Trapped
David Boulton My Search for Patty Hearst Steven Weed and Scott Swanton (Seeker and Warburg £4.90) Steven Weed was Patty Hearst's schoolteacher and lover. They got engaged at Christmas 1973 and planned to marry Si months later. But by then Patty was Tania, a terrorist bank robber on the run; and Weed, discarded as a 'sexist pig', had begun to write this book.
Weed tells us little we don't know alreadY about Patty but provides a harrovving 'inside' view of the strains on the Hearst family, struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible as Patty first criticised. then renounced and finally reviled them. At first Weed played silent spectator as the Hearsts deployed their wealth and power to try and force a deal on the Symbionese Liberation Army. By the time he realised their tactics were not only alienating the SLA but feeding Patty's own disillusionment it was too late to distance himself from their mistakes. Patty eventually included him in her denunciation of the 'pig Hearsts' and his isolation was completed when, after a bitter quarrel, he was thrown out of the Hearst house.
So Weed began his own search for the truth about his ex-fiancée, and a painful process it turned out to be. If only because it seemed to absolve him, as well as the Hearsts, from blame or responsibility, he wanted to believe the theory of 'brainwashing' expounded by the family and the army of experts and lawyers. But in all honesty he found he couldn't reconcile it with Patty's taped communiqués, her Part in the Hibernia bank robbery or her action in opening fire to prevent the arrest of two SLA members. Weed concluded, as I did in my own less subjective study of the Slispublished last year, that Patty was preciselY what she claimed to be: a convert rather than a conscript. A San Francisco jun' endorsed that conclusion last month. And therein lies the irony of Weed's book; he ended by writing, unwittingly, what amdunted to a powerful, indeed unanswerable, case for the prosecution.
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