Patty's Battle Gets Under Way

THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY, said one hyperbolic headline. "The battle of the shrinks," others termed it. "This is the most fully covered case in the history of this country that I know of," declared Federal Judge Oliver J. Carter with some exaggeration as selection of a jury began last week in San Francisco's Federal Building.

The judge is presiding over the federal bank-robbery trial of Patty Hearst, 21, the publishing heiress who was kidnaped by members of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army from her Berkeley apartment two years ago and then took part in their criminal and revolutionary activities. As the jury selection proceeded, mostly behind closed doors, some 100 reporters representing publications and broadcasting stations throughout the world milled around outside the court and enlarged on trivia: the court had approved Patty's request to have her long hair trimmed in jail; someone had sent her an application for an American Express credit card, suggesting that she could "buy gifts, send flowers, cable money, host a dinner, even if you can't be there."

The Government's case, being prosecuted by veteran U.S. Attorney James L. Browning Jr., 43, is that a submachine-gun-toting Patty willingly joined four S.L.A. members in robbing a branch of San Francisco's Hibernia Bank on April 15, 1974. Celebrated Defense Attorney F. Lee Bailey, 42, will concede that Patty was there, all right, but only out of fear for her life because of threats by her captors. Both sides will present psychiatrists to express opposing views on whether the granddaughter of the late Publisher William Randolph Hearst could have been "brainwashed" by her abductors, as claimed by her lawyers. During what is expected to be a four-to five-week trial, the defense plan is to have Patty take the stand to describe her treatment after being kidnaped.

The nature of Bailey's argument was previewed in London by British Psychiatrist William Sargant, who spent five long sessions with Patty last November, at the Hearst family's request. Writing in the London Times, Sargant claimed that "there is not a shred of truth in any allegation that she cooperated in her kidnaping." He said studies of prisoners of war show that a normal person cannot endure more than 30 days of confinement, harassment and threats from terrorist captors without breaking down. After Patty had been blindfolded for 60 days and tortured, he said, "she had a short period of unreality and a distortion of her body image, which was alarming to her in the extreme." He claims that during the bank robbery "she was so frightened that she nearly fainted."

As a pale, thin, almost inconspicuous Patty sat attentively through the open sessions, the theatrical Bailey attracted more press attention than his client.

Out of court, Bailey also created headlines by attacking another well-known lawyer, William Kunstler, who has defended a variety of antiwar and political radicals. At a press conference in Dallas, Kunstler claimed that he had been asked by Catherine Hearst, Patty's mother, to handle the case before the Hearsts finally retained Bailey. Kunstler, who occasionally sounds like some of his more extreme clients, said he refused because "I don't work for pigs." Bailey, charging that Kunstler had never been approached to defend Patty and knew his statement was false, threatened to take the matter up before the New York State Bar Association's disciplinary committee. Said Bailey: "Catherine Hearst was induced to have lunch with Mr. Kunstler on the assumption that he represents so many crazy people, one of them might know the whereabouts of her daughter."

Kunstler, meanwhile, was in the news for another reason last week. At the same press conference, he took an incredibly warped view of the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. "I don't disagree with murder sometimes, especially political assassinations, which have been a part of political life since the beginning of recorded history," Kunstler said. "I'm not entirely upset by the Kennedy assassinations. In many ways two of the most dangerous men in the country were eliminated. It is hard to tell what the glamour of Kennedy could have done. Kennedy excited adulation and adulation is the first step toward dictatorship." Kunstler assured startled reporters, however, that "I couldn't pull the trigger myself."

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