Patty Hearst, a grandchild of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was 19 at the time.
The group had first appeared in November when it had murdered Marcus Foster, the black Superintendent of Oakland Public Schools, and wounded his deputy superintendent Robert Blackburn.
The name of the entity, it might be noted, came from this, according to the organization:
The name 'symbionese' is taken from the word symbiosis and we define its meaning as a body of dissimilar bodies and organisms living in deep and loving harmony and partnership in the best interest of all within the body.
It's hard to seem how murdering public school superintendents fits that supposed goal. Robert Blackburn, who survived his wounds, noted:
These were not political radicals, They were uniquely mediocre and stunningly off-base. The people in the SLA had no grounding in history. They swung from the world of being thumb-in-the-mouth cheerleaders to self-described revolutionaries with nothing but rhetoric to support them.
Emblematic of the times, the goof ball entity was a kind of sort of Communist terrorist cell that rapidly became disenchanted with "the people" after distributions of food, which it had demanded as a ransom in Berkeley, didn't go well.
In April, the group raided a bank in San Francisco, in which Hearst seemed to take part, although she denied doing so willingly. She nonetheless was convicted due to the actions and served two years out of a seven-year sentence before Jimmy Carter, ever the kind man, had her released. Bill Clinton pardoned her.
In May the organization moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, where they got into a shootout at a sporting goods store where Hearst, on guard duty, fired shots. A shootout a couple of days later at a supposed safe house killed six of them.
Hearst was arrested in September 1975, back at a San Francisco safe house.
Hearst, as noted, was convicted, but she claimed she had never participated willingly, and had been raped and threatened while a captive. Given the nature of the SLA, that's certainly possible. Early on, however, after her arrest she had said that she comported her thoughts to theirs and was given a choice of being freed or fighting with them, and she elected to fight.
After her release, Hearst married Bernard Lee Shaw, a policeman who was part of her security detail during her time on bail. They had two children. He died in 2013.
The Provisional IRA bombed a bus on the M62 Motorway in England, killing nine solders and three civilians, including two children.
The Yom Kippur War resumed, but only as between Syria and Israel, with 500 Cuban soldiers joining a Syrian tank unit. Fighting resumed in the Golan Heights.
Time Magazine featured Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil on the cover, with the caption "The Impeachment Congress.
