That Girl: The Captivity and Restoration of Patty Hearst

By Rick Perlstein, The Nation. Posted January 19, 2009.

But the SLA was also implicated in the typical dodges of thug life. The most fascinating witness at Hearst's trial was Ulysses Hall, who had earlier been in prison with DeFreeze. Shortly after the bank robbery, out of curiosity, Hall rang up DeFreeze to ask him, one hood to another, what his motive was in the impressment of a captive he could have ransomed for millions of dollars. DeFreeze's reported answer provided the clearest insight into the complex admixture of criminal mischief, outright lunacy and genuine revolutionary fervor that drove the man who took as his name Cinque Mtume, after the leader of the Amistad slave rebellion and the Swahili word for "prophet." DeFreeze/Cinque explained that his main concern was the fugitive gang's survival. Ransoming Hearst, or even merely releasing her, would render them more vulnerable to capture. The safe play, DeFreeze told Hall, "was to put her in a position where she would become...a part of the group." Even better if she committed a dastardly crime by their side. Then she would be right there on the hook with them.

The methods by which Hearst was psychologically coerced into identification with the SLA is the most famous part of her story (it's depicted with relative faithfulness to the documentary record in a 1988 film by Paul Schrader). Gagged, blindfolded and bound, the 19-year-old was shunted off, Graebner writes, to a "small, smelly closet (twenty-five by seventy-nine inches), padded but otherwise empty, where she would remain for about six weeks, the first two weeks blindfolded, the first few days without access to a toilet." She thought she was being buried alive; earlier, from the other side of the door, the barked explanation had emerged from "General Field Marshall" Cinque: she was a "prisoner of war" of a massive and widely dispersed army and would be killed if she tried to escape, beaten or dangled from the ceiling if she made any noise. For the next two days she was hectored about the organization's worldview; on day three interrogators began lecturing her about the "crimes that her mother and father have committed against we the American people and the oppressed people of the world."

Her captors also sexually assaulted her. "I mostly thought that I would be killed," she later testified. That nicely served Cinque's purposes. Soon the voices coming through the closet door were telling her that she was likely to be killed in a police raid. (The police would end up accidentally killing most of the group.) Those who had once been her tormentors would be her protectors. "You can join us and fight with us, or you can die," Cinque eventually offered. "I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs," Hearst wrote in her 1982 memoir Every Secret Thing. "I had lived in fear of the SLA for so long now that fear of the FBI came easily to me."

Oliver Twist is a moral map of post-Poor Laws London as Charles Dickens understood it, drawn according to the various characters' reactions to the dazed and abused captive Oliver. The masters of the workhouse see him as inherently criminal, mere exemplar of his indigent class even before he has done anything to judge him by. Fagin, meanwhile, describes a strategy to brainwash the traumatized Oliver different in no particular way from that of the latter-day underground man, Cinque Mtume. First they all but lock Oliver in a closet. Then they let him experience a redemption that they engineer, casting themselves as his protectors against the clutches of the outside world. Then they draft him into their common legal jeopardy, because:

"Once let him feel that he is one of us; once fill his mind with the idea that he has been a thief; and he's ours! Ours for life. Oho! It couldn't have come about better!" The old man crossed his arms upon his breast; and, drawing his head and shoulders into a heap, literally hugged himself for joy.... "He must be in the same boat with us. Never mind how he came there; it's quite enough for my power over him that he was in a robbery; that's all I want."

After Oliver is impressed into committing an armed robbery alongside Fagin's gang and is shot during the crime and left behind to die, the servants who rescue him view his mere participation in the crime as sufficient to convict him, his soul manifested in his bare acts alone. Dickens's heroes, meanwhile, are liberals who intently probe the circumstances that make Oliver not so much a moral agent as a victim. ("Surely the poor child's story," the saintly Rose intones, "will be sufficient to exonerate him.")

Free will or coercion? Guilty or innocent? Admit to how you would judge Oliver, and Dickens will tell you who you are -- and, from the coordinates that result, plot the shape of an entire social world. Graebner's methodology in Patty's Got a Gun is similar. The heart of the study treats Hearst's trial as a public argument about what it meant, and to whom, to be said to possess an autonomous "self" in America around 1973-76: if an "autonomous" self could be said to exist at all. "Was there something extraordinary in Patty's background or makeup that could explain the variety of roles she had taken on in so short a time?" Graebner writes. "Or was this protean Patty a sort of mirror image of the ordinary Patty? And, if that were true, were all ordinary people vulnerable, or open, to such dramatic transformations?" In mid-'70s America, you could not answer the question without taking a side in the country's emergent culture war.

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