That Girl: The Captivity and Restoration of Patty Hearst (Page 2)

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.

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.

These were the questions, he demonstrates, that everyone was asking in the 1970s. Some will find certain of his examples too tendentious (Cindy Sherman's photo series Complete Untitled Film Stills felt that way to me); but some will find them quite brilliant and convincing. Consider the intellectuals: the '70s was the time when social thinkers and their students became increasingly conversant, and comfortable, with the idea that the ego was not master of its own house. Althusser, Foucault, Debord, Derrida and Robert Jay Lifton, one of Bailey's expert witnesses: all, in various ways and to various degrees, were dealing with the notion of the self not as a sovereign but as a subject, yoked to deterministic forces that made individual will seem more and more a fiction. We were all--were we not--victims of brainwashings of our own. "The understanding of addiction as a disease remained prevalent into the 1970s," Graebner points out in one of his fugues on the trial's relationship to its cultural context, "but by 1980 addicts were increasingly being held personally responsible for their plight, and 'she could even be you'"--the slogan of a popular anti-Valium campaign--"had morphed into Nancy Reagan's 'just say no.'"

By the time of his closing statement, Bailey realized that the trial was not going his way--that his expert witnesses, with all their nuanced questions about who, after all, could be said to possess a "true" self, were utterly falling flat. Abruptly, Bailey shifted tack. He pleaded with the jury, "I am not really a flaming liberal" and admitted that he, too, had been angry at Hearst when she called her parents pigs. He began arguing in the same Perry Mason just-the-facts mode as the prosecution. He "revealed," Graebner concludes, "a great concern: that he might be arguing his case to the silent majority." And so he was. One juror, reflecting on the decision to convict, noted that Hearst's postcaptivity interest in radical feminist tracts like Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, which she read under the SLA's sway during her captivity, was "more important than some things" in arriving at the verdict. The jury considered the intellectuals and their insistence on the limits of free will, and blanched; speaking for American culture as a whole, the jurors had tired of elite discourse's flirtation with the complexities of the protean, overdetermined self. Our national cult of self-made identities triumphed. Enough with the fashionable nonsense about vulnerable selves: people mean precisely what they say and do precisely what they intend to do.

The summer after Hearst's trial, Star Wars was released and immediately became a pop sensation. America now preferred its captives to be self-willed self-rescuers. Rambo would soon grace movie screens; Ronald Reagan would soon be president. And Patty Hearst would go to jail, a harbinger of our new age of "personal responsibility." What was a captive supposed to do? The jury decided: she was supposed to just say no.

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