The New Yorker:

The former President once made an offhand remark about Charles Manson’s guilt. The reaction shows how aberrant Donald Trump’s rhetoric is.

By Ruth Marcus

On August 3, 1970, prosecutors in Los Angeles were in the second week of presenting their murder case against Charles Manson and three young women accused of killing the actress Sharon Tate and six others. 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. “One of the reasons is, perhaps—and this may be a square observation—is that the good guys come out ahead in the Westerns; the bad guys lose,” Nixon suggested.

Then Nixon shifted to the Manson trial, and what he believed was a contrary tendency, especially among the young, to “glorify and to make heroes out of those who engage in criminal activities.” That attitude, Nixon lamented, had been on display in the front-page coverage of Manson. “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. As Jeff Guinn described it in “Manson,” his 2013 biography, “Within moments, Nixon’s remarks flashed across national wire services.” The jury for the Manson trial was sequestered and prohibited from reading newspapers or watching TV news, Guinn explained, “so prosecutors felt reasonably certain that the jurors wouldn’t immediately learn what the president said.” That didn’t stop defense lawyers from demanding a mistrial; surely, they argued, jurors would see the front-page headlines: “manson guilty, nixon declares,” blared the Los Angeles Times; “nixon’s tate trial furor,” said the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Ronald Hughes, a lawyer for one of the women accused alongside Manson, said, “When the President of the United States finds it necessary to comment on the guilt or innocence of a defendant, it indicates that defendant is past the point of getting a fair trial.” (The judge overseeing the case said that he saw no basis for declaring a mistrial.)

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