Kidnapping A Generation

Caitlin Flanagan revisits the story of Parry Hearst:

Patty Hearst caught our attention because she was an innocent and largely naive young woman who was being fought over, in public, by two powerful forces: her parents and “the culture” in its most extreme and violent manifestation. At one particularly heartrending moment, her father defended her against charges that she had joined the SLA: “We’ve had her 20 years; they’ve only had her 60 days,” he said. Then Catherine Hearst broke her usual silence: “I know my girl.” That’s why we couldn’t let the story go, not because Patty herself fascinated us, but because we were desperate to know, in the epic battle for her affections, whom she would choose: Catherine or Cinque? It was the kind of question many of us were grappling with in our own lives, and Patty Hearst gave us the perfect excuse to talk about our own situations without really talking about them, not directly. We needed someone like her just then. As the U.S. attorney said in his closing arguments, by way of reminding the jurors how Patty had ended up on trial: “She didn’t call us. We called her.”