---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 14:39:21 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: SLAs legacy a violent void
SLA's legacy a violent void
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/11/MN176472.DTL>
Late arriving on revolutionary stage with no lasting message
by Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, November 11, 2002
The Symbionese Liberation Army, a 1970s radical
group back in the news because four of its graying
members have just pleaded guilty to a long-ago
murder, was a violent, revolutionary gang that had
almost no political message and was known chiefly
for kidnapping Patty Hearst.
It was the gang that came to the '60s revolutionary
party just as everyone was leaving, joining the
mainstream and putting away their protest signs,
experts say, and the SLA never understood that
much of the reason for that era of protest was over.
"The SLA was so over the edge that nobody wants to
relate to them," said Terry Anderson, a Texas A&M
University historian who wrote "The Movement and
the Sixties." "By 1974, when the SLA kidnapped
Patty Hearst, most historians felt the Movement had
extinguished itself. Congress had approved the Equal
Rights Amendment.
The troops were coming home from Vietnam. The
Paris peace accords had been signed. I just see
these SLA people as leftover radicals."
Now, a new generation of the young, many of them
toddlers when the SLA was in its heyday, knows the
group mostly as the bank robbing band that, 27
years ago, killed a 42-year-old housewife delivering
church receipts.
Last week, four SLA members, including Sara Jane
Olson, already in custody on a 1975 attempted
bombing offense, pleaded guilty to second-degree
murder in the death of Myrna Lee Opsahl during the
April 21, 1975, robbery of a bank in the Sacramento
suburb of Carmichael. Now in their mid-50s and
leading the kind of sedate bourgeois lives they railed
against 30 years ago, William Harris, his ex-wife
Emily Montague and Michael Bortin are about to go
off to state prison for terms of six to eight years.
This morning, a fifth member of the SLA, fugitive
James Kilgore, is scheduled to appear at an
extradition hearing in Cape Town, South Africa,
where he has been working as a researcher and
teacher. In 1976, he was an associate of the SLA
and was wanted then, as he is now, on federal
explosives charges. Kilgore, now 55, married and
with two young children, faces up to 10 years on the
federal charges and another six on the state murder
charge.
WITH TIME, A NEW PERSPECTIVE
Back in the early '70s, however, Kilgore was a fiery
young radical, freshly minted from UC Santa Barbara,
where he had met and become the lover of Kathleen
Soliah (now Olson), a former high school pep rally
leader who, like Kilgore, had become radicalized in
the heady ferment of antiwar and civil rights fever then
sweeping American campuses. They came to
Berkeley and soon joined other radicals who would
ultimately form the SLA.
Although reams have been written about the group,
given what many say was their near-genius knack for
publicity in kidnapping the granddaughter of colorful
newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, perhaps
the best way to figure out what the SLA wanted to do
is to listen to their own words. In court the other day,
they were contrite and humble, profusely apologizing
for the death of Opsahl.
But in April 1976, when they gave an "as told to"
interview to New Times magazine, their cant was
clearly different.
"The SLA was based on the need to develop a
guerrilla front with the idea that armed actions along
with above ground political organizing educates and
mobilizes people in support of revolution," SLA leader
William Harris told the magazine. Harris talked about
the "War Council" and the "Symbionese Federation,
" consisting of "autonomous combat units that would
operate underground (SLA) and an aboveground
political support infrastructure."
One combat unit "operation," as Emily Harris (now
Emily Montague) put it, was the assassination of
Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster, an
act that backfired so loudly, because Foster was so
respected in Oakland, that the SLA had to follow it
up with something far more spectacular. On Feb. 4,
1974, they kidnapped Patricia Hearst from her
Berkeley apartment.
"The heinousness of what they did (by killing Foster)
was obscured by the fact that they went on to kidnap
Patricia Hearst," said Todd Gitlin, a Columbia
University professor and author of "The Sixties: Years
of Hope, Days of Rage."
SHOOTOUT, BANK HEISTS, JAIL
Hearst joined the SLA and spent 19 months with
them, watching six of them die in a Los Angeles
shootout with police, then helping the remainder of
the gang hide from the FBI, while continuing to rob
banks, until she and the Harrises were captured in
September 1975. Hearst was convicted on federal
bank robbery charges and spent 22 months in prison.
The Harrises spent nearly eight years in state prison
for kidnapping Hearst.
But after that, the Harrises joined the mainstream
William Harris became a respected private
investigator in San Francisco, got married to a lawyer
and is raising a family; Emily Montague became a
computer whiz and entered the world of six-figure
annual incomes, doing computer wizardry for movie
makers.
Bortin married Josephine Soliah, Olson's sister, and
became a floor contractor in Portland, Ore. The other
day, in court, when he was pleading guilty and
apologizing for his behavior a quarter of a century
earlier, he said that the violence of the SLA had
damaged the cause of everyone else who was
peacefully protesting, an admission that piqued
Gitlin's interest.
"What Bortin has finally figured out, as was the case
with the Weathermen and parts of the Black
Panthers, is that the SLA were the gravediggers of
something that had been alive," Gitlin said. "That's
the historical meaning. There was absolutely nothing
positive about it. It was just pure wreckage."
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E-mail Michael Taylor mtaylor@sfchronicle.com.
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