Patty Hearst: Born in a bad year

The latest Atlantic has an intriguing review essay by Caitlin Flanagan on Patty Hearst:

Girl, Interrupted

I have never understood why the Ford Justice Department went all out to prosecute Hearst. Her "membership" in the SLA was always a dubious concept in light of the ordeal she suffered after her kidnapping. By prosecuting her, the DOJ threw away their best witness against the remaining SLA terrorists and their accomplices.

Maybe it was something in the air or in the water of San Francisco Bay. Plenty of people sympathized with the Symbionese Liberation Army, accepted its absurd intellectual pretensions, and justified its brutal and murderous actions. Flanagan is not one of them and her sharp mind slices through the BS:

The SLA was probably the first band of revolutionaries to marry a commitment to radical feminism with the use of systematic rape as a means of recruitment.

That sort of cold-eyed realism was in short supply in 1976. Patricia Hearst had the bad luck to be kidnapped, rescued, and then tried when America was out-of-its-mind crazy.

Had the events happened a few years earlier, the residual common sense of the public would have cut through the illusions that surrounded the SLA. The reality of Hearst's ordeal-a naïve teen-ager kidnapped and brutalized by ex-cons, thugs, and fanatics-would have stopped the prosecution.

A few years after Hearst's conviction, the legal system and juries began to accept the 'battered woman" defense. If ever a woman could claim that she had been battered into submission it was Patty Hearst.

At her trial, the Republican prosecutor made common cause with New Left radicals. Both were intent on minimizing her physical and psychological ordeal. The US Attorney did so in order to undermine her defense. The radicals did so in order to obscure the guilt of their vicious friends.

Like politics, high profile trials make for strange bedfellows.

To give credit where it is due: Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979; Bill Clinton gave her a pardon when he left office in 2001.