Mount TBR #7

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

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

In early 1974, I was a high school senior cracking wise all the time to hide my uneasiness about going to college in the fall. I was a simple kid that wanted two things: not to flunk out of State and a girlfriend.

So with these clear-cut but crucial goals alternating in my mind, I didn’t have mental space to devote to the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst on February 4, 1974. Keep in mind in those far off days of pre-cable TV and pre-24 hour news, our country felt huge. Since replaced by Florida as LaLa Land, wacky California and its dizzy denizens felt very far away. And, self-involved and self-regarding as I was, I was off to a university better known for partying than political activity.

Anyway, in this book, Toobin reminds us what a dark period the Seventies really were. Despite my two burning concerns, in the main people were nervous about gas prices and the energy crisis, disgusted over Watergate and politics, and stressed about disappearing factory jobs due to foreign competition and higher oil prices. The fact that a rich young woman could be snatched out of her apartment and then seemingly turned into a bank-robbing criminal was yet another example of things going to hell in a hurry.

This kidnapping gripped the imagination of the general public, stoked by the intense media scrutiny that lasted for eighteen months. Toobin underlines the curious fact that the first world-wide feed of live news with the minicam was the May 17, 1974 shootout between the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and the LAPD. 

The SLA members always told Patricia Hearst that they posed no danger to her but she was in fact in danger of being attacked and killed by the police in a raid. This was one of the very few points on which they were correct. The LAPD did not hold back even when they assumed that Patricia Hearst was in the house as they poured 5000 rounds into it (while receiving about 3000 in return) and set it afire as an unintended effect of using tear gas.

Lesson learned: Don’t do what the government doesn’t like, kids. A cell or the grave ain’t a good choice.

About 40 years ago there was a raft of books about the kidnapping, such as Belcher and West’s Patty/Tania. But Toobin thought since no book had been written in about 30 years, it was time for a re-evaluation. This is worth reading because Toobin provides more details that Belcher and West, as employees of Hearst’s father, were too discreet to include. Also, Patty/Tania, rushed into print as quickly as January 1975, did not cover the year in which Patricia Hearst and Harrises were on the run or their trials.

Toobin, a writer for The New Yorker, writes clear prose in a readable style. He captures but does not belabor how strategically and tactically inept the militia group was or how infantile their politics were. He has a reliable eye for the good story and spins crackerjack tales about characters such as Tom Mathews, the high school student kidnapped by the Harrises and Hearst on the day of the shooting at Mel's Sporting Goods. Young Tom got a see The New Centurions at drive-in with them and they let him go so he could be in time for a baseball game he had to play the next day.