Nixon Now Looks Restrained

"A thousand miles away, at the Federal Building in Denver, President Richard Nixon was attending a conference on crime control for federal and state officials. Nixon, with Attorney General John Mitchell standing at his side, worried aloud that the Administration's "batting average" in convincing Congress to enact crime legislation had been "very poor." He mentioned that he had just watched "Chisum," a new John Wayne movie, and mused about why Westerns were so appealing."

""Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason," he said. (One murder was tried separately.) "Here is a man yet who, as far as the coverage was concerned, appeared to be a rather glamorous figure, a glamorous figure to the young people who he had brought into his operations." Chaos ensued. The sitting President had done something that then seemed an unthinkable breach of ethics: he had opined on the guilt of a criminal defendant."

On August 3, 1970, prosecutors in Los Angeles were in the second week of presenting the murder case against Charles Manson and three women accused in the Tate and other killings. President Richard Nixon attended a crime-control conference in Denver and expressed frustration with the Administration's poor success in passing crime legislation. Nixon commented that Westerns are appealing because the good guys win, then criticized press coverage that seemed to glamorize Manson and make criminals into heroes for young people. Nixon declared Manson guilty of multiple murders, provoking chaos and rapid dissemination of the remarks across national wire services.

Read at The New Yorker