“The kidnapping of Patricia Hearst,” writes Jeffrey Toobin, “is very much a story of America in the 1970s.” But in his gripping new book — part strange-but-true crime epic, part cultural history — the veteran legal reporter presents a case with unsettling overtones for an unsettled nation almost fifty years older. American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst traces the intersection of a strangely assorted group of radicals who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army and the 19-year-old granddaughter of the legendary newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst.
Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials — including hours of FBI interviews with suspects — Toobin painstakingly and compellingly reconstructs the events that unspooled when the Berkeley-based SLA first abducted Patty Hearst from the driveway of her home, from their demands of food donations to the poor in lieu of ransom, to their announcement that Patty had renounced her former life to join their armed cause, to an infamous San Francisco bank heist, and the apocalyptic gunfight between the LAPD and SLA. Having missed out on the confrontation, Hearst and two others fled and found sanctuary among fellow radicals. When the FBI finally tracked Hearst down in 1975 — more than a year and a half after her abduction — her conversion looked to have been total, aiding in bomb-making plots and in another bank robbery that caused a teller’s death.
Hearst’s subsequent trial featured yet another shocking twist — the assertion by the defense that their client’s transformation had been wholly a matter of psychological manipulation on the part of her captors, and that her life as a fugitive and participation in SLA crimes was the result of a program of brainwashing. The resulting controversy over Patty Hearst’s intent and culpability have only added to the sense of enigma around her case, and American Heiress offers it as a perhaps unique case study in the question of how far any one of us is capable of changing ourselves to match a shift in the reality around us.
Toobin is not only a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and legal affairs correspondent on CNN, but the author of multiple bestsellers including The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, and The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. Just before the release of American Heiress, Jeffrey Toobin spoke with me by phone about his research, what brought him to the Hearst case, and how the strange atmosphere of early 70s California resonates with an anxious U.S.A. in 2016. –Bill Tipper
The Barnes & Noble Review: What brought you to this? Was there a specific moment when you thought, “Patty Hearst; I want to write about that story.”
Jeffrey Toobin: It’s actually a very straightforward story. I wrote a piece for the New Yorker a couple of years ago about this jail in Baltimore that had been taken over by a gang called the Black Guerrilla Family, and the history of the Black Guerrilla Family, which started, it turns out, in the California prisons in the 1970s, which were a big hotbed of political activism. I got interested in that story, and I went to lunch with my editor at Doubleday, Bill Thomas, and I was telling him about that, and he said, “But what about Patty Hearst?” Because the SLA also came out of the California prisons.
BNR: You write that prison activist George Jackson, the author of Blood In My Eye is something of a link between those movements…
JT: He was actually the founder of the Black Guerrilla Family. So my immediate reaction when Bill suggested that was, “Oh, there must be a million books about Patty Hearst.” So he said, “Well, go check it out.” And I found that, in fact, nothing has been written about Patty Hearst for decades, that there were a bunch of books that happened in the immediate aftermath, and then nothing. So I thought, “Wow, there really might be something here,” and I started looking into it, and I realized that the story was much richer and more evocative than I had expected.
BNR: As I began reading it became clear how little I knew or remembered– and I suspect this is true of most people today – about the SLA. The name, the Symbionese Liberation Army, itself almost resisted sort of interpretation. They couldn’t have picked a name that was more of a kind of cipher for the idea of vague radicalism.
JT: In fact, as I write in the book, the name is a good reflection of the absurdity of the whole SLA enterprise. There is no such word as “symbionese.” They didn’t liberate anyone or anything. You can’t really call a dozen people an army. But the name has, you know, entered into American history because of this bizarre case.
BNR: So to exactly that point, as you present who they were, forming around this escaped convict, Donald DeFreeze, who became known as Cinque, and the kind of set of radicalized younger people some of whom had been working in the prison education aspect of the left wing movement in that time, getting further radicalized and getting attuned to the idea that the Revolution will have to be led by black Americans, by people who have been imprisoned. But what you present is this group that’s a chaotic amalgam of radical fervor, this half-baked Bonnie and Clyde outlaw fantasy, and cult-like dysfunction. Was it just chance that this is the group that became the most notorious of all those leftist radicals of that period?
JT: I don’t know if I would call it chance. They committed the only political kidnapping in American history, before or since. So it’s not surprising that their name is remembered. That is a sinister, important accomplishment. What they had no way of knowing is that their target was in a restless moment in her life that found her receptive to joining with these lunatics.
That’s what turns this case into an American epic, the transformation, disputed though it is, of Patty Hearst.
BNR: What’s fascinating about the story, in your careful retelling here, is that she goes from victim to protagonist — she really does become the figure who makes this such a notorious and lasting kind of event in our history. She takes over the story.
JT: The lunatic politics of the SLA are subsidiary to the broader and really important questions of: What is free will? How do people decide what they do? The question of Hearst’s conduct is really the mystery at the heart of this case.
BNR: You’re very careful as you walk through and lay out all of the evidence in the quest for the solution to that mystery. The books is structured so that you both tell the story from the various viewpoints that illuminate it and eventually lead the reader to the court case, giving us the evidence that the juries in the various cases had, and also all the evidence that they didn’t have. You’re very careful not to draw a final conclusion yourself—or to explicitly say that you do—about the truth or falsity of Patty Hearst’s claims in her trial. But you do leave us saying that there’s bigger game here, which is the question of what does it mean that she could change from one person to another person, another person almost directly opposed to that earlier personality, and then change back.
JT: That’s right. I do think that I am pretty clear that I don’t believe that Patricia was coerced into committing this extraordinary list of crimes that she did over almost a year-and-a-half. I think that she did join the SLA. She did voluntarily rob banks and set up bombs and shoot up a street in Los Angeles. I don’t think she staged her own kidnapping. But I certainly believe that she was a voluntary participant in a lot of crimes.
BNR: As you point out, that looks very clear in retrospect. It is interesting, then, as you do, to revisit that case for the commutation of her sentence that was made, and, interestingly and fascinatingly to me, driven forward or given extra strength by the tragedy of the People’s Temple.
JT: Right. One of the things that interested me the most in the book is that the overall atmosphere of madness in the United States in the mid-1970s, especially in the Bay Area, and the People’s Temple, was a classic demonstration of that
BNR: You also note that her kidnapping happened right on the heels of a string of the Zebra murders in San Francisco.
JT: The Zebra murders, which I knew nothing about before researching the book. Can you imagine if a group of Black Muslims decided just to murder random white people on the street, which is what happened, how that would be responded to today? It’s just unbelievable how crazy it was. The People’s Temple forms a sort of bookend to the whole story. Jim Jones tries to get in on the action.
BNR: He wanted his group to distribute the food for the poor, which the Hearsts bought as an SLA ransom demand.
JT: Right. And then later, the fact that he led all of his followers into suicide persuades a lot of people that brainwashing is real, and Patricia should have her sentence commuted, which it was.
BNR: Is this the last gasp of a kind of 1960s-based idea that there will be a real left-wing revolution, or is it more of a zombie afterlife of those movements?
JT: I think it’s a combination of the alienation of the post-’60s counterculture, which, you know, after the end of the draft, saw most middle-class kids fade away, and only the hardcore remained. And then you had the example around the world of other revolutionary movements, like the Tupamaros in Uruguay, like the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, which the SLA very clearly modeled themselves on.
BNR: I want to talk about that famous photograph of her that the SLA stages right when she is announcing her joining. You call it “the Mona Lisa of the 1970s,” What does that image come to represent for people now? In other words, have we overlaid too much glamour on top of this?
JT: What gives the book, I think, contemporary resonance is that, you know, terrorism is nothing new in the United States. We are very scared of ISIS today. But in fact, there was more terrorism in the ’70s. That photograph also I think shows that outlaw glamour is a concept that’s been around for a long time.
BNR: Let me ask you a little bit about what it was like to put the book together. There’s an element of historical reconstruction that you had to do, that must have been quite different than writing about, say, the O.J. case.
JT: This is the first book I’ve written that is really at the border between journalism and history. I covered the O.J. case in real time.
BNR: So you had your own experiences and interviews and notes to build that book from.
JT: Yeah. I was a kid during the Hearst story, and essentially had no first-hand knowledge of it. So it was completely reconstructed from the sources that were available to me. Fortunately, I found that not only were there a lot of documentary sources that had never been tapped, but also that there were a lot of people still alive who wanted to talk.
BNR: Who for you were the most revelatory people that you spoke with?
JT: I don’t really want to sort of rank my sources. I was able to speak to people in all parts of the story. FBI agents. Prosecutors. Defense lawyers. SLA members. Crime victims. The crazy bystanders. People who had weird tangential connections to the case, like Jane Pauley and Lance Ito. It was an eclectic, fun experience.
BNR: What aspect of the story yielded the most surprise for you, where you might have had one expectation about it that turned out to be different?
JT: I think, to me, the biggest revelation was Patty’s lost year, which is the period after the shootout in May of ’74 until her arrest in September of 1975, when the incompetent FBI had no idea where she was—and she was participating in this extraordinary terrorist offensive that went on for some time, until she was caught. I think that period to me was the most extraordinary and interesting.
BNR: It’s a period in which she’s both doing that, and she’s falling in love in a very real-seeming or real way with one of her fellow terrorists, basically.
JT: Yes. She did it twice, first with Willie Wolfe, then with Steve Solia.
BNR: You remark that there’s a throughline in all of her relationships, that these are figures who provide sort of protection and authority she winds up…
JT: Yes. Steve Weed, her teacher, her kidnapper, her protector, her bodyguard.
BNR: Who she winds up married to for the rest of his life.
JT: Right.
BNR: You’ve remarked on the fact that the Hearst case confronts us with the history of homegrown American terrorism, at a moment when our sense of the word is strongly associated with the idea of foreign terrorists. During the time this was all happening, the sense of real panic in the culture surrounding these events, the sense that lots of the rules of engagement between the political class and ordinary people, between the media and the people who they report on and serve, are all in tremendous and terrifying flux. Some of that seems unhappily familiar right now. As you were working on this, did you see this speaking at all to our particular moment, not just with regard to something like terrorism, but with regard to the mood of the country?
JT: I think it’s a combination. I do think that if you believe, as many people do, that events are shimmering out of control, it may be helpful to know that things have been worse in the past. But I don’t want to pretend that I wrote this book as sort of like a guide to contemporary life. It’s mostly just an extraordinary story from the past that has one woman at the mysterious heart of it.
Photo of Patricia Hearst courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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Sig Nordal 