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From Bach to “Tanya”: KPFK Radio (1959–74)

On June 24, 1960, L.A.’s listener-supported FM station, KPFK, aired a “Special Report” on the protests against the HUAC hearing in San Francisco the previous month, which had “investigated” the Communist Party in California. KPFK had begun broadcasting a year earlier as Southern California’s first non-commercial FM station, part of the Pacifica Radio Network of three stations, which had started in Berkeley and now included New York. For the first time people had taken to the streets in a tumultuous protest against the committee. While 4,000 demonstrators marched and shouted and chanted outside San Francisco city hall, inside the hearing room thirty-six out of thirty-eight witnesses refused to cooperate with the committee, and the audience jeered committee members and the witnesses who were friendly to them. The program on KPFK, produced by the Berkeley Pacifica station, KPFA, had been recorded on site, and listeners heard the whole thing: the chanting crowd outside; a friendly witness telling committee members that he had been a “one-time hard-core member” of the party and that he had concluded that “the Communist Party lowers man to the level of a beast in the field”; and the audience’s laughter when committee counsel Richard Ahrens asked the witness, “You have found your way back to God and patriotism, is that correct?”¹

Nothing like that had ever happened at a HUAC hearing before. History was being made that day, and KPFK told the full story, including the part—described by demonstrators—where “officers of the San Francisco motorcycle squad, in helmets and leather jackets, appeared behind the barricade on the steps of city hall,” and turned fire hoses on the demonstrators, but “we just stood our ground … so they shut off the hoses and without any warning at all the cops just charged … the cops were picking up the students bodily” and throwing them down the stairs. Listeners heard the crowd singing and cheering, and the students chanting; the crowd roar became more intense; above the roar, you could hear screams of a girl; and then, clearly, the singing: “We shall not, we shall not be moved.”²

The documentary went on with the testimony inside the hearing room—including that of Bill Mandel, a Marxist with a show on KPFK, who opened his statement as follows:

Honorable beaters of children, and sadists, uniformed and in plain clothes, distinguished Dixiecrat wearing the clothing of a gentleman, eminent Republican who opposes an accommodation with the one country with whom we must live in peace in order for us all and our children to survive … If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution—if you think I’ll cooperate with you in any way, you are insane!”³

It was great radio, and all of it was on KPFK in June 1960.

Of course, the HUAC documentary wasn’t the only piece about the Left aired on the station. It also ran programs on the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which trained civil rights workers; on proposals for a police review board in L.A. (a cause for the next several decades); and a documentary about opposition to the death penalty. Also featured were physicist Hans Bethe and the Lobby for Peace, discussing nuclear disarmament; a series on “Californians of Mexican Descent”; and a program on “America’s involvement in Africa.”

KPFK in its first year—1959—also took another step that would shape its history for the next decade, and contribute to the history of L.A.: it invited Dorothy Healey, chairman of the Communist Party in Los Angeles, to produce a regular fifteen-minute public affairs show with the bold name “Communist Commentary.” In the wake of Krushchev’s “Crimes of Stalin” speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the party was at a low point by 1959, with fewer than 500 members in L.A.—they had had more than 3,000 a decade earlier.⁴ The national office tried to get rid of Dorothy because she led a group of reformers seeking a more democratic and less secretive party, but she held on to her position because the LA people recognized what Bettina Aptheker, activist and daughter of a prominent party leader, called her “energy and charisma.” In subsequent decades, Dorothy would mentor the younger generation of LA activists.

Giving Dorothy Healey a show on KPFK aroused the red-hunters, and in 1962 the Federal Communications Commission withheld the license renewal of KPFK (and the other two Pacifica stations) pending its investigation into “Communist affiliations.” In January 1963, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) subpoenaed KPFK and the other two Pacifica stations—because, the San Francisco News Call Bulletin reported, “the Los Angeles station has permitted a woman Communist to comment on current affairs.”⁵ When the SISS announced that its hearings would be held in secret, Pacifica leaders demanded that they be open to the public and requested permission to broadcast the proceedings. The request was denied.⁶

James O. Eastland, Mississippi Democrat and champion of segregation, chaired the subcommittee, with Thomas Dodd of Connecticut as vice chairman. Also in attendance at the KPFK hearing: Senators Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, Kenneth Keating of New York and Roman Hruska—a Republican windbag from Nebraska best known for his 1970 speech in support of Nixon’s nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Carswell’s critics had called him a “mediocrity.” Hruska replied: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they? … We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.”⁷ (The Senate rejected Carswell’s nomination.) Most of the questioning of KPFK witnesses was conducted by the subcommittee counsel, a Nevada hack with the wonderful name Jay Sourwine.

The day started with Trevor Thomas, acting president of the Pacifica Foundation, telling the committee in a prepared statement that “avowed members of the Communist Party have been heard” on KPFK and the other stations, but that was “in keeping with the foundation’s policy affording a public platform for all.” He emphasized that “seventy to eighty percent of our broadcast day is music, drama, literature, poetry, and children’s programs.” KPFK, he said, was not a left-wing station; instead (as the first Folio, the station’s official publication, had declared), “All shades of the political spectrum are represented.” Dorothy Healey was one of the ten commentators who had “different perspectives”; the list also included William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk. Thomas emphasized that Healey was on the air for only fifteen minutes twice a month with her “political views.”⁸

Senator Hruska interrupted. “I do not believe the Communist Party has any political views,” he said. “They have views that are calculated to overthrow this country. That is not political views.”⁹

Sourwine then said he was concerned about Dorothy Healey getting airtime because “the Communists always seek to infiltrate mass communications as early as they can in every country” which is “a prelude to the Communist takeover in country after country.” First Dorothy, then … revolution! He asked whether KPFK or the other Pacifica stations “broadcast any programs from Radio Moscow.” (The answer was “no.”)¹⁰

Next came Peter Odegard, a director of the Pacifica Foundation and a professor in the UC Berkeley political science department. When he was asked about Healey and other Communists, he told the committee: “I do not like to be associated with these people. I loathe them.” You might call that “pandering,” or “opportunism”; but it’s also possible he was sincere. He continued: “But I believe that our listeners have a right to hear this, just as they have a right to hear people like Gerald L. K. Smith, who we also interviewed.” Gerald L. K. Smith was a neo-Nazi and white supremacist so far to the right he was shunned by segregationists like Strom Thurmond—you might say he was not exactly “balance” for Dorothy Healey. But Odegard concluded that KPFK put both Gerald L. K. Smith and Healey on the air “so that the people may judge what these, what I call ‘enemies of freedom’ are saying.”

Hruska protested: “You created them.”

Odegard: “No, we did not create them … They exist. These are facts of life.”¹¹

He was right about that.

Next the subcommittee called Pauline Schindler, widow of the LA architect Rudolph Schindler. She was seventy years old; in the 1930s she had run a salon of left-wing intellectuals and artists at the famous Schindler House on Kings Road in Los Angeles.

Sourwine asked the inevitable question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

She answered “Not the party, but I was once a member of the Communist Political Association—ages and ages ago, briefly. In 1946 … they threw me out. They did not approve of me.”

That was the end of her testimony. The hearing was reaching its climax: Dorothy was next. They started by asking her, “What is your business or profession?”

She declined to answer, responding: “I believe the greatest danger that this country faces today is the possibility of concentration camps of the mind, the dictatorship of big business, of control exercised and expressed through agencies of government determining what people can or cannot think. It is my opinion that all areas of expression are protected by the First Amendment.” She also pled the Fifth.

Sourwine then asked: “You are a fairly well-known commentator on radio. Do you want to decline to admit this?”

“The question of what or who is well known is, of course, a matter of opinion, but as I have already stated, I do not believe that this committee has any right to inquire into any questions regarding … press or radio.” And she again pled the Fifth.

“You have a program on radio station KPFK regularly, do you not?”

“The same answer … for the same reasons.”

Sourwine then showed her a document that had the fascinating title Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General of the United States, v. Dorothy Healey. It said Bobby Kennedy had petitioned the Subversive Activities Control Board in 1962 to require that Dorothy register with the attorney general—himself—as “a member of a Communist-action organization.” It then cited evidence from five witnesses that she was a Communist—two former party members turned snitches, and three reporters who had interviewed her and to whom she had said she was a Communist. One of the snitches said she had given the keynote address to the Southern California district convention of the CP in 1960, and that she had said, “Now is the ideal time to set about popularizing socialism in American terms: its rational productive relations, its elimination of material want … its devotion to humanism and faith in the perfectibility of man,” and “its respect for and encouragement of true culture as against mere amusement.” That sounded suspiciously like KPFK.¹²

Sourwine continued, “Will you admit that you are the Dorothy Healey referred to as the respondent in this case?”

Dorothy’s reply: “I am struck by the fact that the only dissenting opinions which the subcommittee wishes to defend are opinions which defend entrenched wealth.” She was referring to a previous witness at a previous hearing—she mentioned “Katanga mining interests”—but it’s hard to tell from this transcript exactly what had transpired. Whatever it was, her remark made Senator Hruska mad: “I move, Mr. Chairman,” he submitted, “that all these comments of this witness … be stricken from the record as … self-serving statements and very unbecoming in the premises, and, besides referring unjustly and improperly to a member of this committee.”

Senator Dodd, apparently the target of Dorothy’s remark, stayed cool. “I am not offended,” he told Sourwine. “I do not mind.”

Sourwine then read a list of names of people who had testified in the Smith Act trial in 1952, a decade earlier, that Dorothy was a Communist. Dorothy replied, “After a six-month trial and after a decision of the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice came into the trial court in 1957 to admit that there was no evidence against me adequate for a conviction that I had at any time conspired to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” She once again pled the Fifth.

“Mrs. Healey,” Sourwine said, “You cannot have it both ways. If you are trying to tell the committee these people testified falsely, you cannot do it in the same breath in which you refuse to answer the question as to whether you know that they testified against you.” He did have a point. “I am willing to leave the record there,” he concluded. “I have no more questions, Mr. Chairman.” Dorothy was dismissed. They never brought up any of the twelve transcripts of her KPFK shows produced by the FBI for the Senate subcommittee.¹³ Apparently they weren’t interested in what Dorothy actually said on KPFK—or maybe what she said wasn’t criminal.

The next attack on KPFK came ten months later, in October 1963. This time it was the FCC, conducting its license renewal hearings, which asked all Pacifica board members, officers of the foundation, and the general manager of KPFK and the other two stations whether they were or had been members of the party. Like many other liberal-left groups, Pacifica had two factions with opposing strategies for responding to McCarthyism. One group of directors proposed a policy declaring that Pacifica would refuse to hire anyone “who is a member of the Communist Party.” Members of the opposing group pointed out that that meant Pacifica would create its own internal McCarthyism—an endorsement of the repression of the Left that was being proposed “at a time when the political climate seems to be shifting away from such practices.” The battle focused on Jerry Shore, executive vice president of the foundation and a former CIO organizer, who had been expected to become Pacifica’s president, but apparently was, or had been, a party member. The left faction won the vote, but Shore resigned anyway. At that point the board voted to appoint Shore the general manager of KPFK, and the three board members who had led the right-wing faction resigned.¹⁴ When the FCC renewed the licenses of KPFK and the other two Pacifica stations in 1964, the station and the network could claim a historic victory over McCarthyism—one that transformed forever the political identity of the station and the network.

Despite all of this political conflict, KPFK had not started out as a left-wing station. It was part of America’s first listener-supported radio network, run by the nonprofit Pacifica Foundation, which had started with a station in Berkeley in 1949, founded by Lewis Hill and a group of pacifists who had refused to fight in the Second World War. The original Pacifica charter declared their goal was resolving conflicts “between nations and individuals” through “understanding” and “dialogue”—not exactly the Marxist position.¹⁵

In 1959, when KPFK got started, listener-supported noncommercial FM broadcasting was a radically new idea. L.A. had no public radio stations—KCRW wouldn’t start broadcasting for another ten years, when it would become the region’s first NPR station (and ten years after that, KCRW hired KPFK’s general manager, Ruth Hirschman). Regular programming began on KPFK at 9 a.m. on July 26, 1959, with Pablo Casals performance of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 1—recorded the previous year at the Casals Festival in San Juan. (Casals refused to play in the United States because of the government’s support for the Franco regime in Spain.) After an hour and a half of Casals came a half hour of poet Kenneth Rexroth, “Recorded in Aix-en-Provence, for KPFK.” Rexroth was one of the elders of the San Francisco scene. Like the Pacifica founders, he had been a conscientious objector in World War II. In his youth he had been active in anarchist politics—the Communist Party had rejected his application for membership in 1930 because of his anarchist leanings. In the Fifties he had sold anarchist newspapers at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and he was among the first American poets to explore haiku and other traditional Japanese poetic forms.¹⁶ After Rexroth came a folk music show hosted by Ed Cray—for decades afterward a professor at USC’s Annenberg School.¹⁷ That was it for day one.¹⁸

Day two began with two and a half hours of classical music, followed by Harvard theologian Paul Tillich with a one-hour lecture on “Basic Religious Questions of Our Time.” After that came more classical music and a short story. Later in the week, jazz shows featured Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, as well as Django Reinhardt and earlier players including Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet. There was a book show, a Jewish folklore show, children’s programs, and live drama—a reading of George Bernard Shaw’s Man of Destiny in KPFK’s own studio.

The public affairs programming in the first month included several of the big thinkers of the day: left-wing sociologist C. Wright Mills lecturing on “The Decline of the Left”; social critic and Harvard professor David Reisman on “The American Future”; Aldous Huxley, British expatriate novelist and author of the dystopian Brave New World, on “The Human Situation”; and UCLA chemist Willard F. Libby on “nuclear energy” (he would soon win the Nobel Prize for discovering radiocarbon dating).

The first KPFK Folio, the publication for subscribers that included the program guide as well as editorial comment, made its political stance clear: “All shades of the political spectrum are represented,” the Folio declared; “ten commentators view the news from a different perspective.” KPFK was committed to no political position. “Our aims are humanistic,” it concluded. “We want to be a concert hall, a lecture room and a part of your living room.” Notably missing: any promise to focus on civil rights or nuclear disarmament or the Cuban Revolution—big issues for the Left in 1959.

But KPFK’s original management, unlike the Pacifica Foundation, did not come from World War II–era pacifists. The first general manager, who built the station, was Terry Drinkwater, later an award-winning reporter for CBS News. Far from refusing to serve in the military, Drinkwater had been an ROTC company commander as an undergrad at Pomona College, and after graduating in 1958, he served as a lieutenant in the US Army infantry. As a Pomona student his passion for radio had already been evident: he founded the Pomona College student-run radio station, KSPC, his roommate Spencer Olin recalled, “and spent countless hours there acquiring equipment, raising funds, and building it up. He was totally committed to that project.” But politically Drinkwater was “not especially ideological,” Olin recalled. “His father, Terrell Drinkwater Sr., was a very conservative Republican and president of Western Airlines. But Terry was not outspokenly Democrat or Republican.”¹⁹

Between leaving Pomona and KSPC and coming to L.A. to start KPFK, Drinkwater went to Berkeley to work at KPFA. His Berkeley roommate, John M. Anderson, recalled that, at KPFA, “he promoted the idea of a Pacifica station in Los Angeles, the Pacifica board agreed, and sometime in mid-1959 he moved to L.A. to help start KPFK.” Anderson agreed that Drinkwater “had no strong attachment to either major party”; he “saw the world with a reporter’s skepticism.”²⁰

The original KPFK news department “was anything but left wing,” recalled Ed Cray, the first assistant director of public affairs and one of three people who produced the news with journalist Gene Marine, who had come down from KPFA along with Drinkwater. (After helping set up the KPFK news department, Marine would return to work in the Bay Area, later writing for the Nation and then Ramparts, as well as publishing one of the first books about the Black Panthers.) The news was “straight down the middle,” Ed Cray recalled. “Gene and I had plenty of opinions, especially on local politics, but we were trained in the old school: your opinion doesn’t count.”²¹

The first week of programming also included Alan Watts’s “Way Beyond the West.” Watts had started broadcasting a weekly show in 1953 for KPFA in Berkeley, and by 1959 he was well known not only in the Bay Area but nationwide for his book The Way of Zen. He became the most listened-to programmer in the history of the station. Part of his strength was that his programs were not taped public lectures like those of Aldous Huxley, David Reisman and C. Wright Mills; Watts talked alone in a studio with a microphone, speaking with remarkable clarity, calm and flawless diction, and seemingly one to one. Then there was his message: the self is an illusion; the goal was for “cosmic consciousness” to replace “self-consciousness,” to live in the here and now, in the “eternal moment,” rather than thinking about the past and the future—in particular, worrying about death.

Watts was “the perfect middle-class Zen master,” historian Matthew Lasar argues. According to Watts, you didn’t need to engage in the rigorous discipline of meditation and study with an approved teacher to achieve a Zen-like state. He called that “square Zen.” He rejected, as well, a second false path, “Beat Zen”—dropping out, rejecting the world. In fact, Watts was promoting what we now call “Orientalism,” what Lasar calls the “well-worn imperial stereotypes” of an earlier era. But in the Cold War context, telling Americans they had a lot to learn from the Chinese was a bold and subversive message.²² And it was clearly “un-American” to embrace Zen Buddhism in a deeply Christian country that had recently added “under God” to its pledge of allegiance (in 1954) and made “In God we trust” its official motto (in 1956).

KPFK’s first week was greeted by the print media with enthusiasm. The Times headline read “KPFK ‘Cultural Bomb’ Will Explode Today.” Calling it “the non-commercial, educational station,” the paper declared that “listeners will be glad to hear that editorializing is reserved for the commentators and will not be contained in regular news shows.” It added that “commentators range from liberal to conservative, so that all shades of opinion will be presented.” A Times columnist called KPFK “the ultimate in FM broadcasting.” And the LA Examiner declared that the station “will have the support of influential and creative people.” “Thirty commercial FM stations are currently beaming their daily programs to the 52 percent of Southern Californians who own FM receivers,” said Westways, the widely read magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California; “Now we shall be fortunate enough to receive the first non-commercial, listener-sponsored FM station in the area … our Southern California brain stimulator.” Time magazine was equally enthusiastic: “Don’t subscribe yourself unless you’re prepared to be caught up in something: A radio station operated for adult minds really does get to be a religion, after you’ve had a chance to hear it for a while.” Frontier magazine reported that “KPFK will be powerful enough—75,000 watts—to blanket the Southland in a sophisticated cloud that will reach its estimated 2,000,000 FM listeners.”²³

KPFK’s first fund drive illustrated the station’s early emphasis on “balance” and “quality” over left-wing programming. A one-day event, it came two days after the broadcast of the documentary on the HUAC protest in San Francisco. The problem, the Folio declared, was that “a scant 7,000 homes have subscribed … not enough.” The fund drive featured actors James Mason with Jack Lemmon and Rod Serling; an interview with Aldous Huxley; Vincent Price reading from Henry V, and Ray Bradbury reading one of his stories; a performance by Pete Seeger; Stan Freberg talking about advertising; humor from Mort Sahl; and a special jazz program for KPFK with Buddy Collette, Terry Gibbs, Shelly Manne and others. Fund-raisers pointed to the other distinguished programming of the previous month, including the Beckett play Embers, recorded by BBC; Faulkner reading from As I Lay Dying; and film director Jean Renoir talking about Albert Camus in the wake of his untimely death that January.²⁴

After just one year on the air, KPFK in 1960 won broadcasting’s highest honor, the Peabody Award. The citation—for locally produced programs—praised the station for covering “a wide range of subjects,” naming the programs “Arming to Parley,” on which Cold War liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr discussed “American military and political problems”; “Conversations on Freedom,” with Brandeis University faculty talking about civil liberties; and “Not Merely a Business,” a documentary on “Freedom and control of radio and television in a democratic society.”²⁵ The station won a second Peabody the following year.

In 1963, the station launched the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, billed as “a benefit for the support and preservation of KPFK,” to be held in May. KPFK subscriber Phyllis Patterson had the idea—she taught history and English in LA public schools and had assigned a class project of setting up a “Renaissance fair” in her backyard in the Hollywood Hills. More than 300 people showed up at an organizing party for her idea of a station fundraiser. Eventually 600 people “contributed materials, time and talent” in putting together the structures, booths and activities, with grounds—in North Hollywood—designed to suggest a spring market fair in England around 1580. Or, as the Folio put it: “Up the dusty lane procede the motley bande of revelers. Jesters leap high, the bright be-decked oxen pull commedia players on their cart … bells of Morris dancers jingle loudly and they raise the Maypole.” Also “canopied tradesmen’s stalls … recorder grounds, dancers and jugglers … candles, jewelry, leather goods, paintings, pottery … trestled tables laden with piping hot beef, leg of fowl and rich, dark breads; pastries, tartes and cakes”; and for the kids, “Punch and Judy, puppet making, fortune telling and donkey carts.”²⁶ The first one was a complete success, with over 3,000 people buying tickets. The Faire became a huge event in subsequent years, a countercultural celebration of precapitalist village life that spread across the United States. Later, in the Nineties, it was taken over by a profit-making corporation.

In 1963, after fighting off HUAC, the FCC, and SISS, KPFK stopped trying to be a neutral forum. “The struggle for dialogue,” Matthew Lasar explains, “seemed pointless in a society that swiftly punished those Americans who spoke their minds.”²⁷ And the concept of “balance” was now radically redefined: instead of the station balancing Left and Right in its own programming, its public affairs shows would provide balance to the mainstream media and their unquestioning adherence to Cold War anti-communism in both domestic and foreign policy. At the same time, several of the station’s leading commentators on the right had refused to appear on a station that broadcast programs featuring Communists—so the notion of “balance” in programming was undermined by the right as well as being redefined by the Left.

The political transformation became clear pretty quickly. Later that year, KPFK and Pacifica began airing I. F. Stone and Bertrand Russell opposing the US war in Vietnam, two years before the anti-war movement developed. In June 1964 the station broadcast an interview with Che Guevara by Betty Petty Pilkington, a freelance journalist.²⁸ Then, in 1965, KPFK broadcast WBAI reporter Chris Koch’s reports from North Vietnam, making Pacifica Radio the first American news organization to send reporters to the North. In 1966 KPFK broadcast discussions of the future of the civil rights movement with leaders of SNCC, CORE, SDS and the SCLC.

The folk music, classical and jazz shows continued, and the children’s programming continued, as did Alan Watts. In fact, even at the end of the Sixties, classical music still filled more hours at KPFK than anything else: on a typical broadcast day in January 1969, which ran from 6 a.m. until midnight, KPFK ran three one-hour programs of classical music. Though they did run a one-hour special about the Beatles that month, it was preceded by a Mozart piano concerto, and followed by Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace.²⁹

KPFK had become a key institution of the Left in L.A. In 1969, the station opened the “KPFK Watts Bureau,” a project to train a dozen Blacks in South Central about radio production, writing, and reporting. Their work, broadcast on KPFK, included a thirty-minute documentary, The Black Man 1970.³⁰

Then, on June 7, 1974, KPFK broadcast a tape that began, “This is Tanya.” She said, “I want to talk about the way I knew our six murdered comrades.” Tanya was Patty Hearst, heiress of the right-wing newspaper family; she’d been kidnapped in Berkeley three months earlier, when she was nineteen, by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which aspired to be an urban guerilla organization. A month after the kidnapping she had released a tape saying she was joining the SLA. Two weeks after that she was photographed robbing a bank; a month later, 400 LAPD officers surrounded a house in South L.A. where several SLA members were hiding. A furious gun battle broke out, broadcast live on TV, which ended with the house catching fire. Six SLA members were killed by the LAPD that day. Two weeks after the shootout, on June 7, 1974, the tape from “Tanya” was dropped off outside the KPFK studio in North Hollywood, and the station put it on the air. After paying tribute to each of her six dead comrades, “Tanya” concluded with the SLA motto: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!”³¹

A federal grand jury investigating the SLA subpoenaed the tape, but KPFK general manger Will Lewis refused to hand it over, arguing that the subpoena violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press. Officials said the subpoena had been “personally approved” by Attorney General William Saxbe—who had been appointed by Nixon during the “Saturday Night Massacre” at the climax of the Watergate crisis, after Elliot Richardson opted to resign from the post rather than follow orders to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Lewis pointed out that he had given authorities a copy of the tape, but not the original, which might have contained fingerprints or other identifying information about its source, and that journalistic ethics required the protection of sources. The federal judge presiding over the case, A. Andrew Hauk, found Lewis guilty of contempt and ordered him jailed for the duration of the grand jury term—three months.³² (He was released—after sixteen days at the federal prison on Terminal Island in L.A.—on an order from Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who declared that the case raised “substantial First Amendment claims.”³³)

The jailing of KPFK’s general manager marked the political climax of the fifteen-year history of the radio station that had become a key institution of the Los Angeles Left. At that point, the station, whose budget came from listener contributions, had 15,000 subscribers (donors), according to the Times, and a listening audience of 300,000.³⁴ That’s why, in 1974, it was KPFK rather than any other station in Southern California that would broadcast the tape that began, “This is Tanya.”