In from the Cold

In a footnote to the years of the counterculture, former Political Revolution ary Jane Alpert, 27, last week surrendered to federal authorities in New York City after living on the lam for 4 1/2 years. She had jumped bail after her conviction in 1970 for conspiring to bomb Manhattan buildings as part of the extreme left's antiEstablishment, anti-corporation, antiwar crusade.

Much had happened in the interval. The Viet Nam War had ended for Americans. A comrade-in-arms, described by Alpert's attorney as her lover, had been killed in 1971 as lawmen stormed New York's Attica state prison to quell a convict uprising. Over the years Alpert, a Swarthmore graduate and ardent feminist, concluded that the radical movement was male dominated and sexist. She also tired of life as a fugitive. "I did not want to spend my life hiding out," she told Federal District Judge Milton Pollack. Accompanied by her parents (her father is a dental-equipment manufacturer), Alpert described her life." return as "the happiest day of my life."

Where had she been? Her lawyer would not say, except that she had worked at a regular job somewhere in the U.S., presumably under an assumed identity. She now faces up to five years in prison on the conspiracy charge, an other five for fleeing. Her return raised speculation about whether such other young women radicals as Kathy Boudin, who fled a bombed-out Greenwich Village town house in 1970, and Patricia Swinton, charged as a co-conspirator with Alpert but never found by police, may also come in out of the cold. A more intriguing question was whether Heiress Patricia Hearst is either willing or able to escape her radical abductors and re-embrace the family she has publicly as sailed.

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