#068 - She Harvey Oswald pt. 4: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Aryan Brotherhood (Side A)

We are back with another installment of our ongoing series about the two women who were convicted of attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford in September 1975.  Picking things up where we left off, we continue our focus on the first of these two ladies who shot their shot at Jerry, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme.  You will recall that Fromme emerged from the hippie counterculture of the 1960s, and more specifically, the so-called “Manson family.” As we’ve laid it out, it’s less of a cult than a criminal enterprise with hippie branding. And like any good American criminal enterprise, it has its ties to the intelligence services as well.

When we last left off Charlie Manson and several of his “Manson Girls” had been sentenced to death (of course, none of them were ever executed due to an intervening Supreme Court decision placing a moratorium on the death penalty).  Fromme and the Manson Girls who were not connected to the Tate and Labianca murders had shaved her heads in solidarity, etched Xs in their forheads, and were doing all they could to further Charlie’s message and help Charlie from the outside. Including by “taking care” of the Aryan Brotherhood members who agreed to protect Charlie in prison…

We will pick things up in the early days of the 1970s, with Fromme still living in L.A. alongside some of the other free Manson Girls. Meanwhile, Charlie, ever the schemer, was doing everything he could to get himself out of jail, and that included making a pact with the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.  What this meant for Fromme was that she and the other Manson Girls were left to bunk with the Aryan Brotherhood gang members who were on the outside while the whole group planned and attempted several botched prison escapes for Charlie.  

What it also meant is that Fromme had effectively swapped out the hippie free love vibes that she was immersed in the late 1960s for a much more brutish and violent culture espoused by the white supremecist Aryan Brotherhood.  And so we spend much of this episode examining whether Fromme, who willingly shacked up and rubbed elbows with the Aryan Brothers, was going along with them wholly ignorant of the violence the Aryan Brotherhood left in its wake, or if she was much more attuned to what was going on than she would have you believe? 

Beyond the facts, we spend a good deal of time discussing the white apologetics of Americans of the baby boom generation and how well buried is the bloody and disgusting history of the highest echelons of power adopting essentially Nazi views on race and White Supremacy.  

There is a lot of content in this one, so we are splitting it up into two parter.  Catch Side A for free, and subscribe to Patreon today to listen to the whole thing now!