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Patty’s Got a Gun

Patricia Hearst in 1970s America

It was a story so bizarre it defied belief: in April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army—who had kidnapped her a mere nine weeks earlier. But the robbery—and the spectacular 1976 trial that ended with Hearst’s criminal conviction—seemed oddly appropriate to the troubled mood of the nation, an instant exemplar of a turbulent era.
 
With Patty’s Got a Gun, the first substantial reconsideration of Patty Hearst’s story in more than twenty-five years, William Graebner vividly re-creates the atmosphere of uncertainty and frustration of mid-1970s America. Drawing on copious media accounts of the robbery and trial—as well as cultural artifacts from glam rock to Invasion of the Body Snatchers—Graebner paints a compelling portrait of a nation confused and frightened by the upheavals of 1960s liberalism and beginning to tip over into what would become Reagan-era conservatism, with its invocations of individual responsibility and the heroic. Trapped in the middle of that shift, the affectless, zombielike, “brainwashed” Patty Hearst was a ready-made symbol of all that seemed to have gone wrong with the sixties—the inevitable result, some said, of rampant permissiveness, feckless elitism, the loss of moral clarity, and feminism run amok.
 
By offering a fresh look at Patty Hearst and her trial—for the first time free from the agendas of the day, yet set fully in their cultural context—Patty’s Got a Gun delivers a nuanced portrait of both an unforgettable moment and an entire era, one whose repercussions continue to be felt today.

Read an excerpt. Listen to an audio interview.


228 pages | 16 halftones | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2008

Criminology

History: American History

Media Studies

Reviews

“I enjoyed this ‘retrospective essay’ on the remarkable story of Patty Hearst. . . . Graebner’s essay offers far more than narrative. It contextualises a story that ‘shocked the nation’ in its historical context, midway between the permissive radicalism of the 1960s and a backlash that anticipated the new conservatism of the Reagan era. . . . Graebner combines erudition and scholarship with a sense of humour.”

Jill Radford | Times Higher Education

“What makes the book worth reading is not so much the first half, a compelling enough account of Ms. Hearst’s kidnapping and subsequent time in the headlines, as the second half: an attempt to put the Hearst affair in the context of an America struggling to emerge from the Vietnam quagmire and the ignominy of Watergate.”

Economist

“In that anxious interval between the twilight of the Sixties and the dawn of Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America,’ no story made the nation as uneasy as the crazy and ambiguous ordeal of Patty Hearst. William Graebner sheds new light on that most troubling story, and thereby helps us understand two nations: the terrified America that watched it all unfold, and the more assured and brutal place that it would soon become.”

Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Introduction

The Story
     Abducted
     The Robbery 
     The Fire
          Early Reactions
     The Missing Year
     The Arrest
     The Trial
     Closing Arguments
     The Jury
     The Verdict
          Reactions

Reading Patty Hearst
     The Fragile Self
     The Victim
     The Survivor
     Stockholm Syndrome
     Paranoid
     The Emerging Conservative Consensus
     Heroes
Notes
Acknowledgments

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