"Acid is groovy, kill the pigs!"--so the former Green Beret doctor Jeffrey MacDonald claims drug-crazed hippies chanted as they assaulted him and murdered his wife and two daughters. The killings occurred in 1970, but given a new parole hearing for a convicted MacDonald, the story is being revisited. For many, the case has become an emblem of culture wars: wicked hippies attacking innocent, patriotic, upstanding Americans. But MacDonald's conviction seems sound, and the claim that America is under siege by a violent counterculture is ugly propaganda.

CBS's 48 Hours Mystery tells us " . . . the MacDonalds were well on their way to a seemingly perfect life. But in 1970, life in America was far from perfect. 'This was an era of . . . counterculture rage in America’ . . . " -- this juxtaposed with an image of a hippie protestor throwing a tear-gas canister back at police.

The storyline is straight out of Al Capp's hateful comic strip L'il Abner where hippie protestors brutalize campus administrators, right out of Forrest Gump where at one point a female hippie protestor, truncheon in hand, chases a fleeing policeman. It's the world of the rightist Washington Times where Jimi Hendrix's rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" is called an "assault on the national anthem." It's a world steeped in the myth of hippie protestors spitting on returning Vietnam veterans. It's a fantasy world.

Among other things, the rub in MacDonald's story is LSD. I've had some experience with the drug: I never enjoyed "tripping": it was physically uncomfortable, and the hangover was like the aftermath of a tropical storm. Still, I've also known people who do enjoy LSD. Thing is, though on occasion I've seen people on LSD anxious, I've never seen anyone on it crazed to kill or even angry. "Trippers" seek a psychedelic experience. That might mean everything from attempting to "see God" to watching pink mushrooms grow out of the carpet, but it usually means a peaceful setting.

Now, hand-to-hand combat is arduous--adrenaline pumping, people fighting for their lives. LSD is not a physical performance enhancer; so, tripping is incompatible with knife-wielding murder.

The "acidheads" I knew, incidentally, weren't burnouts. They were often future professionals, med students who would trip on Friday nights, hit the books on Sunday. Usually, they were very smart; even when doing LSD, they could, if they choose, be relatively coherent. They weren’t out of their minds. In his Can't Find My Way Home, Martin Torgoff mentions a man who took his GREs under the influence "finished a half hour early and scored tremendously well."

The point here isn't to promote LSD; it's that as a nation, we tend to be ignorant and misinformed about LSD, that we stereotype LSD users; this stereotype, in turn, has become part of a larger stereotype of hippies as a whole. Much of the nation has gone from seeing the counterculture as a peace-and-love community to seeing it as a maniacal cult of psychopathic killers; many have a visceral fear of “crazed hippies” high on LSD coming to butcher them and their families.

Okay, what about the Manson family murders? They were hippies high on acid, right? Well, actually not. Countercultural author Ed Sanders researched and wrote The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion. As Torgoff writes, "Sanders discovered that speed--the cold, hard drug of the Nazi blitzkrieg--and not LSD had been the killers' drug of choice on the night of the murders . . . "

Speed--now that makes sense. Developed by Nazi scientists to supercharge Hitler's wehrmacht, amphetamines are the killer's drug of choice.

So, if LSD wasn't present in the Manson murders, and if an LSD high isn't conducive to hand-to-hand combat, why would those hippies said to have slaughtered MacDonald's family have been chanting, "Acid is groovy"?

An answer, of course, would be that in a shameless appeal to hysteria about hippies, MacDonald made the story up. It wouldn't be the first or last time a murderer tried to blame an ethnic or racial outgroup; in Boston in 1989, for instance, Charles Stuart, a Caucasian, killed his wife and blamed it on an African-American. Also, a blood-smudged copy of Esquire carrying a story about the Manson-family murders was found at the MacDonald crime scene; the media often linked those murders to LSD use; so, this Esquire was likely MacDonald's "inspiration."*

Thankfully, MacDonald's parole was again denied. Hippie-haters see him as a martyr largely because it validates their warped perception of the world: Mom, the military, apple pie--all that's good and decent in America crucified on the broken cross of the counterculture. But the MacDonalds were no more attacked by marauding hippies than America itself has been victimized by a violent counterculture. We are not the enemy.

 

FN--The following is from Joe McGinniss’ book Fatal Vision:

xxxxx. . . Harrison [a Green Beret and close friend of MacDonald] explained that Jeffrey MacDonald had just received the new issue of Esquire magazine in the mail. It was the March 1970 issue. There was a picture of Lee Marvin on the cover, and next to it the caption: "Evil Lurks in California--Lee Marvin is Afraid."
xxxxxAlmost the entire issue was devoted to articles about witchcraft cults and drug orgies and violence in California. Among the stories to which MacDonald had specifically called Harrison’s attention--saying, "Hey, Ron, you’ve got to take a look at this, it’s really wild"--had been one which described how an "acid queen" with long blond hair, attended by a "retinue of four," had consummated a candlelit LSD orgy by copulating with a black swan.
xxxxxAnother story dealt with the murder of Sharon Tate by members of the Charles Manson cult.
xxxxxMention was made of the fact that Tate had been pregnant when she was killed [so was MacDonald’s wife], and that the word PIG had been written in her blood on the headboard of her bed [as also happened in the MacDonald case]. (54)