Holding Out for a Hero: Patty Hearst and American Culture in the Seventies

On February 4, 1974, armed members of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped Patty Hearst, heiress of the Hearst family fortune and University of California student, from her Berkeley apartment. "Patty," writes historian William Graebner, "wearing only a blue bathrobe, had been gagged, blindfolded, and her hands bound, dragged through the living room, struck in the face with a rifle butt, and forced into the trunk of a car" (p. 1). By any measure, Patty's experience was terrifying. During her captivity with the SLA, she was threatened with death, raped repeatedly, and locked in a small, dark closet. For weeks, the SLA conducted interrogations about her "bourgeois" family past and indoctrinated her with leftist ideology. Patty survived her captivity, only to be caught on videotape participating in the SLA's armed robbery of a San Francisco bank and identified as the shooter in their shoplifting attempt at a Los Angeles sporting goods store. After the Los Angeles police destroyed the SLA's hideout in one of the most dramatic and fiery shootouts in the history of live television, Patty lived as a fugitive for over a year with surviving members of the SLA. As images of Patty went public—trench coat, beret, and sawed off M-1 rifle at the ready—her tape-recorded political broadcasts from the underground hit the airwaves. Americans discussed Patty's story endlessly, debating why she had behaved as she did and what her actions meant: was Patty a victim, a survivor, or a criminal? Had she willingly embraced the radical ideologies and terrorist tactics of her captors, or had she been brainwashed?

In his lively cultural history of the 1970s, Patty's Got a Gun, Graebner traces competing explanations of Hearst's transformation into a revolutionary and her subsequent trial and conviction for armed bank robbery. Patty, argues Graebner, became a cultural touchstone. The stories people told about her flexible identity—from apolitical heiress to kidnapping victim, to radical woman with a gun, to vacuous "zombie-like" girl—represented the central anxieties of the 1970s and revealed a culture in transition. As Americans turned away from the shattered hopes of Great Society liberalism, they "muddled through" the Seventies, surviving an era of great uncertainty, fear, and even paranoia, on their way to embracing the conservatism of Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority. Against the backdrop of the 1970s, Graebner reads questions about Patty's motives and the discourse surrounding her trial as a sign of soul-searching by a culture caught in limbo. Were political radicalism, political violence, and criminal behavior—which Americans increasingly conflated—rooted in historical, social, and biological causes or determined by individual choice and free will? "These questions," writes Graebner, "had deep resonance for a society caught in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate climate of malaise, midway between the liberal zeitgeist of the 1960s and the emerging conservatism of the 1980s, between a culture that valued the endurance of the survivor and had compassion for the victim and one that longed for the transcendence of the hero" (p. 8).

During her trial in 1976, attorneys were the first to purposefully advance opposing explanations for Patty's actions. F. Lee Bailey, her defense attorney, portrayed Patty as a victim. Terrorized, broken, and brainwashed by her captors, she was too frightened and paranoid to escape. Renowned psychologists, including trauma specialist Robert J. Lifton, testified that "coercive persuasion" had resulted in the absolute destruction of Patty's individual will. Only under duress had she become an outlaw. Patty's crimes, as well as her defiance of gender norms and class expectations, were the consequences of traumatic mistreatment. Her inability to resist her captors mirrored the experiences of prisoners of war, concentration camp survivors, and victims of communist brainwashing. To convict Patty was to blame the victim.

Graebner argues that, during the Sixties, the defense's argument would have fallen on sympathetic ears. Aware of the...