That Girl: The Captivity and Restoration of Patty Hearst

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

The prosecution, attempting to convict Hearst as a voluntary revolutionary, drafted off the opinions of conservative editorialists processing the traumas of the 1960s. She was fit progeny, as one Midwestern paper put it, of "Mansonettes, seeking flower-child summers but finding themselves as mass murderers.... Political rabbit holes from which fallen PhD candidates emerge as Weathermen. Pitiful bands of Jesus freaks, lost on behalf of a God who must cry for the waste." "Liberals in Congress" were blamed, and "today's climate of permissiveness," and "a generation of youth worship, permissive parenthood, and soft-headed justice." Hadn't we always warned it would end up like this? Others blamed Berkeley itself: "Fungus thrives in human warmth. Perhaps violence thrives in the vacuum of permissiveness that exists on some campuses these days." Class was never far from these sorts of backlash arguments: that what one paper called "Mrs. Hearst's little darling," what another called a "rebellious miscreant," was a "spoiled rich kid."

The argument proceeded in blithe innocence of facts: actually, Hearst's parents were quite strict; she lived modestly; worked in a department store for pocket money; and was utterly apolitical, with hardly the imagination for rebellion. ("Venice is nice, but smelly," she wrote to her boyfriend during her dutiful high school trip abroad. "The only thing in the world she wanted then," her boyfriend wrote in his memoir, "was to have two kids, a collie, and a station wagon.") The argument succeeded with the jury nonetheless, Graebner says. The prosecution, after carefully but risibly establishing an insurrectionist streak in her "unparalleled" "capacity for sarcasm" and such childhood acts as "telling a nun to go to Hell," won the case, he thinks, when a lawyer stumbled into the formulation that she was a "rebel in search of a cause." It was but a short step, went the logic, to the tapes she made proclaiming she would never "choose to live the rest of my life surrounded by pigs like the Hearsts," and from there, to outright criminality. (Anyone's Daughter was the title of a popular book on the trial; "Could Your Daughter Kill?" was a Los Angeles magazine story on the Manson trial of 1970.)

Bailey made a bold and unprecedented case for exoneration. His opening statement, in Graebner's paraphrase, called Hearst "a creature lacking in will, no longer in control of her actions: a victim." ("Surely the poor child's story," he may well have said, "will be sufficient to exonerate her.") Bailey's strategy was to call a series of expert witnesses who would guide the jury through the state-of-the-art thinking about "coercive persuasion," popularly known as "brainwashing," and compare Patty with its most famous victims. During the Korean War, "forceful interrogation" by Chinese captors induced "compliant behavior" in 60 percent of American prisoners of war, according to studies by one expert witness called by the defense. In 1948 the Hungarian Cardinal József Mindszenty was arrested, stripped naked in public, made to wear a clown outfit, treated to a month of beatings, druggings and episodes of sleep deprivation, then "confessed" to enormous anti-Communist crimes (his memoirs were published around the time of Hearst's kidnapping). One defense psychiatrist even called Hearst's pallid affect during the trial -- a courtroom reporter labeled it "zombielike" -- the "Mindszenty look."

It was hogwash, argued the prosecution, these silly softies who thought of criminal defendants as patients "requiring therapy." The government prosecutor later told a reporter "that Patty had used victimhood to mask the most exhilarating experience of her life"; a prosecution psychiatrist said that Patty, no patsy she, was no less than the "queen" of the SLA. During one part of the trial, they resorted to the epistemology of Victorian workhouse overseers: we must judge the drifting, feckless hippie children of the rich by what they essentially are. During another phase, they chose a Victorian epistemology of blunt literalism: look at what Patty Hearst did, what she said, what she chose (she picked up a gun -- so how could she have intended anything but to pick up a gun?). Negotiating this swirl of significations, Graebner proposes, the trial became a public referendum on the very questions of free will and determinism, of the mutability of the self, of the nature of individual responsibility.

See more stories tagged with: patty hearst, sla

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »