San Francisco: Detroit of the Pacific? - 7 June 1974

I can’t help thinking that a week or so ago some of you may have seen the first episode of the television series I did for the BBC on the History of America.

I don’t wish to push my own wares, and happily it’s now too late to advertise this particular item but – and believers in extrasensory perception, may get a bang out of this – it happened last Sunday (last Sunday being, as I talk now, 2 June) I was sitting down reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times, a formidable task which would normally qualify one for a PhD thesis since last Sunday’s Times, was, I calculated, 280 pages long. Of course what you do is to roam freely, leaping on things not that ought to interest you but those that do.

I, for instance, glanced at the front page of news section, tut-tutted my way through such horrors as random fire on the Golan Heights, the decision of a court to allow a chemical company to spew its wastes into a famous lake, the rising concern among western diplomats over the possibility that Russia and China could sooner than later erupt into a war, and so on.

But then, my eye fell, on a very long, and sorrowful piece. It was about San Francisco. And, as I started to read it, I had a sudden strange feeling. I looked at the clock. It was at five past three in the afternoon, and it struck me, that at that moment, five after eight in the evening British time, my first programme on America would be just starting, the little pictorial essay on San Francisco as it appeared to me 40 years ago. And this, it seems to me, is an episode fit of Mr Arthur Koestler's, "let the mockers think what they will". The irony of this coincidence, is simple and I must admit, it's hurtful.

We filmed that episode lovingly, two years, ago, when I made plain – I hope that what I was showing you – I was trying to recapture the feel, the special charm, of San Francisco when I first saw it and stayed there. Even though, of course, we were filming today’s San Francisco and had to dodge our cameras round such atypical monstrosities as the soaring skyscrapers that have appeared downtown, obliterating such very small and characteristic landmarks as Coit Tower, and the old fine Ferry Building. A cluster of soulless high rises that have caused some people now to call San Francisco today Pittsburgh on the Pacific.

I recalled, with a particular wince, my short sally on the film, into China Town showing young people doing oriental exercises, and amiable old men sitting placidly on benches warming themselves in the spring sun. And then a week ago I was reading about the eruption in China Town of youthful gang wars, an occasional murder, the rising indignation of the San Francisco Chinese at their mousy living quarters, their lowly jobs, and their perennial status as subservient, if not second class, citizens.

The New York Times piece followed very closely the general line of a similar piece written only two weeks before in the London Sunday Times. Both of them were written around the theme of the shattered myth of San Francisco as a special and specially charming American city. The facts they both drew on are grim and they are not to be denied. First, as I have hinted is the wrecking of the city's physical shell. For many years, for many decades, a city law prohibited the building of anything higher than, I think, 12 or 15 storeys. The skyscraper, essential as it might be to the growth of the narrow island of Manhattan, was not allowed to overpower the spectacle of San Francisco as a city built on nine high hills, where thousands and thousands of small gingerbread houses, many of them in white-painted wood, rambled comically and agreeably up and down the rolling hills, and gave most inhabitants, a view of the splendid bay.

Well, the present mayor of San Francisco is a what used to be called a go-getter. Going and getting what, I have no notion. He believes in progress, and development, and cement and steel, and big city contracts for more and higher skyscrapers. But that is the least of the blots on the old city. Since last autumn there has been the nightly terror generated by the Zebras – the gang of young blacks that takes the ritual oath of initiation to murder at least one white. So far, there have been 18 murders of ordinary citizens picked at random.

The police then committed the howling error of stopping blacks on the streets at night, and challenging them for identification, a bit of asininity that had to be abandoned in the outrage of the black population. And that population, by the way, has grown and grown so that now San Francisco follows the new atom of defeat, whereby the white population begins to abandon the heart of the city to the blacks, and retreats to the valley’s suburbs.

The city has also recently suffered from a paralysing general strike of all public services. Well, the recital of afflictions goes on and on, and begins to suggest that, if the deterioration continues, San Francisco is in danger of being known as the Detroit of the Pacific. Detroit, I throw in a shuddering reminder, has, every year, five times the murder rate of Belfast. And that with no bombing. So when Londoners say to me is it true what they say about New York, I say, no what they say about New York is true of Detroit. New York is way down the list, I think number 17, on the big-city crime roster.

Well it’s a depressing story, and the head of the tourist board in San Francisco had a chin-up time assuring the New York Times that there has been no lag in the regular tourist invasion of the town. No question, though, if we had been filming there today, something would have to have been said to stress the point that we were talking about San Francisco any time between say, 1933, and 1968/7.

There is, however, one stain in San Francisco that the whole world knows about and one which I should guess all of you have theorised about. To be exact, it happened across the bay in Berkeley, last February, but all the stories, the continuing baffling stories, are datelined San Francisco and the poor old city has to take the shame of it. I am talking, of course, about the weird kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, and the tragic consequences which, as I talk, are not yet at an end.

I was in San Francisco when it began and we have been into this several times since, so it’s too late to start all over, and trace the story, step by grizzly step. But everybody has a theory, and I find that among Europeans, British visitors especially, there is a great fondness for the most sensational hypothesis – which is that Patricia Hearst herself was in cahoots with the Symbionese Liberation Army and that the kidnapping was a hoax. Well, of the dozen or so more or less plausible theories this is the one that both the FBI and the closest friends of Miss Hearst have most thoroughly and convincingly demolished.

The other night, the American television talker Dick Cavett, made possibly the most revealing, certainly the most absorbing, contribution to the whole puzzle. He brought together for 90 minutes Miss Hearst’s fiancé, Steve Weed, and the Atlanta editor who was kidnapped within days of the Hearst exploit and the American diplomat who was kidnapped in Brazil three, four years ago, and the government's expert on kidnapping – a youngish middle-aged man, who has spent the last several years interviewing kidnapped people and pondering the evidence of kidnappers and kidnapped here and in and Europe.

They were strikingly different types but as they told their stories one curious thing came clear, that is most likely, I think, to surprise not merely the smart alecs among us, but all good men and true who have been paying amateur detective during the past four months. The one theory that sensible people find hardest to take, is that Patricia Hearst was brainwashed, on the premise that Patricia Hearst was a fairly ordinary nice young woman with, to be sure, a streak of rebellion against the fat-cat image of her parents, but miles away in her mind and disposition from the frantic radicalism of the SLA.

I gave a hint, the last time I talked on this theme, of a personal experience shared some years ago by many hapless parents, that you can have a sensible, decent and intelligent child, even one with much humour, who in the process of a few months, can be turned by a pseudo-psychological or religious group into a zombie that you find impossible to recognise, as your own child. A very chilling experience, and one made possible by groups that have only one positive, though hair-raising skill, which is to be able tap the unconscious of an impressionable young man or woman – worse, of a teenager – and allow their unconscious to explode, in rage, resentment and hate, of those closest to them.

It’s as if these people walk down into a cellar with a torch and said but don’t you understand there is dynamite down here. And then set it off. It was the whole mission of Sigmund Freud, on the contrary, to make the patient aware of what is damaging and explosive in his or her unconscious so that the doctor could then show precisely how the most destructive forces in one's nature can be controlled.

Freud once said the psychiatrist couch is the field of purgation, the place where the unconscious may explode under control, so that the patient doesn’t let it explode in life or has, he added another time, 'to release inhibitions under controlled conditions, and then guide the patient into seeing what inhibitions it's necessary to put back so as to cope better with a life ahead".

Well the gist of Mr Cavett’s panel proved from their own confessions not only that it’s possible to sympathise with one's kidnappers but that it is absolutely the normal experience of kidnapped people to identify with their kidnappers and to begin, for sanity's sake, to admire them.

There is, today, a girl in Stockholm who is waiting for her kidnapper to come out of jail so that she might marry him. I end on this cliffhanger, and next time, I’d like to go into the fascinating testimony of these famous kidnapped victims.

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