Just Finished Reading: American Heiress – The Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin (FP: 2016)

It was a turbulent time. A time of Vietnam War protests, a time of sexual liberation. It was the age of Watergate, the time of the bomb, of the youth explosion and of the urban guerrilla. At radical ground-zero in the San Francisco Bay area a rag-tag group of political extremists – mostly white and mostly female – decided that they need to act in the name of ‘the oppressed peoples of the Earth’ against those who oppressed them with seeming impunity. Their first act shot the group – the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) – into local prominence when the killed a popular black educator. Not getting the reaction they had hoped for (they were in fact vilified by both Left and Right for their senseless assassination) they decided on another act, one which could not be ignored – the kidnapping of a local Capitalist. Also by accident they stumbled upon the perfect victim: 19 year old Patty Hearst, the heiress to the Hearst fortune and a local San Franciscan student. In an almost bungled raid they managed to snatch her away from her apartment and by doing so became international celebrities. But that was far from the end of it. With the police and FBI publically incapable to tracking the terrorist band down and becoming more embarrassed by the day they were as shocked as anyone when she made her first public appearance – holding a machine gun as part of a SLA bank raid. After months in captivity Patty Hearst had joined her captors in their revolutionary struggle against the System that had made her family millionaires.

I think I remember this story back in 1974. I’m sure that I had seen that classic image (above) of Patty holding her gun in the bank on the cover of my parent’s newspaper. I could be imagining things – projecting back in time - but the image is hazy enough to feel real. Told with great narrative force and with dramatic flair this book follows from the moment she is kidnapped until she is released from prison years later after her Presidential pardon. Told primarily from Patty’s viewpoint (despite the fact that she refused to co-operate with the author) it draws on both public records and testimony of all those involved from the authorities, the press, the Hearst family and the other guerrilla’s themselves (and their many helpers who assisted them in their time on the run). Context is supplied as the political climate shifted in the US throughout the 1970’s and the radicalism the Hearst found herself a part of became less acceptable across the western world. The author really excels in bringing out the chaotic nature of the radical movement of that time which exhibited little in the way of focus or analysis of the political strengths and, more importantly, weaknesses of the capitalist system. Like many other groups their focus was on the twin pillars of the terrorist playbook: mayhem and publicity together with a naïve belief that their actions would be hailed by the public and bring about the revolution that so many of them imagined was just around the corner. This is a very interesting slice of political history from a very interesting, strange and truly chaotic era. Recommended and more to come from the decade without a fashion sense.