rolling Stone story as one of the publications that provided CIA employees with cover.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“General Curtis E. LeMay, a legendary fighter pilot who’d implemented the carpet bombing of Japan during World War II. A notorious hawk, LeMay had served as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d tried to organize a coup against Kennedy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he wanted to force the military to flout the president’s orders and bomb the Soviet missile bases they’d found in Cuba.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“During a congressional investigation of the CIA’s illegal domestic operations, the agency admitted that it had more than 250 “assets” in the American media in the 1960s. Their identities were never revealed.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“a paper titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he claimed to have achieved the impossible: he knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge. In case the CIA didn’t grasp the significance of this, he put it in layman’s terms: “It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“If the CIA wanted a presence in the Los Angeles DA’s office, Younger didn’t strike me as someone who’d put his foot down. Nor did his second in command, Lynn “Buck” Compton, who’d been an LAPD detective before getting his law degree and joining the DA’s office. Compton was the lead prosecutor in the trial of Sirhan B. Sirhan for the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. And he’d been a World War II hero—his exploits with the parachute infantry regiment, the Easy Company, were chronicled in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“And though David never mentioned it in his writing, his work owed a clear debt to the landmark research of another NIMH psychologist, John B. Calhoun, who’d studied rat populations since 1946. Calhoun reported that rats in confined groups—even without drugs—became uncharacteristically aggressive. They’d erupt in rape, murder, cannibalism, and infanticide. A dominant male rat emerged in the “behavioral sink”—Calhoun’s term for his aggregated rat cultures—subjugating other males into a tribe of cowering, enfeebled followers and organizing female rats into a “harem” of sex slaves. The strangest group to emerge was “the probers”: “hypersexualized” male rats that stalked and raped both males and females, and often cannibalized their young. The probers would commit “frenzied” and “berserk” attacks against rat families sleeping in their burrows, leaving the remains of half-eaten victims. Again, no drugs were involved here; the probers emerged simply as a result of their confinement. They deferred only to the dominant male rat, fleeing if he caught sight of them.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“After the Family was caught, Time magazine picked up on the bizarre parallels between Stranger in a Strange Land and Manson’s own “nest.” In January 1970, it ran a piece called “A Martian Model?” arguing that Manson had “no powers of invention at all… He may have murdered by the book.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“As reported in the New York Times that May, the committee’s final report determined that “FBI headquarters approved more than 2,300 actions in a campaign to disrupt and discredit American organizations ranging from the Black Panthers to Antioch College,” and that the Bureau “may have violated specific criminal statutes” in pursuing actions that “involved risk of serious bodily injury or death to targets.” The Church Committee noted that COINTELPRO”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Bernardine Dohrn, of the Weather Underground, put it most outrageously: “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“He’d essentially been on a thirty-year victory lap, and he had his talking points down cold. It was hard to get him off script.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“I’d gotten in a shouting match with Tom Cruise about Scientology; Gary Shandling had somehow found a way to abandon me during an interview in his own home; and I’d pissed off Alec Baldwin, but who hasn’t?”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties