the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt twelve)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

The political zeitgeist, as reflected by the Ford administration’s Justice Department, also compelled the government to bring Patricia to trial. By that fall, the legacy of the 1960s had grown even more toxic; San Francisco was crazier than ever. When Patricia was arrested, there had already been fifty bombings in California alone in 1975. After-hours explosions at power plants, government offices, and corporate headquarters became so routine that they scarcely received any news coverage. And it wasn’t just bombings. On September 5, 1975, two weeks before Patricia was arrested, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme pointed .45-caliber handgun at President Ford as he walked through a park to the state capitol in Sacramento. A member of Charles Manson’s crime “family,” Fromme was wrestled to the ground by a Secret Service agent before she could get off a shot.

Then, on September 22, just four days after Patricia was arrested, Sara Jane Moore came a great deal closer to killing the president. The matronly bookkeeper volunteered to become an FBI informant while working with Randy Hearst’s food giveaway the previous year. Still obsessed with the Hearst case, she circulated among the activists she had met in the China Basin warehouse and then provided leads to the FBI. Moore purchased a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and waited for President Ford outside the St. Francis hotel, in the heart of downtown San Francisco. As Ford walked from the hotel to his limousine, Moore fired a shot that just missed the president’s head. She tried to get off a second round, but a Vietnam veteran named Olver Sipple knocked her down, potentially saving the president’s life. (In the ensuing publicity, Sipple was outed as a homosexual. He came to feel that this disclosure ruined his life, an illustration that San Francisco, in the mid-1970s, had yet to become a fully welcoming haven for gay people.)

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt eleven)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

Between bombings, the comrades achieved something close to a normal life. They were regulars at the drive-in movies that still dotted the region, and on one occasion the Harrises prevailed upon Patricia to go to an anti-Vietnam War documentary. Bill made a spectacle of himself in the theater, bellowing encouragement to the Vietcong forces on the screen. “Eat lead, pigs!” he shouted at the sight of American troops. Even in disguise, Patricia felt compelled to sink down in her seat, out of both embarrassment and fear of being discovered. Still, she had the fortitude to refuse the Harrises’ perverse summons to another film.

“Ask me to do anything, ask me to rob a bank with you,” Patricia told them. “But don’t ask me to go to a movie theater and get arrested watching Citizen Kane.”

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt ten)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

The comrades took to the task with enthusiasm. In particular, the female comrades made a special effort to show that they could contribute as much to the action as the men. Wendy Yoshimura, who had learned to make bombs with her former flame Willie Brandt, took the role of lead designer. She envisioned simple pipe bombs, which would consist of gunpowder stuffed inside two-inch pipes, attached by wires to a battery for a spark and an alarm clock as a timing device. Kilgore and Kathy Soliah spent a day driving around Marin County buying the components.

True to form, Bill Harris had a different approach. Based on his study of the cookbook, he decided he could improve on Yoshimura’s design. Bill and Emily worked on his idea at Geneva Avenue—which paralyzed Patricia with fear of an accident—and then experimented with detonation devices on some old mattresses in the tiny backyard. Bill’s test resulted in a small, smoldering fire and a summons to the fire department. According to Patricia, Emily told the firefighters that local kids smoking cigarettes had started the little blaze.

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt nine)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

Jack Scott was born in 1942 and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his father ran a prosperous family tobacco business until his alcoholism drove the operation into ruin and his family into near destitution. Jack found a refuge from his chaotic home on the playing fields of his high school, where he captained the football team and set records as a sprinter. He was offered athletic scholarships to Villanova and Stanford. He spent a year at each school before a foot injury ended his athletic career and cost him his scholarship. The stark reality of college sports, where an injury could cost a student his education, left him with a sour impression. Scott spent a year in Greenland, graduated from Syracuse, then went west to Berkeley to study for a Ph.D.

Even before he received his doctorate, Scott made a national name for himself. He founded the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society, which aimed to capture and focus national attention on the exploitation of athletes in the college and pro ranks. Scott’s group challenged the authority of coaches, denounced racism in sports, and questioned the medical treatment of athletes. Scott helped write Dave Meggyesy’s 1970 best-selling insider’s account of playing in the NFL, which described rampant drug use and violence against women. As sports editor for Ramparts, a counterculture magazine based in San Francisco, Scott made exactly the enemies he wanted. Spiro Agnew, the vice president of the United States and a great sports fan, denounced Scott by name for questioning the verities of the national pastimes. The most famous visitor to Scott’s institute in Berkeley was Bill Walton, the UCLA center who was at the time the best college basketball player in the country; later, Walton and Scott would become close friends.

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt eight)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

Cinque also wanted to hide the two vans that brought the comrades to Fifty-Fourth Street. Freeman showed him the secluded alley about a block away that was frequently used as a temporary home for stolen vehicles. DeFreeze and the man hustled the two vans into the alley, but the SLA leader would soon recognize the folly of relying on a drunken stranger for advice on operational security. The police knew about the stash in the alley, and that was where the uniformed officers discovered the vehicles around noon. They radioed in the information, which prompted the arrival of the SWAT team, with its dozens of backups. The vise was tightening.

By early afternoon, the scene inside the house had turned increasingly surreal and crowded. Minnie’s children returned from school to find Nancy Ling making Molotov cocktails in the kitchen. One of the children, who was eleven years old, recognized DeFreeze, who introduced himself as Cinque, from television. When the boy asked him his name, DeFreeze repled that the boy should go into the bathroom and lie down in the tub if he didn’t want to get killed. The boy fled out the back door instead. An older man named Clarence Ross settled in with a pint bottle of whiskey. At another point, Christine Johnson and a woman named Brenda got into a fistfight. Impressed with the seventeen-year-old Brenda’s skills, the comrades asked if she wanted to join the SLA. A male friend of hers arrived, and DeFreeze asked him to go buy them a car. He gave the fellow $500 in cash, and he never returned with a car or the money. More than a dozen people passed through the house over the course of the day, and DeFreeze disclosed his identity to virtually all of them.

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt seven)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

Events moved so quickly on May 16 that the news media never caught up. But the shoot-out at Mel’s and the chase that followed gave local television stations the chance to mobilize the following morning. In those days, most local stations sent out camera crews to shoot film that had to be developed back at their studios. But KNXT—which stood for “experimental television”—possessed a new technology that allowed it to broadcast live from the field through a microwave transmitter attached to the top of a small truck. The technology was so new that the team at KNXT is said to have invented its name: the Minicam.

KNXT (later renamed KCBS) would become a national prototype for local news in America. This happened, in part, because Mary Tyler Moore’s aunt happened to work as the business manager of the station, and she shared tales of the station’s lead anchor, Jerry Dunphy—who served as the model for the hapless Ted Baxter. But the station was also a journalistic and ratings leader, with a strong institutional commitment to securing scoops. For KNXT, the Minicam was a not-so-secret weapon. Bill Deiz, a thirty-year-old correspondent for KNXT, wanted to deploy the new technology when he showed up for work on the morning of May 17 to cover the biggest story the city had seen in a long time: the sudden, thunderous arrival of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt six)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

The three SLA vehicles linked up later in the morning. DeFreeze appeared in his red-and-white van, which had the odd feature of dainty curtains on the windows. Nancy Ling was deputized to find the group a place to live, and she returned to report that she had located a house at 822 West Eighty-Fourth Street, in South Central, for the modest sum of $70 a month. When the comrades assembled there, they saw why the price was so low. Even by the modest standards of the comrades’ living conditions in San Francisco, the place was a wreck—a three-room shack with no electricity and thus no hot water, in the heart of the ghetto. Even with the big score at the bank, the comrades couldn’t help but notice the downward trajectory of their living conditions. They had gone from a comfortable suburban house in Concord, to a modest home in Daly City, to a pair of seedy apartments in San Francisco, to this hovel in Los Angeles. The dismal regression offered a vivid counterpoint to DeFreeze’s promises of imminent victory.

There was no furniture, no stove, no refrigerator, no cooking utensils. Emily Harris and Camilla Hall snuck out to a grocery store and returned with canned spinach and okra, which they attempted to flavor with another purchase, canned mackerel. The comrades who could stomach the mixture ate it cold. Patricia, her weight already below a hundred pounds, lived on crackers and Kipper Snacks, a different kind of canned fish. As in San Francisco, the black neighborhood made it difficult for anyone but DeFreeze to leave the house without drawing attention. Mostly, they stayed inside, doing their military drills and calisthenics in desultory compliance with their established custom. DeFreeze added instruction in knife fights to their daily ritual.