Pardon me, but pardon Patty Hearst? What’s the rush? So she can vote Republican in Y2K? Presidents frequently drop pardons as one of their last acts in office, but the powerful Hearst Corporation is working Bill Clinton over one-and-one half years ahead of the time the pardon train usually leaves the station to cleanse newspaper heiress Patty Hearst of the Symbionese stain in her past.
Why the rush? Unless it’s part of a deal with the criminal division of the Justice Department to pardon Ms. Hearst, who married her former security guard and is now Mrs. Shaw and a soccer mom extraordinaire in suburban Connecticut, in return for her providing damaging testimony aiding the government’s case against another former SLA gun moll, Kathleen Soliah, now Mrs. Sara Jane Olson and also a soccer mom in St. Paul, Minnesota. The FBI recently rudely yanked Soliah from a 23-year sojourn in domestic bliss to face trial in January on stale terrorism charges. San Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon is defending.
Jimmy Carter, the president who saw a flying saucer, who, with the gentle prodding of the Hearst newspapers, commuted Patty’s prison sentence for bank robbery and urban guerrilla terrorism 20 years ago, has asked President Clinton to finish the job and pardon the girl. Al Gore and Janet Reno have also been massaged.
Funny, but the reason Carter, reading the lips of the Hearst press, gives for pardoning Patty — that she has led an exemplary life since the Symbionese Liberation Army dust-up and is now a “model citizen” with a daughter in her first year at Georgetown — applies exactly to Kathleen Soliah since her SLA tour of duty, down to the daughter in the first year of college. By any standard of fairness, the same reasons that Patty Hearst should be pardoned mandate that Kathleen Soliah should not be prosecuted.
There is abundantly more evidence that Patty Hearst participated in the fatal SLA bank robbery in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael (including Hearst’s admission in her 1982 candidly honest memoir, “Every Secret Thing,” that she was in on the tragic SLA bank heist) than the feds have to pin Kathleen Soliah even remotely to explosive devices near a police car in Southern California.
Yet now-soccer mom Soliah is being charged with a crime for which investigators admit they have no evidence, while now-soccer mom Hearst, who has admitted to being involved in a fatal bank robbery, has never been charged with that crime. The sins of the bad upper class rich girl Tania Hearst (Patty took the name from the brave guerrilla lady who fought and died with Che Guevara, while at the same time spying on Che for the KGB — so rich are the contradictions of the left in their complexity!) seem to be on a different level on the Justice Department dipstick of changeable crimes than the sins of the more middling class Soliah whose only apparent level of post-SLA prosperity comes from marrying a middlewest emergency room doctor.
The genius of the government’s plan, if genius it be, to put the coffin lid on the memory of the SLA is that a full pardon for Hearst, as former president Carter has requested of sitting president Clinton, would mean in the exacting lexicon of Hearst lawyers a pardon for all crimes known and unknown while the heiress was in her Tania mode. That would save Mrs. Shaw the craven embarrassment of having to seek immunity from being charged in the Carmichael bank robbery, because she would have already been forgiven everything by the Bubba in the White House and would be free to say whatever might please the government in the prosecution of Kathleen Soliah, on a speedy course toward trial in January.
There are suggestions that this is what government prosecutors (some of whom at this late date were no doubt in diapers — not red — when the SLA was in heinous flower) are hankering for. Tania Hearst-Shaw complained during an appearance on Geraldo that she couldn’t see why the government wanted her on the witness stand since she was a convicted felon and who would believe her? A little pardon (in this case, big) would go a long way towards changing that situation — the closet, the sex, the guns, the denouncing of her patrimony as “Hearst pigs,” the newspaper heiress reaching the age of retainer underground with a price on her head, such ugly stuff that would be washed away with a full pardon — which is the version of reality that the Hearst family newspapers have been seeking since they prevailed on the ever-compliant Jimmy Carter to commute Patty’s sentence two decades ago. Now they are close to the candle, and close enough to burn another exemplary suburban mom, Sara Jane Olson/Kathleen Soliah, in the process.
As the late Howard Gossage used to say, something in this violates the decent opinion of mankind. It is not right that one soccer mom be so belatedly railroaded and martyred so that another might complete the legal cleansing process to pass country club inspection and regain the privilege of the ballot in time to vote for W. in the millennium election.
“The similarities between the post-SLA lives of these two women are remarkable, in some ways almost identical,” said Stuart Hanlon, the attorney for the now-Mrs. Olson.
The government’s mean-spirited approach to a classically dead case against the long-vanished Soliah however makes a cleansed-Tania’s testimony against her former revolutionary soulmate almost indispensable.
The feds apparently don’t think much of their bombing case, an opinion in which they are not alone, but will advance a legal theory against Kathleen Soliah that amounts to charging her with conspiracy against the US government by violence. In such cases, evidence of other crimes by members of the conspiracy is considered relevant.
Thus the United States government, in the first month of the new century, is planning to put the Symbionese Liberation Army on trial. If the SLA is proven guilty, and then-Ms. Soliah is proven to be a willing member of the SLA… legal bingo!
The residual, irresistible impulse to prosecute the left is deep in the DNA of the Justice Department careerists. It is incidentally ironic that the American left, what there is left of it, hated the SLA. Both old and new left were at first horrified by the romantic terrorism of the Symbionese hoods who thought the way to improve education in the ghetto was to murder the principal, and as the super-fem-rads running the SLA pursued their lonely, tragic search for the Fountain of Youth or a real revolutionary underground in America ended up despising the Symbionese perhaps even more than the right did; from the right perspective — the SLA was at least good red meat to be had. The feeling became mutual. “Man, if Angela Davis supported me, man, I’d commit suicide,” said Viet-vet turned SLA soldier Joe Remiro.
“I read every word of what Patty Hearst told the FBI and I think the government is going to have a hard time with this approach,” said Paul Avery, co-author of the most authoritative book on the SLA, “Voices of Guns.”
“The government didn’t believe her when they were debriefing her during the trial — even then Patty was snitching — so they didn’t use her as a witness in the trials of other SLA members. Even after her sentence was commuted, they didn’t use her to testify against Emily and Bill Harris,” Avery said.
But the insistent Hearsts want a pardon — and they have the carrot to hold out to Bill Clinton of the powerful upstate Albany Times-Union endorsing Mrs. Clinton for the Senate in New York state (the same Hillary-card political temptation is before the Clinton administration to let its Justice Department approve the challenged acquisition of the San Francisco Chronicle by Hearst to merge with its Examiner to make San Francisco a one-newspaper town.
Hearst tactics are rarely new, but often effective. The publisher of the Albany Times-Union, Timothy White, was sent to San Francisco early this year to take the helm of the Hearst flagship Examiner and hasten the Chronicle acquisition. Almost the first thing White did upon arriving in town was to offer Mayor Willie Brown — whom the editorial side of the Examiner fabulously hates — the Examiner’s endorsement for re-election if Brown would not oppose the merger. Brown opposed it.
Now a new generation of Justice Department zealots apparently wants to make sure that at least one soccer mom doesn’t get away with SLA murder back in the murky ages of the century.
“Getting a pardon for Patty in return for using her testimony against Kathleen is about the only way the government has a chance to convict her. I don’t think it’s much of a chance, but it’s their only chance. And I guess they’re going to take it,” said Avery, the author of “Voices of Guns.”
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