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Speaker 2: At four o'clock on the afternoon of September twenty second,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore fired a shot at
Speaker 2: President Gerald Ford just outside the side entrance of the
Speaker 2: Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco. She missed. As we
Speaker 2: heard last episode, Sarah Jane's public defender contacted La Times
Speaker 2: reporter Ellen Hume while she was having dinner with her husband.
Speaker 2: He told her that Sarah Jane wouldn't talk to him
Speaker 2: until she talked to Ellen. Could Ellen come up to
Speaker 2: San Francisco? She caught the last plane a reminder, Sarah
Speaker 2: Jane was going by the name Sally at the time.
Speaker 3: What Sally wanted me to do was write her manifesto,
Speaker 3: And what I had worked out as a deal with
Speaker 3: my editors and with Sally's attorney was that I would
Speaker 3: help her by drafting a statement as she wished it
Speaker 3: to be, whatever she wanted, just to be a kind
Speaker 3: of help. Heer to draft it, but that that would
Speaker 3: be included in a real news story that I would
Speaker 3: write as I interviewed her in prison. So it was
Speaker 3: a deal where she'd get her manifesto, but I would
Speaker 3: get my professional job done, but without exploiting her. She
Speaker 3: would have her statement and I would have my story.
Speaker 3: And she apparently agreed to this through her lawyer. So
Speaker 3: the next day the arraignment occurred, September twenty.
Speaker 2: Third, was a wild day at the courthouse. Sarah Jane
Speaker 2: and Patti Hurst both had hearings, so did SLA member
Speaker 2: Steven Solia. This is from the Berkeley Barbes coverage of
Speaker 2: that day in court.
Speaker 1: With two hundred reporters at the courthouse looking madly for
Speaker 1: the Patti Hurst bail hearing, the place had the air
Speaker 1: of an activities night for speed freaks on an ocean liner.
Speaker 1: Patty Hurst's hearing would be in the Ceremonial courtroom on
Speaker 1: floor nineteen at ten am. Those who couldn't get in
Speaker 1: could go to Solia's court appearance a couple of floors below.
Speaker 1: At two pm, there would be a bail hearing on
Speaker 1: Sally Moore's sanity that promised to be pretty quick.
Speaker 3: Every reporter in the world was converged on this courthouse
Speaker 3: in San Francisco, and I took the rose off my
Speaker 3: breakfast tray at the Cliff Hotel, got myself to the courthouse,
Speaker 3: got in there, and then when she was brought into
Speaker 3: the courtroom, her lawyer had told me that she was
Speaker 3: so worried that the FBI wouldn't let me talk to her, so,
Speaker 3: wanting to give her a signal that I was there
Speaker 3: and was going to talk to her, I jumped up,
Speaker 3: waved the red rose and said Sally and sat down.
Speaker 3: It wasn't support, it wasn't anything, but just a signal
Speaker 3: that I was there.
Speaker 4: Walter.
Speaker 3: That night on CBS News had a report that a
Speaker 3: supporter jumped up in the courtroom and waved a red rose.
Speaker 3: And when I talked to Carol Plougash about this recently,
Speaker 3: she said, it's amazing you didn't get arrested for doing that.
Speaker 3: So I was able to proceed and cover the hearing.
Speaker 2: But either no one noticed or no one could be
Speaker 2: bothered to do anything about it. It was just another
Speaker 2: odd moment in a flood of odd moments. Again from
Speaker 2: the Berkeley Barb, this time describing what happened after Patty
Speaker 2: Hurst's hearing ended.
Speaker 1: The scene became a little confused. At that point, one
Speaker 1: hundred and ten reporters bolted out of their seats and
Speaker 1: headed for the doors. You have to remember that nobody
Speaker 1: knew the terrain as they chased after the hearsts. From
Speaker 1: that point on, it was like the Poseidon Adventure. The
Speaker 1: elevators immediately jammed with reporters, film crews, sound men. People
Speaker 1: ran up and down the corridors looking for stairwell or
Speaker 1: someone to interview. The hallways filled with reporters crying frantically
Speaker 1: for telephones and unlocked doors.
Speaker 3: And then I went back and waited in the hotel
Speaker 3: room and a call came, and her lawyer called me
Speaker 3: and said, okay, tonight, I'm going to get you in,
Speaker 3: but let's have supper first. So we had supper, and
Speaker 3: he said, look, the FBI may confis. Get your notes.
Speaker 3: This is not going to be easy, but we'll drive
Speaker 3: after we have supper. So he prepared me. I couldn't
Speaker 3: have a recorder, I couldn't have a pen I couldn't
Speaker 3: have a purse. I could barely have a sheets of
Speaker 3: paper and a pencil, which the lawyer gave me. That's
Speaker 3: all I could take into the interview.
Speaker 2: Sarah Jane was being held in a jail cell in
Speaker 2: Redwood City, just outside of San Francisco. While she had
Speaker 2: gained instant notoriety, she was not the most famous person there.
Speaker 2: The New York Times reported on the sudden appearance of
Speaker 2: the jail's news celebrity inmates.
Speaker 1: There are five singles sets and the maximum security corridor
Speaker 1: of the women's section of the jail. Sheriff John MacDonald said,
Speaker 1: one is empty, one has a mentally disturbed woman in it,
Speaker 1: one has a woman accused of robbery, and Miss Hurst
Speaker 1: and Miss Moore occupy the two others, which are across
Speaker 1: the corridor from each other. It has been reported here
Speaker 1: that the two women discussed that episode that touched both
Speaker 1: their lives, and that they exchanged cordial greetings. They don't
Speaker 1: seem to have anything else much in common, the sheriff said.
Speaker 3: So I go in there and the first thing I
Speaker 3: say to this woman who's in a nightgown in a sweater,
Speaker 3: I say, Sally, why did you do this? She said,
Speaker 3: because the FBI killed your story on me. I said,
Speaker 3: what do you mean? She said, it wasn't in the
Speaker 3: paper this morning. I said, Sally, it wasn't supposed to
Speaker 3: run today. It's supposed to run Wednesday. And she said, oh,
Speaker 3: and looked downcast. Can you imagine how amazing and terrible
Speaker 3: and weird that whole thing was. I said to myself, Okay,
Speaker 3: so my story didn't run, and that's why she tried
Speaker 3: to kill the president. I states, wait a minute, but
Speaker 3: I understood that she believed that story was going to
Speaker 3: save her life. And I, now, having thought about this
Speaker 3: for all these forty some years, understand that by trying
Speaker 3: to kill the president, and she was mentally unstable. Okay,
Speaker 3: she was emotionally ill. This was not a well person,
Speaker 3: and I didn't understand that at the time, but she
Speaker 3: clearly was. She believed that if she did something really
Speaker 3: dramatic and heroic from the revolutionary's point of view, then
Speaker 3: they wouldn't kill her.
Speaker 2: I'm Toby Baal.
Speaker 5: And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current.
Speaker 6: Nay.
Speaker 7: She was a lovely child. And later I had to
Speaker 7: bet you're ever in a bank where the guvernor had
Speaker 7: you know, I don't think anybody.
Speaker 5: Feel Episode twelve. They would like everyone to believe that
Speaker 5: only kooks do it.
Speaker 2: Americans who saw the dramatic conversions from Middle American to
Speaker 2: radical young made by Lynette from Sarah, Jane Moore and
Speaker 2: Patty Hurst could look at two well known incidents to
Speaker 2: try to understand what had happened. The first was a
Speaker 2: series of events involving American POWs held during the Korean War.
Speaker 8: My name's Joel Dimsdale. I'm an emeritus professor of psychiatry
Speaker 8: at University of California, San Diego. What was observed in
Speaker 8: the Korean War was that there were certain circumstances that
Speaker 8: made people more persuadable, and people started doing on accountable
Speaker 8: things that were just difficult to explain.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty two, Colonel Frank Schwabel and thirty five
Speaker 2: other Air Force POWs publicly confessed to using German warfare
Speaker 2: against North Korea. In nineteen fifty three, after the armistice
Speaker 2: was agreed to, twenty one US soldiers chose to live
Speaker 2: in communists China rather than return home. In between these
Speaker 2: two events, other POWs collaborated in making anti war broadcasts.
Speaker 2: The term brainwashing had first been coined in nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: and it now was used to try to explain what
Speaker 2: had happened. Timothy Melly, professor of English at Miami University,
Speaker 2: told Smithsonian Magazine quote, the basic problem that brainwashing is
Speaker 2: designed to address is the question why would anybody become
Speaker 2: a communist. It is a story that we tell to
Speaker 2: explain something we can't otherwise explain. The theory at the
Speaker 2: time was that the treatment of the POWs could cause
Speaker 2: fundamental changes in a person's behavior or beliefs, or even
Speaker 2: allow complete control over them.
Speaker 8: So you take somebody who subject them to enormous stress,
Speaker 8: force them to confess in group circumstances, sleep, deprive them,
Speaker 8: isolate them from others, and you have a recipe for
Speaker 8: coercion and persuasion.
Speaker 2: The public panic over brainwashing reached its cultural apex with
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixty two film The Manchurian Candidate, about a
Speaker 2: returning Korean War soldier who's conditioned to commit an assassination
Speaker 2: when he receives a signal.
Speaker 9: Allow me to introduce our American visitors. I must ask
Speaker 9: you to forgive this somewhat lackadaisical matters, but I have
Speaker 9: conditioned them or brainwashed them, which I understand that the
Speaker 9: new American.
Speaker 2: Were The second incident was the attempt by a parole
Speaker 2: named John Eric Olsen to rob a bank called Credit
Speaker 2: Banken in Stockholm, Sweden in nineteen seventy three. Olsen and
Speaker 2: a partner held four hostages inside the bank for six
Speaker 2: days before surrendering after police pumped tear gas into the vault.
Speaker 2: None of the hostages would testify in court against the robbers,
Speaker 2: and in fact began to raise money to aid in
Speaker 2: their defense. The bond felt by the hostages towards their
Speaker 2: captors became known as Stockholm syndrome. But we can look
Speaker 2: back even further a century ago to the earliest observation
Speaker 2: of this kind of change, made by the Russian scientist
Speaker 2: Yvonne Pavlov. The Pavlov of Pavlov's dogs, who he conditioned
Speaker 2: to respond by salivating to sounds that they associated with
Speaker 2: being fed. This was an early breakthrough in cycle logical conditioning.
Speaker 2: Pavlov worked in a basement laboratory in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Speaker 2: The dogs he experimented with were housed in kennels in
Speaker 2: this lab. In September of nineteen twenty four, Saint Petersburg
Speaker 2: experienced intense flooding, and inside Pavlov's lab the water level rose.
Speaker 2: The dogs trapped in cages, held their snouts as high
Speaker 2: as they could, just above the waterline, apparently for hours. Eventually,
Speaker 2: Pavlov's assistants arrived to save the dogs, but to do
Speaker 2: this had to force the dog's heads underwater before pulling
Speaker 2: them through the cage doors. This too, was obviously traumatic
Speaker 2: for the dogs, and.
Speaker 8: What Pavlov discovered was that the stress of that situation
Speaker 8: was so extensive that the dogs were never the same.
Speaker 8: They forgot everything that they had learned. He was a genius.
Speaker 8: He could teach a dog to respond to middle C
Speaker 8: on the piano and ignore D on the piano. He
Speaker 8: was that good. So for Pavlov's dogs to forget everything
Speaker 8: that they'd learned was something. The other thing that Pavlov
Speaker 8: observed was that stress change the dog's feelings. All of
Speaker 8: a sudden, they changed their character, their personality. Some of
Speaker 8: them became timid, some became aggressive. The dog who used
Speaker 8: to like Sga hated Serge thereafter. So massive stress seems
Speaker 8: to shake up organisms, whether they be dogs or humans,
Speaker 8: in a way that causes people to forget.
Speaker 2: This idea that massive stress, whether by accident or design,
Speaker 2: can cause people to become susceptible to suggestion or change
Speaker 2: is largely accepted now, but as we will see, this
Speaker 2: was not the case in the mid seventies. But before
Speaker 2: we get to that, let's return to Ellen Hume, who
Speaker 2: was trying to work with Sarah Jane to create a
Speaker 2: statement about her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford.
Speaker 3: After we did the interview, I went back to my
Speaker 3: hotel room in drafted the statement and I would call
Speaker 3: a lawyer and read it to him and over and
Speaker 3: over again, multiple drafts. He said she won't accept it.
Speaker 3: I kept trying to change it, and she never accepted it.
Speaker 3: So I just said, look, I've reached my deadline. I
Speaker 3: will incorporate her ideas into my story to say this
Speaker 3: is what she's trying to say. And I faithfully did that.
Speaker 3: And it's important to me to note that I really
Speaker 3: tried to fulfill any obligations I could have had to
Speaker 3: help her, and I didn't want to exploit her in
Speaker 3: any way. But the story that came out in the Times,
Speaker 3: the editors whoever massaged it didn't talk about the fact
Speaker 3: that she had thought a story was going to run
Speaker 3: about her, and that she thought that was going to
Speaker 3: save her life. It was just that she wanted to
Speaker 3: prove herself to the radicals, and it did use my
Speaker 3: interview material faithfully, but it just left out the piece
Speaker 3: that she had said to me about why she had
Speaker 3: done it. I now look back on it as she
Speaker 3: probably would have done it anyway. What happened after I
Speaker 3: did my interview with her was it ran the next
Speaker 3: day in the La Times, and it ran in every
Speaker 3: paper roll around the world because it was an exclusive
Speaker 3: jailhouse interview with her and no one else had had
Speaker 3: access to her.
Speaker 2: Ellen's story contained parts that seemed to originate in the
Speaker 2: attempts to draft Sarah Jane's statement. These show the extremes
Speaker 2: of stress she was experiencing and put her attempt on
Speaker 2: forward within the framework and language of the radical movement.
Speaker 2: These quotes are read by Mary Catherine Garrison.
Speaker 5: I am not a berserk woman. I was afraid of
Speaker 5: myself that I would come apart out of control, afraid
Speaker 5: I would go around shooting people. And then it was
Speaker 5: kind of an ultimate protest against the system. I did
Speaker 5: not want to kill somebody, but there comes a point
Speaker 5: when the only way you can make a statement is
Speaker 5: to pick up a gun.
Speaker 2: In this final excerpt, Sarah Jane identifies with the anger
Speaker 2: of the radicals. She distinguishes this emotional response from what
Speaker 2: she calls the theoreticians, presumably the radical writers who inspired
Speaker 2: revolutionary action. Moore said she hoped her action would somehow
Speaker 2: force the radical movement to unite, to.
Speaker 5: Forge some kind of unity between the rage that led
Speaker 5: to the formation of the SLA combined with theoreticians. I
Speaker 5: wanted them to face the realities of some of the
Speaker 5: things they put in motion. I wanted people to rethink things.
Speaker 5: But it's more than that. I have experienced a kind
Speaker 5: of rage and frustration many people feel. People are driven
Speaker 5: to act.
Speaker 2: The publication of the LA Times article made Ellen a
Speaker 2: musquet interview, and she responded by retreating from the public eye.
Speaker 3: I just went into hiding. I didn't take phone calls.
Speaker 3: I didn't do TV or radio interviews. Everyone on Earth
Speaker 3: was trying to interview me. I felt so awful about
Speaker 3: what had happened, and again I thought that I might
Speaker 3: have been able to stop it, and it just killed
Speaker 3: me that I hadn't taken that call.
Speaker 5: Sarah Jane's legal situation after her arrest was tenuous. There
Speaker 5: was no question that she had fired at the president.
Speaker 5: The only hope for her lay in some kind of
Speaker 5: mitigating factor that would diminish her legal responsibility. Sarah Jane
Speaker 5: was examined by six psychiatrists to determine whether she was
Speaker 5: sane and competent to stand trial. She was reportedly not
Speaker 5: very forthcoming in these psychiatric interviews. The psychiatrists were not
Speaker 5: in agreement about a diagnosis, though all agreed that she
Speaker 5: suffered from some form of mental illness. They did agree
Speaker 5: that she was competent to stand trial while she met
Speaker 5: the competency threshold. The people that Toby interviewed who knew
Speaker 5: her in nineteen seventy four in nineteen seventy five, certainly
Speaker 5: perceived psychological trouble. Journalist Carol Pogash.
Speaker 4: She's clearly a disturbed person, but it wouldn't have occurred
Speaker 4: to any of us that she would act on it.
Speaker 4: She was this nutty person who none of us took
Speaker 4: seriously until we had to.
Speaker 5: But because Sarah Jane had been found competent to stand trial,
Speaker 5: her defense would have to be that she had not
Speaker 5: been competent at the time of the assassination attempt. On
Speaker 5: December ninth, her lawyer at the time, a man named
Speaker 5: James Hewitt filed a notice of defense based on mental
Speaker 5: condition and insanity defense. Sarah Jane furiously opposed this, in
Speaker 5: her mind, delegitimized the reason she had taken the shot
Speaker 5: at Ford. The attempt would be considered the exploits of
Speaker 5: a mentally ill person rather than a revolutionary act, and
Speaker 5: she was adamant that hers was a revolutionary act. That's
Speaker 5: why she had wanted to work with Ellen Hume to
Speaker 5: draft a statement, because she wanted people to know. Here,
Speaker 5: Sarah Jane talks with journalist Ben Williams.
Speaker 10: The government has to believe that any political act of
Speaker 10: that sort, they would like everyone to believe.
Speaker 4: That only kooks do it.
Speaker 10: That anyone that isn't happy with our system, anyone that
Speaker 10: would actually attack it in such a violent fashion, they
Speaker 10: must put it down to kooks. They must say that
Speaker 10: these are insane people. I think, you know, honesty compels
Speaker 10: me to say that it was an an out that
Speaker 10: was offered to me. Let it be that you were crazy,
Speaker 10: that's your that's your your route to freedom.
Speaker 11: I mean, the government offered you the yes who Well,
Speaker 11: in terms of the prosecutor, I don't think that it
Speaker 11: was as averse.
Speaker 8: As that.
Speaker 5: Against the wishes of her lawyer. On December twelfth, three
Speaker 5: days after the not guilty plea, Sarah Jane stood in
Speaker 5: front of a judge and changed her plea to guilty.
Speaker 5: Journalist Ellen Hume.
Speaker 3: When she pled guilty, I was really angry at the
Speaker 3: judicial system because here was a person with mental illness.
Speaker 3: She never should have been allowed to plead guilty and
Speaker 3: not have a trial. But when she pled guilty, that
Speaker 3: meant she's just going to be in prison for the
Speaker 3: rest of her life, which she pretty much was.
Speaker 6: Her plea was bad in my opinion, not that I
Speaker 6: know a lot of this poilet game, but it was
Speaker 6: pretty obviously manipulated it into pleading.
Speaker 5: Lawyer Peggy Garrity.
Speaker 6: I's been a lawyer for about five minutes at this point.
Speaker 6: There was a woman who was very involved in feminist
Speaker 6: organizations in the office I was renting a space from,
Speaker 6: and she was contacted and she didn't want to deal
Speaker 6: with it, and something about Sarah Jane was not getting
Speaker 6: access to her child.
Speaker 5: This was Frederick, Sarah Jane's nine year old son, by
Speaker 5: John Alberg, the Hollywood sound producer her After Sarah Jane's arrest,
Speaker 5: Frederick moved in with a married couple who had known
Speaker 5: Sarah Jane for a decade. They raised Frederick until he
Speaker 5: graduated from high school in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 6: I was so excited about being in the practice of law.
Speaker 6: I was dying to go out to the federal prison.
Speaker 6: So I went out and talked to her and left
Speaker 6: thinking there's something I can do for this woman, something
Speaker 6: else I can do, because it wasn't really about the child.
Speaker 6: So I talked to her about everything, and I decided
Speaker 6: I could do basically effectively, Hey, this corpus to help
Speaker 6: her not get out, I guess, but get a trial.
Speaker 6: She would talk to me like she didn't talk to
Speaker 6: other people. So I just said, having fun like a new,
Speaker 6: brand new baby lawyer. I'm sitting here thinking, my god,
Speaker 6: an assassin, a real assassin.
Speaker 5: Sarah Jane had been increasingly isolated in her last months
Speaker 5: before shooting at Ford. In prison, this process continued. She
Speaker 5: had few visitors. Peggy Garrity visited in her capacity as
Speaker 5: a lawyer. Ellen Hume visited as someone you understood Sarah
Speaker 5: Jane's loneliness.
Speaker 3: But I went to visit her in Long Beach because
Speaker 3: that's where one of the prisons where she was being held,
Speaker 3: and surprisingly they let me in as if I were
Speaker 3: a family member, and we hugged each other because you know,
Speaker 3: I always was kind of supportive of her in many ways,
Speaker 3: and just in terms of listening to her, not because
Speaker 3: I supported her ideas she was glad to have somebody
Speaker 3: visit her. I just thought she's alone, you know. I
Speaker 3: did it out of compassion, out of just human kindness.
Speaker 3: But I realized after that she was so unstable. She
Speaker 3: could have had a jailhouse knife and knife to me
Speaker 3: in the back as I hugged her, and I thought
Speaker 3: I better go back there again, and I didn't.
Speaker 5: This concern about Sarah Jane having a knife turned out
Speaker 5: to be well placed.
Speaker 6: So I spent a lot of time going back and forth,
Speaker 6: and there's one story still blows me away. She'd done something.
Speaker 6: So we're meeting in this room where there's like armed
Speaker 6: guards all around us, and she asked me, I'm Manilla
Speaker 6: folder and says, don't go through the metal detector. Like
Speaker 6: I know, I can't hand it back to her. Whatever's
Speaker 6: in there is not a good thing. And even the
Speaker 6: rookie years I am, I'm like, oh, nop so. I
Speaker 6: when I leave here, I don't go through the metal detector.
Speaker 6: I go around it. I get back to my office
Speaker 6: and I open up and it shived that big. It's
Speaker 6: like twelve inches. I kept it for a long time,
Speaker 6: and that disappeared. I don't know where it went.
Speaker 5: So Sarah Jane's strange behavior continued in prison. She continued
Speaker 5: to maintain that she was completely saying her time in
Speaker 5: the radical underground, she said, had changed her, made her
Speaker 5: understand things differently, and to her, the irony was that
Speaker 5: it was all because the FBI had used her as
Speaker 5: an informant. Without that urging, she said, she would never
Speaker 5: have become involved to that degree with the radical movement
Speaker 5: and would not have developed her revolutionary commitment. What seems
Speaker 5: fairly clear from her story is that Sarah Jane tried
Speaker 5: different lifestyles and then discarded them. She did it a
Speaker 5: number of times, women's Army Corps, military wife, mother, Hollywood wife,
Speaker 5: doctor's wife, conservative, political organizer. Each time she moved on
Speaker 5: without looking back, leaving parents, siblings, husbands, and children in
Speaker 5: her wake. This pattern, potentially driven by mental illness, most
Speaker 5: likely played a factor in her sudden and rapid conversion
Speaker 5: to the radical young, but were there other contributing factors.
Speaker 5: We've seen how the escalating danger Sarah Jane face likely
Speaker 5: led to her assassination attempt. It seems like a stretch
Speaker 5: to say that she experienced coercive persuasion. Unlike the Korean
Speaker 5: War POW's or credit bank and hostages or Patty Hurst,
Speaker 5: she wasn't under anyone's physical control, but the same factors fear, isolation,
Speaker 5: indoctrination dominated her life. Did this situation, combined with her
Speaker 5: habit of reinvention and likely mental illness, lead to her
Speaker 5: a sudden adoption of such radical beliefs. It's impossible to
Speaker 5: know for sure, of course, but it may explain her
Speaker 5: actions and her assessment of her situation in the radical underground.
Speaker 5: When feeling she had no recourse, she took the shot.
Speaker 5: The judicial course following Lynette's and Sarah Jane's attempts, denied
Speaker 5: the opportunity to find out more about their conversion experiences.
Speaker 5: Sarah Jane pled guilty and wasn't brought to trial. Lynette
Speaker 5: was brought to trial, but managed to turn it into
Speaker 5: a farce. She initially tried to serve as her own
Speaker 5: defense attorney, but was unable to abide by the rules
Speaker 5: of the court. After that, she essentially refused to attend
Speaker 5: the trial, and on the occasion she did, refused to
Speaker 5: walk so had to be carried by a deputy to
Speaker 5: the court room. She provided minimal cooperation with her defense attorney,
Speaker 5: and at one point threw an apple at the prosecutor,
Speaker 5: hitting him in the face and knocking off his glasses.
Speaker 5: You get the picture. She was found guilty and sentenced
Speaker 5: to life in prison without a real examination of how
Speaker 5: she had come so thoroughly under Manson's sway. But this
Speaker 5: was not the case with Patty Hurst. In fact, her
Speaker 5: trial revolved primarily around this question, did Patty actually become
Speaker 5: a revolutionary and if so, did she become one of
Speaker 5: her own free will or was she brainwashed? After the break,
Speaker 5: Joan Beck joined the Chicago Tribune as one of the
Speaker 5: very few women working in the newsroom in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 5: She worked her way from lifestyle beat topics such as
Speaker 5: fashion and cooking, to harder news focusing on topics such
Speaker 5: as education and medical research. In nineteen seventy five, she
Speaker 5: became the first woman to serve on the Tribune's editorial
Speaker 5: board and began writing a commentary column. On Friday, September
Speaker 5: twenty sixth, nineteen seventy five, a week and a day
Speaker 5: after the capture of Patty Hurst, Beck wrote a column
Speaker 5: titled many Parents study Patty for Answers.
Speaker 1: In it, she wrote, one of the most fearsome aspects
Speaker 1: of this long, tragic story has been trying to explain
Speaker 1: in some rational way why a beloved daughter of what
Speaker 1: may seem to be good, caring parents could turn as
Speaker 1: harshly and hatefully on her family and their lifestyle as
Speaker 1: she seemed to have done. Patty's public rejection of her
Speaker 1: family in the taped Pighirst messages differs only in degree
Speaker 1: in drama from the kind of rejection many other parents
Speaker 1: have been getting from young adult children whose behavior they
Speaker 1: can no longer understand, and they are desperately hungry for
Speaker 1: any crumbs of understanding. Too often, there seems to be
Speaker 1: no family pathology, no social trauma, sufficient to account for
Speaker 1: some of the young adults who are spoiling their lives
Speaker 1: with drugs, or losing their bearings in sexual experimentation, or
Speaker 1: dropping out of college aimlessly, or generally balking at growing
Speaker 1: up into responsible adults.
Speaker 5: Parents confused by their children adopting seemingly incomprehensible political and
Speaker 5: ethical beliefs probably goes back millennia, but came into particular
Speaker 5: relief with the emergence of the radical young in the
Speaker 5: nineteen sixties. That Patty Hurst had changed, at least temporarily
Speaker 5: during her time with the sla seemed obvious. But how
Speaker 5: much free will did she have in the matter. When
Speaker 5: she heard of Patty's arrest, her mother, Catherine said, thank God,
Speaker 5: she's all right. Please call it a rescue, not a capture.
Speaker 5: To her, Patty was the victim who needed to be saved,
Speaker 5: not the gun toting revolutionary. The question of which of
Speaker 5: these two people Patty really was became the crux of
Speaker 5: her trial.
Speaker 12: The story that Patricia Hurst today began telling is a
Speaker 12: horror story of being captured, tortured, driven to the brink
Speaker 12: of insanity from which she is only now beginning to return.
Speaker 12: That is her story that will be her de pace.
Speaker 3: She was in court for a hearing today.
Speaker 12: Her lawyer is saying she is in too fragile a
Speaker 12: condition to take the witness in. The judge saying Hill
Speaker 12: appoints psychiaprists to examine her because of all she claims
Speaker 12: to have been proved. She did not speak in court,
Speaker 12: but her affidavit was admitted and told her story of
Speaker 12: being kidnapped, thrown in the front of a car, taken
Speaker 12: to a hideout, and forced into a closet for nine weeks.
Speaker 5: When Patti Hurst was arrested on September eighteenth, the public
Speaker 5: had no idea what her experience over the past nineteen
Speaker 5: months had been. The only clues were the audio communicates
Speaker 5: that had been released in the early days of her
Speaker 5: time with the SLA, and then her participation in the
Speaker 5: robbery of the Hibernia Bank. Her months with the SLA
Speaker 5: were a complete void, and given the interest in the case,
Speaker 5: it is not much of an exaggeration to say that
Speaker 5: the nation waited anxiously for the story to emerge. The
Speaker 5: first inkling came from the affidavit filed with the court
Speaker 5: by her defense. One of her attorneys, Terence Halenan, read
Speaker 5: from the affidavit in front of a press gaggle.
Speaker 13: She remained in this case with her hands brown, blindfolded
Speaker 13: and no light time. The closet was hot and extremely uncomfortable.
Speaker 13: When the Brian plot was removed, she felt that if
Speaker 13: she were on an LSD trip, everything was out of proportion,
Speaker 13: big and distorted, the suggestion there that she had been drugged.
Speaker 12: Also was so weak by them she could barely stand.
Speaker 13: After an interminable length of time, which seemed to her
Speaker 13: to be weeks, she was released from the closet and
Speaker 13: seated with the gang of captors who were at that
Speaker 13: time discussing the robbery of a.
Speaker 5: Bank, and the SLA members told Patty that she had
Speaker 5: to accompany them during the bank robbery. She needed to
Speaker 5: allow herself to be photographed and to say her name
Speaker 5: out loud so there would be no doubt she was
Speaker 5: actively involved in the hold up.
Speaker 12: That was the Harbrunnia bank hold up. And becauseier Hurst
Speaker 12: did exactly as she claimed she was ordered to do,
Speaker 12: because the affidavit says she held her mind clouding, he
Speaker 12: was losing her sanity.
Speaker 5: This was functionally the beginning of her defense, positioning her
Speaker 5: actions with the SLA as a product of fear and brainwashing,
Speaker 5: But very quickly a different narrative was also put forward.
Speaker 5: This came in the form of a Blockbuster magazine article
Speaker 5: that portrayed Patty hurst time with the SLA in a
Speaker 5: very different and more complicated light.
Speaker 14: My breakthrough was a big expose of Timothy Leary testifying
Speaker 14: before a grand jury's about how the weather Underground broke
Speaker 14: him out of prison. But in the process, the sources
Speaker 14: and the people I got to know throughout the Bay
Speaker 14: area led me to the Hearst situation.
Speaker 5: This is retired journalist David Weir. He and his good
Speaker 5: friend Howard Khne researched and wrote a blockbuster article for
Speaker 5: Rolling Stone magazine about Patty Hurst and the SLA at
Speaker 5: a time when the FBI was having no luck in
Speaker 5: finding them.
Speaker 14: I started realizing and that I knew people that knew
Speaker 14: people that knew people that were the people helping the SLA.
Speaker 14: So Howard and I told John Winner. He of course
Speaker 14: recognized it was the biggest story in the world. Was excited,
Speaker 14: but our condition was don't publish it until they catch her,
Speaker 14: because we don't want to be essentially snitches helping the
Speaker 14: FBI catch these people whether we agree with them or not.
Speaker 5: John Winner was the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone.
Speaker 5: He agreed to hold off in publishing the article. The article,
Speaker 5: titled The Inside Story, was released a month after Patty's arrest.
Speaker 5: They had the biggest scoop on the planet.
Speaker 14: We were just deluged with reporters. Reporters came from all directions,
Speaker 14: and you know, Rolling Stone at that point was on
Speaker 14: Third Street in San Francisco in a warehouse office, and
Speaker 14: the crowded around, and we were both twenty eight and
Speaker 14: I'd never appeared before the press before. Howard kind of
Speaker 14: went catatonic. He didn't have anything to say. Joan Wenner,
Speaker 14: the head of the magazine, was hiding in his office.
Speaker 14: He didn't want to come out and deal with it.
Speaker 8: So it was all on me.
Speaker 14: And like I say, I'd never done anything like this
Speaker 14: before in my life.
Speaker 5: This is David Weir at that press conference.
Speaker 15: Our information is that the political content of their arguments
Speaker 15: about the inequitable distribution of wealth in this country and
Speaker 15: a lot of things that a lot of us would
Speaker 15: agree with did make an impact on Patty Hurst, and
Speaker 15: that she was receptive to these correct political positions, and
Speaker 15: that so she did come to have a sympathy with
Speaker 15: what the SLA was telling her. Politically, then, as we
Speaker 15: understand it, her conversion was more emotional in the end
Speaker 15: then political, in that the SLA people warmed up to her,
Speaker 15: called her sister treated her in a friendly way after
Speaker 15: being at first unfriendly and more threatening to her. That
Speaker 15: complex sort of three folded says circumstances led to the conversion,
Speaker 15: not this sort of simplistic brainwashing theory that I think
Speaker 15: has been has been spread so far.
Speaker 14: We had a different narrative. It's not that we said
Speaker 14: that she absolutely had one hundred percent sincerely converted into
Speaker 14: a revolutionary soldier. It's just that we conveyed that that
Speaker 14: was the impression that all the people were met her
Speaker 14: during those many months underground came away with. She seemed
Speaker 14: to be almost the fiercest SLA soldier, and her actions
Speaker 14: tended to verify that. When Bill Harris and Emily Harris
Speaker 14: had shoplifted and were in danger of being caught at
Speaker 14: Mells Hardware in La, it was Patty in the getaway
Speaker 14: car who strayed the hardware front and the people there
Speaker 14: with machine gun bullets, so they escaped, And so actions
Speaker 14: like that really were hard to reconcile with the kidnap victim.
Speaker 2: This more complicated story was the focus of the Rolling
Speaker 2: Stone article, which described Patty's political and emotional indoctrination, her
Speaker 2: growing sense of betrayal by her parents and her emerging
Speaker 2: view of societal problems. The following short excerpts are in
Speaker 2: the same order they appeared in Weir and Cohene's article
Speaker 2: and show how they detailed the process of Patty's conversion.
Speaker 1: So Patty grew impatient as the ransom negotiations bogged down.
Speaker 1: I felt my parents were debating how much I was worth,
Speaker 1: she later said, like they figured I was worth two million,
Speaker 1: but I wasn't worth ten million. It was a terrible
Speaker 1: feeling that my parents could think of me in terms
Speaker 1: of dollars and cents. I felt sick all over by degrees,
Speaker 1: her disillusionment with her parents turned into sympathy for the SLA.
Speaker 1: For a month, she had been kept in a small
Speaker 1: isolation chamber approximating a San Quentin whole. She became weak
Speaker 1: and could hardly stand up. To be able to walk
Speaker 1: freely from one room to another seemed the world's greatest pleasure.
Speaker 1: Patty was urged to attend the SLA's daily political study sessions.
Speaker 1: She was invited to listen to the SLA National Anthem,
Speaker 1: an eerie jazz composition of wind and strings that Sink
Speaker 1: had selected, and she was furnished with statistical evidence and
Speaker 1: quotations from George Jackson and Rochelle McGhee that promoted her
Speaker 1: political development.
Speaker 2: George Jackson and Rochelle McGee were prison radicals whose writings
Speaker 2: were influential in the revolutionary movement.
Speaker 1: Patty was shown a long list of Hirst family holdings,
Speaker 1: nine newspapers, thirteen magazines, four TV and radio stations, a
Speaker 1: silver mine, a paper, and prime real estate. Her parents
Speaker 1: clearly were part of the ruling elite, and the only
Speaker 1: power that could fight that money was the power that
Speaker 1: came out of the barrel of a gun. The SLA's
Speaker 1: motives made more sense. They wanted to redistribute the Hurst
Speaker 1: wealth to more needy people.
Speaker 3: It was her.
Speaker 1: Parents and the economic class they represented who were to
Speaker 1: blame for her misery and countless authors. The SLA members
Speaker 1: encouraged her radicalization. They hugged her, called her sister, and
Speaker 1: ended her loneliness. Patty's conversion was as much emotional as political.
Speaker 1: Seven weeks after she was kidnapped, Patty asked to join
Speaker 1: the SLA.
Speaker 2: Patty Hurst's trial for her participation in the Hibernia bank
Speaker 2: robbery began on February fourth, nineteen seventy six again Professor
Speaker 2: Emeritis Joel Dimsdale.
Speaker 8: Her trial wasn't about who done it, was why she
Speaker 8: done it, And the psychiatric testimony formed the guts of
Speaker 8: the trial, and it was like a formal struggle between
Speaker 8: these different expert opinions. So the defense psychiatrist's view was
Speaker 8: that she was under massive stress, she was isolated, she dissociated,
Speaker 8: and that in essence, her behavior was coerced.
Speaker 2: This defense required the jury to accept the more complicated
Speaker 2: view of control, that it could be the result of
Speaker 2: things like the terror of a violent kidnapping, isolation in
Speaker 2: a closet for weeks, and forced indoctrination. It also tied
Speaker 2: her participation in the bank robbery to her seeming conversion
Speaker 2: to the SLA. But the prosecution had a different, arguably
Speaker 2: simpler view.
Speaker 8: The prosecution argued for a very narrow definition of coersion.
Speaker 8: If I hold a gun to your head, I'd tell
Speaker 8: you to rob a bank right now, that's coercion. But
Speaker 8: if I tell you rob a bank tomorrow, is that
Speaker 8: coersion now? The SLA told Patty that if she didn't
Speaker 8: join them, they would come after her family, and in fact,
Speaker 8: they did come after her family. They bombed a family household.
Speaker 2: This was the bombing of Hurst Castle on February twelfth,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy six, by the New World Liberation Front, the
Speaker 2: group who publicly accused Popeye Jackson of being a police
Speaker 2: informant right before his execution, and who committed this bombing
Speaker 2: in support of the SLA. It caused about five point
Speaker 2: five million of today's dollars in damage to the property.
Speaker 8: The jury, initially, they were all very sympathetic to Patty.
Speaker 8: Had thought no kidnapping, no participation in the robbery, she
Speaker 8: wouldn't have been there. As they went into the details
Speaker 8: of the case, they rather quickly came to a decision
Speaker 8: that she was guilty. The second piece of it, of course,
Speaker 8: is well, should there be mitigating circumstances. It's one thing
Speaker 8: to say she's guilty, but marked these unusual circumstances. Oddly enough,
Speaker 8: the court did not decide that there was anything mitigating
Speaker 8: about this at all. They said she was a rich brat,
Speaker 8: and they sentenced her to the average sentence in California
Speaker 8: at that time for a first time. Bank Robert gave
Speaker 8: her no extra mitigation consideration at all and set her
Speaker 8: off to jail.
Speaker 2: And so the jury found that despite enduring many of
Speaker 2: the same conditions as the Korean War, POW's isolation, fear doctrination,
Speaker 2: none of this mattered. She was responsible for the actions.
Speaker 2: She'd made a conscious decision to become a revolutionary, and
Speaker 2: this may have been the correct verdict.
Speaker 14: When you think about it. The big questions that remain.
Speaker 14: Did Patty suffer from Stockholm syndrome from being held in
Speaker 14: the closet and perhaps fearing she'd be killed and the
Speaker 14: trauma of being kidnapped, or did she voluntarily convert to
Speaker 14: becoming an SLA soldier, or are there nuances of this
Speaker 14: that she may have been initially traumatized but also was
Speaker 14: a very rebellious person. She was only a teenager, and
Speaker 14: she'd been a rebellious girl from very young age, getting
Speaker 14: into trouble and having to change schools from the age
Speaker 14: of twelve or fourteen in these private religious schools and
Speaker 14: things like that.
Speaker 2: Even the people within the radical movement weren't sure.
Speaker 14: It was a very public debate about that, but internally
Speaker 14: throughout the network of people supporting the SLA and helping
Speaker 14: the survivors, particularly after the LA shootout, there was a
Speaker 14: debate among the people who were our sources. I can
Speaker 14: honestly say nobody seemed to know for sure, and I
Speaker 14: can say fifty years later, I don't know for sure.
Speaker 14: Patty Hurst herself may not know for sure. I think
Speaker 14: this is an incredibly complicated situation. And I remember interviewing
Speaker 14: cops doing some other stories. As they drive around the
Speaker 14: city at bus stops, they would look at the people
Speaker 14: waiting at the bus stop and the way they would
Speaker 14: pace and the number of steps they would take and say,
Speaker 14: that guy was in San Quentin, guy was in Fulsome
Speaker 14: that guy was in David. They could tell years after
Speaker 14: freedom who had been imprisoned where by their pacing, Because prisoners,
Speaker 14: like animals in the cage, pace the perimeter over and
Speaker 14: over and over all day long. It gets imprinted in
Speaker 14: their mind. So what I'm saying is I think once
Speaker 14: somebody has been kidnapped, they're always a kidnap victim. Even
Speaker 14: after they're free, they're never truly free.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy three, the top grossing film in the
Speaker 2: United States was The Exorcist, the story of an adolescent
Speaker 2: girl possessed by a demon. A famous moment from the
Speaker 2: film comes when the girl's mother is pleading with a
Speaker 2: priest to consider the possibility that her daughter is possessed.
Speaker 2: She says, i'd known my gut.
Speaker 16: I'm telling you that that thing upstairs isn't my daughter.
Speaker 2: This quote echo the reactions of parents of many of
Speaker 2: the people involved in this story. In episode two, we
Speaker 2: heard Manson follower Susan Atkins, father, you.
Speaker 17: Can be involved in almost anything because the hypnotic trans
Speaker 17: you won't do something that is basically against who but
Speaker 17: you know is right. But under a note, you've can
Speaker 17: do almost anything. I don't know how to stand by
Speaker 17: her side. I lost her.
Speaker 2: In an interview with the La Times, Martin Solia, the
Speaker 2: father of the three Solia siblings who joined the SLA, said.
Speaker 1: They were good kids, good students, and Stephen was an athlete.
Speaker 1: But they went up north and got screwed up at home.
Speaker 1: They were good right wing Republicans who got up every
Speaker 1: morning and pledged allegiance to the flag. How do you
Speaker 1: figure it?
Speaker 2: And Randolph Hurst echoed this sentiment to the press after
Speaker 2: Patty Hurst appeared as a militant in the Hibernia bank robbery.
Speaker 7: You have a reaction to it. She was a lovely
Speaker 7: child and sixty days later the picture over in a
Speaker 7: bank with a gun in her hand. You know, I
Speaker 7: don't think anybody feel.
Speaker 2: It's disorienting. When someone undergoes a fundamental change in their
Speaker 2: perception of the world, the people around them wonder what happened.
Speaker 2: What caused Lynette from to follow Manson, Patty Hurst to
Speaker 2: join the SLA, Sarah Jane Moore to become a self
Speaker 2: styled Marxist revolutionary. Was it mental illness? Was a coercive persuasion?
Speaker 2: Was it a sudden realization of truths about the country
Speaker 2: and the world that had been hidden before and were
Speaker 2: now a parent, along with an ideology to direct how
Speaker 2: to think about it? And how do you know? It
Speaker 2: seems to me that any huge shift in a person's
Speaker 2: understanding of the world will seem to those around them
Speaker 2: as the product of mental illness or coercive persuasion. People
Speaker 2: would probably say brainwashing, but the person who has made
Speaker 2: the change probably experiences it as a lifting of the
Speaker 2: veil of a burst of understanding. Lynette, Sarah Jane, and
Speaker 2: Patty each most likely experienced either mental illness or coercive persuasion,
Speaker 2: or both. They ended up at the furthest extremes of
Speaker 2: the radical young. They are not representative of the millions
Speaker 2: of people who adopted the new ethos that developed during
Speaker 2: what we call the sixties. They are the exceptions, anomalies
Speaker 2: whose journeys somehow all ended within a two and a
Speaker 2: half week period in northern California. This is Paggy Gharrity
Speaker 2: talking about a prison meeting she had with Sarah Jane.
Speaker 6: Well, you're sitting in the prison yard is like patio tables, umbrellas,
Speaker 6: round tables, and we're sitting there and she says, that's
Speaker 6: squeaky over it. She's staring at us, and I look
Speaker 6: over and this tiny little person so it's glaring, glaring, glaring.
Speaker 6: It was really creepy, super creepy. Em sitting with one
Speaker 6: assassin looking at another, and I'm I'm like, okay, yeah, lawyer.
Speaker 6: For maybe two years at this point, there were moments
Speaker 6: I thought I'm in this thing too deep.
Speaker 18: Ford had his hands out and was waving and had
Speaker 18: just come from breakfast with the businessman, and he looked
Speaker 18: like cardboard to me.
Speaker 5: Lynette from was released from the Federal Medical Center Carswell
Speaker 5: in Fort Worth, Texas, on August fourteenth, two thousand and nine.
Speaker 5: She now lives in Upstate New York.
Speaker 16: And I know it's really hard to understand, because it's
Speaker 16: really hard for me now to try to think of
Speaker 16: of our what it was really in my mind, you
Speaker 16: know how I could have thought that way, because it's crazy.
Speaker 16: This doesn't make any sense at all.
Speaker 5: President Jimmy Carter commuted Patty her sentence after she had
Speaker 5: served twenty two months for robbing the Hibernia Bank. She
Speaker 5: was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin in Dublin, California,
Speaker 5: on February first, nineteen seventy nine. President Bill Clinton pardoned
Speaker 5: her on January twentieth, two thousand and one, his last
Speaker 5: day in office. She currently lives on the East Coast
Speaker 5: and raises show dogs.
Speaker 10: In the very nature of the act that I committed,
Speaker 10: you know, I made an irrevocable commitment.
Speaker 6: To a cause.
Speaker 2: Sarah Jane Moore also served a term at the Federal
Speaker 2: Correctional Institution Dublin. She was released on December thirty one,
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven. She lives in a nursing home
Speaker 2: in Nashville, Tennessee. During Sarah Jane's interview with Playboy magazine,
Speaker 2: writer Andrew Hill asked if she could just gribe what
Speaker 2: she was feeling on the day she shot at gerald Ford.
Speaker 2: She responded by reciting a poem.
Speaker 5: She'd written, hold hold still my hand, steady my eye,
Speaker 5: chill my heart, and let my gun sing for the
Speaker 5: people scream their anger, cleanse with their hate, and kill
Speaker 5: this monster.
Speaker 2: Is the monster in this poem Ford, I don't think so.
Speaker 2: No one was screaming their anger about gerald Ford. They
Speaker 2: were screaming their anger about America. In Sarah Jane's own telling,
Speaker 2: the end of her journey in the radical Underground was
Speaker 2: a single gunshot at a symbol of all that she
Speaker 2: had come to hate about her country, A single gunshot
Speaker 2: that missed.
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