Jeffrey Toobin, in American Heiress: the wild saga of the kidnapping, crimes and trial of Patty Hearst (Doubleday, 2016), points our that there were 2,000 bombings a year in the United States in 1972,1973, 1974(the year Patty Hearst was kidnapped), with more than twenty people killed each year. Thomas Nagel, in his review of Richard English's Does Terrorism Work? ("London Review of Books," 8 September 2016) says that all the terrorists mentioned "failed in their main aims." In 1970 I had to go to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn for my draft physical because the Whitehall St. draft facility had been bombed. There have always been disgruntled -- for various reasons -- bombers in this country. The particularly odd thing about the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), who kidnapped Patty Hearst, is they did not seem to have any but the vaguest goals and never consisted of more than ten people.
Toobin (whose excellent book on O.J. Simpson I wrote about on 6/25/16) follows the Patty Hearst case in fascinating detail, giving us particulars about all the participants in a period when the "counterculture" was on its way out and feminism and black power were on the way in. Patty Hearst was in rebellion against her wealthy parents and eventually succumbed to the half-baked Marxism of her kidnappers, participating in a bank robbery for which she was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Of course it helps if one has wealthy and powerful parents and so Patty Hearst received a commutation from Jimmy Carter and a pardon from Bill Clinton and has been living happily ever after, married to her former bodyguard (who died in 2013) and, as Toobin says, "she did not turn into a revolutionary, she turned into her mother."
Toobin (whose excellent book on O.J. Simpson I wrote about on 6/25/16) follows the Patty Hearst case in fascinating detail, giving us particulars about all the participants in a period when the "counterculture" was on its way out and feminism and black power were on the way in. Patty Hearst was in rebellion against her wealthy parents and eventually succumbed to the half-baked Marxism of her kidnappers, participating in a bank robbery for which she was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Of course it helps if one has wealthy and powerful parents and so Patty Hearst received a commutation from Jimmy Carter and a pardon from Bill Clinton and has been living happily ever after, married to her former bodyguard (who died in 2013) and, as Toobin says, "she did not turn into a revolutionary, she turned into her mother."
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