Charles Manson was born on this date in 1934. As the leader of a small cult of personality in southern California in the late 1960s, Manson became an American icon of psychopathy during a series of unapologetic courtroom antics while on trial with his followers for two shocking mass-murders. (Adding to his notoriety, Manson's acolyte Squeaky Fromme was later jailed for attempting, ineptly, to assassinate President Gerald Ford for no particular reason in 1975.)
Manson had taught his Family about a coming "Helter-Skelter" (misspelled, in blood, as "Healter-Skelter" by Tex Watkins on the refrigerator of victim Sharon Tate). This apocalyptic race war, named after a Beatles song, was supposed to be triggered by an album Manson would record with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, which would lure sexually-liberated white women away from the Haight-Ashbury and down to Death Valley where Manson held court. The exodus of white women would so infuriate the black men who had been having sex with them, that a worldwide race war would erupt whose only white survivors would be the Manson Family, hiding in an underground city beneath Death Valley whose existence Manson postulated. Presuming the inferiority of nonwhites, Manson claimed his Family could go on to rule the world after other white people had been destroyed.
When this album of Manson's began failing to work out (he had actually done a small amount of recording with Dennis Wilson), he ordered the Tate and LaBianca murders on August 8 and 9, 1969. Attempting crudely to make the murders look like the work of blacks, Manson believed these atrocities would ignite his hoped-for race war. Manson and his followers were arrested 14 weeks later, on December 1.
As a note, Manson generally denies he ever claimed any of the above, insisting his race-war theories were invented by Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi. However, Manson's rambling diatribes (for instance with talk-show host Tom Snyder) are so lacking in an alternate explanation of the Family's activities - not to mention the fact that Manson is cheekily evasive and pseudo-wise to a point of outright incoherency - that if anything, his antics lend Bugliosi's account more plausibility.
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After a series of failed predictions of the world's end - including forecasts going back to the 19th century, as well as for 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975, 1984, and 1994 - the Jehovah's Witnesses announced on this date in 1995 their new lack of expectation that the apocalypse was particularly near.
