Days of Rage (46 page)

14

WHAT PATTY HEARST WROUGHT

The Rise of the Post-SLA Underground

As Patty Hearst and the Harrises drove south from Los Angeles toward the city of Anaheim that day, May 17, 1974, their car radio was alive with reports of the LAPD’s failure to capture their comrades in the house on Eighty-fourth Street. Harris roared with laughter and pounded the wheel every time an announcer repeated the news that the SLA had gotten away. The laughter stopped, however, once they checked into a hotel room down the road from Disneyland late that afternoon. Flipping on the television, Harris watched for a moment, confused, thinking at first that the scenes of policemen creeping toward a house on every channel were recordings of the morning raid on Eighty-fourth Street. With mounting horror, he finally realized this was a second raid, being shown live.

“That’s our people in there!” Emily Harris screamed.

They watched it all, live, for hours, the firefight, the flames, the burning house, the bodies. Harris shouted at the television throughout, demanding that the three stage a rescue attempt, then realizing its futility, finally
collapsing in Emily’s arms in tears, blaming himself as Patty, curled up on the floor, trembled.

“It’s all my fault,” Harris kept saying. “I killed them. . . . Oh, I wish I was there. . . . I wish I was dead, too.”

Shell-shocked, they spent that weekend at the hotel, then drove to Costa Mesa, where they stayed for a week at another hotel, watching the news, going over what had happened, going over their mistakes, before each of them swore their renewed allegiance to continue the SLA’s struggle. On Memorial Day, ten days after the conflagration on Fifty-fourth Street, they drove north on Interstate 5, returning to the Bay Area, the only place they had friends they felt they could trust, who might hide them.

Their car broke down as soon as they reached San Francisco. After two days lugging a heavy duffel bag packed with guns between hotels, they managed to rent an apartment in Oakland. For the next few days they lay about inside, swilling jug wine as the Harrises squabbled, over money, over their plans, over sex; when Emily denied him, Harris simply mounted Patty, who felt powerless to object. Most of all they discussed who might be safe to approach. It was Emily who finally came up with a promising name: Kathy Soliah, one of Angela Atwood’s waitressing friends. It turned out to be a fateful choice.

 • • • 

By all rights, the fiery destruction of the SLA should have brought an end to what little remained of the underground movement. Instead, it reinvigorated it. Where the vast majority of Americans viewed the SLA as a tiny, bizarre cult, those still inclined to believe in armed struggle envied the SLA’s “achievements”: the food program; the humbling of the Hearsts, millionaire capitalists; and most of all the publicity, the endless magazine covers and television coverage. For the first time in years the underground was part of the national conversation again. To those few who still yearned to hear it, the message was clear: Armed underground struggle was still a viable alternative, even in mid-1970s America, and its new crucible was Berkeley.

Within two years, in fact, four significant new bombing groups would emerge, three of whose founders either came from the Bay Area Left or had visited Berkeley in attempts to join the underground. Two new radical journals began publishing, the first since the death of Eldridge Cleaver’s
Right On!
, both devoted to chronicling underground bombings and the printing of communiqués. Within weeks of the SLA’s immolation, a series of public events—the trial of Joanne Chesimard, massive rallies in support of Attica plaintiffs, and the unlikely reemergence of the Weather Underground—would provide opportunities for scores of new underground members to meet, mingle, plot, and plan. The bombings, robberies, and deaths that resulted would, against all odds, extend the life of the radical underground into the 1980s.

It all began, in a way, with Kathy Soliah, who was twenty-seven that spring. Tall, with straight brown hair and a strong jawline—in some photos she bore a passing resemblance to Bernardine Dohrn—Soliah had waitressed with Angela Atwood before both women quit in anger after their manager ordered them to wear low-cut blouses. Like Atwood, Soliah was an amateur actress, and like Atwood she had wanted to join the SLA; according to Patty Hearst, Bill Harris had rejected Soliah, saying she was “too flaky to be trusted with the SLA’s underground activities.”

She was, in some ways, the SLA’s biggest fan. News of their deaths incensed her. In the following days she cobbled together a protest rally. Held on June 2, 1974, in a corner of Berkeley’s Ho Chi Minh Park, it drew four hundred or so onlookers, many of whom seemed to drift into the park out of curiosity; the FBI filmed the proceedings from a nearby building. Along the front of the stage, someone had lined up bottles of DeFreeze’s favorite beverage, Akadama Plum Wine. Soliah took the microphone wearing pink bellbottoms, a turtleneck sweater, and enormous sunglasses. “I am a soldier of the SLA,” she began.

Cinque, Willie, Camilla, Mizmoon and Fahizah were viciously attacked and murdered by five hundred pigs in LA while the whole nation watched. I believe that Gelina and her comrades fought until the last minute. And though I would like to have her be here with me right now, I know that she lived happy and she died happy. And in that sense, I am so very proud of her. SLA soldiers, although I know it’s not necessary to say, keep fighting. I’m with you.

The Harrises read about Soliah’s appearance in the newspapers and decided to contact her. Emily made the approach, slipping Soliah’s aunt a note asking to meet at a Berkeley bookstore. Soliah appeared overjoyed. They gathered the next night at an Oakland drive-in;
The Sting
was playing. The Harrises spent hours telling Soliah every last detail of what happened in Los Angeles. Soliah swore that many in Berkeley still supported the SLA; she and her boyfriend, Jim Kilgore, in fact, were ready to sign up then and there. For the moment, though, Harris was less concerned with new recruits than with finding a safe place to hide. When he mentioned the possibility of heading to New York, Soliah said she knew someone who might be able to take them. His name was Jack Scott. He was, of all things, a radical sports writer, a onetime college athletic director who went on to write for
Ramparts
.

Scott had already spread word around Berkeley that he wanted to meet the SLA, but not to chauffeur them. He wanted to write their story. A meeting was arranged at the Oakland apartment. Scott said he was happy to drive them to New York, provided that they went unarmed; Harris objected, and their argument stretched toward dawn. Finally they agreed the guns would remain in the trunk. On June 7 Patty and the Harrises recorded a new communiqué for release; in it, Harris announced that the SLA lived on, now operating as a unit of something called the New World Liberation Front. The name meant nothing to police. Afterward everyone piled into three cars and drove east, toward the mountains. It was the beginning of what the press would later call Patty’s “lost year.”

 • • • 

Kathy Soliah did more than save the SLA. For weeks she had been fretting about the bad publicity the SLA was getting. So, with a group of radicals, she helped form a study group called the Bay Area Research Collective, known as BARC, which began publishing
Dragon
, a mimeographed journal
that would become the landmark paper for underground groups.
Dragon
quickly grew beyond an initial focus on the SLA. Between 1975 and 1977 it would publish bombing news and communiqués from almost all the second-generation underground groups, especially those on the West Coast. But
Dragon
was more than just a clearinghouse for the underground. In an early announcement BARC indicated that it was affiliated with this New World Liberation Front, or NWLF.
*

This being Berkeley in 1974, no one took this kind of talk seriously, not even the FBI. The NWLF might be a genuine new underground group, or it might, like so many others, exist only on paper. But something was afoot. During a jailhouse interview in late May, the SLA’s Joe Remiro told a local author, John Bryan, of a May 25 “emergency meeting” in which a number of Bay Area radical groups had formed a new umbrella organization to coordinate the activities of the SLA, the NWLF, and others. In a subsequent issue,
Dragon
carried a letter, supposedly from the NWLF, in which it invited anyone and everyone to detonate their bombs in the name of the NWLF, a tactic it acknowledged made the group seem larger than it was. At least initially, the group’s invitation was met with a yawning silence.

Then, on August 5, came the first NWLF bomb, a dud, left outside an office of the General Motors Acceptance Corp. in suburban Burlingame, California. A communiqué announced “greetings and love to the Symbionese Liberation Army.” Three nights later came another—another dud—left outside a San Francisco GM dealership. In September two NWLF bombs shattered windows late at night outside two Bay Area offices of Dean Witter, a stock brokerage firm. After that the bombs began going off, on average, every sixteen days. On October 2 one damaged a women’s bathroom at a San Francisco Sheraton; on October 5, a Sheraton in Los Angeles; on October 30, the home of a retired ITT executive in Silicon Valley; on November 6, seven meter-maid motorcycles in a Berkeley parking lot. By the end of 1974 eleven NWLF bombs had gone off, at which point the Bay Area press, long accustomed to random radical bombings, was obliged to take notice.

The NWLF would become one of the great mysteries of the underground era. At first the FBI assumed that Bill Harris and the SLA were responsible. But NWLF bombs would still be exploding long after Harris and his acolytes were off the streets. They would go on year after year, in fact, mostly in California, until, in time, the NWLF would be credited with planting more bombs than any other underground group, more than twice as many as the Weather Underground. The truth about the group, or at least part of it, would not emerge for years.

 • • • 

Of the bombing groups that rose to public view beginning in 1974, perhaps the most surprising was the resurgent Weather Underground. It had been a long time coming. For Weather, 1972 and 1973 amounted to lost years, during which time they all but disappeared from public consciousness. Looking back today, few Weather alumni can remember much that happened then, in large part because very little did. Between May 1972, when it struck the Pentagon, and March 1974, when it attacked a federal building in San Francisco, Weather staged only two small bombings. By October 1973, when a three-year-old set of indictments against the leadership was dropped in Detroit, the
New York
Times
called the group “dormant.”

These were the years when the Movement slowed and then died, fracturing into dozens of radical shards. The final blow was the long, slow end of the Vietnam War, symbolized by the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, in January 1973. A few weeks later Weather issued a statement hailing the North Vietnamese “victory,” but it was a short, desultory thing, noticed by few. The fact was, for many in the underground, the end of the war brought a kind of emotional vertigo, a rare moment of celebration followed by the morning-after realization that a dominant focus of their lives had suddenly disappeared. Without the war to protest, and without any sense that their bombings had changed the American condition, Weather had all but stopped doing them.

“We, like most of the Left, began to evaporate after the Vietnam War began ending,” recalls Paul Bradley. “By ’72 things were settling down. We
read a lot, met with people, tried to raise money. There was a lot of talk about the role of armed actions, because we had done a lot of them and nothing had changed. There was a sense we should do something else, but there was no sense what that something else was.”

For the moment, they did very little. It was during this period, in fact, that a number of Weathermen began taking actual jobs. In Los Angeles Rick Ayers worked as a housepainter and gardener. In San Francisco Bradley found work as a mechanic at a foreign-car dealership. He rode a cable car to work. His bosses adored him, handing him the garage keys, and Bradley returned their loyalty, at one point declining to attend a Weather retreat because he feared losing his job.

At the highest levels, however, only a handful of cosmetic changes were made. The leadership was rebranded the Central Committee; at one point the group’s name was changed to the strangely corporate-sounding Weather Underground Organization. In May 1973 the New York cell roused itself to bomb a trio of police cars in Queens after a cop killed a ten-year-old black boy named Clifford Glover. Three years earlier Weatherman had been in the headlines on a regular basis. The morning after the Glover bombing the
Times
couldn’t even get its name straight; its article suggested the group at some point had renamed itself “Weather People.” No one knew; no one particularly cared. Coverage of the year’s second bombing that September was just as dismissive. In protest of the CIA-backed coup in Chile, Weather detonated a bomb on the ninth floor of ITT headquarters in Manhattan, demolishing several empty rooms. Responsibility calls went to the
Post
and the
Times
, which seemed skeptical that Weather even still existed.

“If yesterday’s bombing was indeed done by people connected with the Weatherman [sic],” the
Times
reported, “it would be one of the few times since the fall of 1970 that the violent splinter of Students for a Democratic Society has been heard from.”

It was, all in all, a grim period for a group of intellectual firebrands who four years earlier had been public figures, giving interviews to
Time
and
Newsweek
. Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, it appears, spent much of it in their Hermosa Beach bungalow, squiring Mona Mellis’s children to old movies and ice cream shops. Jeff Jones and the New York cell remained in their
Catskills hideaway. After the dropping of federal indictments, many Weathermen were no longer fugitives; while Dohrn and others were still wanted on state charges linked to the Days of Rage, Bill Ayers and Ron Fliegelman were now free to walk into FBI headquarters without fear of arrest. Dozens of agents were still looking for dozens of Weathermen—still breaking into their families’ homes, in fact—but the only new arrest they made was dumb luck, when Howie Machtinger stumbled into a stakeout outside his brother’s Manhattan apartment in September 1973. He made bail and promptly returned underground, releasing a statement thumbing his nose at the FBI as he did.