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Jeffrey Toobin

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst Hardcover – August 2, 2016

by Jeffrey Toobin (Author)

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From New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Nine and The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, the definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an insane era in American history

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”
The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing—the Hearst family trying to secure Patty’s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing “Tania” wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty’s year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term “Stockholm syndrome” entered the lexicon.
The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s). Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. American Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors’ crusade.
Or did she?

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Doubleday
Publication date

August 2, 2016
Dimensions

6.4 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
ISBN-10

0385536712
ISBN-13

978-0385536714
Lexile measure

1110L
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Editorial Reviews

Review

A New York Times Bestseller

"The abduction and subsequent radicalization of Patricia Hearst is one of the most bizarre but illuminating episodes of that tumultuous era of protest...and in American Heiress Jeffrey Toobin retells the story with a full-blown narrative treatment that may astonish readers too young to remember it themselves...Toobin spins this complex chapter of recent history into an absorbing and intelligent page-turner."
—The Washington Post

"[A] clever companion piece to The Run of His Life (1996), his book about the O. J. Simpson case. Mr. Toobin has used the same winning formula of delving deeply into an American crime story that had tremendous notoriety in its day and retelling it with new resonance. Ms. Hearst’s tale is much more bizarre than Mr. Simpson’s... [I]n an age of terrorism, the chronicle of how a sedate heiress named Patricia morphed into a gun-toting, invective-spouting revolutionary calling herself Tania holds a definite fascination."
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“[R]iveting… American Heiress is a page-turner certainly, but Toobin, a gifted writer, infuses it with much more…Even if he ridicules the ideas and condemns the violent deeds of this ragtag group of revolutionary wannabes, they emerge not as cardboard villains but flesh and blood protagonists.”
—The Boston Globe

“Toobin has crafted a book for the expert and the uninitiated alike, a smart page-turner that boasts a cache of never-before-published details...Toobin’s book successfully captures the unrivaled spectacle of the Hearst drama.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Terrifically engrossing…Toobin uses his knowledge of the justice system and his examination of the evidence to pierce the veil of spectacle…As for Patty Hearst herself, Toobin treats her as a person, not a tabloid phantasm.
—New York Times Book Review

“[A] spell-binding retelling … In the end the real test of a writer’s worth is…how well they can tell a story that’s already been told many times before by many different people, including — in this case — by some of the main characters themselves. By that standard Toobin gets an A-plus for American Heiress… Everything about this book feels right: the structure, the style and the tone, which is the New Yorker meets Raymond Chandler. As always with great writing, it comes down to a strong, distinctive narrative voice spiced with the judicious use of juicy details.
—LA Weekly

About the Author

JEFFREY TOOBIN is the bestselling author of The Nine, for which he won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, The Oath, Too Close to Call, A Vast Conspiracy, and The Run of His Life, which was made into the critically acclaimed FX series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the senior legal analyst at CNN.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

The doorbell rang at 9:17 on the evening of February 4, 1974.

From their perch on the sofa in the living room, Patricia Hearst and Steven Weed looked at each other and shrugged. No one was expected. But it was Berkeley, so who knew?
Still, visitors were unlikely. Their cozy duplex was one of four apartments at 2603 Benvenue Avenue, a sturdy, well- made structure covered in the chocolate- brown shingles that were a signature of the neighborhood around the University of California, where both Patricia and Steve were students. The apartment offered an unusual degree of privacy. There was no door to the street, only a pair of garage doors, which were open. To enter, one had to walk up an outside stairway along the side and then find the entrance to apartment 4 on an interior walkway. Few did.

With some trepidation, Patricia and Steve walked to the front hall. Weed pulled open the door a crack and saw a woman he did not recognize. Her clothes appeared slightly disheveled.
“I’m sorry but I think I backed into your car,” the woman said. “I’m sorry. Can I come in and use the phone?” Patricia turned away in disgust, thinking that the visitor had damaged her beloved MG roadster. Then, as she headed back toward the living room, she heard a crash.
Three people, all bearing weapons, burst into the apartment. The woman at the door was named Angela Atwood, and she had not had a car accident. She was acting, and she was, as it happened, an actress who had recently played a leading role in a local production of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. On this night, however, she was using her talents to initiate a kidnapping.

Two men rushed in behind Atwood. Later, Weed would insist that both were black, but only one was— Donald DeFreeze, who had recently applied a political filigree to a lifetime of petty and not-so-petty crime. The other man was Bill Harris, an agitated, compulsive talker, also a theater person at one time as well as a Vietnam veteran, and currently a revolutionary. DeFreeze knocked Weed to the floor, and Patricia fled toward the kitchen, in the back of the apartment.

“Where’s the safe? Where’s the safe?” DeFreeze demanded. He had an almost quaint conception that rich people kept their money at home in safes. Steve and Patricia did no such thing, and Steve protested that there was no safe. “Take my wallet,” Weed said. “It’s all the money I have. Take anything you want!” DeFreeze, unhappy with this answer, belted Steve across the head with a homemade sap— a leather- covered piece of lead. The pain knocked Weed almost unconscious.

Atwood chased Patricia into the kitchen and put a black automatic pistol in her face. “Be quiet and nobody’ll get hurt,” she said. Harris ran after Patricia as well and then dragged her back toward the front door, where he placed her facedown on the floor. Atwood began tying Patricia up. She fought back— Patricia was stronger than her delicate, barely five- foot frame suggested— but Atwood managed to get some nylon cord wrapped around her arms and legs. She also tried to put a gag (actually a racquetball) into Patricia’s mouth and a blindfold over her eyes, but her fierce resistance left both restraints hanging loosely around her head. Still, with Weed semiconscious and Hearst trussed, there was a brief moment of silence, which was broken by the arrival of a new face at the door.

Steve Suenaga, also a Cal student, lived in one of the apartments across the walkway. He was heading out to see his girlfriend, when he noticed some unusual activity inside apartment 4 and poked his nose in the door.
DeFreeze grabbed Suenaga and told him to get on the floor, facedown. Atwood tied him up, too. Suenaga heard Hearst whimpering, “Please leave us alone . . .”

“Quiet!” Harris said to her. “Or we’ll have to knock you out.”

Atwood said to DeFreeze, who seemed to be in charge, “They’ve seen us, we’ve got to kill them.”

Suenaga raised his head, and DeFreeze struck him on the head three times with his weapon— an M1 carbine converted into a machine gun.

A moment later, Weed was able to rise from his stupor. He made a wild rush at Harris, who blocked his advance with the sawed- off automatic he was carrying and slammed Weed to the ground. Weed then bolted for the back door. He pushed through the screen, busting it off its base, fled into the tiny yard, ran past his marijuana plants, vaulted the fence, and disappeared into the night. Two hostages— Hearst and Suenaga— remained tied up on the floor by the door.

Lying facedown, Patricia began to realize that she was confronting more than a robbery. These people had demanded a safe but didn’t look for one. They didn’t even take Steve’s money. What did they want? Why would mere thieves take the trouble to tie her up?
She soon found out that her fears were justified. Atwood left first for the getaway car, a 1964 Chevrolet Impala convertible that the kidnappers had carjacked earlier in the evening. (In the backseat of the car, tied up and dazed from a pistol- whipping from Atwood, was Peter Benenson, the owner of the vehicle, covered by a blanket. He had been accosted after leaving a nearby market in Berkeley.) Camilla Hall, a poet as well as a terrorist, was at the wheel of Benenson’s car, which she had backed into the driveway of 2603. The trunk was ajar, awaiting human cargo.

The commotion had started to draw attention. In the house next door, a Berkeley student named Sandy Golden and three classmates were studying for a bacteriology exam in his apartment. When they heard a woman scream, they ran onto a small porch that faced 2603. For a moment, they stared eye to eye with DeFreeze, who lifted his weapon and fired two quick bursts at the students. He missed. Atwood jumped in the passenger seat.
Harris, meanwhile, was half dragging, half carrying Patricia down the stairs along the side of the building toward the waiting car. She was kicking, screaming, and wearing nothing but a bathrobe, a pair of panties, and fuzzy blue slippers. Harris raised the trunk with one hand, but it bounced up and slammed shut. He groaned in frustration. He now had to put Patricia down and retrieve the key from Camilla Hall, in the driver’s seat. While Harris went for the key, Hearst . . . disappeared. The kidnap victim had wiggled free from her bonds, for Atwood’s training for the stage had yielded few insights about knot tying. After a few panicked seconds, Harris located Hearst, who had scampered into the garage, near her own MG. Harris again lifted her up and this time managed to deposit her in the trunk and close the lid on top of her.

Then, for Patricia Hearst, chaos yielded quickly to darkness and silence.
And cold. The temperature in Berkeley had dropped into the forties, and she had only her bathrobe for warmth in the trunk. A trunk? What was she doing there? What did they want? Why was this happening?
In a way, she already knew: it was because of her name. It is difficult, at a remove of several decades, to conjure what the name Hearst still meant in 1974. Fame, wealth, and power on a grand scale. Her grandfather William Randolph Hearst (who died several years before Patricia was born in 1954) was a newspaper publisher, but that barely captures the scope of his renown. The Chief, as he was known, built the grandest private residence in the United States, San Simeon, and his life inspired perhaps the greatest American film, Citizen Kane.
Patricia was just nineteen, restless and unformed, the product of a lonely childhood in a big wealthy family. She was the middle child of five daughters, the rambunctious one, the one the governess (that was the term the family used) disciplined with a hairbrush. She was sent off to boarding school when she was only ten and was in and out of five schools before she graduated from high school. She was never exactly expelled— Hearsts were not expelled— but it was suggested that she would be happier elsewhere, especially by the nuns who ran the Catholic institutions chosen by her mother. Mrs. Hearst was displeased, often.

Catherine Campbell Hearst was a regal presence, as austere as the limestone mansion in Hillsborough where she and Randolph Apperson Hearst presided. In temperament, she differed greatly from her husband. Catherine was tightly wound, a stickler for proprieties, a Georgia beauty who persuaded Randy to make a kind of halfhearted conversion to Catholicism. In contrast, Randy liked nothing so much as a long day in a duck blind followed by a big meal fueled by scotch and red wine. He was a businessman of sorts, the publisher of the family’s flagship newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, but his role there was mostly that of a figurehead. Still, Randy possessed a kind of journalistic curiosity about how the rest of the world lived. Patty was his favorite; he related to her spunk and moxie as well as to her aversion to formal education. And she, in turn, loved her dad and allowed him to call her Patty without complaint. For others, she preferred Patricia. As for the Hearst name or her family’s history, Patricia had little interest. She made a point of never seeing Citizen Kane.
Her final high school had been the Crystal Springs School for Girls, in Hillsborough, which aspired to be a finishing school in the mode of Madeira or Miss Porter’s, where the daughters of the San Francisco elite would prepare graduates for a women’s college and, more important, for marriage. But by the early 1970s, the turmoil of the era had penetrated the manicured hedges of Crystal Springs, and the girls there began wanting something more than the lives of their mothers. Some wanted careers. Patricia wanted Steve. After graduating from Princeton, Steve Weed took a job teaching math at Crystal Springs, and his shaggy good looks generated more than academic interest among the girls in his classes. Patricia began driving her MG to his apartment for, she said, extra help with her geometry homework. They began sleeping together right around her seventeenth birthday. Steve was twenty- three.

Patricia accumulated enough credits during her peripatetic education to graduate from Crystal Springs after the eleventh grade. A year at a local junior college followed. When she told her parents she was staying with girlfriends, she was actually spending most of her nights at Steve’s. Upon her return from a long trip to Europe, she announced to Randy and Catherine that she would be moving in with Steve. Her mother wanted Patricia to enroll at Stanford, which was more socially prominent, but Patricia preferred the University of California at Berkeley, where Steve had started graduate school in philosophy.

There, abruptly, the fun stopped for Patricia, even if few people knew the depth of her despair. In those days, as always, she spoke in a kind of lock-jawed monotone that gave away little of what she was feeling. That fall, in their first days together in the apartment, Patricia pinned her hope for happiness on an actual marriage, or at least an engagement, and she hinted that she expected a ring. (In the manner of most unmarried couples who lived together in those days, they felt compelled to sign the lease as “Mr. and Mrs. Steven Weed.”) In time, Patricia got a ring— sort of. For Christmas, in 1973, Steve gave her a pair of moccasins and a piece of paper with the word “ring” written on it, as a kind of promissory note. Hardly a romantic gesture. Steve thought Patricia was sarcastic. Patricia thought Steve was condescending. (Both were right.) Patricia enrolled as a sophomore at the university, and when she told Steve she was thinking of becoming a veterinarian, he informed her that she could never master the math and science requirements. She chose art history instead.
Reluctantly, Patricia lapsed into the life of a proto- housewife. She bought furniture and crammed every surface with knickknacks— little vases, ceramic shoes and bunnies, glass jars with stoppers, tiny sculptures. Tasteful prints, mostly Impressionist, lined the walls. (Patricia’s mother, in a forlorn nod to Catholicism for a daughter living in sin, gave the couple a sixteenth- century stations of the cross bas- relief.) Above their bed, on the second floor, in an oval frame, was the photograph of the couple that had run in the newspaper to announce their engagement. The decor matched their lifestyle— middle- aged. (Still, in a couple of ways, their tastes did reflect those of their generation. By the front door, there was a rack of their favorite wine, called Romance, which retailed for ninetynine cents a bottle, and they always maintained a generous stash of pot, which Steve also tried to grow in the garage as well as in the backyard.)

Patricia cooked and cleaned; Steve did neither. They did everything, including have sex, on his schedule, not hers. Patricia made the beds or left them unmade, as she did on February 4. Their evening together on that occasion was typical. Dinner was chicken soup with tuna fish sandwiches, followed by Mission: Impossible on television, then schoolwork in silence on the downstairs sofa. Bathrobe and slippers had become her home uniform. At nineteen, this was her life? On the eve of her kidnapping, Patricia later acknowledged, she was “mildly suicidal.”

Now, incredibly, those fuzzy slippers were evidence of her struggle to escape from Bill Harris. Police photographers would note the presence of one on the stairway and the other on the driveway. And where was Steve, the man of the house? Her fiancé? Her protector? He had run away. “Take anything you want!” Steve had told the kidnappers, and indeed they had. They had taken Patricia Campbell Hearst, and now she was locked in the trunk of a car.

The kidnappers brought three vehicles to 2603 Benvenue that night. There was the stolen convertible with Hall at the wheel, along with the kidnap team of Atwood, Harris, and DeFreeze; one hostage, Benenson, was in the backseat, and the other, Hearst, was in the trunk. Emily Harris (Bill’s wife) and Nancy Ling Perry parked a stolen station wagon parallel to the front of Hearst’s apartment. A sometime sex worker turned terrorist, Ling (as she was known) was volatile even by the standards of her colleagues; when she saw DeFreeze firing at the students on the porch next door, Ling stuck her automatic weapon out the window of her car and shot two quick bursts at them as well. She also missed. Waiting on the other side of Benvenue, facing 2603, was a blue Volkswagen Beetle driven by Willy Wolfe, the youngest in the group and the least experienced criminal. He was joined by Patricia Soltysik, known to all as Mizmoon, the name given to her by her occasional lover the poet Camilla Hall. The plan was for Wolfe to lead a three- car caravan away from the scene, followed by Hall driving the kidnap vehicle and Emily Harris and Nancy Ling Perry in the rear.

The plan nearly failed at the outset. Wolfe made a left onto Parker Street, with the two other cars following close behind. Suddenly a Berkeley police cruiser appeared from nowhere and flashed its lights at the Volkswagen. The officer walked slowly to the driver’s side to talk to Wolfe.

Were they caught? The kidnapping itself was over quickly, but the gunfire prompted several calls to the police.
DeFreeze and Harris, with automatic weapons splayed across their laps in the Chevy, faced a moment of decision. With eyebrows more than words, they asked each other, could we waste a cop? If the officer was questioning Wolfe about the kidnapping, it was only a matter of minutes until the whole plan unraveled. The only way to protect their mission— their “action,” in the military argot they favored— was to kill the cop right now. DeFreeze was a killer, as he had proven just a few weeks earlier. But Harris was bigger on talk than violence; in Vietnam, he’d never even removed the rifle from beneath his bunk. But that was then. In unspoken accord, DeFreeze and Harris prepared to open their doors and turn their guns on the officer who was questioning their comrade.

Just then, DeFreeze and Harris saw the police officer walk away from Wolfe’s window, return to his vehicle, and drive away. Later, they learned that the officer had only stopped the Volkswagen to tell Wolfe to turn on his lights.
And so the three cars headed off into a future that was nearly as mysterious to the captors as to their captive. There were just eight of them— Donald DeFreeze, Bill and Emily Harris, Angela Atwood, Camilla Hall, Nancy Ling Perry, Mizmoon Soltysik, and Willy Wolfe— but they called themselves an army, the Symbionese Liberation Army. As they drove off into the California night, with Patricia Hearst as their unwilling passenger, their unofficial motto might well have been “What now?”

Excerpted from AMERICAN HEIRESS: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin. Copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey Toobin. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday; 1st edition (August 2, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385536712
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385536714
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1110L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #854,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #511 in Hoaxes & Deceptions
- #2,113 in Crime & Criminal Biographies
- #5,137 in United States Biographies

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Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, senior legal analyst at CNN, and the bestselling author of The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, The Nine, Too Close to Call, A Vast Conspiracy, The Run of His Life and Opening Arguments. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, he lives with his family in New York.

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Arbie

Great Fiction! But, as History? NOT!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 8, 2016

Verified Purchase

I wrote an earlier review of this work for Amazon in which I gave the book 5 stars for being "great fiction," and that was not an unfair evaluation, since the writing is quite good, even if the claimed research that went into it is slipshod and probably biased toward the terrorists. Unfortunately, said review was very long, and Amazon cut it arbitrarily by 50 per cent, leaving the more important half on the floor. This, in effect, left the reader with an essentially useless review.

I've pulled the earlier effort and substituted for it a modified review I wrote for Goodreads, which is (VERY) condensed but ought to be more informative to those who simply want a quick snapshot by which to justify a purchase.

Enjoy!

* * *

Elsewhere, I've called this book great fiction, but giving it five stars without having that in the title seems quite unjustified. American Heiress is well written, moves quickly, and keeps the reader interested, and no one can take that away from Mr. Toobin. The research, however, which so many unfamiliar with the case have praised, is horrid -- although Mr. Toobin implies that he has examined an exhaustive number of sources and thousands of pages of materials, American Heiress is so full of factual errors that one must wonder whether Toobin even familiarized himself with the secondary sources he cites in his footnotes and bibliography. He doesn't get the facts right about the Foster murder, he doesn't get the facts right about the Hibernia robbery, and in almost every circumstance where the word of Patricia Hearst conflicts either with her abductors or her jailers, Toobin sides against Hearst and often in the most arbitrary manner.

Examples:

Toobin (who was allowed to buy boxes of records collected by surviving kidnapper William Harris) swallows whole Harris' line that the SLA had all of three members (Donald DeFreeze, Nancy Ling Perry, and Mizmoon Soltysik) at the time of Foster's death. It takes almost NO research -- no more than a quick read of Les Payne's and Tim Findley's Life and Death of the SLA -- to know this isn't true. Furthermore, Toobin contacted me as part of his research into the matter, and I pointed out to him that BOTH Joseph Remiro AND William Harris likely were parties to Dr. Foster's killing. But, perhaps the offer of the documents obliged Toobin not to look all that carefully at the culpability of his benefactor.

Toobin claims that Foster was killed with the Rossi revolver by Mizmoon; he was killed in fact with one of the Walthers .380s owned by Joseph Remiro (Remiro had two, a PP and a PPK), and per our conversations Toobin has to know that -- this is a deliberate falsehood.

Toobin rejects Patricia Hearst's account of what happened at the beginning of the Hibernia robbery in favor of the Government's version, even though the Government's version is not physically possible. Toobin needed to look no further than Marilyn Baker's Exclusive! The Inside Story of Patricia Hearst and the SLA to find independent confirmation of Hearst's account.

Toobin rejects Patricia Hearst's sworn testimony that she received her Universal carbine "as is" from William Harris the morning of the Hibernia heist, and that during the robbery, she looked down to see the bolt in an open condition (which disables the gun). Toobin instead reports William Harris' current contention that the gun was jammed by Patricia when a carbine round misdrilled for cyanide hung up in the action. This election on Toobin's part confirms what any gun owner would know about the firearms expertise of someone who grew up and lives in New York City. Those of us confined to the real world are left, guffawing on the floor.

Toobin also in effect calls Patricia Hearst a liar (and William Harris, his documentary mentor, a truth-teller) when Toobin relates Patricia's stay in (or not in) the small closet at Golden Gate. He apparently is unaware that Hearst's blindfold was recovered from this closet, even though Ronald Koziol reported just that in the Chicago Tribune, a newspaper Toobin reviewed during his research.

In Toobin's e-mails with me, Toobin SPECIFICALLY was warned to keep syntactical writing patterns in mind as a defense against swallowing the Harrises' claims of authorship of incriminating writings they passed off as Hearst's. Nevertheless, Toobin ascribes ten passages, mostly from the infamous Tania Interview (a Harris fake concocted during the summer of 1974), to authorship by Hearst. Of these passages, only one half of one of them (the back half of number 6) actually was written in its final form by her. Despite this, Toobin claims in his closing acknowledgements that he was able to get inside Patricia's mind by reading her letters, comments, and communiques, thereby excusing his inability to get her to co-operate with his efforts. The reality is that he knows what the Harrises SAID was in her mind -- as part of the fantasy world that is the universe according to Bill Harris.

Toobin claims the SLA kidnappers had neither expertise nor interest in brainwashing Hearst. The Harrises' own manuscript denies this, and truth is that the Symbionese had a manual plus associated materials on how to do it! I have a copy of this manual; so apparently does Toobin (but he was in too much of a hurry to realize it).

Toobin doesn't reject Hearst's claim of rape outright, but he does report the current claim of the Harrises that Hearst never was sexually assaulted by Defreeze. Harris said exactly the opposite to Payne and Findley (Life and Death of the SLA, supra) 40 years ago. Toobin also sails down the path to conclude that Hearst did fall in love with one of her abductors, Willy Wolfe. His analysis here is exceptionally shallow.

Toobin (who LOVES big piggy government and wants even more of it -- he's going to vote for Hillary and has used several of his interviews over American Heiress to sing the praises of a future, demodonkey-dominated Supreme Court) gives NO weight to government crimes or incitements committed against Hearst while she was captive -- she was called a "common criminal" who was "expendable," to be "wiped out" by the police, by the highest officers in the land -- and he totally ignores the extreme level of SLA threats made against her, either directly or indirectly through their writings and speeches, upon the excuse that SLA politics was immature and incomprehensible, so he doesn't have to waste any time studying them.

This attitude of willful ignorance also allows Toobin to ignore SLA writings I KNOW I flagged for him, which writings make clear that the SLA, as a matter of policy, told lies and spread rumors as part of a campaign to wage a "war of nerves" over the radio against "the enemy."

Toobin relates a claim made by Jack Scott, that Scott overheard Patricia tell Scott's mother, that Patricia had participated in her own kidnapping as part of an effort to get out of marrying Steven Weed. Toobin (correctly) rejects the substance of the claim upon overwhelming evidence Patricia was, indeed, kidnapped violently, then engages in wild speculation over WHY Patricia would tell such a lie to Louise Scott. Toobin here takes as gospel the idea that Scott (who once tried covertly to warn Jim Kilgore that Kilgore had been fingered for the murder of Myrna Lee Opsahl) NEVER would lie to us! In Toobin's universe, only Patricia Hearst tells lies.

Is it any wonder then that Toobin, having sold his pen to a terrorist and a traitor (the Symbionese, in addition to all else, formally declared war on the United States of America) in exchange for 150 boxes of stuff he gives no evidence of even having looked at, presents us with a roller-skate tour that, in the end, doesn't even get the name of the FBI case file correct (it is "HEARNAP," not "HERNAP" as Toobin reports at least four times, specifically WA 7-15200 OO:SF).

It would be very hard to libel Patricia Hearst in the United States of America, but Toobin, in American Heiress, has at least come very close. He writes very well but proceeds with wanton and reckless disregard for truth. Personally, I suspect he was biased all along (he found me through the investigative efforts of Josiah Thompson, the lead investigator for Kathleen Soliah, and Stuart Hanlon, who has served as defense counsel for several SLA terrorists and once employed Bill Harris for a clerk); however, since Toobin only would respond by saying I am biased too (Patricia is my once-intended wife), the proper thing for me to do is let his work product speak for itself.

Still five stars for great fiction; but, if anyone actually thinks American Heiress is HISTORY, one star for what is little more than pretense.

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Kiwiwriter

A great tale of a strange time with many echoes and messages for today.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 27, 2018

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If the Symbionese Liberation Army hadn't kidnapped people, robbed banks, hijacked people and cars, murdered innocents, and set off bombs, they would be the funniest group of would-be terrorists in American history. Instead they became a menace to the American body politic at a time when there were too many menaces to the body politic.

Nevertheless, author-lawyer Jeffrey Toobin does catch the odd moments of dark humor in his comprehensive, caustic, and highly readable account of the SLA and Patty Hearst, along with its brushes with the famous of its era and our era, which include such names as Sally Jane Moore (one of President Ford's two attempted assassins), Lance Ito (then a law student), Thomas Noguchi ("Coroner to the Stars"), Jane Pauley (then an acting major), Darryl Gates (then a senior LAPD officer), and Larry Bird.

Toobin makes it pretty clear that the SLA's members were narrowly-educated kids who didn't have any real ideas but that they were against the system, and they coalesced their inchoate effort to overturn it around the least likely leader they could find: a sociopathic third-rate thug who drank plum wine, grooved on having his own private army of nubile women willing to shoot guns for him and have sex with him, whose outer limit of revolutionary thought was to hurl obscenities at the cops pursuing him for robbing banks and killing a school superintendent.

This bizarre band included an angry and drug-addicted stripper and sex worker; a lovelorn woman who wanted to see her killer boyfriend freed from jail; a quarrelsome married couple that fought each other more than the "system;" and an artistic lesbian who was clinging to her not-too-faithful girlfriend. They chose to kidnap Patty on the theory that they could trade her with the "Fascist Insect that Preys on the Life of the People" for two of their number held in prison, like spies being swapped in a Cold War movie at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge. Unfortunately for all concerned, the various police agencies were not going to play "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" with seven nutballs.

Instead, Patty, being rebellious and unhappy with her fiance and life of privilege, joined their cause, robbing a bank, shooting up a sporting goods store to help her buddies escape a shoplifting arrest, and living in Sullivan County, New York, for a year, even when her surviving captors were eager to be rid of her.

There are incredibly hilarious and sad scenes in the book, all well-rendered. The SLA takes their captive, and doesn't know what to do with her. They issue a ransom note without a demand. They then make an insane demand that the Hearsts give away millions of dollars in food, which turns into a disaster. They move from one hideout to the next, each one worse, finally going to Los Angeles, where one of their top members idiotically exposes himself by stealing a bandolier in a store. That enables the LAPD to find their address from a ticket in their van's window, and the SLA, instead of yielding to overwhelming forces (or the logic of the situation) opens fire on the uber-military LAPD. Biiiiiig mistake....the LAPD destroys their building, killing all inside. But Patty isn't there. She's with the quarreling and shoplifting couple.

They regroup back in San Francisco around some friends, one of whom is a sportswriter, who offers to spirit them across the nation to New York, so he can write the big book on their travails. The couple, tired of Patty out-radicalling them, suggest that the sportswriter take her off their hands, calling it a "Ransom of Red Chief" situation. Nope, Patty is a committed radical now. She's "Tania."

Patty/Tania spends a summer in New York, then goes back to Oakland to cause more chaos with the new SLA members, planting bombs and robbing a bank, and earning a marginal income by painting houses. Her return to Oakland attracts the attention of the FBI, which has been unable to find her, and they storm her apartment with guns drawn. Patty immediately wets her pants.

Once incarcerated, she defiantly pumps her fist and lists "Urban Guerrilla" as her occupation, but lets her family handle her defense. Another massive mistake, as they hire the highly overrated and extremely flamboyant F. Lee Bailey, who promptly botches the case, being more concerned with his lecture tours and the book he's writing about the defense than actually getting Patty off. The prosecution wins its case when one of the paralegals notes that she wore (in that famous picture) and continued to wear a piece of Mexican art as a necklace, even though she said that came from her "rapist." That clinched the case...no woman wears a "gift" from her "rapist."

So Patty goes inside, Bailey's book doesn't sell (nobody wants to read about a botched defense), and her powerful family are ultimately able to wangle a parole from Jimmy Carter and a pardon from Bill Clinton on his last day in office, completing that circle. The other SLA survivors do time for their various crimes after years of evasion, mostly at the pressure of the victim's son. As for Patty...she turns into the mother she rebelled against by joining the SLA.

All of this is in the story, and it alternates readably between sadness, humor, absurdity, and tragedy. A great tale of a strange time with many echoes and messages for today.

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Top reviews from other countries

vrgs

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 18, 2017

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Not as well written as Toobin's other books but highly informative as usual.

R. M. H.

... the Patty Hearst saga in real time and thoroughly enjoyed this book which brought back memories of that era

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

I am of an age where I remember the Patty Hearst saga in real time and thoroughly enjoyed this book which brought back memories of that era.
For me the greatest strength of the book is placing the events of her kidnapping etc, within the broader framework of the turbulence of those times.
The book sheds light on the fundamental question of was she a willing participant in events or a victim.
The book is easy to read and follow, the writing flows and events are presented in an understandable and logical manner.
A great read!

One person found this helpful

J Faulkner

Wonderful Supplemental Piece of History

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 30, 2019

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I am of the age that I followed closely the events back in both 1974 and 1975, and have read close to every book written about Patricia. During the weeks i was reading the book, the 6-part CNN special was airing; and I was sad when her family and her did not decide to add insight to the series.

D. H. Burney

Three Stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 13, 2018

Verified Purchase

What a waste

Elizabeth Wall

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 14, 2018

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THANK YOU!

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