Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Patty Hearst

Patty Hearst has haunted me ever since day one. Her story started in February, 1974 when she was kidnapped by a group that called themselves The Symbionese Liberation Army, a group of wackos, crackpots, overt madmen and one possible genius. It is hard to pick what part of the story is the most distressing. And now, years later, the story is back, spearheaded by a publicity blitz for a new book, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, by Jeremy Toobin.
 
Patty Hearst was 19-years-old, the granddaughter of the wealthy newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, when she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. They were a small group with no coherent goals and several were clearly mad. Toobin's explanation for them is the best I have ever heard: They were the activist endpoint of the demonstration, the Guerilla Theater. They were not a movement, they were an armed display. A revolutionary spectacle.

There are two inexplicable elements to the story. (Toobin asks a third question: How did she get off?)
First, crazy people do not join groups and they certainly do not join other madmen. Isolation, preoccupied self-absorption, is the very nature of psychosis. Charming as the notion might be, there are no revolutions in an asylum. An individual might threaten Nurse Ratchet but he will have no help. So how did these lunatics organize? Modern problems make this question all the more important.
Second, what happened to Hearst? She was a rather simple girl from a very rich family thrown into this loony bin who emerged a gun-toting, stranger bombing, bank robber. How did this happen? What was going on in her mind? There was some serious problems at the time. During the early and mid '70s, there were 1,000 — 1,000!— bombings a year in the United States, many the result of the murderous Bill Ayres, his murderous wife and his SDS. But Patty Hearst, bank robber? Again, with the maniacs drifting to more modern death cults, it is a reasonable question.

The Smart girl failed to take some opportunities to escape but she was a frightened child. Hearst may not have been a PhD candidate but the life she was trapped in certainly looked worth escaping. Why didn't she? Here is Toobin on one of Hearst's escape opportunities: "Patty and two of the SLA members decide to go shopping. They need stuff and they go to a sporting goods store. Bill and Emily Harris go inside the sporting goods store, leaving Patty in a van across the street, with the key in the ignition. She's free to leave — she can drive away, she can walk away — but instead she waits. Bill and Emily Harris stupidly decide to shoplift. They leave the store and the clerk tackles them on the sidewalk. Across the street Patty Hearst is looking at her two comrades tackled by the clerk. So what does she do alone in the van? Does she drive away? Does she walk away? No, she picks up a machine gun and fires wildly across the street to try to free Bill and Emily Harris. It doesn't work at first, so she picks up another gun and fires another fusillade of bullets across the street, miraculously not hitting anybody, but, in fact, successfully freeing Bill and Emily Harris, who get back into the van and drive off."
She also ended up in the E.R. with poison oak. Nothing. She was in difficulty on a hike and was helped by a forest ranger. Not a word. Instead she maintained her anonymity and went on robbing banks, shooting up streets and placing bombs.

After her small group of inept desperadoes were all killed, Hearst was eventually captured by the FBI, convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 7 years in federal prison. She served 22 months before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. Later, President Bill Clinton pardoned her.

Toobin calls the presidential actions on Hearst's behalf an example of "wealth and privilege in action. ... The fact that she got these two presidential gestures of forgiveness is the purest example of privilege on display that frankly I have ever seen in the criminal justice system," Toobin says. Although, for some reason, many of the insane radicals of the time were never seriously judged. (See Ayres, his murderous wife and their SDS death cult.)

           
"This iconic photograph became one of the most famous images of the 1970s," Jeffrey Toobin says. It shows Patty Hearst standing in front of a Symbionese Liberation Army flag several months after she was kidnapped.
Hearst's iconic photograph in front of a Symbionese Liberation Army flag several months after she was kidnapped.

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