San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Shocking Hearst kidnapping still resonates
50 years after her abduction, parallels to that era abound
Virulent distrust of elected officials and media. Cries that the country is on the wrong track and the common guy is being exploited by the rich. Armed terrorists wanting to take over the government and killing people they believe threaten their ideals.
Sound like the radical politics of today? It also describes the chaotic, violent environment of the 1970s. Today, though, such zeal is seen predominantly in the extremist right wing. Back then it was on the extreme left — and in the middle of that turbulent time, 50 years ago this week, was an event that would span most of the ’70s and become one of its most recognizable emblems:
The kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia “Patty” Campbell Hearst by the self-styled revolutionaries of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
On the crisp winter night of Feb. 4, 1974, the 19-year-old UC Berkeley student was snatched screaming from her Berkeley apartment and stuffed into the trunk of a stolen Chevy. The terrorist group’s goal was to wring ransom from her father, Randolph Hearst, who ran the San Francisco Examiner and was chairman of the Hearst Corp., and to gain the release of two of its members jailed on charges of murdering Oakland schools Superintendent Marcus Foster the year before.
It didn’t work, and the story blew up internationally. Media organizations camped outside the Hearst family mansion in Hillsborough. The SLA issued communiques proclaiming it was at war with capitalism, demanding $4 million, and released a tape recording by Hearst saying: “Mom, Dad, I’m OK. I’m with a combat unit that’s armed with automatic weapons. … I just hope that you’ll do what they say Dad, and just do it quickly.”
The messages signed off with the SLA’s slogan: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.”
The SLA’s stated goal, like that of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and other violent left-wing groups of the day, was to turn 1960s political zeal into armed insurrection. The gang, led by Donald DeFreeze, an escaped convict who’d been doing time for armed robbery and who called himself “General Field Marshal Cinque,” had only 10 members. But with the abduction of the heiress of the sprawling Hearst media empire (which has owned the Chronicle since 2000) and one murder already under its belt, the SLA dominated headlines.
And the story just kept getting stranger.
After the group’s ransom and prisoner release demands didn’t work, the Hearst family agreed to the SLA’s order to feed the poor, launching a $2.3 million “People in Need” food giveaway program. It was a chaotic failure. Then in early April came a bombshell: The SLA released a tape of Hearst saying she’d joined them, adopted the name “Tania” after a companion of Che Guevara, and was now “fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people.”
Less than two weeks later, she was caught on a security camera wielding an assault rifle and helping rob a Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. Over the next year, she helped the gang knock over another bank outside Sacramento, shot up a sporting goods store in Inglewood and went on the run after six SLA members, including DeFreeze, died in a fiery shootout with the police in Los Angeles.
Following her capture in San Francisco in September 1975, Hearst was found guilty of the Hibernia heist and sentenced to seven years in prison. She served 22 months before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence, setting her free in February 1979.
Hearst couldn’t be reached for this story, but she has said in past interviews and in her 1982 memoir, “Every Secret Thing,” that she was raped and coerced into participating in the SLA. She testified against the gang members, and President Bill Clinton later pardoned her, making her the first person in U.S. history to get a commutation from one president and a pardon from another.
“It’s hard to put into words how chaotic the winter of 1973, ’74 already was, and then came the Patty kidnapping,” recalled Duffy Jennings, a former Chronicle reporter who helped lead the coverage. “It was all hands on deck at the paper. On any given day you’d have on the front page stories about Patty Hearst, the Zodiac and the Zebra killings, not to mention Watergate.”
Now retired S.F. police Detective Frank Falzon said Hearst’s kidnapping stood out among the ongoing calamities of the time.
“It was a scary time in the Bay Area, and I had never seen anything like that kidnapping,” said Falzon, whose memoir with Jennings, “San Francisco Homicide Inspector 5-Henry-7,” recounts
his work on high-profile ’70s crimes from the Zodiac murders to the City Hall assassinations. “We were all looking for her, and then it played out for so long after that with the taped communications … the bank robberies, them getting killed in L.A.
“It was almost unreal.” Looking back, historians and many who lived through the saga can’t help but notice parallels to today.
Recent years have seen armed militias at right-wing protests and in state capitols, the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and ceaseless broadsides in far-right media calling for civil war and denouncing the federal government and president as illegitimate. Fear — of terrorists, of deranged mass shooters, of rising crime — appears pervasive. Emboldened white supremacists unabashedly speak and march in public.
Likewise, the 1970s also radiated with fear. The Zodiac Killer was sending taunting letters to the Chronicle after killing five people, and violent anti-war protests rocked every university. The most prolific serial killers in San Francisco history wreaked their havoc — the Zebra Killers, a group of Black men who selected victims on the basis of race, shot 21 people, including future Mayor Art Agnos, killing 14.
In late 1978, more than 900 people poisoned themselves in Jonestown, Guyana, at the direction of the mad cult leader Jim Jones, and gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in San Francisco City Hall.
Nationally, with President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal as a jangling backdrop, revolutionary leftist terrorist movements scared the Establishment the most — topped by the SLA, with a captive Patty Hearst as its prize.
“In a weird way, today is an extension of what happened in the 1970s,” said David Talbot, author of “Season of the Witch,” one of the definitive books about the 1970s in San Francisco. “The far right has become the far left.
“When you see the photos of the people inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, they look like the left of the ‘70s — bearded, long-haired people,” he said. “In some ways, they were the counterpart of the radicals in the ’70s, with their disregard for civility and the rule of law.”
Patricia Hearst now lives a comfortable life in the Northeast, where she has raised show dogs and acted in quirky John Waters films such as “Cry Baby” and “Serial Mom.”
Dozens of books and movies have tried to chronicle her journey, with some — notably Jeffrey Toobin’s 2016 book “American Heiress” — contending that she was a willing convert to the SLA. Others say she was a powerless victim of Stockholm syndrome.
Roger Rapoport, who covered the kidnapping in 1974 for New Times magazine, has written the latest book. He opted not to land definitively in any camp, instead writing a fictionalized novel called “Searching for Patty Hearst.”
Hearst “did a very good job on that book of hers, and when Bill Clinton pardoned her, I think that book sealed the deal,” Rapoport said. “Toobin’s book was good, too. I’m not saying one is right and one is wrong. I think the different points of view are valuable.”
There’s no such wavering from George Martinez, the attorney who represented Hearst in her court appeals and clemency and pardon applications.
“After her release, it began to sink in that she had been brainwashed,” Martinez said, “but the people on the other side of the case — the prosecutors — never accepted that. But for me, it’s clear: If you have complete control over anybody, and you convince that person their survival depends on adopting their point of view, it doesn’t take a genius to know that their instinct for survival will tell them to do what they need to survive.”
Only one of the eight surviving SLA members remains in prison: Joseph Remiro, who drew a life sentence for murdering Foster. As for the other seven, “They’re all fine, living very quiet lives, and none of them wants to talk,” said attorney Stuart Hanlon, who defended several of them. “They did their time.”
He says that in hindsight, the radical struggle against “the man” he politically supported as a college student and young lawyer had been blunted before the SLA took it to twisted levels.
“I came out of Columbia (University) in the ’60s … and moved out here and got involved in leftist politics,” he said. “But then we realized that whatever we dreamed was going to happen, the revolution, all of that stuff, was over by the early ’70s. We thought politics, music and psychedelics were going to change things — and they didn’t.
“Very few of us saw what we would have after Obama — we didn’t see Trump coming. The revolution not only did not get televised — it never happened. And if you were ever involved in those politics, it was very disappointing.”