WEBVTT - S1 E12: Pavlov’s (almost) Drowning Dogs 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:05.040 Rip Current is a production of iHeart Podcasts. The views 0:00:05.040 --> 0:00:09.200 and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the host, producers, 0:00:09.280 --> 0:00:13.160 or parent company. Listener discretion is it fine? 0:00:16.920 --> 0:00:20.000 At four o'clock on the afternoon of September twenty second, 0:00:20.360 --> 0:00:24.320 nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore fired a shot at 0:00:24.320 --> 0:00:28.520 President Gerald Ford just outside the side entrance of the 0:00:28.560 --> 0:00:35.040 Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco. She missed. As we 0:00:35.080 --> 0:00:39.720 heard last episode, Sarah Jane's public defender contacted La Times 0:00:39.720 --> 0:00:43.360 reporter Ellen Hume while she was having dinner with her husband. 0:00:44.159 --> 0:00:46.600 He told her that Sarah Jane wouldn't talk to him 0:00:46.960 --> 0:00:49.960 until she talked to Ellen. Could Ellen come up to 0:00:50.000 --> 0:00:56.000 San Francisco? She caught the last plane a reminder, Sarah 0:00:56.120 --> 0:00:58.640 Jane was going by the name Sally at the time. 0:01:00.280 --> 0:01:03.080 What Sally wanted me to do was write her manifesto, 0:01:03.480 --> 0:01:06.119 And what I had worked out as a deal with 0:01:06.200 --> 0:01:09.960 my editors and with Sally's attorney was that I would 0:01:10.200 --> 0:01:12.920 help her by drafting a statement as she wished it 0:01:12.920 --> 0:01:15.280 to be, whatever she wanted, just to be a kind 0:01:15.280 --> 0:01:17.520 of help. Heer to draft it, but that that would 0:01:17.520 --> 0:01:20.600 be included in a real news story that I would 0:01:20.640 --> 0:01:24.640 write as I interviewed her in prison. So it was 0:01:24.680 --> 0:01:26.959 a deal where she'd get her manifesto, but I would 0:01:26.959 --> 0:01:30.840 get my professional job done, but without exploiting her. She 0:01:30.880 --> 0:01:33.600 would have her statement and I would have my story. 0:01:33.959 --> 0:01:37.240 And she apparently agreed to this through her lawyer. So 0:01:37.440 --> 0:01:42.480 the next day the arraignment occurred, September twenty. 0:01:42.200 --> 0:01:45.679 Third, was a wild day at the courthouse. Sarah Jane 0:01:45.680 --> 0:01:49.720 and Patti Hurst both had hearings, so did SLA member 0:01:49.800 --> 0:01:53.800 Steven Solia. This is from the Berkeley Barbes coverage of 0:01:53.840 --> 0:01:54.720 that day in court. 0:01:55.880 --> 0:01:58.640 With two hundred reporters at the courthouse looking madly for 0:01:58.680 --> 0:02:01.120 the Patti Hurst bail hearing, the place had the air 0:02:01.200 --> 0:02:04.280 of an activities night for speed freaks on an ocean liner. 0:02:04.880 --> 0:02:07.920 Patty Hurst's hearing would be in the Ceremonial courtroom on 0:02:08.040 --> 0:02:11.280 floor nineteen at ten am. Those who couldn't get in 0:02:11.440 --> 0:02:14.560 could go to Solia's court appearance a couple of floors below. 0:02:15.280 --> 0:02:17.640 At two pm, there would be a bail hearing on 0:02:17.720 --> 0:02:20.560 Sally Moore's sanity that promised to be pretty quick. 0:02:22.080 --> 0:02:25.360 Every reporter in the world was converged on this courthouse 0:02:25.400 --> 0:02:28.440 in San Francisco, and I took the rose off my 0:02:28.840 --> 0:02:32.840 breakfast tray at the Cliff Hotel, got myself to the courthouse, 0:02:33.000 --> 0:02:36.520 got in there, and then when she was brought into 0:02:36.520 --> 0:02:39.520 the courtroom, her lawyer had told me that she was 0:02:39.800 --> 0:02:42.920 so worried that the FBI wouldn't let me talk to her, so, 0:02:43.760 --> 0:02:46.880 wanting to give her a signal that I was there 0:02:47.440 --> 0:02:50.000 and was going to talk to her, I jumped up, 0:02:50.200 --> 0:02:53.240 waved the red rose and said Sally and sat down. 0:02:53.800 --> 0:02:57.200 It wasn't support, it wasn't anything, but just a signal 0:02:57.560 --> 0:02:58.560 that I was there. 0:02:59.360 --> 0:02:59.680 Walter. 0:03:00.440 --> 0:03:03.840 That night on CBS News had a report that a 0:03:03.919 --> 0:03:07.360 supporter jumped up in the courtroom and waved a red rose. 0:03:09.200 --> 0:03:12.200 And when I talked to Carol Plougash about this recently, 0:03:12.280 --> 0:03:16.120 she said, it's amazing you didn't get arrested for doing that. 0:03:16.800 --> 0:03:20.280 So I was able to proceed and cover the hearing. 0:03:22.120 --> 0:03:24.320 But either no one noticed or no one could be 0:03:24.360 --> 0:03:27.480 bothered to do anything about it. It was just another 0:03:27.600 --> 0:03:32.480 odd moment in a flood of odd moments. Again from 0:03:32.520 --> 0:03:36.120 the Berkeley Barb, this time describing what happened after Patty 0:03:36.200 --> 0:03:37.320 Hurst's hearing ended. 0:03:39.000 --> 0:03:41.800 The scene became a little confused. At that point, one 0:03:41.840 --> 0:03:44.480 hundred and ten reporters bolted out of their seats and 0:03:44.520 --> 0:03:47.440 headed for the doors. You have to remember that nobody 0:03:47.480 --> 0:03:50.400 knew the terrain as they chased after the hearsts. From 0:03:50.400 --> 0:03:53.160 that point on, it was like the Poseidon Adventure. The 0:03:53.200 --> 0:03:57.600 elevators immediately jammed with reporters, film crews, sound men. People 0:03:57.720 --> 0:04:00.320 ran up and down the corridors looking for stairwell or 0:04:00.360 --> 0:04:04.240 someone to interview. The hallways filled with reporters crying frantically 0:04:04.280 --> 0:04:06.960 for telephones and unlocked doors. 0:04:09.520 --> 0:04:11.680 And then I went back and waited in the hotel 0:04:11.760 --> 0:04:14.680 room and a call came, and her lawyer called me 0:04:14.720 --> 0:04:17.760 and said, okay, tonight, I'm going to get you in, 0:04:18.080 --> 0:04:20.200 but let's have supper first. So we had supper, and 0:04:20.200 --> 0:04:22.799 he said, look, the FBI may confis. Get your notes. 0:04:23.600 --> 0:04:26.840 This is not going to be easy, but we'll drive 0:04:26.960 --> 0:04:29.120 after we have supper. So he prepared me. I couldn't 0:04:29.200 --> 0:04:32.080 have a recorder, I couldn't have a pen I couldn't 0:04:32.120 --> 0:04:34.919 have a purse. I could barely have a sheets of 0:04:34.920 --> 0:04:37.400 paper and a pencil, which the lawyer gave me. That's 0:04:37.440 --> 0:04:39.920 all I could take into the interview. 0:04:40.600 --> 0:04:43.200 Sarah Jane was being held in a jail cell in 0:04:43.240 --> 0:04:47.280 Redwood City, just outside of San Francisco. While she had 0:04:47.320 --> 0:04:51.400 gained instant notoriety, she was not the most famous person there. 0:04:52.200 --> 0:04:54.880 The New York Times reported on the sudden appearance of 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:57.039 the jail's news celebrity inmates. 0:04:58.720 --> 0:05:01.960 There are five singles sets and the maximum security corridor 0:05:02.040 --> 0:05:05.160 of the women's section of the jail. Sheriff John MacDonald said, 0:05:06.080 --> 0:05:09.040 one is empty, one has a mentally disturbed woman in it, 0:05:09.520 --> 0:05:12.760 one has a woman accused of robbery, and Miss Hurst 0:05:12.800 --> 0:05:15.800 and Miss Moore occupy the two others, which are across 0:05:15.839 --> 0:05:19.000 the corridor from each other. It has been reported here 0:05:19.120 --> 0:05:22.000 that the two women discussed that episode that touched both 0:05:22.040 --> 0:05:26.039 their lives, and that they exchanged cordial greetings. They don't 0:05:26.040 --> 0:05:28.920 seem to have anything else much in common, the sheriff said. 0:05:30.320 --> 0:05:33.440 So I go in there and the first thing I 0:05:33.520 --> 0:05:36.320 say to this woman who's in a nightgown in a sweater, 0:05:37.080 --> 0:05:41.479 I say, Sally, why did you do this? She said, 0:05:41.680 --> 0:05:45.400 because the FBI killed your story on me. I said, 0:05:45.400 --> 0:05:48.320 what do you mean? She said, it wasn't in the 0:05:48.360 --> 0:05:52.160 paper this morning. I said, Sally, it wasn't supposed to 0:05:52.240 --> 0:05:55.839 run today. It's supposed to run Wednesday. And she said, oh, 0:05:55.920 --> 0:06:01.960 and looked downcast. Can you imagine how amazing and terrible 0:06:02.120 --> 0:06:08.400 and weird that whole thing was. I said to myself, Okay, 0:06:08.480 --> 0:06:10.560 so my story didn't run, and that's why she tried 0:06:10.600 --> 0:06:13.400 to kill the president. I states, wait a minute, but 0:06:13.480 --> 0:06:16.440 I understood that she believed that story was going to 0:06:16.480 --> 0:06:20.080 save her life. And I, now, having thought about this 0:06:20.120 --> 0:06:24.440 for all these forty some years, understand that by trying 0:06:24.480 --> 0:06:28.359 to kill the president, and she was mentally unstable. Okay, 0:06:28.360 --> 0:06:31.440 she was emotionally ill. This was not a well person, 0:06:31.920 --> 0:06:34.479 and I didn't understand that at the time, but she 0:06:34.640 --> 0:06:38.039 clearly was. She believed that if she did something really 0:06:38.120 --> 0:06:42.760 dramatic and heroic from the revolutionary's point of view, then 0:06:42.800 --> 0:06:43.839 they wouldn't kill her. 0:06:47.240 --> 0:06:48.320 I'm Toby Baal. 0:06:48.640 --> 0:06:52.640 And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current. 0:06:57.880 --> 0:06:58.040 Nay. 0:06:58.200 --> 0:07:02.720 She was a lovely child. And later I had to 0:07:02.839 --> 0:07:05.000 bet you're ever in a bank where the guvernor had 0:07:05.120 --> 0:07:06.799 you know, I don't think anybody. 0:07:06.400 --> 0:07:13.560 Feel Episode twelve. They would like everyone to believe that 0:07:13.680 --> 0:07:15.160 only kooks do it. 0:07:20.200 --> 0:07:23.760 Americans who saw the dramatic conversions from Middle American to 0:07:23.880 --> 0:07:27.680 radical young made by Lynette from Sarah, Jane Moore and 0:07:27.760 --> 0:07:31.280 Patty Hurst could look at two well known incidents to 0:07:31.360 --> 0:07:35.120 try to understand what had happened. The first was a 0:07:35.160 --> 0:07:39.600 series of events involving American POWs held during the Korean War. 0:07:40.720 --> 0:07:44.840 My name's Joel Dimsdale. I'm an emeritus professor of psychiatry 0:07:44.920 --> 0:07:49.280 at University of California, San Diego. What was observed in 0:07:49.320 --> 0:07:54.000 the Korean War was that there were certain circumstances that 0:07:54.240 --> 0:08:02.160 made people more persuadable, and people started doing on accountable 0:08:02.520 --> 0:08:05.400 things that were just difficult to explain. 0:08:07.040 --> 0:08:10.800 In nineteen fifty two, Colonel Frank Schwabel and thirty five 0:08:10.840 --> 0:08:15.680 other Air Force POWs publicly confessed to using German warfare 0:08:15.800 --> 0:08:20.560 against North Korea. In nineteen fifty three, after the armistice 0:08:20.640 --> 0:08:24.320 was agreed to, twenty one US soldiers chose to live 0:08:24.360 --> 0:08:28.960 in communists China rather than return home. In between these 0:08:29.000 --> 0:08:34.040 two events, other POWs collaborated in making anti war broadcasts. 0:08:35.160 --> 0:08:38.679 The term brainwashing had first been coined in nineteen fifty 0:08:39.280 --> 0:08:41.560 and it now was used to try to explain what 0:08:41.679 --> 0:08:47.240 had happened. Timothy Melly, professor of English at Miami University, 0:08:47.600 --> 0:08:52.520 told Smithsonian Magazine quote, the basic problem that brainwashing is 0:08:52.559 --> 0:08:56.440 designed to address is the question why would anybody become 0:08:56.480 --> 0:08:59.480 a communist. It is a story that we tell to 0:08:59.559 --> 0:09:04.480 explain something we can't otherwise explain. The theory at the 0:09:04.559 --> 0:09:07.400 time was that the treatment of the POWs could cause 0:09:07.440 --> 0:09:11.440 fundamental changes in a person's behavior or beliefs, or even 0:09:11.480 --> 0:09:13.840 allow complete control over them. 0:09:14.520 --> 0:09:18.520 So you take somebody who subject them to enormous stress, 0:09:19.559 --> 0:09:24.079 force them to confess in group circumstances, sleep, deprive them, 0:09:24.640 --> 0:09:28.800 isolate them from others, and you have a recipe for 0:09:29.760 --> 0:09:32.120 coercion and persuasion. 0:09:33.880 --> 0:09:38.040 The public panic over brainwashing reached its cultural apex with 0:09:38.120 --> 0:09:42.240 the nineteen sixty two film The Manchurian Candidate, about a 0:09:42.280 --> 0:09:46.559 returning Korean War soldier who's conditioned to commit an assassination 0:09:46.880 --> 0:09:48.679 when he receives a signal. 0:09:49.160 --> 0:09:53.560 Allow me to introduce our American visitors. I must ask 0:09:53.600 --> 0:09:56.920 you to forgive this somewhat lackadaisical matters, but I have 0:09:57.040 --> 0:10:00.840 conditioned them or brainwashed them, which I understand that the 0:10:00.920 --> 0:10:02.160 new American. 0:10:01.720 --> 0:10:07.720 Were The second incident was the attempt by a parole 0:10:08.120 --> 0:10:11.840 named John Eric Olsen to rob a bank called Credit 0:10:11.920 --> 0:10:16.720 Banken in Stockholm, Sweden in nineteen seventy three. Olsen and 0:10:16.760 --> 0:10:20.120 a partner held four hostages inside the bank for six 0:10:20.240 --> 0:10:24.640 days before surrendering after police pumped tear gas into the vault. 0:10:25.520 --> 0:10:28.720 None of the hostages would testify in court against the robbers, 0:10:28.760 --> 0:10:31.760 and in fact began to raise money to aid in 0:10:31.800 --> 0:10:35.480 their defense. The bond felt by the hostages towards their 0:10:35.520 --> 0:10:39.680 captors became known as Stockholm syndrome. But we can look 0:10:39.720 --> 0:10:43.960 back even further a century ago to the earliest observation 0:10:44.080 --> 0:10:46.920 of this kind of change, made by the Russian scientist 0:10:47.320 --> 0:10:52.679 Yvonne Pavlov. The Pavlov of Pavlov's dogs, who he conditioned 0:10:52.720 --> 0:10:56.280 to respond by salivating to sounds that they associated with 0:10:56.400 --> 0:11:01.079 being fed. This was an early breakthrough in cycle logical conditioning. 0:11:02.440 --> 0:11:06.319 Pavlov worked in a basement laboratory in Saint Petersburg, Russia. 0:11:07.080 --> 0:11:10.280 The dogs he experimented with were housed in kennels in 0:11:10.360 --> 0:11:15.079 this lab. In September of nineteen twenty four, Saint Petersburg 0:11:15.200 --> 0:11:20.360 experienced intense flooding, and inside Pavlov's lab the water level rose. 0:11:21.240 --> 0:11:24.760 The dogs trapped in cages, held their snouts as high 0:11:24.760 --> 0:11:30.880 as they could, just above the waterline, apparently for hours. Eventually, 0:11:31.000 --> 0:11:34.640 Pavlov's assistants arrived to save the dogs, but to do 0:11:34.720 --> 0:11:38.600 this had to force the dog's heads underwater before pulling 0:11:38.640 --> 0:11:42.960 them through the cage doors. This too, was obviously traumatic 0:11:43.000 --> 0:11:44.880 for the dogs, and. 0:11:44.840 --> 0:11:48.920 What Pavlov discovered was that the stress of that situation 0:11:49.480 --> 0:11:52.280 was so extensive that the dogs were never the same. 0:11:53.160 --> 0:11:57.480 They forgot everything that they had learned. He was a genius. 0:11:57.520 --> 0:12:01.240 He could teach a dog to respond to middle C 0:12:01.480 --> 0:12:04.120 on the piano and ignore D on the piano. He 0:12:04.240 --> 0:12:08.240 was that good. So for Pavlov's dogs to forget everything 0:12:08.280 --> 0:12:12.120 that they'd learned was something. The other thing that Pavlov 0:12:12.240 --> 0:12:17.560 observed was that stress change the dog's feelings. All of 0:12:17.559 --> 0:12:22.640 a sudden, they changed their character, their personality. Some of 0:12:22.640 --> 0:12:28.160 them became timid, some became aggressive. The dog who used 0:12:28.160 --> 0:12:35.079 to like Sga hated Serge thereafter. So massive stress seems 0:12:35.120 --> 0:12:39.480 to shake up organisms, whether they be dogs or humans, 0:12:40.200 --> 0:12:43.440 in a way that causes people to forget. 0:12:44.920 --> 0:12:49.320 This idea that massive stress, whether by accident or design, 0:12:49.720 --> 0:12:53.800 can cause people to become susceptible to suggestion or change 0:12:54.320 --> 0:12:57.920 is largely accepted now, but as we will see, this 0:12:58.080 --> 0:13:01.840 was not the case in the mid seventies. But before 0:13:01.840 --> 0:13:05.000 we get to that, let's return to Ellen Hume, who 0:13:05.120 --> 0:13:07.480 was trying to work with Sarah Jane to create a 0:13:07.520 --> 0:13:11.200 statement about her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford. 0:13:12.480 --> 0:13:14.400 After we did the interview, I went back to my 0:13:14.440 --> 0:13:17.040 hotel room in drafted the statement and I would call 0:13:17.080 --> 0:13:19.160 a lawyer and read it to him and over and 0:13:19.200 --> 0:13:22.320 over again, multiple drafts. He said she won't accept it. 0:13:22.679 --> 0:13:25.560 I kept trying to change it, and she never accepted it. 0:13:25.640 --> 0:13:28.200 So I just said, look, I've reached my deadline. I 0:13:28.240 --> 0:13:32.240 will incorporate her ideas into my story to say this 0:13:32.320 --> 0:13:35.440 is what she's trying to say. And I faithfully did that. 0:13:35.800 --> 0:13:39.319 And it's important to me to note that I really 0:13:39.360 --> 0:13:43.560 tried to fulfill any obligations I could have had to 0:13:43.640 --> 0:13:45.920 help her, and I didn't want to exploit her in 0:13:45.960 --> 0:13:49.720 any way. But the story that came out in the Times, 0:13:49.760 --> 0:13:55.240 the editors whoever massaged it didn't talk about the fact 0:13:55.360 --> 0:13:57.160 that she had thought a story was going to run 0:13:57.200 --> 0:13:58.800 about her, and that she thought that was going to 0:13:58.880 --> 0:14:01.120 save her life. It was just that she wanted to 0:14:01.160 --> 0:14:04.880 prove herself to the radicals, and it did use my 0:14:05.040 --> 0:14:09.480 interview material faithfully, but it just left out the piece 0:14:09.720 --> 0:14:11.640 that she had said to me about why she had 0:14:11.920 --> 0:14:14.400 done it. I now look back on it as she 0:14:14.480 --> 0:14:18.160 probably would have done it anyway. What happened after I 0:14:18.200 --> 0:14:21.520 did my interview with her was it ran the next 0:14:21.600 --> 0:14:24.280 day in the La Times, and it ran in every 0:14:24.320 --> 0:14:26.560 paper roll around the world because it was an exclusive 0:14:26.640 --> 0:14:30.320 jailhouse interview with her and no one else had had 0:14:30.360 --> 0:14:31.760 access to her. 0:14:32.720 --> 0:14:36.000 Ellen's story contained parts that seemed to originate in the 0:14:36.040 --> 0:14:40.360 attempts to draft Sarah Jane's statement. These show the extremes 0:14:40.360 --> 0:14:43.600 of stress she was experiencing and put her attempt on 0:14:43.680 --> 0:14:47.040 forward within the framework and language of the radical movement. 0:14:48.000 --> 0:14:50.680 These quotes are read by Mary Catherine Garrison. 0:14:51.480 --> 0:14:54.280 I am not a berserk woman. I was afraid of 0:14:54.280 --> 0:14:57.560 myself that I would come apart out of control, afraid 0:14:57.600 --> 0:15:02.560 I would go around shooting people. And then it was 0:15:02.680 --> 0:15:05.600 kind of an ultimate protest against the system. I did 0:15:05.640 --> 0:15:07.840 not want to kill somebody, but there comes a point 0:15:07.880 --> 0:15:10.040 when the only way you can make a statement is 0:15:10.080 --> 0:15:11.000 to pick up a gun. 0:15:12.200 --> 0:15:15.880 In this final excerpt, Sarah Jane identifies with the anger 0:15:15.880 --> 0:15:20.320 of the radicals. She distinguishes this emotional response from what 0:15:20.360 --> 0:15:25.200 she calls the theoreticians, presumably the radical writers who inspired 0:15:25.280 --> 0:15:30.480 revolutionary action. Moore said she hoped her action would somehow 0:15:30.520 --> 0:15:34.880 force the radical movement to unite, to. 0:15:34.080 --> 0:15:37.000 Forge some kind of unity between the rage that led 0:15:37.040 --> 0:15:41.360 to the formation of the SLA combined with theoreticians. I 0:15:41.400 --> 0:15:43.560 wanted them to face the realities of some of the 0:15:43.600 --> 0:15:47.240 things they put in motion. I wanted people to rethink things. 0:15:47.280 --> 0:15:50.000 But it's more than that. I have experienced a kind 0:15:50.000 --> 0:15:53.680 of rage and frustration many people feel. People are driven 0:15:53.800 --> 0:15:54.720 to act. 0:15:55.840 --> 0:15:58.800 The publication of the LA Times article made Ellen a 0:15:58.920 --> 0:16:04.040 musquet interview, and she responded by retreating from the public eye. 0:16:04.360 --> 0:16:06.560 I just went into hiding. I didn't take phone calls. 0:16:06.600 --> 0:16:09.520 I didn't do TV or radio interviews. Everyone on Earth 0:16:09.600 --> 0:16:13.280 was trying to interview me. I felt so awful about 0:16:13.320 --> 0:16:16.080 what had happened, and again I thought that I might 0:16:16.120 --> 0:16:18.320 have been able to stop it, and it just killed 0:16:18.360 --> 0:16:21.320 me that I hadn't taken that call. 0:16:21.440 --> 0:16:25.600 Sarah Jane's legal situation after her arrest was tenuous. There 0:16:25.640 --> 0:16:27.920 was no question that she had fired at the president. 0:16:28.480 --> 0:16:30.440 The only hope for her lay in some kind of 0:16:30.480 --> 0:16:34.920 mitigating factor that would diminish her legal responsibility. Sarah Jane 0:16:34.960 --> 0:16:38.160 was examined by six psychiatrists to determine whether she was 0:16:38.200 --> 0:16:41.880 sane and competent to stand trial. She was reportedly not 0:16:42.040 --> 0:16:46.160 very forthcoming in these psychiatric interviews. The psychiatrists were not 0:16:46.200 --> 0:16:49.320 in agreement about a diagnosis, though all agreed that she 0:16:49.400 --> 0:16:53.160 suffered from some form of mental illness. They did agree 0:16:53.360 --> 0:16:56.720 that she was competent to stand trial while she met 0:16:56.720 --> 0:16:59.840 the competency threshold. The people that Toby interviewed who knew 0:16:59.840 --> 0:17:03.320 her in nineteen seventy four in nineteen seventy five, certainly 0:17:03.400 --> 0:17:08.880 perceived psychological trouble. Journalist Carol Pogash. 0:17:08.960 --> 0:17:11.959 She's clearly a disturbed person, but it wouldn't have occurred 0:17:12.000 --> 0:17:14.199 to any of us that she would act on it. 0:17:14.680 --> 0:17:18.120 She was this nutty person who none of us took 0:17:18.160 --> 0:17:20.480 seriously until we had to. 0:17:22.280 --> 0:17:25.359 But because Sarah Jane had been found competent to stand trial, 0:17:25.920 --> 0:17:28.480 her defense would have to be that she had not 0:17:28.600 --> 0:17:32.520 been competent at the time of the assassination attempt. On 0:17:32.600 --> 0:17:35.360 December ninth, her lawyer at the time, a man named 0:17:35.400 --> 0:17:39.600 James Hewitt filed a notice of defense based on mental 0:17:39.600 --> 0:17:45.800 condition and insanity defense. Sarah Jane furiously opposed this, in 0:17:45.840 --> 0:17:48.880 her mind, delegitimized the reason she had taken the shot 0:17:48.920 --> 0:17:52.399 at Ford. The attempt would be considered the exploits of 0:17:52.440 --> 0:17:56.040 a mentally ill person rather than a revolutionary act, and 0:17:56.080 --> 0:18:00.520 she was adamant that hers was a revolutionary act. That's 0:18:00.560 --> 0:18:02.280 why she had wanted to work with Ellen Hume to 0:18:02.320 --> 0:18:06.359 draft a statement, because she wanted people to know. Here, 0:18:06.640 --> 0:18:09.880 Sarah Jane talks with journalist Ben Williams. 0:18:09.800 --> 0:18:12.679 The government has to believe that any political act of 0:18:12.680 --> 0:18:14.600 that sort, they would like everyone to believe. 0:18:14.359 --> 0:18:15.840 That only kooks do it. 0:18:16.680 --> 0:18:19.399 That anyone that isn't happy with our system, anyone that 0:18:19.400 --> 0:18:22.880 would actually attack it in such a violent fashion, they 0:18:22.960 --> 0:18:25.199 must put it down to kooks. They must say that 0:18:25.200 --> 0:18:31.320 these are insane people. I think, you know, honesty compels 0:18:31.359 --> 0:18:33.000 me to say that it was an an out that 0:18:33.160 --> 0:18:36.360 was offered to me. Let it be that you were crazy, 0:18:36.440 --> 0:18:39.920 that's your that's your your route to freedom. 0:18:39.960 --> 0:18:45.040 I mean, the government offered you the yes who Well, 0:18:45.080 --> 0:18:50.199 in terms of the prosecutor, I don't think that it 0:18:50.280 --> 0:18:51.280 was as averse. 0:18:50.960 --> 0:18:51.600 As that. 0:18:54.040 --> 0:18:57.840 Against the wishes of her lawyer. On December twelfth, three 0:18:57.920 --> 0:19:01.159 days after the not guilty plea, Sarah Jane stood in 0:19:01.160 --> 0:19:03.840 front of a judge and changed her plea to guilty. 0:19:05.160 --> 0:19:07.160 Journalist Ellen Hume. 0:19:07.880 --> 0:19:11.760 When she pled guilty, I was really angry at the 0:19:12.000 --> 0:19:15.400 judicial system because here was a person with mental illness. 0:19:15.760 --> 0:19:18.400 She never should have been allowed to plead guilty and 0:19:18.600 --> 0:19:21.359 not have a trial. But when she pled guilty, that 0:19:21.400 --> 0:19:23.000 meant she's just going to be in prison for the 0:19:23.040 --> 0:19:25.240 rest of her life, which she pretty much was. 0:19:26.760 --> 0:19:29.119 Her plea was bad in my opinion, not that I 0:19:29.160 --> 0:19:30.639 know a lot of this poilet game, but it was 0:19:30.680 --> 0:19:33.760 pretty obviously manipulated it into pleading. 0:19:34.960 --> 0:19:36.879 Lawyer Peggy Garrity. 0:19:37.680 --> 0:19:39.960 I's been a lawyer for about five minutes at this point. 0:19:40.119 --> 0:19:42.600 There was a woman who was very involved in feminist 0:19:42.680 --> 0:19:45.200 organizations in the office I was renting a space from, 0:19:45.240 --> 0:19:49.480 and she was contacted and she didn't want to deal 0:19:49.520 --> 0:19:52.240 with it, and something about Sarah Jane was not getting 0:19:52.240 --> 0:19:53.200 access to her child. 0:19:54.760 --> 0:19:58.040 This was Frederick, Sarah Jane's nine year old son, by 0:19:58.119 --> 0:20:02.399 John Alberg, the Hollywood sound producer her After Sarah Jane's arrest, 0:20:02.720 --> 0:20:04.920 Frederick moved in with a married couple who had known 0:20:04.960 --> 0:20:08.320 Sarah Jane for a decade. They raised Frederick until he 0:20:08.359 --> 0:20:10.520 graduated from high school in nineteen eighty four. 0:20:11.800 --> 0:20:13.960 I was so excited about being in the practice of law. 0:20:14.320 --> 0:20:16.080 I was dying to go out to the federal prison. 0:20:16.440 --> 0:20:18.800 So I went out and talked to her and left 0:20:18.840 --> 0:20:21.000 thinking there's something I can do for this woman, something 0:20:21.000 --> 0:20:24.439 else I can do, because it wasn't really about the child. 0:20:25.080 --> 0:20:27.320 So I talked to her about everything, and I decided 0:20:27.359 --> 0:20:31.160 I could do basically effectively, Hey, this corpus to help 0:20:31.160 --> 0:20:33.280 her not get out, I guess, but get a trial. 0:20:34.160 --> 0:20:35.760 She would talk to me like she didn't talk to 0:20:35.840 --> 0:20:39.040 other people. So I just said, having fun like a new, 0:20:39.080 --> 0:20:41.720 brand new baby lawyer. I'm sitting here thinking, my god, 0:20:41.960 --> 0:20:43.400 an assassin, a real assassin. 0:20:44.680 --> 0:20:47.680 Sarah Jane had been increasingly isolated in her last months 0:20:47.720 --> 0:20:52.480 before shooting at Ford. In prison, this process continued. She 0:20:52.600 --> 0:20:56.600 had few visitors. Peggy Garrity visited in her capacity as 0:20:56.600 --> 0:21:00.000 a lawyer. Ellen Hume visited as someone you understood Sarah 0:21:00.200 --> 0:21:01.119 Jane's loneliness. 0:21:02.160 --> 0:21:04.000 But I went to visit her in Long Beach because 0:21:04.040 --> 0:21:06.320 that's where one of the prisons where she was being held, 0:21:06.720 --> 0:21:10.080 and surprisingly they let me in as if I were 0:21:10.119 --> 0:21:13.679 a family member, and we hugged each other because you know, 0:21:13.760 --> 0:21:17.200 I always was kind of supportive of her in many ways, 0:21:17.240 --> 0:21:19.960 and just in terms of listening to her, not because 0:21:20.000 --> 0:21:23.040 I supported her ideas she was glad to have somebody 0:21:23.119 --> 0:21:26.320 visit her. I just thought she's alone, you know. I 0:21:26.359 --> 0:21:29.840 did it out of compassion, out of just human kindness. 0:21:30.320 --> 0:21:33.399 But I realized after that she was so unstable. She 0:21:33.520 --> 0:21:36.720 could have had a jailhouse knife and knife to me 0:21:36.760 --> 0:21:38.800 in the back as I hugged her, and I thought 0:21:38.840 --> 0:21:42.440 I better go back there again, and I didn't. 0:21:43.600 --> 0:21:46.800 This concern about Sarah Jane having a knife turned out 0:21:46.840 --> 0:21:47.640 to be well placed. 0:21:48.960 --> 0:21:50.760 So I spent a lot of time going back and forth, 0:21:51.040 --> 0:21:54.879 and there's one story still blows me away. She'd done something. 0:21:54.920 --> 0:21:57.680 So we're meeting in this room where there's like armed 0:21:57.680 --> 0:22:00.800 guards all around us, and she asked me, I'm Manilla 0:22:00.840 --> 0:22:05.159 folder and says, don't go through the metal detector. Like 0:22:06.000 --> 0:22:08.680 I know, I can't hand it back to her. Whatever's 0:22:08.720 --> 0:22:11.240 in there is not a good thing. And even the 0:22:11.320 --> 0:22:13.520 rookie years I am, I'm like, oh, nop so. I 0:22:13.560 --> 0:22:16.159 when I leave here, I don't go through the metal detector. 0:22:16.160 --> 0:22:18.000 I go around it. I get back to my office 0:22:18.000 --> 0:22:20.320 and I open up and it shived that big. It's 0:22:20.480 --> 0:22:22.520 like twelve inches. I kept it for a long time, 0:22:22.560 --> 0:22:24.320 and that disappeared. I don't know where it went. 0:22:26.040 --> 0:22:30.760 So Sarah Jane's strange behavior continued in prison. She continued 0:22:30.800 --> 0:22:34.080 to maintain that she was completely saying her time in 0:22:34.119 --> 0:22:37.560 the radical underground, she said, had changed her, made her 0:22:37.640 --> 0:22:41.480 understand things differently, and to her, the irony was that 0:22:41.520 --> 0:22:44.080 it was all because the FBI had used her as 0:22:44.080 --> 0:22:47.840 an informant. Without that urging, she said, she would never 0:22:47.880 --> 0:22:50.600 have become involved to that degree with the radical movement 0:22:50.840 --> 0:22:55.280 and would not have developed her revolutionary commitment. What seems 0:22:55.320 --> 0:22:58.359 fairly clear from her story is that Sarah Jane tried 0:22:58.440 --> 0:23:01.800 different lifestyles and then discarded them. She did it a 0:23:01.880 --> 0:23:07.320 number of times, women's Army Corps, military wife, mother, Hollywood wife, 0:23:07.480 --> 0:23:12.399 doctor's wife, conservative, political organizer. Each time she moved on 0:23:12.680 --> 0:23:17.560 without looking back, leaving parents, siblings, husbands, and children in 0:23:17.640 --> 0:23:22.480 her wake. This pattern, potentially driven by mental illness, most 0:23:22.680 --> 0:23:25.600 likely played a factor in her sudden and rapid conversion 0:23:25.640 --> 0:23:29.639 to the radical young, but were there other contributing factors. 0:23:30.560 --> 0:23:33.840 We've seen how the escalating danger Sarah Jane face likely 0:23:33.920 --> 0:23:37.320 led to her assassination attempt. It seems like a stretch 0:23:37.359 --> 0:23:41.040 to say that she experienced coercive persuasion. Unlike the Korean 0:23:41.040 --> 0:23:44.439 War POW's or credit bank and hostages or Patty Hurst, 0:23:44.880 --> 0:23:50.719 she wasn't under anyone's physical control, but the same factors fear, isolation, 0:23:51.040 --> 0:23:56.199 indoctrination dominated her life. Did this situation, combined with her 0:23:56.240 --> 0:23:59.800 habit of reinvention and likely mental illness, lead to her 0:24:00.000 --> 0:24:04.560 a sudden adoption of such radical beliefs. It's impossible to 0:24:04.560 --> 0:24:07.199