Reporting America: The Life of the Nation 1946-2004 by Alistair Cooke

Author:Alistair Cooke [COOKE, ALISTAIR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036070, HIS037070, 21st Century, HIS36010, United States, 20th Century, General, HIS037080, HIS036000, HIS029000, history, HIS00000, HIS054000, HIS036060
ISBN: 9781590208526
Google: EsiHpwAACAAJ
Publisher: Overlook Press
Published: 2012-05-15T23:54:48.776262+00:00

Alistair Cooke returned to this theme in his

Letter No. 1314 broadcast on 19 April 1974

Because of what happened last week, I think we have to remind ourselves of what was known about Patty Hearst’s character. For once she was captured, there started a weird sequence of exchanges between the kidnappers and the girl’s parents that is, so far as we know, unique in the history of kidnapping. No warning letters written in clumsy capitals. No demands for ransom money to be delivered at a crossroads at midnight. But tape recordings mailed to a radio station; tape recordings of Patricia Hearst’s voice in which she talked directly to her parents. In the first one, she appealed to her father to do what her captors demanded: to distribute millions of dollars’ worth of food to the poor, indeed to anyone who lined up at specified places. You’ll remember the first distribution was marred by mob scenes and people simply pillaging the supplies. Then the SLA demanded more money and more food, and the subsequent scenes were more orderly. Meanwhile, another tape had been received and played on the air, far and wide. Miss Hearst, who in the first tape sounded toneless and on the verge of stupor, was now, if not lively, more testy, blaming her parents for being laggard in doing everything the SLA demanded.

Also, Miss Hearst proclaimed that the SLA knew very well what they were about, and she more than hinted that they were dedicated, as we say, idealists. Both times, the parents and old friends agreed, it was the voice of nobody but Patricia, though opinions varied about her mental state, whether or not she’d been drugged, whether or not she was speaking for herself or speaking, either literally or figuratively, with a gun at her back. Obviously, whatever her emotional state, she wasn’t saying anything the SLA didn’t approve of. There was then, you may remember, a couple of weeks or so when nothing more was heard, and people began to say they wouldn’t give a nickel for her life. Since the SLA didn’t appear to be satisfied with the charitable efforts of the Hearsts, maybe they had, as they had threatened, done away with her.

And then came the third tape: a real shocker. Without any question it was, once again, the voice of Patricia Hearst, but now angry, in a whining sort of way, carping, condemning the ineffectiveness of the food effort, despising her father as a liar, and for the first time incorporating some of the dreary, parrot-like jargon of the movement: the evils of the corporate state, the identification of anybody not of a like mind as a fascist and so on. The first thing to notice about this tape was that it was tied to no date or recent event. The previous tapes had mentioned something that had happened no more than a day before the recording, evidently to demonstrate that what we were hearing was not the voice of a dead woman. But the third tape, the scolding one, was timeless.

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