Yesterday marked 50 years since the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. Hearst came to embrace the SLA’s revolutionary cause, adapted the nom de guerre Tania, and helped the SLA rob banks.
On September 18, 1975, the FBI finally tracked down Tania. Hearst drew 35 years but in 1979 President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. In 2001. On January 20, 2001, President Bill Clinton granted Patricia Hearst a full pardon. No word about any favors in return but maybe one of those presidential historians on PBS will get to the bottom of it. For a cinematic treatment of the case see Network, released in 1976.
The Ecumenical Liberation Army, a group of “hobgoblin radicals” headed by the Great Ahmed Kahn (Arthur Burghardt), kidnaps heiress Mary Ann Gifford (Cathy Cronkite, Walter’s daughter). In the style of Tania, Gifford joins the Ecumenicals in bank robberies, which they record on film. When the Communist Laureen Hobbs (Marlene Warfield) uses the footage in her “Mao Tse-Tung Hour” show, Gifford calls her out.
“You f—— fascist! Did you see the film we made of the San Marino jail breakout, demonstrating the rising up of the seminal prisoner class infrastructure?” Hobbs tells Gifford to “blow the seminal prisoner class infrastructure out your ass!” For cinéma vérité on the seventies, it doesn’t get better than Network, a good film to see if you are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
Meanwhile, in 1975, SLA member Kathleen Anne Soliah took part in a bank robbery in Carmichael, California, that claimed the life of Myrna Opsahl, a doctor’s wife who had come to deposit church funds. Soliah fled to Minnesota, masqueraded as housewife Sara Jane Olson, and was not captured until 1999. In 2009, after serving seven years, the SLA vet was released from prison in California and allowed to serve her parole in Minnesota.
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