Charles Manson died this past week at the age of eighty-three.
He was the leader of a cult called the Manson family in California during the latter half of the 1960’s.
On August 9th and 10th in 1969, he and some of his followers slaughtered seven innocent people in two homes in Los Angeles.
The ostensible reason Manson gave for the murders was to provoke a race war from which his “family” would survive and lead the victorious African-Americans because they would be unable to govern themselves.
All of the participants were convicted of the murders they committed and were sentenced to death.
When California did away with the death penalty the sentences were changed to life imprisonment and they became parole eligible.
Manson was denied parole a dozen times and died in prison.
As the news of Manson’s impending death was reported, I hoped that he would not be the subject of an extensive obituary by the New York Times.
I am a daily reader of the Times. I view it as America’s newspaper of record and trust the accuracy of the facts it reports.
My feeling was and is that while the news of his death merited being reported, an extensive recounting of his life in an obituary did not.
Bruce Weber, who retired from the New York Times last year, described the process for how a New York Times obituary is decided and written.
He reported that the decision whether to write an obituary was an editorial one made at the highest level of the newspaper.
The decision, the research and writing often occur long before the subject’s death.
Sometimes, the subject of the future obituary is contacted for an interview about their life and it has led to the occasional inquiry by the subject about whether an obituary is being prepared.
Weber reported that often, when family and friends are contacted after a death, they perceive that an obituary in the New York Times is a kind of honor and “is going to give validity to the person they lost.”
In the course of his eight year stint writing obituaries, Weber reported that only a dozen of his may have ran on the front page.
Thus the placement on the front page of the New York Times is an additional “honor” above and beyond the obituary itself.
I therefore, was singularly disappointed to pick up the Thursday, November 21st edition of the New York Times and see a front page obituary of Charles Manson.
The author of the piece was Margalit Fox, whose biography disclosed she was under the age of ten when Manson and his fellow murderers went on their homicidal rampage.
Perhaps because she was too young to have appreciated the gruesome horror of the crimes and what was revealed in the trials that followed, she went in search of meaning in Manson’s life.
She posited Manson as an “enigma,” wondering whether he was “a paranoid schizophrenic,” or a “sociopath devoid of human feeling” or “a charismatic guru as his followers once believed and his fans still do?”
To be fair, she also offered whether “…was he simply flotsam, a man whose life, The New York Times wrote in 1970 stands as a monument to parental neglect and the future of the public correctional system?”
Ms. Fox credited him with actually “espousing a philosophy that was idiosyncratic mix of scientology, hippie anti-authoritarianism, Beatles lyrics, the Book of Revelation and the writings of Hitler.”
Anyone who has ever watched or listened to the ravings of Charles Manson during an interview, knows that Ms. Fox owes an apology to philosophers everywhere.
Additional space was allotted to describing Manson’s musical talent in singing and songwriting despite the fact that the scene of the first night’s murders was chosen because the record producer, Terry Melcher, who had found Manson’s talent lacking, lived there.
The New York Times has memorialized many deserving figures in death through its penetrating and detailed recounting of their lives.
Almost all of them have made significant contributions to the world in whatever field they endeavored.
I can’t help but feel that devoting almost two full pages, beginning on the front page, to Charles Manson by portraying him as some kind of cultural icon, cheapens that recognition.
If the Times felt compelled to sum up Manson’s passing rather than simply report his death, they could have done it in five short words.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.