Patty/Tania –
Jerry Belcher and Don West
On February 4, 1974, the United States experienced its
first political kidnapping. The radical left group Symbionese Liberation Army
(SLA) kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Campbell Hearst from her apartment
near the UC Berkeley campus.
In those far-off pre-information superhighway days, this
fantastical crime garnered as much media attention as our society could muster:
three major TV networks, local daily newspapers, and radio broadcasting. The hyper-competitive
paperback book publishers churned out “instant books” – books written and
published very quickly to exploit burning reader interest in topics of the day.
Pyramid Books hustled this instant book into print in January 1975, while Bill and
Emily Harris and Patty Hearst were still on the run.
Readers can easily imagine what half-baked junk many
instant books were back then. However, Belcher and West give us a
fast-moving narrative of the case. The outstanding point is that the two
reporters provide wide-ranging background on the major players and their
experiences. For example, they reproduce in full a pathetic autobiographical
letter Donald DeFreeze, head of the SLA, wrote to a judge. Pathetic either way,
that is, whether it is the pitiable truth or a cynical attempt to stir the
sympathy of a judge.
Belcher and West give a wealth of interesting detail on
the fringe characters to whom the media paid no attention. I had no idea that
the prisons were such hotbeds of political activity and discussion in the late
Sixties. Various programs had college students visit inmates for educational
purposes and consciousness-raising rap sessions. But these meetings sometimes
turned into political agitation and radicalization on both sides.
After the draft stopped vacuuming up college students,
the anti-war movement lost a lot of steam and so did other far left activist groups. And by the early 1970s political
activism on the left had curdled into angry, disappointed, desperate youth
striking out in various ways. The authors discuss how the SLA recruited members
from a defunct Maoist revolutionary group called the Venceremos ("We will
win") who broke off from other radical groups because those groups were
too restrained for them. The SLA claimed responsibility for the cold-blooded
killing of Oakland School Board Director Marcus Foster, an African-American who
was doing great work under trying circumstances. For this senseless stupid act,
they were roundly condemned by other leftist groups.
As an added attraction, the appendix includes texts of
the Symbionese Liberation Army tapes and communiques. Such primary documents
- with unreadable content, incoherent
organization, harsh invective, and strutting tone - capture the utter poverty of imagination,
education, or theory of the self-styled revolutionary militia.
Both writers were veteran newspaper reporters so they
were careful with facts and documentation. Their writing is brisk, readable, and
not as flat and grey as much journalistic writing was back then. They
had to be cautious about objectivity and not sensationalizing the case, because
they worked for the San Francisco Examiner, edited by the victim’s father Randolph
“Randy” Hearst. To Hearst’s credit, one gets the feeling that he did not
interfere with coverage by his paper or investigations for this book project.
But, as we would expect, Belcher and West don’t mention Hearst’s fondness for
red wine nor do they discuss the strain the kidnapping put on the Hearsts' marriage.
Be aware that, as journalists usually do, Belcher and
West break down when they try to take the bird’s eye view. For instance, the
discussion of the influence on excessive TV watching on the anti-social
behavior of the white, middle-class, baby boomers is singularly unpersuasive.
Our present-day image is that the Sixties were the time
of turbulence, the Seventies of mellow. In fact, in only 18 months in 1971 and 1972 the United States saw
in excess of 2,500 domestic bombings, according to FBI statistics. Besides the violence, the Seventies were a time when people retreated into bitter
privacy and staying afloat. People felt nervous and disgusted over gas prices
and blows to the auto industry, economic woes in what now is called the Rust
Belt, fears about crime like serial killings and mass murders related with drugs, and the breaking of confidence
and trust due to lies about the Vietnam war and the Watergate political crisis
that forced Nixon’s resignation. Things hippie went mainstream in the Seventies
– getting high, casual clothes, bright colors, crafts like macramé, just you
and me simple and free, have you never been mellow – but the left politics of
the hippies went into disrepute because of cults like the SLA and
hundreds of mad bombings
Such is the oddity of life that we can be in the middle
of commotion and upheaval but have little sense of the hurly-burliness of it
all. In this book, Belcher and West didn’t seem to realize what crazy times the
1970s were, a cluelessness which appealed to me mightily. Because looking back I
didn’t know the Seventies were that nutty either - in 1974 I was just a wiseass
high school senior and naïve college freshman. I wanted only two things: not to
flunk out of State and a girlfriend.
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