Happily Hippie-American

The Infamous Case of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald: 

“The Ballad of the Green Berets” Meets “Helter Skelter”? 

“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,1 the story is being revisited. For many, the case has become an emblem of culture wars: wicked Hippies attacking decent, patriotic Americans. But not only does MacDonald almost certainly belong in jail, the im­plication of an America under siege by a violent Counterculture is ugly propaganda. 

CBS’s 48 Hours Mystery tells us, “[T]he 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 shock and counterculture rage in America,’” explains MacDonald’s former attorney—this juxtaposed with an image of a Hippie protestor throwing a tear-gas canister at police2(“Jeffrey MacDonald”). 

No, it wasn’t the War in Vietnam, race riots or the nuclear Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads that was keeping the nation “far from perfect”; it was those crazy, violent hippies!—“Oh! Why won’t they just let decent, God-fearing Americans live in peace?!” 

The storyline is straight out of Al Capp’s hateful comic strip L’il Ab­ner where Hippie protestors brutalize campus administrators (166-69), right out of Forrest Gump where at one point a female Hippie protes­tor, truncheon in hand, menaces 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” (Gaffney). It’s a world steeped in the myth of Hippie protestors spitting on returning Vietnam veterans. It’s the silly, self-serving fantasy world of neoconservative bigotry.

And MacDonald is almost certainly a liar. A major problem in his MacDonald is al­most certainly a liar. A major problem in his story is the LSD/“acid” claim. story is the LSD/“acid” claim. “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 probably the most arduous thing a human being can do—adrenaline pumping, people savagely fighting for their lives. LSD is not known as a performance enhancer; tripping is usually incompatible with ice-pick-wielding murder.3 

As a nation, we tend to be ignorant and misinformed about LSD, and we’ve been trained by the War on Drugs and the mainstream me­dia to stereotype LSD users;4 this stereotype, in turn, has become part of a larger stereotype of Hippies as a whole. As such, some Americans have gone from seeing the Counterculture as a peace-and-love com­munity to seeing it as a maniacal cult of psychopathic killers; some, apparently, fear “crazy hippies on drugs” 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 Martin 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 . . .” (241). 

Speed—now that makes sense. Developed by Nazi scientists to supercharge Hitler’s wehrmacht as it surged across Europe, amphet­amines are the killer’s drug of choice. 

But if LSD wasn’t involved in the Manson murders, and if an LSD high generally isn’t conducive to a coordinated attack involving hand-to-hand combat, why would those Hippies said to have slaughtered MacDonald’s family have been chanting “Acid is groovy”? If Mac­Donald had claimed they were chanting, “Speed is groovy!” his story would be more plausible.5

Most likely, in a shameless appeal to hysteria about Hippies, a pan­icked, post-bloodbath MacDonald made his Manson-copycats story up on the fly. It wouldn’t be the first or last time a desperate murderer tried to blame an outgroup. And that erroneous assumption about the Manson murderers being on LSD was in a story in a blood-smudged copy of Esquire found at the MacDonald crime scene (Wikipedia, “Jef­frey R. MacDonald”). 

Thankfully, MacDonald’s parole has been repeatedly denied. What’s odd is that—given the obvious and serious problems in Mac­Donald’s story, given that the courts have consistently upheld Mac­Donald’s conviction—the myth of MacDonald’s innocence and mar­tyrdom persists. 

Many, I suspect, are determined to see him as a hero because it validates their warped perception of the world: Jeffrey MacDonald as a virtual Christ figure who’s been cruelly victimized by a “permissive” society that let the Hippie killers get away while irrationally persecut­ing a noble Green Beret: “Mom, the military, apple pie—all that’s good and decent in America crucified on the broken, inverted cross of the Counterculture!” 

1 The CBS story I’m about to mention (“Jeffrey MacDonald: Time For Truth—Convicted Murderer Says New Evidence Will Exonerate Him”) aired November 6th, 2006; at that time, MacDonald had a pa­role hearing coming up; indeed, the news story might be thought of as an attempt to influence the parole board.

2 What’s strange here is that the “hippie protestor” is throwing the tear-gas canister back at the police, but CBS wouldn’t think of describ­ing that time as one of “police rage” or “conservative rage.” 

3 In a possible exception to this rule, there was an incident in Boul­der in July 2015 where a man on LSD flipped out, grabbed a hammer and became violent, but the details of this incident would seem to undercut the MacDonald story: the guy was stark naked and out of his head—hardly in a position to coordinate any kind of sustained and murderous attack, particularly with others in a similar state (Stanley). 

4 One way to combat this stereotype is to remind people that the great Steve Jobs used LSD—didn’t regret it either. 

5 This, I believe, is a new argument regarding a significant flaw in MacDonald’s defense.