Washington Post: Patty Hearst was kidnapped 50 years ago. Was she a victim or terorist?
The startling news 50 years ago Sunday that Patty Hearst, granddaughter of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, had been kidnapped by a far-left terrorist organization was eclipsed only by the more shocking revelation two months later that she had “renounced” her “class privilege“ and joined the militant group.
Following her Feb. 4, 1974, kidnapping by the tiny, disorganized Symbionese Liberation Army, Hearst began to lose faith in her wealthy family’s ability to meet the SLA’s initial $4 million ransom demand ($25 million today), which continued to escalate. On April 3, she released a tape as “Tania,” the 11th member of the SLA.
A photo of Hearst in revolutionary garb, toting a machine gun, instantly made her a front-page celebrity. On April 15, security footage showed her robbing a San Francisco bank owned by a childhood friend’s dad. The following month, she was back in the headlines after firing more than two dozen rounds to rescue her kidnapper Bill Harris as he was being tackled by Inglewood security guards at Mel’s Sporting Goods. Hours later, she joined Harris and his wife, Emily, in the kidnapping of suburban Los Angeles high school student Tom Matthews because they needed his family van as a getaway vehicle.
Her face was on post-office “wanted” posters nationwide as the FBI’s vast Operation Hernap task force chased her across the country for the next 16 months. She was finally arrested back home in San Francisco in September 1975, not long after her involvement in two Sacramento-area bank holdups, including one that left a customer dead.
Her defense lawyer said she’d been brainwashed. Hearst said she’d been raped by several of her kidnappers and forced to rob banks and read taped communiqués that attacked her family and fiancé.
The prosecutors insisted, citing her own words, that she had joined the rebellion and voluntarily turned on her parents and the Hearst empire.
The prosecutors’ argument won over the jury, and she was sentenced to seven years in prison.
So who was Patty Hearst? A multitude of labels have been applied to her: clueless wealthy heiress, rebel, young bride-to-be, kidnapping victim, rape victim, terrorist, fugitive, Stockholm syndrome archetype, criminal, recipient of a presidential pardon. But what was her true nature?
Fifty years later, the answer remains unclear. But my extensive personal interactions with two of the people closest to Hearst during her turbulent youth can help shed some light on one of the most mysterious figures in American history.
“Where would I go?”
My education on the Patty Hearst saga began in earnest when I wrote a book with her fiancé Steve Weed, who lived in my Berkeley home for months after he was beaten during her kidnapping.
Weed began a relationship with Hearst when she was 16 and he was her 23-year-old high school math teacher. While one of Weed’s fellow teachers knew she was secretly spending nights at his place, her parents were oblivious to their secret romance. At first, the perks of the relationship for Hearst included copies of a final exam Steve took from her geometry teacher’s files.
Then, unexpectedly, in December 1973, they announced they were getting married. After reading about their summer wedding plans in the San Francisco papers, the SLA comrades decided she was the ideal target. Two months later, they kidnapped her from the Berkeley duplex she shared with Weed.
After he recovered from his beating by SLA members during the kidnapping, Weed moved in with Hearst’s parents, but they found him a challenging houseguest, and he left after a few weeks. Around this time, I interviewed him for New Times magazine. When an editor asked if I’d co-write his memoir, he moved into my Berkeley home for four months while we worked on the book, which was never published.
Amid Patty’s memorabilia, valuables and Hearst estate rugs he brought to my house for safekeeping was the statement for her trust fund worth $70,000 (more than half a million today) when she turned 21.
Weed told me Hearst resented the way her parents dominated her life, saying, only half in jest, that she wished “they’d die in a plane crash.”
He insisted nothing in Hearst’s past explained her decision to join the SLA. Once when they were together, she brazenly stormed through a United Farm Workers picket line at a Safeway supermarket, calling the protesters “miserable … migrant people” and a series of expletives.
At the time, Weed said, she had little interest in the women’s movement, and she regarded her father’s concern and support for impoverished Latinos living in San Francisco’s Mission District with a mixture of distrust, amusement and disdain.
After her “reeducation” in captivity, she attacked Weed in SLA communiqués published in her father’s San Francisco Examiner. In one, she professed her agreement with the SLA women who “insisted that the trouble with Steve and with all bourgeois men was that … they could not abide the thought that women could think and choose for themselves.” She would never see or talk to Weed again.
That decision may have been related to Patty’s communiqué declaring her love for one of the SLA kidnappers, William Wolfe. Their love story was cut short on May 17, 1974, when Wolfe and five other SLA members were shot to death and partially incinerated by the Los Angeles Police Department. This 9,000-round shootout would go down as the biggest domestic firefight in U.S. history.
Hearst eulogized Wolfe in a taped communiqué as “the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”
The deadly firefight convinced her that surrendering to the police could get her killed.
“The pig lies about the advisability of surrender,” she explained in another taped communiqué, “have only made me more determined.” Besides, as she said later, “Where would I go?”
According to the SLA’s Harris, Patty’s captors repeatedly told her she was free to return home to her fiancé, to live out the American Dream with two kids, a collie and a station wagon.
That return wouldn’t come until 1979, when President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence after 22 months served. Thanks to a vigorous Hearst lobbying campaign, Bill Clinton, in his last official act as president, granted her a full pardon in 2001.
She married her bodyguard, former San Francisco cop Bernard Shaw, who was later appointed head of Hearst corporate security. Hearst became a mother, grandmother, philanthropist, actress, novelist and kennel club competition winner. Today, she is 69. She couldn’t be reached for comment.
“Patty Hearst was ideal”
Hearst’s surviving kidnappers Bill and Emily Harris went to prison in 1977. In 1988, five years after they were paroled, Bill Harris granted me his first lengthy interview, for a series in the Oakland Tribune. The SLA, he said, mistakenly assumed Hearst would be an easy $4 million ransom hit that could jump-start their revolution.
“Patty Hearst was ideal: an heiress, and a perfect symbol of the control of the media and the ruling class,” he said. “What plutocrat wouldn’t want to quickly ransom their daughter from a gang of revolutionaries on the eve of her society wedding?”
Harris got in touch again last month when he learned of my new novel, “Searching for Patty Hearst,” a fictionalized account of the kidnapping. A half-century after the kidnapping, he shared his perspective on what had happened to Hearst.
Her father, Randolph Apperson Hearst, who taught her to shoot a gun when she was 9, “treated her like the son he never had,” Harris said in an email. “When Randy claimed to be too poor to engage in negotiations with the SLA, it shocked the hell out of her, hurt her, but she seemed to get over it fairly rapidly as she began to consider what repatriation really meant. Go Home!? Seriously?”
I asked if he thought Patty was brainwashed or a true revolutionary during her SLA days. He said:
Please imagine this. Patricia Hearst’s various transitions, without complex contexts, are sometimes incomprehensible but often predictable.
Make no mistake, she was NEVER a revolutionary. She rejected the excesses of her class and she was compelled to rebel against the institutions she’d identified as oppressive, because of the kidnapping.
She first learned from us that, amongst us, only she had the privilege of a defense, assuming she survived any attempts to apprehend her. We had no problem with her defense as long as she and her lawyers kept it legit. Her public & recorded demeanor after her apprehension put serious pressure on her attorneys to figure out how to monsterize us & embellish the narrative claiming torture, rape & brainwashing. Not very comradely.
Still, I absolutely feel no animus toward Hearst. She saved my bacon on the Imperial Highway in Inglewood as I was being arrested for shoplifting.
That version of Patty Hearst — the one who came in firing to free her kidnapper from arrest — is hard to square with the one Hearst later described in a tell-all book. She wrote that after her brutal kidnapping, the only way to survive was to follow orders, rob banks, kidnap a teenager and issue communiqués crafted by her captors.
When Paul Schrader turned her book into a 1988 film starring Natasha Richardson as Hearst, he added a fictionalized encounter between Hearst and her father at the end. In a review of the movie in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote, “Did Patty Hearst become part of the S.L.A. willingly, or was she simply trying to save her life? The movie shows you that, in the state she was in, there was no difference."
We can only conclude that all these conflicting accounts will never truly be resolved. Fifty years later, the events that followed Hearst’s kidnapping remain — and will remain — an unsolvable mystery.
Roger Rapoport, author of the just published novel Searching for Patty Hearst (Lexographic Press), was one of the lead reporters covering the Patty Hearst case in 1974-75. More at pattyhearst.com