-Caveat Lector-
STRANGE SAGA OF THE SLA & THE PATTY HEARST KIDNAPPING
San Francisco Bay Guardian, June 30, 1999
Copyright (c) 1999 San Francisco Bay Guardian
"The SLA demanded that the [right-wing] Hearst Corporation
[distribute FREE FOOD for the poor] as one condition for their
release of Patty Hearst, kidnapped heir [to the Hearst millions].
Hearst agreed and threw together an effort that, by February 22,
1974, made its first "distribution," limited to San Francisco.
"It was a disorganized disaster. Scores of people were
injured as panicked workers threw boxes of food off moving trucks
at an unexpectedly huge crowd of people showing up for the food.
"The size of the crowds -- about 2000 people [including
scores of RICH people in disguise] -- shocked the media and so
angered California governor Ronald Reagan that he blurted out:
'It's too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism.'"
"Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the 'Symbionese Liberation
Army' (SLA), her 'brainwashing' and subsequent defection, the
group's overblown, swaggering communiques, the silly nicknames
chosen by its members, and the sheer drama of it all were great
entertainment in 1974.
"But no matter what you thought about the SLA, it was
gut-wrenching to watch grinning LA cops turn South Central into
Vietnam for a day, incinerating six SLA members in the process.
"Don't fuck with [the Establishment]" was the obvious
message, delivered in prime time ... "
___________________________________________________
THE STRANGE SAGA OF THE PATTY HEARST KIDNAPPING
by Paul Krassner
In February 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the
Symbionese Liberation Army, led by Donald "Cinque" DeFreeze. One
of its demands was a free-food program. Patty's father, Randolph
Hearst, publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, arranged for
such a project. Gov. Ronald Reagan commented on the long line of
people waiting for free food, saying he hoped they'd all get
botulism. Patty was kept in a closet, became a member of the SLA,
changed her name to Tania, adopted radical rhetoric, robbed a
bank, and went on the lam, becoming a vehicle for repressive
action on the right and wishful thinking on the left.
She was captured in San Francisco after 18 months. She was
so surprised that she peed in her pants, but that was only
reported in the Chronicle, not the Examiner. She was permitted to
change in the bathroom. The FBI inventory of her possessions did
not include "pants, wet, one pair," but there was on the FBI list
a two-foot marijuana plant (as compared with almost a pound of
pot not reported that the FBI found at the apartment from which
she had been kidnapped). There was also a bottle of Gallo wine in
the SLA safe house, not exactly a loyal gesture to the United
Farm Workers it purported to support. And there was an
unidentified "rock" found in Patty's purse.
Originally she was to be defended by Vincent Hallinan and
his son, Terence, who visited her in jail. As Tania she had
called Vincent a "clown" in a taped communique; now as Patty she
said of Terence, "He's good. Like, I really trust him politically
and personally, and I can tell him just about anything I want and
he's cool." It was, however, a relationship that would not be
permitted to mature.
When Patty described her physical reaction to having her
blindfold removed in captivity, Terence recognized a similarity
to reactions to LSD. Patty agreed that there had been something
reminiscent of her acid trips with her boyfriend, Steven Weed, in
the old Hearst mansion. Her defense was going to be involuntary
intoxication, a side effect of which is amnesia. So Patty would
neither have to snitch on others nor have to invoke the Fifth
Amendment for her own protection. In response to any questions
about that missing chunk of her life, she would assert, "I have
no recollection."
The Hallinans instructed her not to talk to anybody --
especially psychiatrists -- about that period. But her uncle,
William Randolph Hearst Jr., editor in chief of the Hearst
newspaper chain, flew in from the East Coast to warn his family
that the entire corporate image of the Hearst empire was at stake
and they'd better hire an establishment attorney, fast.
Enter F. Lee Bailey. He had defended a serial killer, the
Boston Strangler, and a war criminal, Capt. Harold Medina of My
Lai massacre infamy, but he would not defend Patty if she was a
revolutionary. You gotta have standards.
Bailey encouraged her to tell the psychiatrists everything
and not say, "I have no recollection." She could trust these
doctors, he assured her, and nothing she said could be used
against her in any way. Now her defense would be based on the
Stockholm Hostage Syndrome (when prisoners of war come to
identify with their captors). Patty had been kidnapped again.
At her trial in 1976, the philosophical paradox that has
long plagued students of human consciousness -- is there is or is
there ain't free will? -- was finally going to be decided by a
jury. In court, Patty's parents had to listen to a taped
communique, "Mom, Dad, I would like to comment on your efforts to
supposedly secure my safety. The [food] giveaway was a sham....
You were playing games -- stalling for time -- which the FBI was
using in their attempts to assassinate me and the SLA elements
which guarded me...."
At the end of the tape, DeFreeze came on with a triple death
threat, paying special attention to Colston Westbrook, whom he
accused of being "a government agent now working for military
intelligence while giving assistance to the FBI." From 1962 to
1969, Westbrook first was a CIA advisor to the South Korean CIA
and then supplied logistical support in Vietnam for the CIA's
Phoenix program. His job was the indoctrination of assassination
and terrorist cadres.
He returned to the United States in 1970 and was assigned by
prison authorities to run the Black Cultural Association at
Vacaville Prison, where he became the control officer for
DeFreeze, who had worked as an informer from 1967 to 1969 for the
Public Disorder Intelligence Unit of the Los Angeles Police
Department. If DeFreeze was a double agent, then the SLA was a
Frankenstein monster, turning against its creator by becoming in
reality what had been orchestrated only as a media image.
But when DeFreeze finked on his keepers, he signed the death
warrant of the SLA. In 1974 he and five others were burned alive
in a fire during a shoot-out with police at a Los Angeles safe
house. DeFreeze's charred remains were sent to his family in
Cleveland, and they couldn't help noticing that he had been
decapitated. It was as if the CIA had said, "Bring me the head of
Donald DeFreeze!"
Hearst testified that she had been raped in a closet by the
lover she had once described as "the gentlest, most beautiful man
I've ever known." Now, prosecutor James Browning was
cross-examining her.
"Did you, in fact, have a strong feeling for [SLA member]
Willie Wolfe?"
"In a way, yes."
"As a matter of fact, were you in love with him?"
"No."
A little later Browning asked if it had been "forcible
rape."
"Excuse me?"
"Did you struggle or submit?"
"I didn't resist. I was afraid."
Browning walked into her trap: "I thought you said you had
strong feelings for him?"
"I did," Patty replied triumphantly. "I couldn't stand him."
Wolfe had been slain in the L.A. shoot-out. His family
hired Lake Headley --an ex-police intelligence officer who was
chief investigator at Wounded Knee-- to find out what had really
happened. He and fellow researchers Donald Freed and Rusty
Rhodes concluded that the SLA was part of the CIA's CHAOS
program. In that context, they concluded that the CIA was
planning to kill Black Panther leader Huey Newton and succeeded
in killing black school superintendent Marcus Foster, after he
agreed to meet Panther demands for educational reforms.
Surviving SLA members Bill and Emily Harris let it be known
that, if called to testify, they would take the Fifth Amendment,
but Emily testified, in effect, via the media. After Patty told
the jury that Willie Wolfe had raped her, Emily was quoted in New
Times magazine: "Once, Willie gave her a stone relic in the shape
of a monkey face [and] Patty wore it all the time around her
neck. After the shoot-out, she stopped wearing it and carried it
in her purse instead, but she always had it with her."
Prosecutor Browning read this in the magazine and had an
aha! experience, remembering the "rock" in Patty's purse
documented on the inventory list when she was captured. He
presented it as his final piece of evidence in the trial, slowly
swinging the necklace back and forth in front of the jurors, as
if to hypnotize them into believing that Patty had not been
forced to rob a bank, even though he had admitted that it was
"clear from the photographs she may have been acting under
duress."
Patty's claim: "I was doing exactly what I had to do. I just
wanted to get out of the bank. I was just supposed to be in there
to get my picture taken, mainly." So the jury found Patty guilty
of being a virtual bank robber. She faced seven years in prison,
but after she had served 23 months, her sentence was commuted by
President Jimmy Carter.
The enigmatic graffiti COLE SLAW LIVES appeared after the
trial, baffling tourists. It was a makeover of SLA LIVES, though
one ex-Berkeleyite assumed that a political activist named Cole
Slaw was dead because there was graffiti saying that he was
alive.
[Paul Krassner covered the Patty Hearst trial for the Berkeley
Barb and Playboy. His Impolite Interviews (Seven Stories Press)
and Pot Stories for the Soul (High Times Books) will both be
published in September.]
The amazing legacy of 1974:
HOW THE KIDNAPPING OF PATTY HEARST
TRANSFORMED LOCAL POLITICS IN SAN FRANCISCO
by Calvin Welch
THE KIDNAPPING of Patricia Hearst by the SLA in February
1974 set off a series of events that transformed local politics
in San Francisco. Those events had nothing to do with either the
SLA or its demented, suicidal "program," which held the press,
politicians, and political groupies enthralled. Instead, they
centered on the actions of community-based organizations to
fashion a large-scale response to an impending disaster in
lower-income neighborhoods throughout the city, and on the
lessons those groups learned and then applied.
The SLA demanded that the Hearst Corporation undertake a
massive food distribution program throughout California as a
condition of the release of the kidnapped heir. Hearst agreed
and threw together an effort that, by Feb. 22, made its first
"distribution," limited to San Francisco.
It was a disorganized disaster. Scores of people were
injured as panicked workers threw boxes of food off moving trucks
as huge crowds of people unexpectedly showed up for the food. The
size of the crowds shocked the media and so upset Gov. Ronald
Reagan that he stated, "It's just too bad we can't have an
epidemic of botulism."
The SLA issued a "communique" the next day demanding that a
"community coalition" be put in charge of the effort under the
leadership of a small, community-based organization called the
Western Addition Project Area Committee.
Hearst's agreement to distribute food was condemned by the
establishment and viewed with suspicion by the "clean
hands" left. He was seen as giving in to
"terrorists" and was shunned by local, state, and
national officials; there was no Red Cross, no United Way offers
of help -- just agents, cops, and ops of every sort watching.
Only state senator George Moscone and Assemblyman Willie
Brown were willing to help (Moscone loaned a staff nutritionist
to inspect the food, and Brown agreed to serve as a trustee of
the $4 million trust fund created to pay for the distribution).
The easy chair East Bay "left" feared that the SLA was a police
front and, in its usual Berkeley bullshit manner, remained aloof.
The media was everywhere, getting things wrong at both 6 and 11.
From Feb. 26 to the end of March, the WAPAC-led Community
Food Coalition managed the Hearst food program, organizing six
distributions, which handed out more than 100,000 bags of
groceries at some 16 locations across four counties. There were
no more injuries, no more "riots," and no outbreak of "botulism."
The operation was centered at the huge China Basin building
on Townsend Street. Scores of trucks were coming and going every
hour. Father and brother Hearst were there 24 hours a day,
talking on the phone, fending off self-serving promoters and
hustlers, and forced by food suppliers and distributors to pay
top dollar. It was an eye-opener for the community folks:
capitalists will compete to sell rope to hang one another. Slowly
Community Coalition members took over the operation and earned
Hearst's trust and respect.
More important, they earned one another's trust and respect,
learning how to work together across race and community lines.
Within three months, the core members of the Community Coalition
formed the Coalition to Register 100,000 Voters, registering
enough voters to elect George Moscone mayor of San Francisco.
Those same groups pulled together a Community Congress in
June 1975 and a year later were at the center of the successful
campaign for district elections of supervisors.
Within two years, some had begun the creation of
community-based nonprofit housing development corporations,
building affordable housing for many of the people in those long
lines seeking free food. Others went on to transform the urban
environmental movement in San Francisco, redirecting it toward
limiting high-rise development and demanding developer payments
for child care and public transit.
The "neighborhood movement" that dominated the political
agenda of San Francisco through the early 1990s was born during
those two insane months in 1974.
[Calvin Welch was a volunteer with the WAPAC Community Food
Coalition and staffed the site at the old Safeway on Fell and
Broderick, where, on March 25, 1974, some 2,000 people lined up
for food at 7 a.m.]
LET KATHLEEN SOLIAH GO
(EDITORIAL) 1974 was a strange time, and most of us have
left it behind. Kathy Soliah should be allowed to do the same.
J.H. Tompkins
During the winter of 1974, you could hear people bumping
"Jungle Boogie" on their car radios in the parking lot at the
Oakland Main Post Office. The women working the LSM machines
threw a collective fit because management had banned platform
shoes, forcing them to re-hem their pants. There was serious hair
everywhere, naturals growing up and out like you wouldn't
believe, long hippie manes tied in a ponytail for safety.
Paranoia was high, belief was low. The war dragged on. Agnew
resigned. Nixon was a crook and everyone knew it. The brother of
an Oakland postal clerk was executed by Chilean fascists in
September's anti-Allende coup. A 14-year-old boy named Tyrone
Guyton was murdered in November by Emeryville police. The Zebra
killings prompted a police dragnet on black men.
I was a mail handler, and mail handlers had nothing to do
but lift and talk. So we talked. A guy named Jesse Johnson, who
had quit the Panthers in 1971, said he didn't trust Huey, but if
you dissed Newton, he'd be all over you in a second. White people
were the devil, Dupree Bolton said ("Nothing personal, man," he
told me, "that's just how I see it."). The Republic of New
Africa, he said, wanted to establish a black nation in the South.
Bobby Edwards told his war story, the same one, over and over:
"Big deal in high school, Napa, football player. Enlisted, a
marine. Shot and shot at like you wouldn't believe. First day
back at home, went into my bedroom. Didn't come out for eight
months." His eyes were always full of tears.
Patty Hearst was kidnapped in Berkeley by a group calling
itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. It was big news, and
bigger still when, two months later, she threw a counterculture
deb party, announcing that she'd joined her captors. She robbed a
bank and denounced her father as a pig Hearst and her ex-fiance
Steven Weed, as a sexist, ageist pig.
The SLA was big news in 1974, and my coworkers talked about
it all the time. In those days, in the Bay Area, after years of
riots, shootings, protests, and Panthers, everyone, for or
against, talked about revolution at the post office, the police
station, the Laundromat, dinner, clubs, the supermarket, and
everywhere else. It was a year of conspiracies, and the post
office had theorists by the dozens: the SLA were everywhere; they
were going to bring the motherfucker down; Cinque was a pig,
using white radicals; white radicals were pigs, using Cinque;
COINTELPRO was behind it; Castro was behind it.
No one gave a shit about legitimate forms of protest,
electoral politics, or Randall and Patty Hearst -- until she
showed up cradling a carbine during a bank robbery, that is.
Overnight she was "one badass white girl." It was a strange year,
and the saga of the SLA wasn't much further out there than
anything else.
The world of radicals and revolutionaries in the Bay Area,
at least those who flirted with the idea of armed struggle, was
pretty small, and everyone knew someone who was in the SLA, or at
least knew someone who knew someone. The murder of Marcus Foster
was stupid and wrong, and a lot of people thought the government
was somehow behind it: by killing Marcus Foster, the argument
went, they got rid of a moderate black school administrator and
had an excuse to attack revolutionaries at the same time.
Still, the kidnapping of Hearst, her subsequent defection,
the overblown, swaggering communiques, the silly nicknames, and
the sheer drama of it all --equal parts comedy and tragedy-- were
great entertainment. I was in my car on High Street in Oakland
listening to KSAN --the station's Dave McQueen and Larry Lee were
invaluable in those days-- when Patty announced, on tape, that
she had joined up. ("It is in the spirit of Tania that I say,
'Patria o muerte! Venceremos!'") I almost drove into a tree.
No matter what you thought about the SLA, it was
gut-wrenching to watch grinning L.A. cops turn South Central L.A.
into Vietnam for a day, incinerating six SLA members in the
process. "Don't fuck with us" was the message, delivered in prime
time and duly noted, for sure. If you were an outlaw yourself,
you couldn't help thinking that the bumbling, posturing SLA --
long on manipulating the media and short on most everything else
-- had made your life more difficult than it already was.
Still, the SLA had its triumphs: Randolph Hearst, whose
arrogance was legendary, suffered public humiliation. He was
described by the SLA in a February '74 communique as the
corporate chairman of the fascist media empire of the ultra-right
Hearst Corporation, which is one of the largest propaganda
institutions of this oppressive military dictatorship ... Who
could argue with that? As a frightened father, he was
unconvincing; as a spokesperson for the Hearst empire, he was a
public relations nightmare.
Things were different back in the day: tanks were empty, so
the world ran in frantic fits and starts on nervous energy alone;
the karmic wire was strung so tight that a sneeze in Berkeley
would get a "God bless" from Oakland, a shotgun in San
Francisco would send North Richmond diving for cover. Everybody
dealt with the madness -- there was no escaping it, no matter who
you were and what you thought of it -- and along the way a lot of
people made mistakes.
It's hard to draw a thread from 1974 to today -- impossible,
actually. After 25 years all I can say is that was then, as the
saying goes, and this is now. Extraditing Kathy Soliah and
putting her on trial is a really bad idea. Should the genocidal
murderers who directed the destruction of Vietnam be arrested for
war crimes? What about the Chicago police who drugged and
murdered Fred Hampton? Or the law-enforcement officials who
framed Geronimo Pratt?
Like most people who were wrapped up in the political and
cultural chaos of the '60s and '70s, Soliah has left those days
behind and is -- or was, until she was arrested -- living a
healthy, constructive life. The SLA paid its price in Los Angeles
in May 1974. It's time to bury the past with those who died then.
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