Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the
City of Love, by David Talbot, Free Press, 452 pages,
$28

David Talbot discovered San Francisco in a literal Hollywood
idyll. “Setting out from the Saint Francis Hotel,” he writes of
visiting the city during 1960s show-biz trips with his movie-star
father, “my siblings and I would trek the wind-whipped hills,
wander through Chinatown and North Beach, and take the ferryboat to
Sausalito. I knew—listening to some older, long-haired teenagers
dressed like Moroccan tribesmen, as they played guitars and flutes
in a Sausalito square—that I would make San Francisco my home one
day.”

Talbot didn’t just move to San Francisco. He conquered the town,
rising to the top of San Francisco−inflected media (a senior editor
gig at Mother Jones, assignments for Rolling
Stone, and a stint as the Examiner’s features
editor). Then in 1995 Talbot led a ragtag band of Examiner
refugees in forming the online magazine Salon, and the
rest was decidedly not history. Salon has charted a
harrowing course through countless iterations (its original URL was
the instantly dated “Salon1999.com”) and cutbacks, annual
predictions of impending death, a long-forgotten “Dutch auction”
IPO, all manner of journalistic controversy, and nearly two decades
of ever-more-vertiginous economic boom and bust. Yet after 17
years—several lifetimes in old media, let alone new
media—Salon is still in business.

Because I have buried more dot-coms than the Grateful Dead have
buried keyboardists, and because Salon not only survived
but graduated a generation of leading journalists, I consider
Talbot both an eminent San Franciscan and a great American. Our
dealings have been cordial but not extensive. In fact, before this
book I assumed Talbot had been born to the San Francisco
aristocracy, figuring he was somehow connected to the Talbot-Dutton
House, a landmarked Italianate townhouse in Pacific Heights.

Season of the Witch, instead, is an adopted son’s
“bloody valentine” to the jeweled City by the Bay, covering the
years from 1967 to 1982. Like many who have fallen for San
Francisco’s charms (this writer included), Talbot remembers what a
paradise the place seemed at first and wonders where it all went
wrong. He argues plausibly that this particular decade-and-a-half
was one of the hairiest, scariest, Dirty Harry–est periods
in the long and often grim history of American cities.

The three sections of Talbot’s
account are titled “Enchantment,” “Terror,” and “Deliverance.” The
“Terror” section is nearly twice as long as the other two combined,
and it covers the city’s descent into chaos in the period after the
January 1967 Human Be-In and the Summer of Love six months later.
In Talbot’s telling, the period after the original hippie bloom was
both a time of transformation and a parade of horribles, from
bombing campaigns to wars against the police to the dawn of
AIDS.

Lest any San Francisco skeptics doubt the city’s ability to
punch above its weight in both culture and mayhem, consider just a
few players from Talbot’s large cast: tragic lady blue Janis
Joplin; Manson family murderer Susan Atkins; Symbionese Liberation
Army guerilla and Patty Hearst kidnapper Cinque, as well as the
heiress Hearst herself; self-styled prison revolutionary George
Jackson; pioneering Chinatown activist Rose Pak; Grateful Dead
front man Jerry Garcia; early AIDS chronicler Randy Shilts; cult
leader and Guyana mass-suicide impresario Jim Jones; murdered
politicians Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, as
well as their assassin, Supervisor Dan White; idiot-savant Dead
Kennedys singer Jello Biafra; a cell of “Death Angels” affiliated
with a Fillmore Street Nation of Islam mosque that murdered 14
people and nearly killed future mayor Art Agnos in the
then-infamous but now little-known “Zebra” racial attacks; the
Altamont-era Rolling Stones and Hells Angels; miracle-working 49ers
coach Bill Walsh; urbane fiction writer Armistead Maupin; seemingly
immortal career politician Dianne Feinstein; and, of course, the
Jefferson Airplane. (Talbot mercifully elides the band’s “Jefferson
Starship” transfiguration of the early 1970s.)

This is the story of a god that failed, and the god is
progressive utopianism. Talbot is relentlessly progressive, but he
embraces the dystopia with gusto, even when that means resorting to
right-wing fire and brimstone. As you read, it becomes clear that
the witch of the title is not just a throwaway journalistic cliché.
Talbot uses demonological terms throughout, referring to the work
of “Lucifer” in a chapter title and throughout the text. He calls
HIV/AIDS a “demon virus” and joins in the tabloid/populist outrage
at the violent crime that engulfed the city in the ’70s.

This being San Francisco, the outrage in most cases must be
directed at career leftists. Talbot describes a December 1973
evening: Two San Francisco Police Department detectives visit
mayor-to-be Agnos in his hospital bed after he has been shot.
Whispering in Greek, they inform Agnos of their theory that his
attacker belongs to a team of four black men who are randomly
killing nonblacks all over San Francisco. Talbot limns the response
of Agnos, who will go on to win 70 percent of the vote in a mayoral
race in 1987: “Ever the good liberal, he immediately thought that
they were overplaying the race angle. ‘You cops are all the same,’
he told them.”

The Zebra case ends up taking much longer to crack than it
should, in part because of the cops’ clumsy policy of stopping all
black males (except, in Chief Donald Scott’s words, “very young
blacks or big, fat blacks”), but also because the police
department, in a city that boasts its own “civil rights
commission,” is subject to severe restrictions. One detective comes
to suspect that the department, which has failed to infiltrate the
mosque on Fillmore, has itself been infiltrated by Nation of Islam
faithful.

Jim Jones, the socialist potentate of the Peoples Temple
(located adjacent to the Nation of Islam mosque), had better luck
embedding followers in San Francisco’s power structure. District
Attorney Joseph Freitas hired Jones’ top lawyer to work in his
office. When Peoples Temple defectors began asking for an
investigation of the cult, Freitas assigned the Jones mole to the
case. Feinstein, Milk, Moscone, and future mayor Willie Brown all
supported Jones even after he and his followers fled to the jungles
of Guyana.

Talbot devotes nearly 50 pages—more if you count a chapter on
Moscone’s victory over conservative John Barbagelata in the 1975
mayoral race, which was achieved with massive vote fraud by Jones
followers—to the Peoples Temple. Giving so much attention to the
very familiar Jonestown massacre (which contributed the catchphrase
drinking the Kool-Aid to our language) seems at first like
a misstep, but Talbot finds a trove of outrages by the city’s New
Left leadership. “Moscone and San Francisco’s liberal leadership
had aided and abetted Jones’ reign of ‘horror, inhumanity, and
bizarre brutalities,’” Talbot writes. “And the press immediately
clamored for an explanation.”

The press, however, had itself been taken for a ride by the
Jones cult. San Francisco Chronicle City Editor Steve
Gavin, an occasional Peoples Temple worshipper, ran a puff piece on
Jones and quashed an investigative piece. Kevin Starr, then an
editor at New West magazine, now the pre-eminent historian
of California, killed another critical look at the Jones cult.

But nobody’s involvement with Jim Jones was less excusable than
Harvey Milk’s. The gay political icon was a regular congregant at
the Peoples Temple even while warning his own staffers about the
bizarre cult. The gold-tongued Willie Brown merely praised Jones as
“a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein [and]
Chairman Mao,” but Milk leaned on the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare to forward Social Security checks to the
Temple’s “beautiful retirement community in Guyana, the type of
which people of means would pay thousands of dollars to patronize.”
When a couple of high-level Temple defectors tried to get their
6-year-old son out of Jones’ custody in Guyana, Milk wrote to
President Jimmy Carter, urging him not to support the parents and
claiming that the child had “loving protective parents in Rev. and
Mrs. Jones.” The child ended up among the 909 dead at
Jonestown.

In 128 minutes of screen time, Gus Van Sant’s Sean Penn vehicle
Milk, for which Dustin Lance Black won a Best Screenplay
Oscar, finds no room for any of this. But Talbot barrels through it
with evil glee, and his stubborn support for the New Left
revolution sharpens rather than dulls his attack.

There is very little not to like in Season of the
Witch. I might have asked for more attention to the role that
redevelopment honcho Justin Herman and his destruction of the
Fillmore District played in the great coming apart. I was saddened
to see only one mention of maverick one-eyed Ramparts
editor Warren Hinckle. But these are minor quibbles in a book where
even the sportswriting is top-notch: Talbot argues that Eddy
DeBartolo’s Niners helped bind up the city’s wounds, with Super
Bowl XVI putting a cheerful coda on the New Left’s Jacobin
terror.

The prim, rich, self-satisfied San Francisco I got to know from
the mid-’90s through the mid-2000s is barely recognizable in
Talbot’s book. Baghdad by the Bay is now a far-left boutique city
run by limousine liberals who ban Happy Meals and circumcision.
Safe and scenic, with small (by California standards) black and
Latino minorities, San Francisco is no longer the main population
center even of Northern California. (Fast-growing San Jose took
that title in the 1990s.) Yet the city’s mix—of weed and wealth,
one-party rule and good-government sanctimony, social laissez-faire
and voluminous regulation, health fascism and the best bars in
America—is built on contradictions. Season of the Witch is
a bracing reminder that even one of the brightest spots of Western
civilization is always just a few inches from anarchy.