Charles Manson Wrote Him a Letter: Ed Sanders, 87, on the Fugs

Ed Sanders is 87 and still savouring a death-haunted piece of correspondence. "Charles Manson once wrote me a letter saying, 'If I was as powerful as you claim then you wouldn't be here,'" Sanders told the Guardian in a rare video-call interview, repeating the cult leader's words with evident relish.

The interview coincides with the release of a new documentary about the Fugs, the band Sanders co-founded and led through the heart of the American counterculture.

Who is Ed Sanders?

Sanders is a musician, poet, activist, journalist and author — a self-described American maverick whose career intersected with nearly every major figure of the 1960s underground. His greatest commercial success remains the 1971 bestseller The Family, which chronicled the lives, crimes and trials of Charles Manson and his followers.

The book positioned Sanders as an authority on the era's darker currents. He was, by his own account, unusually well placed to report on what he calls crazed hippies, having played a pivotal role in launching the US counterculture himself.

The distinction matters to him. Sanders espoused peace, love and consciousness-raising — not Manson's apocalyptic worldview.

What did the Fugs actually do?

According to the Guardian's account of his career, the list of exploits is short but startling:

• He gave Jimi Hendrix his gear
• He freaked out Frank Sinatra
• He inspired Norman Mailer
• With the Fugs, he tried to topple the American war machine — including the famously attempted levitation of the Pentagon

The band's stunts blended avant-garde theatre with political protest, a combination that made the Fugs a reference point for the era's absurdist radicalism.

The Guardian's headline frames the attempt to levitate the Pentagon as part of "the almost unbelievable life" of a man it calls the trickster god of the US counterculture.

Why does The Family still matter?

Published in 1971, The Family remains Sanders's bestselling work and a foundational text of true-crime reporting on the Manson murders. Its authority derived partly from proximity: Sanders had spent years inside the counterculture that produced both the Fugs and, at its violent fringe, the Manson family.

The Manson letter, arriving after the book's success, underscores the uneasy relationship between the two strands. Sanders chose to read it as confirmation of reach rather than threat, recounting it half a century later with a storyteller's timing.

What comes next?

The new documentary on the Fugs will introduce Sanders's exploits to audiences too young to have witnessed the Pentagon stunt. At 87, he remains the last word on an era he helped invent — and, as Manson's letter suggests, one whose consequences he survived to narrate.