She Harvey Oswald 3: Sex and the Spectacle

We are back with another installment of our ongoing miniseries about the two women who pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford in the fateful month of September 1975.  This week we continue our exploration into the life and times of the first of these two, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. One of our goals with this miniseries has been to trace the events and experiences that ultimately led these women to their actions, and weaving their lives and would-be assassinations into our larger narrative of the integrated spectacle.  As for Squeaky, we started out by setting the scene of her dystopian suburban upbringing in the 1950s and 60s.  Her father worked for weapons manufacturer, Northrop Aircraft, and was a weird guy to say the least.  He was abusive to Squeaky and the rest of his family (as well as anyone around them).  The tension that this created in the house led to regular blowout fights which ultimately led Fromme into the arms of Mr. Helter Skelter himself, Charles Manson.  When we left off last, Squeaky, Charlie, and the fledgling flock of Mansonites were living a nomadic life, traveling to various parks and remote wilderness locations, as well as cities and towns throughout the American West, as their “family” grew. In this episode we link up with Squeaky as the Manson family gives up the nomadic life and takes up residence in LA, first at Beach Boy Dennis Wilson’s estate, and later at the Spahn movie ranch in Hollywood. We discuss Squeaky’s unsettling role in the family’s sexual grooming of teenagers, and her later role as caretaker for the elderly George Spahn, pondering the parallels between Charles Manson and Jeffrey Epstein, and between Squeaky and Ghislaine Maxwell.  Finally, we will discuss how Squeaky - who claimed she never saw anyone kill anything in her life - lived through, processed, and pontificated about the family’s various homicides and highly spectacular trials therefore. Buckle up because this magical mystery tour is heading in some dark directions.