Patty Hearst was kidnapped on February 4, 1974, when I was in my second year of law school. After about two months she had bonded with her captors, and from then on was a part of the Symbionese Liberation Army, as the group who kidnapped her called itself. Amazingly, she remained at large until september 18, 1975, when FBI agents found her in a San Francisco apartment and arrested her for a bank robery she had partipated in while acting with the SLA.
This part of the story takes up the first 257 pages of Toobin's book, 75% of the total. This detailed, day-to-day account strikes me as rather pointless. I was much more interested in the legal machinations which followed.
Patty's father hired a local attorney, Kayo Halliman, to represent Patty at the bail hearing. Halliman had Patty sign an affidvait saying she had spent her time in captivity in a drug-induced haze, which was contrary to the facts as unovered by Toobin in his research. Toobin says that this affidavit was a "gigantic legal miscalculation", because it locked Patty into a version of her time in captivity before her attorneys had a chance to investigate and plan an appropriate trial strategy. Patty was denied bail, so the suberterfuge with the affidavit was all for naught.
Understandably, Patty's father looked for a higher-profile lawyer and came up with F. Lee Bailey, who met with Patty in jail on September 26th, a scant eight days after her arrest.
The bank robbery trial began on February 4, 1976, exactly two years after the kidnapping. Bailey presenting Patty's brainwashing defense, and the jury got the case on March 19th. The guilty verdict came in the next day, and she received a prison sentence of seven years, which the judge determined to be the normal sentence for a San Francisco bank robber.
Toobin rightly critices Bailey, whose legal skills did not justify his reputation. Bailey had gained his national repuation in the 1960s when he took on the Sam Shepard case and won him a new trial, at which Shepard was acquitted. But losing the Patty Hearst case in the 1970s severely damaged his reputation. It wasn't until the 1990s that I became personally aware of what a poor advocate he had become, when I saw him in court during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Bailey simply had no ability to communicate effectively, no ability to connect with the jury. Simpson's other attorneys were admirable, but Bailey was a bust. Bailey had many ethical problems as well, and in 2001 he was found guilty of seven counts of attorney misconduct by the Florida Supreme Court and was disbarred; he lived out the rest of his life in disgrace.
The aftermath of Patty's conviction is, in many ways, the most interesting part of the whole saga. There arose a groundswell of support for a commutation of her sentence to time served, and on January 29, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed the commutation. Nearly everyone who weighed in supported the commutation, including the U.S, Attorney's office which had proseucted her, the FBI agents who had worked on the case, and former California Governor Ronald Reagan, who was already shaping up to be Carter's opponent in the 1980 election.
The backdrop at this time was the mass suicide of 909 followers of Jim Jones in Guyana just two monthe earlier, in November of 1978. This caused John Wayne to advocate for Patty's release by observing: "It seems quite odd to me that the American people have immediately accepted the fact that one man can brainwash nine hunderd human beings into mass suicide, but will not accept the fact that a ruthless group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, could brainwash a little girl by torture, degradation,and confinement."
After her release from prison, Patty married her bodyguard, Bernie Shaw, and lived a quiet life with him and their two daughters in San Francisco. In the 1990s she decided that she wanted a presidential pardon, and she started lobbying for one from President Bill Clinton. She had powerful allies in Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, both of whom wrote handwritten letters to Clinton in support of the pardon. On January 20, 2001, Patty was among the 140 pardons issued by Clinton on his last day in office.
Toobin waxes philosophic in describing the Heart sage as representative of the death of the 1960's counterculture: "In and around San Franisco, the music stopped when the 1980s arrived. There was, essentially, no more counterculture; the term became obsolete. Radical outlaws like the members of the Symbionese LIberation Army, who even in their heyday were stragglers from the 1960s, virtually disappeared altogether....In San Francisco, the AIDS plague arrived, decimating the gay commmunity and sapping, for a time, the political energy of the city. The notion of revolution, which was never appealing to more than a handful of Amerians, became absurd....The surviving members of the SLA, and their allies, struggled to find a place in this unwelcoming world."
My own life trajectory fits squarely into Toobin's narrative. I spent most of the first half of the 1970s in law school, which I enjoyed immensely. But when I got out in 1975, Legal Aid jobs had dried up, and I drifted into private practice with a small firm. What followed were four years of misery, until I broke free of my shackles in early 1980 and struck out on my own. I was still faced with the hostility and racism which were so pervasive in thr adult world, but at least I was my own boss.
The '70s were a bleak time in other ways as well. The music cuture had completely gone to pot with the prevalence of country, disco, and rap. In the political/economim world we were subjected to the inept rule of President Jimmy Carter, who gave us 18% home mortgage loans. Unscrupulous real estate agents, which describes most of them, were talking naive home buyers into undertaking these outrageous loans, on the false promise that houses were a great investment for the future and would continue to appreciate at the then rate of 11% a year.
The deacde ended with the year-long Iran hostage crisis, spawned by Jimmy Carter's horrendous decisin to let the Shah of Iran into the U.S. Our faith in ourselves and our country was severely shaken by this debacle. The 1970s were just a bleak time any way you look at it. All the promises of the '60s seemed to disintegrate into a decade aptly called the "Me Decade" by Tom Wolfe.
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