The Fascist Insect That Preys Upon The Life Of The People

American Heiress: The Wild Saga
of the Kidnapping, Crimes and
Trial of Patty Hearst
By Jeffrey Toobin

Toward the beginning of  "American Heiress," Jeffrey Toobin's history of the infamous Patty Hearst ordeal, he distinguishes the story as one that was definitely of the 1970s, and not the decade before it:

"The 1960s were hopeful, the 1970s sour; the 1960s were about success, the 1970s about failure; the 1960s were sporadically violent, the 1970s pervasively violent."

On that matter, Toobin writes quite a bit about the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1970s -- terrorized by the Zodiac Killer, the Zebra Killers, politically-motivated bombings and a law enforcement apparatus that seemed powerless to do anything about them. It comes across like the epicenter of America's nervous breakdown.

There's an old saying that all America's loose marbles rolled west. It was probably originally meant as a mild insult, but it's the sort of thing Californians take pride in. Reading "American Heiress," however, the expression takes on a sinister color. Among the Northern California figures who appear at the margins of Toobin's take on Patricia Hearst story are Sara Jane Moore, who would later try to assassinate President Gerald Ford at San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel (17 days after Manson Family member Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate him in Sacramento) and the Rev. Jim Jones (who would, a couple years later, flee to Guyana and die in a mass killing and suicide).

I read Toobin's account of all this and thought, "Yeah, that's the San Francisco where I grew up."

Local Girl Makes Bad

The story of Patricia Hearst (the news media took to calling her Patty after her kidnapping) was just part of the culture when I was growing up in San Francisco. The SLA's inscrutable seven-headed cobra symbol was just another politically-loaded imageto become clip art for punk show flyers. Patricia was just the subject of songs by Camper Van Beethoven or the Misfits. Later, I worked for Hearst newspapers in San Francisco and her story came up from time to time around the newsroom. (Usually, in hushed tones, in case anyone from the corporate office was in town.)

It's almost impossible to quickly sum up the whole Patty Hearst saga, but in case you don't know the basics, here goes: Hearst was a 19-year-old heiress of the famous newspaper family and a student at UC Berkeley when she was violently kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small terrorist group that espoused violent revolution in what Toobin memorably calls "a kind of pidgin leftist rhetoric." Their communiques frequently concluded with the bizarre message, "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!" Even among the underground world of leftist revolutionaries in the Bay Area of the 1970s, the SLA were outliers. Other groups condemned them after the SLA murdered Marcus Foster, the popular African American superintendent of Oakland public schools, whom the SLA (mistakenly) believed was overly friendly with police. (Although led by an African American man named Donald DeFreeze, its small membership was largely made up by white women.)

In a bizarre twist, after a month of captivity, Hearst announced she had changed her name to Tania, joined the group as a full member and took part in bank robberies. After DeFreeze and most of the SLA's members were killed in an intense gunfight with the Los Angeles Police Department, Hearst and the surviving members went on the run. She was finally arrested back in San Francisco more than a year later. She was tried for her role in the robbery of a San Francisco bank, and found guilty in a case that hinged on the question of whether she was a willing participant in crime, or one who was not culpable for her actions because she was threatened and brainwashed into committing them.

Toobin is good in showing how the trial, in a larger sense, served as a proxy for the culture clash and political battles outside the courtroom. Describing what he calls the trial's "battle of the psychiatrists," Toobin quotes the historian Rick Perlstein as saying:

"The defense psychiatrists offered up what was essentially a left-wing view of the self-as plastic, protean, moldable-- and of human beings as the product of their environment, not quite responsible for their individual decisions and acts."

By contrast, Toobin says, the prosecution psychiatrists argued:

"... [T]hat individuals were accountable for their own actions and that indulged children, rich or poor, had no right to blame circumstances for their choices in life."

Ultimately, Patricia was found guilty, but her sentence was commuted by President Carter and she was eventually pardoned by President Clinton. These Democratic presidents may have been swayed by the supposedly liberal view of Hearst's psyche -- and it's hard for a liberal like me to not feel some sympathy for the ordeals she went through. Still, the end result strikes me, fairly or not, as a product of  Republican thinking: A wealthy person from a family that has access to powerful people may be forgiven for her youthful indiscretions in a way that other people aren't.

Sloganeering California, Looking Minnesota

Some years ago, I moved from San Francisco to Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I don't hear a lot about Hearst these days, but I was drawn to Toobin's book when I saw it in Garrison Keillor's Saint Paul bookstore. I thought, in our current turbulent political era, this very 1970s story suddenly feels less isolated and historically distant than it did even a couple years ago.

Reading "American Heiress," I see the connections I see between my life and American life today and the Patty Hearst story go further than I realized. It turns out that Hearst's first lawyer after her arrest was the brother of my favorite professor in college. The LAPD chief who led the disastrous gunfight with the SLA was the same guy who was finally forced out in the early 1990s after the Rodney King scandal revealed the police force's racist abuse. (Now there is a story that won't go away.) Toobin shows how the other surviving SLA members literally almost got away with murder until after Sept. 11, 2001, changed the climate with regard to tolerance of terrorism. Another SLA associate, Kathy Soliah, was finally arrested in 1999, after living for 25 years under an assumed name in St. Paul, about a mile from my house.