American Heiress Is a Fascinating Look at a Wild Chapter in American History

Case in point: Patty Hearst. For most people, if the name resonates in 2016 it’s with a vague sense that she was a rich girl who was kidnapped and joined with her captors to rob banks. But as Jeffrey Toobin explores in his brilliant new book, American Heiress, the Patty Hearst kidnapping was one of the most complex and rich moments in 1970s America, a fixed point in time that tied together seemingly every problem assailing our country. In fact, Toobin (a prolific writer currently best known for The Run of His Life, his book about O.J. Simpson that served as the source material for the first season of American Crime Story, The People v. O.J. Simpson) has given us more than a detailed, fast-paced book about a famous moment in history: he’s given us a time machine that transports readers back to a barely recognizable America.

1974
It’s difficult for anyone who wasn’t an adult in 1974 to grasp just how different everything was. Toobin’s first triumph in this book is to make these differences fascinating, pointing out things like the fact that live news broadcasts of unfolding events had almost never happened before the Hearst kidnapping; prior to that most news was delivered by anchors using canned footage and interviews. He paints an ugly but accurate picture of a country that was enduring gas shortages; a president who had just resigned in disgrace, highlighting corruption at the highest levels of government; and the souring of the antiwar and countercultural movements of the Summer of Love into bombings and killings. One of the key things Toobin points out is that in 1974 the Hearst name was still incredibly powerful; 40 years ago it stood for money and influence—although, as Toobin also reveals, not nearly as much of either as Hearst’s kidnappers assumed.
Timeless Incompetence
Patty Hearst was just 20 years old when the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) burst into her apartment and kidnapped her, setting off what is revealed by Toobin to be a nearly endless loop of incompetence reaching epic heights. The SLA themselves, led by the frequently drunk and incomprehensible Donald DeFreeze, had little organization, almost no concrete goals, and only the slightest grasp of how the “actions” they planned against what they saw as a fascist and oppressive society would result in change—and yet their incompetence was matched first by the FBI and local law enforcement, who should have easily tracked down these amateur terrorists, and later by the legal system, which Toobin, a legal expert of unparalleled experience, witheringly excoriates with equal derision for the defense and the prosecution. Anyone who thinks the current state of law and order and competent government is somehow worse than it was 40 years ago will be quickly disillusioned when reading what amounts to the tragicomedy of the Hearst kidnapping.
Stockholm Syndrome
At the trial of Patty Hearst, the condition known as “Stockholm Syndrome,” wherein captives psychologically bond with their captors due to the stress and emotional impact of their experience, was first made famous as a defense for her actions. Toobin explores this on a micro scale, digging into exactly how a well-off college student from a famous American family could suddenly become an enthusiastic participant at a bank robbery a few months after her kidnapping. He also explores it on a macro scale, studying each member of the SLA and offering the reader glimpses into their unhappy youths, their scrambled political beliefs, and their personalities, with the end result being that the reader comes to understand perfectly how Patty Hearst lost her fear of her captors—then was drawn into their delirious schemes. Though Hearst herself refused to cooperate with Toobin, he has plenty of material to work with and draws a finely detailed sketch of Hearst as a person, making this a fascinating biography of a complex figure.
The Devil Is in the Details
As with all of Toobin’s work, American Heiress reads like a novel in many ways. Toobin gets inside the heads of each character and lays out the scenes with a deluge of clearly communicated detail. Take, for instance, the actual kidnapping, which unfolds with like something out of an Elmore Leonard book: the SLA chooses Hearst as their target more or less out of convenience and sheer bad luck, then needs to steal a car to make it happen. But none of the SLA can hotwire a car, so a carjacking is necessary. As the time designated for the kidnapping winds down, no suitable cars can be located, and the SLA wanders the neighborhood following people, hoping to chance on someone getting into a parked car. When they finally arrive at Hearst’s apartment, Toobin suggest that any sort of determined resistance may likely have repelled the kidnappers. By the end of the sequence, it’s a wonder that the members of the SLA managed to achieve anything—and the fact that they did, for a short time, achieve real results is less a testament to their abilities than to the insanity of the country in general and San Francisco specifically in the early 1970s.