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.)
For their part, Administration officials scrambled to walk back the gaffe. As the New York Times described the events, minutes after “the assembled newsmen rushed to file their reports,” the White House press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, summoned them to a damage-control session. The President, Ziegler insisted, had intended to use the word “alleged”; he hadn’t meant to express a view on Manson’s guilt or innocence. Mitchell, the Attorney General, weighed in, asserting that Nixon had not “made a charge or implied one.” The President, en route back to Washington, had Mitchell and the White House counsel, John Ehrlichman, draft a statement backing down even further. “We had quite a time on Air Force One trying to work out a correction,” Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, wrote in a diary entry. The plane circled while the President’s men hashed out the language. “The last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstances,” Nixon’s statement read. “To set the record straight, I do not know and did not intend to speculate as to whether the Tate defendants are guilty, in fact, or not. All of the facts in the case have not yet been presented. The defendants should be presumed to be innocent at this stage of their trial.”