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In “American Heiress,” Jeffrey Toobin revives the story of Patty Hearst for a new audience, using previously unreleased material to chronicle her odyssey from sheltered rich girl to kidnap victim to gun-wielding bank robber. Toobin appears Sept. 17 at the Seattle Public Library.
‘American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst’

by Jeffrey Tobin

Doubleday, 368 pp., $28.95


On Feb. 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a leftist radical group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst, a college junior, was an heiress to the Hearst family fortune, and her kidnapping splashed across the front pages of America’s newspapers. The sensational story exploded when Hearst tape-recorded a message, vowing allegiance to the group and announcing her new nom-de-guerre, “Tania.”

Her parents desperately tried everything to secure her release, even agreeing to feed all of the poor people in Oakland and San Francisco, Calif., for free as a show of “good faith.” Hearst responded by prominently wielding a machine gun during a robbery of the Hibernia Bank, near San Francisco.

With access to previously unreleased material, Jeffrey Toobin recounts Hearst’s journey down the rabbit hole from kidnapping victim to self-righteous revolutionary and back again. Toobin, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a legal analyst for CNN, is well matched to the story, with a keen eye for detail and a powerful narrative style.

And what a story. The SLA was hardly an “army.” Led by Donald DeFreeze, members of the pathetic group styled themselves as “revolutionaries” but in truth constituted a handful of naive misfits hoping to inspire revolution by issuing baroque “communiqués” thickly layered in impenetrable Marxist jargon. It was, to put it mildly, ineffective.

But they certainly were well-armed. Equipped with machine guns and pistols, the “army” scurried from one dismal hideout to another.
The FBI launched a nationwide dragnet to locate Hearst but for the better part of a year turned up nothing but embarrassing failure. The FBI ultimately traced the self-styled revolutionaries to their depressing suburban hideout in Los Angeles. Hearst, with Bill and Emily Harris, was away when the police formed a cordon around the house, and the standoff erupted into the largest police shootout in American history. The police lobbed more than 5,300 rounds of ammunition and 83 canisters of tear gas. The SLA comrades returned fire with more than 2,000 rounds before the house caught fire, and all of them were either shot or burned alive.

Hearst, Bill and Emily Harris, now joined by several others, targeted Crocker National Bank near Sacramento for their next “withdrawal.” But Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year old mother of four, was in the bank and, when she didn’t drop to the floor fast enough, Emily Harris shot and killed her with a shotgun.

The FBI eventually tracked down Hearst and the others. Her family hired F. Lee Bailey, then one of the most arrogant and self-indulgent celebrity lawyers in the country, to represent her. Hearst soon began cooperating with the FBI, completing her transition from “revolutionary” to victim.

Bailey, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a disaster. Hearst was convicted and sentenced to serve seven years. Her family posted bail and launched a rehabilitating PR campaign. On Jan. 29, 1979, President Carter commuted her sentence without comment. She had served less than a year in prison. Twenty-two years later, on his final day in office, President Clinton issued a full pardon. Neither mentioned the death of Opsahl during the Crocker National Bank robbery.

Toobin’s book is a fascinating ride through a troubled time, as the more innocent ’60s faded to memory and were replaced by something far darker. “American Heiress” is a terrific study of a malleable young woman who either bravely survived a horrific ordeal, or cravenly joined delusional self-appointed “revolutionaries,” killing an innocent mother along the way, and got away with it. Or perhaps both.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s gripping new work, “Valiant Ambition,” tells how, after years of bickering by Congress and the states, the Revolutionary cause was finally galvanized and united by Benedict Arnold’s betrayal. Philbrick appears Monday, May 23, at Town Hall Seattle.


‘Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution’

by Nathaniel Philbrick

Viking, 443 pp., $30



The story of America’s founding is well known: Defiant citizen-soldiers threw a “tea party” in Boston, formed a well-timed coalition with the French, and defeated the mightiest army on Earth. It’s a great story, but the truth is, that’s not how it actually happened.

In fact, the Revolutionary War dragged on for eight years. George Washington’s “army” was barely supported by a bickering Congress and by deeply divided states uninterested in building a unified national government. The continental army nearly froze and starved to death at Valley Forge, for lack of meaningful support from Congress.

Nathaniel Philbrick, who won the National Book Award for “In the Heart of the Sea”, tells the fascinating story of Washington’s struggle, the fractious young Republic and Benedict Arnold’s surprisingly central role in it all. This is history at its most compelling: political machinations, military jostling and outright treachery. And Philbrick’s vivid writing brings the whistling cannon balls and half-frozen soldiers to life (and death) in vivid detail. He will discuss his book at Town Hall Seattle on Monday May 23, 2016.

One of Washington’s strongest generals, Benedict Arnold, played a decisive role in several key battles. He succeeded in delaying the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that could have lost the war for the Americans. The British recognized and rued his brilliance. Congress didn’t and promoted others past him, a stinging rebuke.

Arnold, desperate for cash, ultimately convinced himself that it was in the colonies’ best interests to end the war and reached out to the British to negotiate. In exchange for a substantial payment, Arnold would reveal the plans for the fortress at West Point (which he then commanded) to assist a British invasion.

He nearly succeeded. Arnold delivered the plans, but the plot was foiled when Major John André, the British spy chief working with Arnold, was stopped on his way back to British-controlled Manhattan by a band of New York militiamen who found the plans and frog-marched him back to the American forces.

Washington had Andre promptly hanged. Arnold, for his part, barely escaped.

Arnold’s treachery galvanized the American revolutionaries, forcing them to recognize that the long-slumbering war could, in fact, be lost and quickly. Self interest was put aside, the war effort funded and victory was ultimately achieved. Washington’s steady leadership obviously deserves unalloyed credit for that victory. But it was Arnold and his infamous betrayal that finally gave the Americans what they needed: a homegrown enemy to save them from themselves.

Perhaps the most honest account of the dysfunctional dynamics of the revolution and its fledgling government was penned by Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1789. He planned to publish it in his retirement but, as the mythology of the heroic American Revolution took hold, he destroyed the monumental memoir instead. “Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men. Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them and thus good may be done. I shall not undeceive future generations.”

Philbrick takes on that very task of “undeceiving” and peels back the mythology to reveal a teetering war effort, a bickering Congress, discordant states unwilling to coalesce to support the new national government and — above all — a traitor who sought to sell out his own country for personal gain and achieved instead the one thing that no other revolutionary could: a unification of the Americans and an end to the war. And for that, we have much to thank Benedict Arnold.

Seattle writer Eli Sanders’ “While the City Slept” indicts a mental-health system that failed to prevent two Seattle women from assault, rape and murder by a disturbed young man.
“While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent into Madness”

by Eli Sanders

Viking, 316 pp., $28


On July 18, 2009, an unusually warm summer evening, 23-year-old Isaiah Kalebu climbed through the open window of a small house in South Park, a working-class neighborhood in south Seattle. Over the course of the next two hours, he brutally attacked the two women who lived there — Jennifer Hopper and her fiancée Teresa Butz — raping them both and eventually murdering Teresa. Kalebu escaped but was captured within days at Magnuson Park.

In “While the City Slept”, Eli Sanders tells the story of how these three individual lives came to fatefully intersect that evening. Sanders, who writes for Seattle’s weekly newspaper, The Stranger, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the murder. Drawing on court records and exhaustive interviews, Sanders compiles an arresting narrative, first of the two victims, then of Kalebu himself. It’s heartbreaking all the way around.

Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz came from different backgrounds. Teresa grew up proud, tough and stubborn in a large St. Louis family. Jennifer was born in the mountains near Santa Fe. They fell in love, moved in together and planned a wedding (technically, a commitment ceremony since same-sex marriage was not yet legal in Washington) for Sept. 12, 2009. Teresa even bought a wedding dress.

Isaiah Kalebu was a troubled young man. He was raised in a household with a distant authoritarian father who had fled a civil war in Uganda and favored corporal punishment with “broomsticks, belts and sticks.” Kalebu started off as an intelligent child who loved to read but slowly began to dissolve into mental illness.

As he grew from a troubled child to smoldering young adult, he appeared in court on numerous occasions. Each appearance was an opportunity for mental-health counseling that could have addressed his mental-health issues. Overworked Superior Court judges with only a partial record before them and grossly underfunded mental- health resources, however, combined to ensure that Kalebu never received the counseling that might have diverted him from the path before him, the path that led to Teresa and Jennifer’s open window and all that followed.
Sanders’ research is meticulous and his writing demonstrates the strength that won him the Pulitzer. He uses vivid imagery to bring the story to life: The polluted Duwamish River snaking through South Park, the neighborhood’s decaying bridge to downtown, and the slumbering mountains in the distance.

As Sanders comments, “Some stories are worth assembling. Some crimes cry out for an accounting. Some offenses indict so much, and reflect so much, that they demand attention — to what was taken, to the taker, to the trials that preceded and followed.” This is certainly a story worth telling with lessons well worth learning.

Unfortunately, the effort is marred by two flaws. First, in recounting Teresa and Jennifer’s life and romance Sanders awkwardly reverts to the present tense, presumably in an effort to infuse immediacy in the telling. The device is more distracting than useful. Second, Sanders devotes the final pages of the book to an extended denunciation of inadequate funding for mental health services. He’s right beyond a doubt, but the discussion seems oddly out of place here, like an opinion column mistakenly tacked onto the end of the book. And it’s unnecessary in any event. Sanders’ superb account of Kalebu’s voyage through the criminal justice system, and its devastating denouement, speaks far more powerfully to our shameful failure to fully fund mental-health resources.

James Neff’s engrossing “Vendetta,” the history of the blood feud between Robert Kennedy and Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, is as riveting as any courtroom thriller.
“Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy versus Jimmy Hoffa”

by James Neff

Little, Brown, 377 pp., $28


The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, plunged America, and much of the world, into deep mourning for the fallen president. But for Jimmy Hoffa, then president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the most powerful unions in America, it was cause for celebration. Hearing the news, he stepped up on his chair in a crowded restaurant and began to cheer. He commented to reporters: “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.”

The hostility was mutual. Bobby Kennedy spent years investigating Hoffa, first as chief counsel to the Senate Rackets Committee and later as attorney general, intent on convicting the corrupt union leader. Hoffa, armed with nearly unlimited Teamster funds and represented by famed lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, was no easy target.

In “Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy versus Jimmy Hoffa,” James Neff brings to life the clash between two of the most powerful men of the early 1960s. Neff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations editor for The Seattle Times, brilliantly weaves this fascinating narrative with newly released material. And what a story: illegal wire taps, jury tampering, corrupt union thugs skimming pension funds, and an ambitious young attorney general intent on getting the bad guy. The result is as riveting as any courtroom thriller, except this is real.

Kennedy and Hoffa could not have been less alike. Hoffa was the son of a coal miner and dropped out of high school at 14 to work in a grocery store to help support his family. Kennedy’s background was, of course, just a little different. Born into wealth and privilege, he only had to worry about how to step out of the shadow of his brilliant and charismatic older brother John.

Kennedy began investigating the Teamsters as counsel to the Senate Rackets Committee. Dave Beck, the Seattle-based president of the Teamsters, famously invoked the Fifth Amendment 117 times during Kennedy’s questioning. Beck declined to seek re-election in 1957, at which point Hoffa took his place. Kennedy’s subsequent focus on Hoffa resulted in serial referrals for criminal prosecution.

But Kennedy’s enthusiasm outran his legal skills and many of his referrals were useless, either because they didn’t actually prove illegal conduct or because Kennedy’s own cross-examinations were so poorly constructed that they left little grounds for prosecution.

When Kennedy became the campaign manager for his brother John’s 1960 presidential campaign, Hoffa used Teamsters funds to undermine the effort. He even hired call girls to try to seduce either Kennedy and then “gather evidence of the assignation with hidden recorders or cameras.” The effort failed, but not for want of trying.

Of course, John Kennedy was elected president in 1960 and controversially appointed Bobby Kennedy as his attorney general. Kennedy’s “Get Hoffa” squad, which devoted enormous resources to try — unsuccessfully — to convict Hoffa, grew more frustrated with every acquittal.

In early 1964, Hoffa was finally convicted of jury tampering and sentenced to eight years in prison. It was cold comfort to a shellshocked Bobby Kennedy, still mourning his brother’s death. Only six weeks later, Hoffa was convicted of defrauding a Teamster-managed pension fund. Hoffa entered prison in early 1967 defiantly, hoping to overturn his convictions. He failed.

But Hoffa was pardoned by President Nixon in 1971 and promptly embarked on an effort to regain control of the Teamsters. He disappeared on July 30, 1975, outside of a restaurant in Detroit. His body has never been found.

Bobby Kennedy was himself shot down shortly after winning the California Democratic primary on June 5, 1968, as he made his way through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Kennedy’s single-minded pursuit of Hoffa was, no doubt, overzealous and likely overstepped legal bounds. But Hoffa was hardly an innocent victim of an unfair “vendetta”: He richly deserved it. Neff’s masterful study of this intensely personal conflict is as engrossing as it is irresistible.

Bryan Burrough’s “Days of Rage” chronicles an era when leftist American students used bombs and other forms of violence in an attempt to convert the working class to their cause.


‘Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence’

by Bryan Burrough

Penguin Press, 585 pp., $29.95


Terrorism today conjures images of Islamic militants horrifically crashing planes into buildings, detonating bombs on crowded subway trains or exploding devices specifically designed to kill or maim large numbers of people. But not so long ago, as the 1960s wound to a close, the idea of “revolutionary violence” was embraced not by religious zealots, but by left-wing radicals, certain they were on the vanguard of the coming revolution.

In “Days of Rage,” Bryan Burrough, author of “Public Enemies,” provides a fascinating look at an almost forgotten era of homegrown terrorism. Groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) routinely bombed post offices, military installations, and corporate facilities in a wildly naive and self-indulgent effort to lead the “oppressed” American working class to revolt. “Days of Rage” relies not only on historical research, but on interviews with some of the principal activists, living in obscurity but still defiant about their underground activity. The book is utterly captivating, coupling careful historical research with breathless accounts of the bombings and the perpetrators’ narrow escapes.

The sheer numbers are astounding. During one 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings, nearly five a day. Yet, as Burrough’s notes, “less than 1 percent of the 1970s-era bombings lead to a fatality; the single deadliest radical-underground attack of the decade killed four people.” Most of the bombs were placed in restrooms and were followed by ornate “communiqués,” filled with Marxist jargon.

This was not an anti-war protest movement. The underground radicals were, instead, committed to righting what they perceived as wrongs in American society and fighting back against racism and police brutality.

Bernadine Dohrn, the stunningly beautiful and promiscuous leader of the Weather Underground, who J. Edgar Hoover called “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left,” famously celebrated Charles Manson’s horrific murder of Sharon Tate in 1969. The SLA grabbed attention by kidnapping 19-year old Patty Hearst in 1974. Neither action led to a tide of sympathy or support. Indeed, by the mid-1970s, the country had moved on, embracing much of the hippie culture, music and style — but emphatically rejecting its violent rhetoric.

The FBI, pushed hard by the Nixon administration, formed “Squad 47” to investigate. The squad conducted widespread “black bag jobs,” opening mail, breaking into homes, and installing thousands of wiretaps — with full knowledge that what they were doing was patently illegal.

When the FBI’s abuses came to light, only three individuals were indicted: Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, Acting Associate Director Mark Felt and Assistant Director Ed Miller. Felt and Miller were both convicted. Felt was fined $5,000, Miller was fined $2,500 and both were quickly pardoned by incoming President Reagan. (Felt, it was revealed years later, was the “Deep Throat” source for The Washington Post reporters breaking the Watergate scandal).

Within weeks, Dohrn turned herself in. At one time the most wanted fugitive in the underground, she was fined a mere $1,500. The Weather Underground had conducted hundreds of bombings but the only individuals convicted were the FBI agents — not the leadership of the organization.

When Ray Levasseur, one of the last violent bombers, was finally arrested in 1984, the world had so completely changed that, as Burrough’s notes, he was the “radical equivalent of the aging Japanese infantrymen found in Pacific caves well into the 1970s, men still fighting a war everyone else knew only from history books.”