The two attempts on President Ford's life and the arrest of Patty Hearst with her revolutionary companions took place within a 100-mile radius of San Francisco Bay. Many of the trends that have shaken the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s—the hippie movement, the drug culture, widespread sexual laxness, campus revolts and ghetto riots—seem to have emerged first in California. Moreover, since the Free Speech Movement started at Berkeley in 1964, the Bay Area has been a festering center for radical political activity, though the number of people involved has greatly declined since the leftist movement's heyday during the Viet Nam War. Thus the events of September 1975 seemed to reinforce the area's reputation as a hothouse for kooks and revolutionaries.
Yet the FBI found no direct links between the attempts to kill Ford and the state's hard-core revolutionaries. Lynette Fromme was a follower of the psychopathic murderer Charles Manson; Sara Jane Moore tried to move from the left fringes and join the extreme radicals, but was never accepted. On the other hand, the underground radicals helped Patty Hearst and the other Symbionese Liberation Army fugitives elude the FBI for a year and a half.
Law-enforcement officials try to draw a careful distinction between the couple of hundred hardcore, bomb-hurling revolutionaries and the above-ground activists, who number in the thousands. The Bay Area has uncounted tiny study groups that regularly meet to debate the application of Communist theories to American society. There also are several radical communes, among them the Revolutionary Union and the October League, that seek to organize leftist groups within labor unions. Still other Bay Area activists work in behalf of prison reform, improved veterans' benefits, black rights and increased help for the poor; indeed, new groups and new causes spring up as fast as a poster can be pasted to a utility pole.
Within this array of leftist activity hide the underground revolutionaries. They strike and burrow underground again in such places as the working-class neighborhoods of Los Angeles and the Mission District in San Francisco or the squalid slums of East Oakland and Sacramento. In addition, many terrorists are believed to be hiding among the students and transient street people of Berkeley's South Campus section. Furtive meetings between the underground and aboveground activists undoubtedly take place in the area's many coffeehouses, bars and parking lots. Other good meeting places are the parks known to students as People's Park and Ho Chi Minh Park.
Through contacts like these, the revolutionaries win new recruits.
Among them were Patty's lover, Steve Soliah, and his sisters Kathleen and Josephine. All three had been active and apparently nonviolent leftists. In 1974 Kathleen addressed a rally of radicals in Berkeley that was attended by Sara Moore. But the Soliahs have turned out to be members of the violent underground, and now the FBI is hunting Kathleen, who was accompanied in flight by Josephine, for questioning about Patty. Asks a bewildered police official: "How do you know when someone like them has gone over the edge from being merely a radical dissident to being an urban guerrilla willing to commit illegal acts? When do they require watching?"