Patty Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army 50 years ago sparked a media tsunami, a paranoia-laced saga that jumped back and forth from barbarity to farce while heightening Berkeley’s reputation as a redoubt for curdled, self-destructive radicalism.
The granddaughter of press baron William Randolph Hearst and scion of the Hearst publishing dynasty, she was a 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore studying art history when several members of the SLA seized her from the Benvenue Avenue apartment she shared with fiancé Steven Weed on Feb. 4, 1974.
Ostensibly led by an escaped convict and alleged police informer named Donald DeFreze (who adopted the nom de guerre General Field Marshal Cinque), the SLA emerged out of a UC Berkeley course on African American linguistics taught by Colston Westbrook, who brought students into the state prison in Vacaville to meet with inmates. The SLA had announced its presence in the Bay Area a few months earlier on Nov. 6, 1973, by assassinating Marcus Foster, the superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District.
Struck down in a hail of cyanide-packed bullets fired by two assailants who also shot and wounded his deputy Robert Blackburn, Foster was the first African American appointed to run a major school district, and his killing was widely denounced by leftist groups across the region. Aside from DeFreze, almost all of the SLA members were white, and many hailed from upper-middle-class families, a fact that made the group’s claim to constitute “the Court of the People” handing out death sentences to fight “the Board of Education and its fascist elements” seem delusional at best.
For a city that prided itself on its vanguard role in movements for social and political change, the SLA’s emergence was “another Berkeley first,” said Roger Rapoport, a veteran journalist who covered Hearst’s kidnapping for New Times Magazine.
Rapoport’s new novel, Searching for Patty Hearst, turns this stranger-than-fiction episode into historical fiction informed by decades of reporting and interviews with many of the key participants.
Rapoport will discuss the book and the events around Hearst’s kidnapping and eventual trial for bank robbery, including her denunciation of her family and seeming embrace of the SLA and its revolutionary agenda, at a series of events around the Bay Area, including Sunday at the Berkeley Historical Society. He also hits Books Inc. on Tuesday, Feb. 6; the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco on Thursday, Feb. 8; Book Passage in Corte Madera on Sunday, Feb. 11; and the Inner Sunset Green Apple Books on Tuesday, Feb. 13.
One motive for kidnapping Hearst was to use her as a bargaining chip to free two SLA members who’d been arrested for Foster’s murder. They were bumbling revolutionaries, but Rapoport hails their genius at manipulating the media, which couldn’t resist a damsel-in-distress narrative that quickly became a rich girl gone wrong story when Hearst announced she’d taken the name Tania and joined the SLA.
The group also demanded that the Hearst family distribute food to poor people across the state. In an attempt to meet the SLA’s demands, the Hearsts created People In Need, a program to give away $2 million in groceries. The initiative attracted the attention of a rogue’s gallery of future Bay Area villains, including Rev. Jim Jones, who unsuccessfully tried to get a piece of the action, and Yusef Bey, who did get involved, although the Your Black Muslim Bakery’s food giveaway drive in Oakland on Feb. 22, 1974, turned chaotic and violent.
Communicating with the public largely through jargon-laden communiques delivered and broadcast on KPFA (usually ending with the SLA motto “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people”), the group was largely destroyed in a shootout with the Los Angeles Police Department on May 17, 1974, which led to the death of DeFreze and five other members.
A rally at Willard Park (which had been rechristened by activists several years earlier as Ho Chi Minh Park) for the SLA brought Steve and Kathleen Soliah to the attention of the surviving members Bill and Emily Harris, who later recruited the siblings to replenish the rank. “They weren’t only picking off these left-wing Berkeley people who were ripe for joining the SLA,” Rapoport said. “They raised a lot of money there, too.”
Rapoport was in the thick of the story. He worked on writing an account of Weed’s experience, with Hearst’s former fiancé moving into his house in Berkeley for six months. The partnership fell apart when Weed decided he wanted to tell his own story. After covering the sensational 1975 San Francisco trial that resulted in Hearst’s conviction, Rapoport landed the first interview with Bill Harris, who was one of her kidnappers. Long after the story receded from the headlines he continued to pursue interviews with people who hadn’t spoken publicly about their involvement.
Despite dozens of books written about the kidnapping, including Hearst’s 1981 memoir Every Secret Thing, there are numerous theories about motivations and culpability. Rapoport wouldn’t speculate about DeFreze’s status as a government-run agent provocateur, though he believes he was a longtime police informant. He discounts the widely circulated story that Hearst was a secret radical who was having an affair with DeFreze before her kidnapping.
His Rashomon-like take on Hearst and the SLA isn’t an attempt to tell an authoritative story. Rather the book “tries to get inside people’s heads and make an informed guess,” he said. “I give equal time to all the participants. Patty claimed to be brainwashed in the trial, but she never spoke to Steven Weed again. It turned out that at the time she was arrested, she was carrying a love token from Willie Wolfe, who died in the shootout with the LAPD. In the book, we’re giving everybody the space to make their own decisions.”
