By J.H. Tompkins

I REMEMBER THE summer afternoon in 1970 like it was yesterday. I was standing with my friend Elena on a street in downtown Oakland. After three years behind bars for killing an Oakland cop, legendary Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was about to be freed. A thousand overwound Black Panther supporters had turned out to greet him – their campaign to "free Huey" and the work of his legal team had won Newton a new trial. We craned our necks and shifted our feet, and then suddenly there he was. The crowd roared, and Newton tore off his shirt, raising his fist in the air and smiling as if he'd just discovered how sweet life could be.

Years later, on the day Newton was murdered in West Oakland by the crack dealer he was trying to rip off, Elena picked me up, and we drove to the spot where he'd died. Newton had played a key role in shaping the political and cultural life of the nonstop circus that came to be called the '60s, and the influence he'd once had on our lives was part of what linked Elena and I. We tried without success to find something worth talking about; eventually Elena dropped a rose on the pavement and we left.

Newton had fallen a long way down – drugs were a problem, and his reputation for violence, including his alleged involvement in the murder of an Oakland prostitute, was not undeserved. He was once a courageous, visionary leader. He also made serious mistakes, hurt people, and died a thug's death.

The only heroes who can't let you down are dead ones. Real people struggle to survive; they fuck up, get scared, give in to confusion and self-doubt – and there was a bumper crop of that back in the day. In fact, back in the day, most of the people who were "activists" – and that was a whole lot of people – weren't revolutionaries, or famous, or even what we would call "radicals" today. They were just ordinary people, thrust into extraordinary times, trying in all sorts of good and bad ways, with great successes and great failures, to survive and build a better world.

I thought about that when alleged Symbionese Liberation Army associate and longtime fugitive Sara Jane Olson (formerly known as Kathleen Ann Soliah) was arrested in 1999, and again a few weeks ago when Olson, along with her brother-in-law Mike Bortin and onetime SLA members Bill and Emily Harris, faced additional charges for the murder of a woman during a 1975 bank robbery.

The recent SLA arrests have hit a community of veteran Bay Area radicals like a time bomb. People are nervous – and for good reason.

The political climate these days is as ugly as it's been in a long time, maybe since the 1960s. And in this climate the whole message of the '60s – the legacy of a generation of idealistic people whose actions changed the nation forever – is at risk.

A different world

Maybe you had to be there. Imagine a generation of young men and women, some in their teens, poised to inherit a world gone insane. More than 50,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had been fed to a killing machine. Vietnam wasn't a count-dead-Americans-on-one-hand sort of war: It was your friend down the block, your cousin, your brother, and you. It was living in Vancouver, or in a wheelchair, or in a trench until you were killed in action, just a name on a long marble wall.

Black Americans in the 1960s lived in a very different world, and white kids didn't really understand. But after a while even the dullest mind had questions. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, all shot dead – speech wasn't free for everyone. Detroit erupted, and then Watts and Newark. Politicians, civic leaders, priests, you name it – nearly every fucking adult you knew lived in a web of lies and denial that insulated them from the ugly racist reality.

Those days birthed social experiments as bizarre as they were forgettable and hair-brained political solutions like you wouldn't believe. We were kids, OK? – a fact, not an excuse. Extraordinary things happened, often when you least expected it. A cop car surrounded by UC Berkeley students kicked off the Free Speech Movement. Incredibly courageous, often desperate African Americans demanded simple justice and equality and paid dearly, again and again. There were dropouts, runaways, crash pads, Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and hippie communes, more than you could count.

The '60s spawned freedom riders, the "outside agitators" who crossed racial and class barriers – some died for it – to fight for civil rights in the South. In 1967 the Black Panther Party picked up legal manuals, Mao Tse-tung's Red Book, and shotguns to institute citizen patrols of the vicious police occupying West Oakland's black community ("Niggers with guns!" – the wail of a terrified cop). And there were the clear-thinking students who in 1963 in Port Huron, Mich., founded Students for a Democratic Society and jump-started an organized flow of damning, socially flammable truth that grew wider, deeper, and more combustible and wouldn't go away, that still won't go away, simply because it was and is true.

There was surprise and frantic fun. You partied like there was no tomorrow, because really, who knew?

America went through dramatic changes in the '60s, some of them lasting. And powerful reactionary forces are still anxious to change things back after all these years.

Today the legacy of the '60s is under attack. Public dialogue on complicated, important questions – globalization, militarization, democracy, nationalism, cultural differences, you name it – has been stunted. Basic social concern – the human impulse to care for others – has been labeled political correctness, a thought-stopping punctuation mark masquerading as a noun. The federal government is choking on prayer, and foreign policy is now defined by a biblically inspired binary, good versus evil.

How is it possible that the nation is capable of forgetting the ugly, antidemocratic history of the Central Intelligence Agency? If America had even a short memory, rather than none, we'd be better off. But believe it or not, the CIA – its history of spilled blood, treachery, and drug dealing overshadowed only by its ability to lie about it all – is suddenly cool in post-Sept. 11 culture. If that DJ job falls through, join the CIA: soon you could be in Uzbekistan, torturing the natives.

On Jan. 30, 2002, S.F. Gate columnist Mark Morford, in a report since confirmed elsewhere, wrote that Attorney General John Ashcroft had directed the Justice Department to spend $8,000 on heavy blue drapes to cover two statues of partially naked women that sit in the department's Great Hall. Ashcroft heads up the country's Justice Department. There is – how can I say this strongly enough? – cause for concern.

The payback

Talk about easy targets.

The SLA was the hapless crew of self-styled revolutionaries that made headlines, if little sense, in the mid '70s. The group was foolish, pathologically self-important, arrogant for no reason, and terribly wrong – which is exactly what a lot of the East Bay's graying radicals told me last week. And the closer they once were to the SLA, the louder they said it.

The SLA first surfaced in 1973 to claim responsibility for the senseless assassination of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster. Nobody had any idea who these people were or why they'd just killed a popular black educator. A communiqué said only that the group was out to eradicate "the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people."

Activists were horrified by Foster's murder, and most leftist circles hurled criticism at the new group. A few months later the group reappeared, kidnapping 19-year-old Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. She was a member of one of California's wealthiest, most-storied, and most reactionary families. An army of federal agents descended on the Bay Area, and the fabulous, unforgettable saga of Patty Hearst was under way. She was held – ransom or death – until she denounced her father and joined the revolution.

The SLA invented a world of their own that, had it not collided with the real world, would have just been hilarious and surreal. It issued threats, orders, and edicts in a style that combined a Stalinist lack of humor and a Norma Desmond feel for life on Earth – and this was a group that paid attention to detail. Each soldier was given a new name and a cabinet post; the group had an anthem and a logo, too – as if Spanky and Our Gang had organized a game of Let's Play Terrorist. Hearst called herself Tania and was shown on TV toting a carbine in a bank robbery. People tuned in, following the action and looking forward to the next show. I was driving in Oakland when KSAN-FM announced Hearst's walk to the wild side; I nearly crashed the car.

"My first thought when I heard about the Marcus Foster killing," Calvin Welch says, "was that they were FBI agents. I mean, what the fuck was this?" Welch is a longtime community activist who now works with San Francisco's Council of Community Housing Organizations. He's passionate and practical when he talks about local issues. "Then came the kidnapping of Hearst," he says. "That was just so bizarre. I laughed. I mean, was this a movie or what?"

"At that time I was at KPOO-FM, and we got communiqués from the SLA," Welch says. "And we had to decide if we were going to turn them over to the FBI, who were a very real presence, because we ran a draft counseling service.

"The FBI and the SFPD frequently came around to our house and threatened us with crazy things like accusing us of transporting people to North Vietnam. They lied, stole, kicked your ass, and you didn't want to deal with them. And then, with the SLA thing, you couldn't turn around without hitting a spook. It was just insane."

Dan Siegel, now an attorney and the president of Oakland's school board, was a student leader in the '60s and a familiar face in radical circles in the years that followed. "The SLA was so strange," he says. "Think about this: they killed the last decent school superintendent Oakland had until [current incumbent] Dennis Chaconas was hired.

"But if you were around radical circles then, you could see how this kind of thing developed – as wrong and crazy as it was. And I've heard it said that almost everyone knew someone connected with the SLA."

He's right on that score, though few people will air it in public. And who can blame them? The SLA's legacy is nothing but trouble. In those days its members were too visible, too stupid, and after the Hearst kidnapping they attracted an army of government agents.

Still, in some ways, SLA members weren't much different from anyone else: Joseph Remiro, the Vietnam vet who, with Russell Little, was arrested for the Foster murder, was active in the hugely influential Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization. My friend Edward knew Pat "Mizmoon" Soltysik at UC Berkeley, and two friends at the post office where I worked knew Angela Atwood.

Guns and trouble

The factors that created the SLA were part of the intense, often very strange political brew that emerged in the early 1970s in the Bay Area.

Increasingly, prisoners and ex-prisoners – most of them black or Latin – were becoming part of the scene. Their status as "heavy," stemming from a connection with street life and conflicts with police, was further enhanced by their race. It was a fact that nonwhite Americans had powerful, bitter experience that brought them to the struggle – but this truth, in the hands and heads of largely white, generally middle-class radicals, generated thinking that was sometimes so fuzzy it would have been great comedy had it not had tragic consequences.

Then there was the debate around guns and the use of violence. It started back in 1967, when members of the Black Panther Party marched onto the floor of the state assembly in Sacramento carrying empty (and perfectly legal) weapons to protest a proposed law to restrict their right to bear arms. It was quite an event, and crucial to understanding the changing world of radicals and revolutionaries.

In 1969 the Weatherman faction of SDS was formed, advocating that the struggle take a more militant, sometimes violent turn. By the early 1970s Venceremos, a prominent group led by ex-Stanford professor Bruce Franklin that believed America's black and Latin populations were increasingly ready to use arms against the government, was active in the Bay Area.

The SLA, like Venceremos, was consumed with the romance of black and Latin culture, and its members were impressed with themselves for brushing up against prison machismo. In 1972, when future SLA members met a convict named Donald Defreeze, they were at a disadvantage: heroic, misguided notions of armed violence combined with a self-concious and confused understanding of race so crippling that when they looked out at the world they couldn't see beyond themselves.

Defreeze, renamed Cinque, became their leader. They followed him into a serious mess.

Timing is everything

The recent SLA arrests jolted people who had thought that part of history was far, far behind them.

First there was the saga of Olson, linked to an alleged SLA attempt to blow up a Los Angeles police cruiser in 1975 and arrested in 1999 after nearly 20 years in hiding. She'd evolved into a progressive soccer mom – not deep cover, just a sign of the times. Last fall she made headlines while stumbling through a depressing series of legal blunders and errors of judgment, during which she copped a plea, tried to renege, and wound up sentenced to 10 years in prison. Then, on Jan. 16, 2002, Olson, her brother-in-law Michael Bortin, and the Harrises (who had each already served 8 years in jail for robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco with Patty Hearst in 1974) were arrested and charged with the murder of Myrna Opshal, during a bank robbery in Carmichael in 1975. Fired with personal ambition and pushed by Jon Opshal, the dead woman's son, Michael Latin of the L.A. District Attorney's Office had badgered the Sacramento District Attorney's Office for five years to reopen the case.

It wasn't an easy fight. Olson's brother Steven Soliah had been tried for the robbery in 1976 and acquitted. The evidence was old and shaky; nobody wanted to try the case. But Litwin and Opshal persevered, and when the events of Sept. 11 triggered a remarkable shift in the political climate, suddenly the SLA was back in the news.

To many people, the timing of the arrests was too perfect to be coincidental.

"The thing is," says attorney Susan Jordan, who was initially associated with Olson's defense, "the prosecutor is cynically taking advantage of the events of September 11. Fear of terrorists is being twisted around and used against the defendants. Things were simpler in 1975. We didn't have the kind of terrorism that we have today. The fact is that '70s terrorists were rank amateurs, new to violence, who didn't know how to use it."

Barbara Lubin, a lifelong activist and the head of Berkeley's Middle East Children's Alliance, puts it more succinctly: "Hasn't anyone heard of the strategy of going after weak links?"

By any standard, the SLA is an easy target. Jon Opshal wants vengeance and a chance to right old wrongs. The political right, on the other hand, sees an opportunity to further redevelop the social and political landscape.

The long-gone and much-maligned SLA may seem irrelevant, but a conviction would set a troubling precedent in the event of future actions against other activists.

Over the past few weeks, I spoke with many people, including medical professionals, teachers, artists, lawyers, and community activists. The arrests troubled all of them, and many expressed concern about the timing, in light of the political climate.

This didn't mean they'd talk on the record. Even veteran activists who have seen a lot of trouble in their lives don't want to go near this one.

"I never trusted the SLA, and the last thing I want is the FBI asking me questions," one activist told me. At the end of another frosty call, when I joked, "So I'll buzz you later to set something up," the sound of the receiver crashing down was painful.

A woman I first met 32 years ago through a friend in the Weathermen shouted at me that the SLA was fucked, that she was sick of talking about them, and that everyone should "get over it." And then there was the Revolutionary Communist Party, which decided it wasn't talking to strangers, a category that included me.

"It gets harder and harder for me to believe that the government doesn't have ulterior motives when they go after any political people," Lubin says. "Look what our government routinely does, look at Chile and Central America, and please, look at Iraq, where over a million children have died since the embargo began. The question is, How paranoid do you have to be before you're paranoid enough?"

A moment of glory

I hate it when people dismiss activists with generalizations like "spoiled rich kids." What's wrong with a rich kid trying to do something extraordinary rather than settling for whatever it is rich kids normally do? The discarding of social privilege to live a life with meaning is an American tradition, and a fine one at that.

I tried with no luck to reach Patty Hearst recently to pass along my thoughts on this matter. Though she was indeed spoiled and rich, there was a time long ago when Ms. Hearst experienced a moment of transcendence that most us can only dream of. On April 3, 1974, after two months in captivity, Hearst ditched the straight life, stepped forward, and exposed and publicly humiliated her father, who, through his wealth and media empire, had heaped insult and indignity on countless others. Her performance included this:

"Dad, you said you were concerned with my life and ... the life and interests of all oppressed people in this country, but you are a liar in both areas.... You are a corporate liar.... Tell the poor and oppressed of this nation what the corporate state is about to do.... Tell the people that [the energy crisis] is nothing more than a means to get approval of a program to build nuclear power plants.... Tell them how law-and-order programs are just a means to remove so-called violent individuals from the community ... in the same way that Hitler controlled the removal of the Jews from Germany" (SLA communiqué 40374).

It didn't last, but it was perhaps the one shining moment in the dismal history of the SLA.

Hearst claims to be anxious to testify against her old friends. She was, she says, a victim of Stockholm syndrome, which causes captives to identify with their captors. Perhaps it's true. But hell, I saw Berkeley students attacked by rioting cops and radicalized in an instant. Besides, she gave her occupation as "urban guerrilla" when she was finally arrested.

Still, the birthright she reclaimed is working out – as birthrights like hers tend to do, buying not just a presidential commutation of her sentence but later also a presidential pardon. The Harrises served eight years, Hearst just two. Now she's set to testify against defendants charged with a crime she has admitted to taking part in. But no matter what happens now, the heir to the Hearst fortune won't go back to jail.

Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine less-favorable conditions for the defendants' day in court. They're up against time, mistakes, and the awesome, all-consuming power of the T word. Although the prosecutors claim existing physical evidence has become more useful with the help of new technology, people close to the case say that in fact it is the same evidence that Sacramento prosecutors have had for years.

The defendants are people who have long since left the SLA part of their pasts behind. "I am a friend of Bill Harris," Lubin tells me, "and I don't justify the killing in the bank robbery at all. But the Bill Harris who I've known, who's been there for me as a friend, and who I care about a lot, well, I can't believe the state went ahead with this. And for god's sake, Sara Jane Olson is a respected person in her community."

It's tough to blame the Opshal son who lost his mother in the shooting. But public opinion post-Sept. 11 has taken a turn so aggressively reactionary that it recalls the red-baiting inquisitions of Joseph McCarthy. Let's face it: 2002 is a bad time to be labeled a terrorist. The onetime SLA members and their associates have paid for at least some of their sins, and all have forged new, productive lives. The turn of events is a kind of worst-case scenario for everybody.

Dog days

Recently my cousin and longtime pal Sharon and I were talking about the past – back when we hung out with the same people and had the same politics.

"I've had people ask me if I regretted all the time I spent as an activist and all that," Sharon said, rolling her eyes. "I can't believe it. The fact is that I don't regret a thing; those years were great."

Non-'60s people (the world breaks down into us and everyone else, of course) hate hearing '60s people rhapsodize, so I won't do it other than to say this: The '60s were full of challenge, and although I'm not a revolutionary now, in my heart, I'm still a revolutionary then. You believed you could change the world and yourself in the process, and that was liberating. The politics were confusing, we made mistakes, and at the end of the day, the fact is that we were right and the other side – racists, politicians, corporate vultures, and the rest – were wrong. It was a great time to be young.

You could never tell what was going to happen next. Something could fall on you from a tree or come loping through your front door with a gun aimed at your heart. That's how it was during my first unforgettable brush with the FBI. It was September 1970, and my best friend, who was attracted to the Maoist Revolutionary Union, and I, who hung out with former Weathermen, moved from Berkeley to Richmond, bringing with us two dogs and a 19-year-old postal worker named Sarah whose political activities were limited to driving a truck painted like an American flag.

One morning several weeks later, a large squad of FBI agents with guns drawn and a pack of reporters in tow came charging up to our house and entered.

They were after a fugitive Weatherwoman who, they were sure, was living in the small room behind our garage. A beefy posse of agents exchanged glances and heavily trotted down the driveway and into the backyard – liberating both dogs, who then raced into the yard of our next-door neighbor, an elderly Lithuanian. She looked sweet, but she hated the dogs, and as was her habit, she began to curse them. The pups liked to do their business in her garden, and she wasn't happy about it – which is, I should add, critical information with respect to this story.

The FBI, believing they were about to nail a Maoist-Weatherman conspiracy, kicked in the back door, waking Sarah, who promptly burst into tears. They dragged her, handcuffed and wearing a nightgown, out front. A few agents ransacked our house – they found guns, drugs, and money and left them all behind, which meant they were after something else that wasn't there. The real action, however, was building outside.

An agent flashed a picture of the fugitive to curious neighbors, and then they pointed to Sarah, which elicited no response. Finally they produced our Lithuanian neighbor – who was not the nice, albeit high-strung, lady I'd thought her but a first-class fink and provocateur. "She is definitely the one," the old woman cried, pointing a crooked finger in Sarah's direction. Cameras started to flash, and the ghost of a satisfied smile graced the face of the agent in charge. He shoved Sarah out in front of him, and the crowd leaned closer. "Is she the one?" he asked. "Are you sure?"

The old lady was sure, and to prove it, she pointed at the dogs, who were pulling a small wire fence from the border surrounding some tulips. "She is the one," the woman hollered in broken English, shaking her head violently. "She is the one with the dogs, look, those dogs. She is the one."

Our neighbor stared venomously at the big shot, who, sweating nervously, stepped back to huddle with a sidekick. They talked, compared Sarah with the photo, looked around, and left. The same journalists later showed up for our press conference, which was the first item on the 11 o'clock news. I celebrated by taking LSD.

A modest proposal

I came across an article in a recent San Francisco Chronicle reporting that President George W. Bush and several cabinet members were casually exploring a timeline to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq. Most extraordinary was the headline, which noted that this time the "U.S. would have to go it alone." The piece was followed a few days later by the news that Israeli premier Ariel Sharon had publicly considered in much the same off-hand fashion whether or not in 1982 a sniper shadowing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat should have just killed him.

Truth be told, things don't look good in the world.

They don't look good for the four ex-radicals, either. It's not clear when the Carmichael trial will begin, but get ready for a roomful of ghosts – and the possibility that a jury will ignore the lack of evidence, buy into the war on terrorism, and send the defendants to jail for life.

If the SLA members killed a woman in a bank robbery, the passage of time and the political context will never justify their actions.

But it's hardly fair. The SLA members, most of them, anyway, were sucked into a political shitstorm started by others. Robert McNamara, William Westmoreland, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger (to name a few) were guilty of sending 50,000 American kids to their deaths and laying waste to Vietnam, a country that was lovely, except where it was nothing but craters and rubble. The men responsible for those crimes have never had to answer for them.

Nobody is in jail for the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Nobody is in jail for setting up Geronimo Pratt, fabricating evidence that sent an innocent man to jail for more than 20 years.

Nobody is paying for all the police beatings, police shootings, FBI harassment and surveillance, COINTELPRO operations, and dirty tricks that were part of life in the 1960s. In fact, nobody's even talking about those crimes.

It's time that the United States stop blocking the U.N. from establishing a new mechanism to bring those responsible for war crimes to trial. Of course, that would mean that men like Henry Kissinger (and so many others) would have to take responsibility for their actions. But it's time to settle the score.

Fair is fair: If Kissinger has to answer for his deeds, then the onetime activists charged in the Carmichael case should do the same. We need closure – something that can be entered into history and, settled, left behind. This would, I think, be just – and when all is said and done, justice is what the '60s was about.