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

I'm going to keep this shirt and sweet.I was almost 11 years old that summer of the gruesome murders. We had the moon landing almost 3 weeks before, and Woodstock would happen the following weekend. The killings eventually overshadowed everything.The book is long, yes, with many people and directions to follow. Don't let reviews dissuade you from picking this up. Tom keeps you on the path, I followed his revelations and narratives very easily. You have to realize that this book is not a one hour detective TV show. It's a true story revolving around personal agendas, narcissism, control, malevolence, evil, hubris, self preservation, out and out lying, and, murder most foul.It's not pretty. Neither is life in the world of drugs and crime. There are definitely still loose ends. There will be, if the players refuse to accept and profess their culpability, and stop hiding behind lies and fake lack of recollection. Now, many people are dead.The why is elusive, many stories and agendas that Inter weave with willing or unknowing subjects. Sequence of events that overlap and sometimes interconnect months later. I don't believe there is one big WHY. There are many, many whys that keep the story and events moving until August 1969.I read Helter Skelter when it came out and it scared the living he'll out of me. I'm 66 now and this scares me still, but for different reasons. The depths of evil and personal aggrandizement that occurred and always will, is scary. If you were alive then and remember, this is a must read.

Excellent. Well-written, very upfront about the complete lunacy of trying to unravel the mystery of the murders but fearlessly treads towards finding out the truth. This work was extremely exhaustive of every possible explanation. O'Neill should be very proud of the work he has done here. Stellar read.

The negative first. This isn't the best structured narrative. The main theme throughout is the author's process of (not) writing this book. For a while, the reader will care about his personal adventure. By the end, with no actual finale, resolution, or well-defined conclusion, you really won't care what happens to the author, or his book, since you already know you're reading it. This text could have been a much bigger hit if it actually had a decent editor or co-author to cut out all of the author's own writing-process backstory.Now the positive. The actual reporting and facts uncovered are thrilling to any true crime devote or Manson researcher. The questions the author brings to the surface really are fascinating, exposing light onto the official story and flaws in the commonly accepted narrative. This alone makes the book a must read, even if you'll need a bit of willpower to push through some lulls along the way! While a major chunk is at best speculation, direct connections not being completely drawn, stopping one step short of groundbreaking reporting, the material provides fodder for the next generation of writers and reporters to come in and finish the work. This is the true value of Chaos: bridging 70's research with that of today's resources so that someone can then pick up the mantle and see where it all leads.

What an eye-opening and important book! It's nice to know there are still some real journalists out there.Anyone who hasn't seen the Netflix adaptation of this book - don't bother!!What should have been a limited series was a quick, barely hour and a half film that refused to look into anything Tom O'Niell researched or questioned. They pulled in Vincent Bugliosi's partner prosecutor, who got to talk more than Tom did and was not asked and made to look like a fool like Tom was either. You could see the bias of netflix - there's a reason they have barely touched the Manson murders with any series. Plus I could have gone my whole life without hearing Manson's music. They focused more on that than going through the fascinating research that Tom O'Neill did.

I read it from cover to cover in one sitting! I couldn't put it down! Truly fascinating! What we've been told is disheartening. It's a much more sordid story. The lengths the establishment went to protect this guy are unfathomable! Clearly he was being used for other purposes. Eye opening read!

As O'Neill was writing about the Manson murders for a 30th anniversary piece for a magazine, he kept finding information that led to another issue and iine of inquiry. First he shows all the inconsistencies in the Helter Skelter motive, as described in the standard source book of the same name. And he shows how Manson and his sick followers were given inexplicably lenient treatment from the authorities before the murders.Then he details how Manson and his followers frequented a health clinic in San Francisco that received some funding from a CIA front organization. He goes on to show that a notorious doctor who was a leading expert on brainwashing/thought control for the CIA was also associated with the same clinic, and was there to study, among other things, LSD's efficacy on brainwashing.What it looked like is that the Manson gang were test subjects - or human lab rats. Connect the dots from the lax treatment pre-murders to the Feds.The author can't definitively prove this thesis, but he lays out all the evidence he was able to find, and leaves it to the reader to decide. (Which is a lot better than others who make claims far beyond their supporting evidence).The book is a great source of info, and will spur further interest in the subject. The murders themselves happened pretty much like Helter Skelter and the newspapers described - a bunch of unbelievably depraved, drugged out hippies under the control of Manson really did kill those people in cold blood on his orders. But the backstory goes a lot deeper and more complex.