Days of Rage (43 page)

13

“PATTY HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED”

The Symbionese Liberation Army, February to May 1974

On the fateful evening of Monday, February 4, 1974, Patricia Campbell Hearst was a very wealthy nobody, at once an anonymous daughter of one of America’s richest families and just another headstrong nineteen-year-old trying to chart a life for herself with her fiancé in a five-room duplex on Benvenue Avenue, at the edge of the Berkeley campus. To acquaintances, Patty was, like many nineteen-year-olds, a bit of a cipher, possessed of a personality as yet ill-defined, which would, in time, allow millions of Americans to make their own easy judgments of her. But to close friends Patty was a teen rebel and not an especially sympathetic one at that. She had been the only student at her private school who refused to wear a uniform, who drove a car, and who referred to farmworkers as “miserable fucking migrant people.” She squabbled with her mother and sometimes her father, Randolph, who helped lead the family media empire, a vast constellation of magazines including
Cosmopolitan
, television stations, and newspapers, most notably the
San Francisco Examiner
.

As a seventeen-year-old at the Crystal Springs School for Girls in Hillsborough, California, Patty had begun an affair with her math instructor, a twenty-three-year-old named Steven Weed. After she graduated, she joined him at Berkeley, where Weed was a graduate student in philosophy; Patty studied art history. In the fall of 1972 they moved into their apartment, where they spent much of their time alone doing the things young lovers do: cooking quiet meals, shopping, and strolling Berkeley’s galleries and coffeehouses. They lived on money from her parents and Weed’s teaching job.

That Monday night, a little after nine, Patty was cleaning the kitchen when Weed answered a knock at the door. Three people, believed to be DeFreeze, Bill Harris, and Angela Atwood, barged into the apartment. A wine bottle was pushed in Weed’s face. “Keep your head down or you’re dead,” someone said as he was shoved to the floor. Atwood ran into the living room and tackled Patty. “Oh, no, no, not me!” Patty cried.

After DeFreeze hit Weed several times with a rifle butt, the trio forced Patty down the outside stairs, firing a volley of bullets over the heads of a pair of curious neighbors. They stuffed Patty, now blindfolded and gagged, into the trunk of a stolen Chevy, its hapless owner still trussed up on the rear floorboards. They drove up into the Berkeley hills, stopped, and transferred Patty to a second car, leaving the Chevy’s owner tied up in his car. In a half hour they were back at the new apartment they had rented in Daly City, a gritty suburb on San Francisco’s southern border. Inside they forced Patty into a fetid closet and slammed the door, warning her not to touch her blindfold or gag. When she briefly panicked, she heard a voice outside the door say, “It’s only a closet, for Christ sake.”

Back in Berkeley, Weed staggered out of the apartment and made it to Cowell Hospital; Berkeley police were soon on the scene, followed by the FBI. Soon afterward, one of Patty’s sisters broke the news to Randolph Hearst and his wife, Catherine. “Patty has been kidnapped,” she said. Hearst calmly asked that police embargo the news, which they managed to do till the next day, when the Oakland newspaper indicated that it was prepared to publish, at which point the embargo was lifted. From the beginning the FBI suspected the SLA, having found a box of cyanide-tipped bullets left behind
at Patty’s apartment, presumably a kind of calling card. Weed couldn’t identify any of the suspects, although he thought he recognized a photo of Thero Wheeler, who had left the group weeks earlier.

For three days Patty’s kidnapping remained a mystery. Then, on Thursday, February 7, a receptionist at Berkeley’s KPFA radio station slit open an envelope and found a communiqué issued by the “Symbionese Liberation Army Western Regional Adult Unit.” Written as an order of “The Court of the People,” it identified Patty as a “prisoner of war” and Randolph Hearst as a “corporate enemy of the people.” There was no ransom demand, just an order that the communiqué be reprinted “in full, in all newspapers, and all other forms of media.”

The SLA’s appearance on the stage transformed the kidnapping of Patty Hearst into what would become, after Watergate, probably the greatest media event of the 1970s. Before it was over, her face would appear seven times on the cover of
Newsweek
alone. Almost all the coverage, especially once the story grew more complicated, would be devoted to Patty: who she was and what she represented, why she did what she did, what it meant, what it symbolized for an America struggling to come to grips with the political and emotional fallout from the 1960s even as the Nixon White House was being revealed to be every bit as corrupt as all those long-haired radicals said it was.

What is notable is how little analysis was devoted to the SLA. From the beginning, the media simply mocked it: the silly cobra heads, the purple prose. The
Kansas City Times
, for one, noting the “paranoia, the messianic posturing,” the “childish fascination with queer names and elaborate symbols,” compared the SLA to the Ku Klux Klan, concluding that it was “sick.” The
Richmond News Leader
went a step further, belittling the SLA’s pronouncements as “childish imaginings of a make-believe world—little girls and boys playing dress-up in mommy’s and daddy’s clothes.” Others threw off reasoned analysis altogether, terming the SLA a bunch of “crazies” and “psychos.”

It was true that the SLA’s ideas, devised by a black ex-convict with little formal education, paled before those advanced by the Ivy League denizens of the Weather Underground; from the beginning, it was always more akin to a cult. But the media’s mockery was more than just a commentary on the SLA’s hazy theorizing. It was a mark of how far—and how far to the right—much of America had come in its rejection not only of ’60s-era violence and protest but of an entire canon of liberal thought, especially parental permissiveness, the overindulgence of academic freedoms, and the coddling of criminals. Just four years earlier the Weather Underground’s bombings had been viewed, however briefly, as a semilegitimate response to Nixon-era policies. The SLA was granted no such credibility. They were just psychos.

Many days that February Randolph Hearst would step outside his suburban mansion and answer questions from the growing media contingent. For the moment, all he could do was appeal for Patty’s safe return. Then, on Tuesday, February 12, after five days of agonized waiting, the SLA’s next communication arrived at KPFA: eight pages of communiqués and two audiotapes, one from DeFreeze, one from Patty. “These people aren’t just a bunch of nuts,” Patty said. “They’ve been really honest with me but they’re perfectly willing to die for what they’re doing. I’m here because I’m a member of a ruling-class family.” It was DeFreeze’s tape that set the stage for one of the decade’s strangest episodes. In the comically stilted language he employed in all the SLA’s communications, he announced that the SLA “court” had ordained that, before it could consider releasing Patty, the Hearsts would need to carry out a “good faith” gesture by giving out food to the “oppressed” people of the Bay Area. The demand was oddly specific: $70 worth of food, to anyone who needed it, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for the next four weeks. “If you can get the food thing organized before the nineteenth,” Patty said, “then that’s okay and it will just speed up my release.”

Randolph Hearst told reporters the “food demand” was “impossible to meet”; one estimate put the cost at $133 million, another at $400 million. Hearst promised to study the offer and suggest an alternative. Before he could, another pair of tapes arrived three days later, one each from DeFreeze and Patty. In his, DeFreeze appeared to back away from the food demand, saying the SLA might accept an alternative. Patty seconded this, saying, “They weren’t trying to present an unreasonable request. It was never intended to feed the whole state. So whatever you come up with basically is okay.”

The SLA had demanded that the food handouts begin on Tuesday, February 19, and it named a series of charity groups that could help organize
them. That day Hearst again stepped before the microphones in front of his mansion and announced he was forming a $2 million foundation to distribute food to the needy, a program called People in Need. Telephone lines were established to draw volunteers. Several of the groups the SLA named said they would help; others, including the Black Panthers, refused, saying they could not approve of kidnappings. Hearst promised the first distribution would take place on Friday, February 22. As final preparations were under way that Thursday, another SLA communiqué was delivered, left at a black church in San Francisco. In it, DeFreeze dismissed Hearst’s $2 million offer as “throwing a few crumbs to the people” and demanded $4 million more in handouts.

It was a colossal—and chaotic—undertaking, tons of donated and purchased groceries loaded onto rented trucks at a San Francisco warehouse, then ferried to supermarkets in black neighborhoods across the Bay Area. Hundreds of people waited in lines. When trucks arrived late, crowds surrounded them. Fights broke out. In some cases workers simply tossed bags of food out of the trucks; at a distribution center in East Oakland, several people were injured after being struck by frozen turkeys. By day’s end, at which point Hearst had hoped to deliver food to twenty thousand people, maybe nine thousand got some. Later distributions, eventually five in all, went more smoothly. They continued through March over the protests of California conservatives, whose sentiments were symbolized by Governor Ronald Reagan’s memorable quip: “It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.”

The SLA’s emergence once again put the remnants of the Weather Underground in a quandary, much as the Panther 21’s request for aid had done three years earlier. “The Patty Hearst thing was great, giving out the food, all of that was great,” recalls Weather’s Paul Bradley, who was working as an auto mechanic in San Francisco. “Of course, we all thought their rhetoric was ridiculous, and none of us paid much attention to the Marcus Foster killing, a horrible thing. Frankly, everybody was confused by the SLA. It was led by this black guy, so it was hard for us to be critical. It was hard to condemn it, too.”

Weather’s ambivalence was reflected in the lone communiqué it issued on the SLA, on February 20. While wishing for Patty’s safety, it noted: “We must acknowledge that this audacious intervention has carried forward the basic public questions and starkly dramatized what many have come to understand through their own experience: It will be necessary to organize and to destroy this racist and cruel system.”

It was not Weather’s finest moment: In 2006, when Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones published a collection of Weather communiqués, their commentary on the SLA was notably absent.

 • • • 

Through much of the chaos Patty Hearst remained where she had been since the first hours after her kidnapping: in a bedroom closet in a rented tract house in Daly City. She described her ordeal in excruciating detail in her 1982 memoir,
Every Secret Thing
. From the beginning DeFreeze was a regular presence in that closet, describing the SLA to Patty as a vast army with training camps and ties to guerrilla groups around the world. When Patty said she had never heard of the SLA, which was a lie, the others began calling her “Marie Antoinette,” joking that she lived inside a cocoon of wealth.

DeFreeze promised she would not be mistreated unless she tried to escape, at which point she would be executed. He would talk for hours, bombarding her with lectures on the SLA’s worldview, from the inhumanity of the prison system to the plight of the oppressed to the evils of ruling-class families like the Hearsts. Between lectures they fed her and led her to the bathroom, still blindfolded, and in time Patty learned all their names: Bo, Fahizah, Cujo, Teko, and more. On her third day in the closet DeFreeze announced that her formal interrogation was beginning, and he handled it himself, firing questions at her about her upbringing, her education, and her family’s media holdings. It lasted for days. She told them everything they wanted to know.

From the closet she could hear them talk. They were practically giddy at the publicity they were receiving. When it was time to issue a communiqué, DeFreeze sat with her in the closet, a tape recorder in his lap. Patty was happy to make the tapes. It was the only way she had to communicate with the
world. As the days wore on, the others began taking turns sitting outside her door, talking to her for hours, usually a litany of SLA propaganda, quoting Mao, talking about the prisons, the oppressed. They just went on and on. Patty marveled at how sincere they seemed, how they genuinely seemed to believe they were leading a revolution that would in time change America forever. Alone in the closet she veered wildly between hope and despair.

Slowly the group began to accept her as something other than a prisoner. When she grew weak from inactivity, sometimes unable to walk to the bathroom without help, they had her do calisthenics. The women watched as she bathed. DeFreeze remained obsessed with the idea of an FBI raid, and in an effort to bolster their defenses he taught Patty to break down and use a shotgun. But it was her seeming acceptance of their political views that truly changed her status. Patty considered herself “apolitical” and didn’t care a whit about Mao or prison conditions; she thought these people were suicidal. But in an effort to improve her plight, she began agreeing with every point they made, until finally they gave her books to read, Cleaver’s
Soul on Ice
, George Jackson, Marx, Mao. They began letting her out of the closet, still blindfolded, to sit in on their political discussions, where she did her best to appear an eager student. She memorized the SLA’s rules and asked an endless stream of questions, every one of which the others were thrilled to answer. In time they stopped calling her “Marie Antoinette.” They called her “Tiny” instead.