The First Amendment; Shana Alexander

The First Amendment and a free people weekly examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s produced by WGBH radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. The host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bernard Reuben. With me today is Shana Alexander who has just written anyone's daughter the new book about the times and trials of Patty Hearst and about a great deal more which has just been published by Viking. Many of you know her as the commentator on the CBS program 60 Minutes. She's been a journalist all of our life she's worked with Life magazine has worked with McCall she was the the editor at McCalls for several years and she's also done a number of books including Shana Alexander state by state guide to women's legal rights. The feminine eye and the book that preceded this was talking woman which was in August. She calls an autobiographical work in pieces which was published by Della court and then reprinted in paperback by

L.. Shane Alexander among other things was a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus. Shane Alexander I must say that this work anyone's daughter which has a subtitle of the trials of Patty Hearst really is the trials of America that's coming of age. Is that a pretty good interpreter. Yes I think it's kind of a modern American tragedy that took place over the last five years since since her kidnapping and trial and subsequent events. Now you look upon the trial you call it her now. And you look well that was the FBI the FBI cold word you know as you look upon her her situation as less involved with particular persons then with whole political themes going on in the country. And one of the things of course was the activities of this man. Yes. And the Symbionese Liberation Army and a group of people around him. Could you describe them as you

describe them in the book. Well they were probably the people that attracted me to the story as early on as I as I was got hooked by this thing which was only five weeks after Patty had disappeared. She was kidnapped we knew that but she had not yet joined them. And in retrospect I realize there were not too different from a kind of permission I had been at about that age. Patty's age was 19 when she was kidnapped. This was a bunch of young women and five women and two men who were in their early twenties graduate students most of them with the University of California highly educated upper middle class white white from to freeze out. The phrase was different entirely different. He was the catalyst that made the SLA come into existence. They had to have a black man around whom to rally but to go back to describing them first. They were intensely idealistic without any knowledge

of what we call street smarts and they want to save the world. And they were willing to murder and kill people to do it they were they were terrorists and they were. They were crazy before they kidnapped Patricia Hearst you remember they assassinated probably a man called Dr. Marcus Foster the black superintendent of schools in Oakland. Senseless senseless brutal assassination which was the blooding really of this group and which they saw in their craziness would trigger the revolution that would free the enslaved blacks of America. They had the same cuckoo idea that Manson. Or that Nixon had when he invented the Houston plan and the White House all three of these groups the Nixon White House the Charles Manson gang and the SLA thought that apocalyptic race war was coming and they were trying in their different ways either to bring it on or to stave it off.

And the phrase of course you describe him more than slightly weird or kooky and anxious to take advantage of the psychological needs that is being expressed by the group that's around well he was a charismatic character. He was a ninth grade dropout. We don't know much about him but I do print in the book a long letter he wrote to the judge begging for mercy and saying that he wasn't crazy and one of his previous convictions. Fortunately the letter tends to indicate the opposite and the judge did not let him out of prison. He had a long rest a long arrest record but he kept getting out all the time and there's a good good reason to believe that he was a police informer and he was cooperating with the prison and police authorities in California and was perhaps an actual provocateur let out in order to let the SLA crystallize around him because they had to have a representative not only of the of the of the black race but he had to be. Of the lowest POS you know of the underclass really so that

he could be the focus Well I think I call him the totem pole without which they're terrified of collapse right now. Another group in this story of course is the Hearst family rather obscure from from an important point of your being important. You know me up skewer. Yes unless something happened to them into their life. It's like the beast in the jungle the James story this was the family to whom nothing ever happened and who are kind of the least of the hearse the least apparent least visible and the least active in the newspaper in their line is an area that was totally in your description devoid of any nuances artistic or social. Yeah so you know the most boring enclave of privilege that I've ever visited. I went to it first Hillsboro or Atherton which is the next suburb when elected Shirley Temple to Congress and I went to interview their insitu before she journeyed to Washington. And it's an area that I thought I coined this expression. Turns out I didn't but I have used it and I call it a

hotbed of social unrest. Pretty much. In looking at this family again I want to stress that you're not so much concerned with them as types. Are you concerned with Emma's types now. You do take off a good deal against Mrs. Hurst Catherine. And you describe her many many times without a hair out of place the one who absolutely annoys Patty Hearst her own daughter when she's at the trial and before appearing always in that black dress the black suit with a black beret in the black not the symbolism of the blackness was interesting. That party was so suggestible after her kidnapping as any one of us would have been suggestible had we gone through the horror of this kidnapping which was traumatic. Experience to put it mildly. That's why I called the book anyone's daughter because I am convinced having not only sat through the case and the trial but then had the opportunity to go and speak at great length to the people

who knew Patty Hearst the best that is the psychiatrist who examined her and the lawyers as well but mainly the psychiatrist anyone's daughter having been put in these circumstances would have reacted the same way. One of Patty's messages when she was tiny Was she wrote we could be meaning we the SLA we could be anyone's daughter son wife husband lover or neighbor or friend. That's true. And you bring up our daughter's yours and mine would be kidnap you bring our important point. Sometimes she was Patty Hearst and later she became Tonya and sometimes she was poor or she had various names various personalities that she had assumed. I think it was really a cover name sort of and they wouldn't speak to her as Tonya in public because they were existing in public and thereby give away her identity. She didn't really have it wasn't Three Faces of Eve kind of model on it and it was she does come across to me from your description as kind of a silly putty that never hardens depending upon the atmosphere she changes just a little bit.

Yes in barely barely memorable words when they were reversed brainwashing turn your back into Patti because they needed not have an urban guerrilla on the witness stand. He said to me she's easy meat. Meaning she had no deep convictions about anything but a few 19 year old girls do have deep political convictions and they're essentially not very interesting people except to their families and loved ones. And she was she is really the most boring character in the book. But she's the character to whom it all happened and around whom the whole carnival occurred. Now I think it goes without saying but I'll just say it anyhow that she was the victim. There was a tragedy that was imposed upon her. Oh yeah. She faced terrible times whether it was in that closet no matter how you interpret it. And she faced terrible times on the run she she probably believe that she would be murdered by the FBI.

She believed she would be murdered by the FBI. She believed she could not go home. You know what. Because her parents wouldn't forgive her for what she had done for the things she had said against them. And she believed that her parents and the FBI were on the same side and she was right. Because for example as soon as she was apprehended the first thing she told her mother when her mother came to visit her in jail was that the SLA had taken part in a murder in a bank robbery in which a woman was killed her mother knowing that. Conspiracy to commit murder is a capital crime because her mother was one of the persons who restored capital punishment to California as a member of the Board of Regents. Nonetheless I believe that her duty to go right to the FBI and tell them that the SLA including her daughter had taken part in a robbery in which a woman was killed. Sometimes I think of Catherine Hearst in terms of your descriptions and I think of Gone With The Wind and think about that tomorrow.

Yes she is a southern belle she's from Atlanta one of the interesting sidebars here is that she was a finalist in the in the Scarlet O'Hara contest that Selznick held in 1937 I think it was to cast the part before we picked Vivian Lee the finalist was Catherine Campbell the belle of Atlanta. And she never really rejected the role. You know she still is that I saw the girl. And she. In her own way she loves her daughter very much but there is not much breadth or tolerance within her within the lovers or so it seemed to me. Another aspect of the book that I think is revealing at least it was to me you introduced F. Lee Bailey at the start you go out to his house you meet his wife was a former airline hoster So he was not your second or third wife and then you you sort of follow on behind him and one of the impressions I get from your book anyone's daughter is that one of the terrible visitations imposed upon

Patty Hearst is F. Lee Bailey that his handling of the trial is utterly flamboyant attire he has an utterly flamboyant and I think he misread the case. He this trial was avoidable and she could have plea bargained down as someone who had never done anything before and who was a victim of the crime of kidnapping at the time that she struck up the bank which is what she was which was the only thing she was on trial for. She would have got off with a tiny sentence or no sentence. But lawyers specially show of liars like to try big cases and prosecutors like to prosecute big cases. And judges like to sit on the bench even though they're all sick before old and sleeping as this judge was and he died a couple of months after the trial so that he was not a sentencing judge. If he had been she would have got such a severe sentence I'm sure he intended to be more merciful to her and not give her a seven year sentence.

But anyhow everybody was showing off in this case and the family with the best of intentions. But but misguided wanted I believe they wanted this brainwashing defense because it was unthinkable to them that a daughter of the Hearst could have joined the SLA they had to and become a political radical terrorist. Unless. She had been brainwashed. But you see the irony was one of many ironies as the jury couldn't buy the brainwashing because to make the defense work it had to extend over a two year period to explain why after everyone burned up in the house in Los Angeles why did she not then go on. Was she still brainwashed. Yes she was. Well doctor how can you explain that. Well the jury couldn't go for it as they told me afterwards because I interviewed them all. It was it was like writing a blank check it was it was overstating the case. And she said throughout this affair indeed from the very beginning of her ordeal but particularly at the trial as a kind of china figurine

and time after time you do point out and I'm quite struck with your descriptive talents you describe the the bone white throat the very delicate fingers the the poise that mysterious. Almost glasses comes out of some oriental paint. She was enigmatic and she remains an egg Matic and no one will ever know what went on in her mind and she doesn't know herself because in fact she was brainwashed to use the colloquial word for it. But she did know that she was brainwashed. She had to believe that she joined them and make herself believe that in order to save her life as she understood it at the time I didn't understand this myself. Dr. Reuben until after the trial was over and there was an opportunity to speak to the people who really knew Patty and who had studied the case principally Dr. West I think of Dr. West had been able to present the case to the jury rather than have a lawyer present or not. Mr. Bailey didn't

do that bad a job. He had a defense that just wouldn't work. It wouldn't wash. But if perhaps of a psychiatrist had been able to explain what was going on in her mind the jurors would have found some way of buying it. But psychiatry and the law don't mix it's oil and water and they just collided in that court. Well in that courtroom psychiatry and politics collided because everybody had their own political angle to beat upon. Yeah but nobody was particularly interested in Perry heard no and absolutely nobody in the whole cast of characters is interested in Patty Hearst except one person Wendy Yoshimura the fugitive Japanee only one who befriended the only person from the instant she was kidnapped. Everybody wanted something out of it. But Wendy who had been born in a Japanese relocation camp and then the family went to Hiroshima after the war where they had come from because her father although her parents were born in the United States they still were put in the in the prison camp during the war.

One of the least attractive chapters in our history. They went back to Hiroshima. Then when the father lost his job as an interpreter for the military there they came back and this girl Wendy their daughter was a complete exile an expatriate of every country. And yet somehow she felt some kinship for barriers and tried to help her try to wean her away from the houses and toward away from terrorism and toward revolutionary feminism. You did but she didn't betray anybody in her own trial and Wendy's trial. She did not name names Perry name 38 names. You described her as being absolutely wild and peculiar not to be trusted and often devious powers of their own. I would like to take us to another area. What is the lesson for anyone's daughter. I have. My own feeling from reading your book is that you see ourselves and you see our children as adrift

and something like flotsam. It's not so much that they're in trouble or the tragedy is about to strike is that we cannot reach them and they they're not exactly sure about where they want to strike out for themselves and we know their individual tragedies in our own lives whether they're marital whether they're social whatnot. Yes it seems less important than the fact that the relationship Catherine heard this rather cold austere relationship and her daughter in one way or another is a rather typical American tragedy. It's not too different from my relationship to my mother when I was Patty's age and for a good long time after that. I had to put a I had a very painful time writing this book because I had to put my own mother in it and my own daughter whom I have the who is a teenager and who who ran away during the course of the trial. My daughter did and she she showed up again but she turned up again you know she ran away with her sleeping bag on her way to visit her.

Her father my my ex-husband so I had to put a lot of this material there was painful to me into the book and a lot many people have criticized the book for having too much. Shana and her mother and daughter instead of sticking on the subject of Patty Hearst. But Patty Hearst is deeply boring. But she's the central focus of this whole circus. Whereas I at least to myself I'm my mother and my relationship to her and my daughter. Fascinating and to go back to your question the problem is communication. It's very hard for mothers and daughters to talk to one another particularly when the daughters are teenagers and when the mothers whether it's Catherine Hurst or my mother or myself as a mother are perfectionists we wish the best and the most for our daughters and we don't necessarily have the gentlest way of trying to pass on this wisdom. Well I didn't find that there was too much shame in the book as a man for anything. That is the that is

the making the implications for Shana Alexander of this anyone's daughter theme. In point of fact I I know you was everybody out there knows you aside from this conversation today which is an absolute pleasure. From the 60 Minutes program and while I hold that in the highest esteem and your participation in it one of the tragedies in that is that you are seen. As you would put a talking woman point counterpoint when that is not the journalistic role that you can best play you know and I was one of the Ry been a writer for 30 years or so and I write that material but and I guess I Jack and I have learned to deal with any subject in 60 seconds which is what we have now. But I call it the punch and I call it the Punch and Judy show. I think really that our producer reinvented a classical art form and the public likes to see Jack and me clubber away at one another but I would I would see you

as if I may as one of the better interviewers one of the better people to to have some resurrection of. See it now or something of that nature because I have to do. I see you held being held on a very tight leash on that 60 Minutes program. What I'd like to do is be an interviewer in tandem with a young man because then we would have. I know that men and women see things differently and so do they different generations and I think it would be fascinating to find someone old enough to be my son. Let's put it that way. And both of us talk to whoever the subject is we will approach it very differently. Well now you are just shattered my ego. I don't think I've destroyed my chances. But to return to any one thought or what else do you see about the implications for our institutions in the country now she received a presidential commutation

not a pardon. It couldn't be a pardon because pardon would imply that she hadn't done what we all know she did she stuck up the bank. That's right and that's that is a mystery that that particular part is is one of the mysteries and the thing not why she kept on the run. The mystery. She says she was under duress she said she was under the bus. So then how could she have been culpable if she was if you say she was under duress in the octagon. Well you see this story is not a whodunit. It is a mystery but it's a why done it. And that's why you know what you're asking me the judge made some rulings which I can't explain it would mean to admit some evidence about a bank robbery and the bank robbery was the was the issue right. But when you allowed evidence to come in about events after the bank robbery in fact all the way 17 months later until the time she was captured during which time there were several other bank robberies and they and evidence.

Covering this whole time from kidnap to capture was in there. That's why the jury couldn't believe that she had been brainwashed all that time. You see that's why didn't work and couldn't have worked with their counselor. Brainwashing is that you change your mind about some item but the concept of being in a new environment as a condition of brainwashing in which you follow the the environment to its end when she was a refugee. I think she was probably a refugee at different times but she was a refugee terrorist. She believed she was a terrorist let's not take that away. Right. Let's not take that away but at the same time should there not be something in the law in which the total thing that happens to you is important for example if people push both people off their coasts in leaky boats. Are they not murderers they pretend to be government officials but if somebody goes out they know that it has the old lifeboat. Problem I suppose they are but but the law cannot handle the nuances of the human mind.

And one more irony is that for a long time and lightened jurists and psychiatry's have been looking for a case and this was the test case they picked in which psychiatry and the role of the expert witness in a criminal trial would be properly performed was a properly performed. Yes it was a but the jury wouldn't buy it. The proper way to do it according to Dr West who was the Chief Defense psychiatrist and Dr Lifton from Yale and Judge basil on who was the architect of this theory of how you ought to do it is that the psychiatry should do a complete study of the person and then just a complete work up and then present the case to the court in the same way that they would present the case to a review committee of their fellow doctors at the hospital. So that's what Dr West and Dr Singer who worked with him did with Patty Hearst. One hundred seventy two page report. Everybody just laughed at it and said well they're trying to write a book too. And as a matter of fact they were going to

do a book but they were going to give the money to charity the point was to show the proper way to use expert testimony in a criminal. You sat in that court room after that. I certainly did and you took your. You rented an apartment and use you studied the thing. But everybody was doing a book now you did a very fine piece of work. But but F. Lee Bailey had an arrangement of yes now that you are going to find out I never understood why I was having such difficulty seeing Patti because he promised me I would see her. And at that point I want to do very much but it turned out that she was under exclusive book contract as well as legal contract. Mr. Bailey and. That in fact seemed to be a conflict of interest to many people including her current attorney who filed some papers trying to get the verdict overturned or get her a new trial before before Carter commuters are sentenced to time served on the basis that one. One thing that was wrong with the first trial was that the lawyer was also the

sole and exclusive biographer. Now there used to be books called Great jury trials remember. Yes I certainly miss. This would certainly be one that would be in that case was a very yes like the trial of the Pig Woman in New Jersey. Right now the trial of Dr. Adams was a wonderful civil Bedford trial book right. This this trial was better than I had any right to expect just as a reporter going into it hoping that I could do some hard reporting which would on the trial itself which would enable me to pull together the two years of work that I had invested in this story about a missing person could have been could have been invert the usual criticism could it not be said that this was terrific real life but not honest theater. And yes I see what you mean I'm not sure that any trial is honest any criminal trial is the editor and it's theatre put on for for an

audience of 12 persons. The jury and they didn't buy it. Well they nearly bought it you in for that one juror was shifting back and forth and you know you you know Judge Carter before the trial so the truck the trouble with this case is you don't know whether to cry or vomit because you don't know whether to believe or not believe her or not the issue is credibility. And by the end of the trial the jury in reaching its verdict which was almost unanimous it was unanimous on the second bow and were both crying and vomiting because they hated the verdict that they felt they had to bring and they felt sorry for her as I did. Anyone would have your heart would have broken to see this girl. Right. On the witness stand this young woman. I wound up thinking you know if you're going to have a public circus of a media carnival of this magnitude why not let the cameras into the courtroom and let everybody judge for themselves. You are such a media circus that other vital trials were ignored even in California at the time.

Oh yeah and nobody paid any attention to anything else but this story. Meanwhile in another part of the farce which was the rest of America this fellow was out there this anti-politician was walking around America saying if you elect me president I'll never lie to you. And that was Jimmy Carter. Well there we shan't Alexander. I don't throw complements around because I'm supposed to be very critical. But by golly I like anyone's daughter. And I know you are a good deal better than I would from 60 Minutes and I think it is a first rate piece of work and I thank you for being on this edition of First Amendment free people. For now Bernard Ruben. The First Amendment and a free people weekly examination of civil liberties and the media in the 1970s. The program is produced in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. Why doesn't your GBH radio Boston which is solely responsible for its cartoon.

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