Patty Hearst arrest, 26 September 1975

Sooner or later something will have to be done about what I can only call the 'appetite' of the media, the evident need of television and radio to guess and speculate at the greatest possible length about something that has just happened and about which we know very little.

Last week, I was about to scrap my talk at the last minute and do a new one because Patty Hearst had been caught in San Francisco and for the next hour or so, if you switched from one television channel to another of the thirteen channels available to us in New York, you'd find that most of them were throbbing with the news. Also, two of the three national networks kept reminding you that at 11.30 that night they would put on special programmes on the incident lasting 30 minutes each. I saw most of one and some of the other and the kindest word you could use to dignify them was to call them 'backgrounders'. By noon of the next day hundreds of thousands of words had been broadcast about Patty Hearst and every bright and smudgy news clip had been dug up and shown again of her in school, at home, supposedly holding up a bank, we saw once again the whole banging, hideous shoot-out in Los Angeles, the cameras wandered pruriently over the house where she'd been taken, nobody had seen the capture, we never saw her. Next morning the press joined the pack with no more news but with columns of guesswork on what might have happened to her in the 19 months of her disappearance, on how she might plead when she came to trial, on whether or not she might be let out on bail. 

So when I sat down to talk about the relatively meaty topic of how America's preoccupations have changed over the past 25 years, all we knew about Patty Hearst was that she'd been caught in a working-class neighbourhood and would probably stand trial on 19 separate federal, or state, charges. When I said that the media have an evident 'need' to guess and speculate at interminable length, I chose the word carefully. The 'need' is simply the need to fill the 20-odd hours that they're on the air. I don't know what television is like in Greenland or Tibet, but it would be a wonderful concession to human sense and sensibility if television was available for, say, only three hours a day. As it is, the networks start up at 6 a.m. and they close down at about 1.30 in the morning. Motion pictures go on all night. Now, given this gigantic maw, this vast belly that has to be fed, it's fairly obvious that, for instance, Shakespeare, if he were alive and writing continuously would be all washed up in about three months. We'd have seen it all. 

There's a radio station in New York that never sleeps. Its slogan is, 'All the news, all the time!' And behind the ceaseless rattle of an announcer's voice you can hear the chatter of the news ticker. This is very useful to turn on if you missed something on the regular hourly news programme but, even then, this station keeps 'updating' the news, as they say, every ten minutes which means saying the same thing over and over again, with minute additions of news to be sure, but also with gobs of the sort of rumour that's prefaced by the adverbs 'allegedly' and 'reportedly'.

The only thing that I could have said a week ago about Patty Hearst, the only interesting speculation at any rate, would have been to wonder if any judge facing a girl giving the clenched fist salute and announcing her occupation as that of an urban guerrilla could be trusted with a bail bond. All that struck me, gasping in a flood of hearsay, was the thought that the urban guerrilla movement, whether large or small, could hardly enjoy a more tasty triumph than that in which Miss Hearst released to her wealthy parents on, say, a million dollars bail, stayed home for a couple of days, or a couple of weeks, and then skipped town again. It was a passing thought and I let it pass and got to the [...] to the old days, when we were worried every fall by the prospect of the atom bomb and the new days when we worry about the prospect of the next presidential sniper. And this, too – though every newspaper in the world is bound to look on it as the compulsory front-page headline – is something that defies any new commentary of mine other than an extension of the one I made less than three weeks ago when that weird little girl in Sacramento pointed a gun (that) didn't go off. 

Once again the president said that the American people were not going to be stopped seeing their president by a couple of people. But how about the third person? Or the fourth? And that night the president, speaking as he very rarely does without script or notes, went on and on about the duty in a democracy for the president to wade into crowds and, as President Johnson used to say, 'press the flesh.' It began to sound in President Ford's mouth like a holy mission and certainly one can see how important it must seem to him as an individual caught and photographed twice in a moment of alarm crouching in the streets, how important to try and retain his pride and poise. But it still seems to me more important for the people of the United States to retain their president and one thing that I should guess greatly increases the risk of other attempts is the huge publicity that's been given to Miss 'Squeaky' Fromme and which, I fear, is now blazing around the person of Sara Moore. It would surely have been an easy, as well as a responsible, thing to do if the managing editors of America's two leading news magazines had called each other up and said, 'Suppose we don't put Squeaky Fromme on our covers? Suppose we call off all the background writers and the special reporters and make our coverage from her point of view disappointingly terse?' 

As it was, she has made the cover of Time and Newsweek and is guaranteed the instant immortality which would-be assassins crave. This craving is, I should have thought, the first consideration the police and the news media should ponder. For the confessionals of innumerable assassins have revealed as perhaps their most powerful motive the drive to be known the world over as the little one who brought down the great one. The ego in such people overwhelms the normal impulses of shame, timidity, conscience. We should never forget the bizarre case of the man who committed the senseless slaughter In New York Central Park of a girl and a dog and an old man, a week or less after the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. Now this man was a fairly recent immigrant and a lonely man who lived in a single room. He, in turn, was mown down by the police in the park, but when they went to the room in his lodging house they found it full of clippings about Sirhan Sirhan, Bobby Kennedy's assassin and pencilled reiterations on scraps of paper of the name Sirhan Sirhan. The eerie and crucial detail was that this man also had a repetitive name like, say, [Darvash Darvash]. The coincidence must have seemed to him an act of fate and the vast publicity given to Sirhan Sirhan egged him – a loner and a nobody – egged him on to a similar, explosive assertion of power. 

Since the San Francisco incident, a great deal has been written about the present state of American society and the public violence that, in the past decade or so, has seemed to range through most of the world. But deploring the sickness of society is useless both as diagnosis or treatment. What we are dealing with in the widespread bombings of public buildings and the kidnapping of public men is, as the Carlos incident showed, a cool-headed organisation of terrorists with a headquarters, perhaps a floating headquarters, that is able to supply both tactics and weapons. What we're dealing with in the assassination attempts is the freedom of deranged or disturbed individuals to have easy access to public men. 

The president’s dogged insistence on maximum exposure to the crowds springs, I dare to suggest, from a deeper motive than he seems to be aware of. Of the comments of the San Francisco incident which were invited by the New York Times, only two, it seems to me, touched on the root of the problem. Mr William F. Buckley said very forthrightly, 'The president has a problem of machismo if he's caught restricting his own movements. But I think a perfectly solemn request by Congress, one that he would be obliged to accept, would solve the problem.' 

Miss Barbara Jordan, a black congresswoman from Texas, and one of the most formidable members of the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach President Nixon, put the latest attempt in its true social context by saying, 'I would say that the assassination attempts are a reflection of what we've always known that there is a mindless element among the citizenry. It's a minority element whose actions can have devastating results. I suggest that the president reduce his schedule to the confines of Washington DC and the White House until there's a reduction of the hysteria which seems to creep into the minds of the mindless.' Inevitably Congress has roused itself to want to do something but just what it's likely to agree on after the long and snail-like progress of a bill through committees and along the floor of both houses is, at present, quite uncertain. 

The first reaction is of congressmen looking for a culprit and finding it in the Secret Service who by now dart around the president like a flight of moths round a single lamp. It came out, by the way, that two days before the president’s visit to San Francisco, Miss Moore had actually told the local police that she might try to 'test' (her word) the security system. Surely this approach is fiddling? In any crowd anywhere that the president plunges into, there are bound to be disturbed people who might be seized by the dizzy ambition to strike him down and if they have a gun, they'll do it. 

Which brings up the latest of the 120 gun control bills now pending before the House Judiciary Committee. It proposes an outright ban on the possession of all handguns and if our past experience of Congress since the murder of President Kennedy is anything to go on, Congress will bicker and the sporting gun lobby will resist and nothing will be done. Even if the ban were made a federal law, somebody, somewhere will always get a gun. Perhaps only a third or fourth attempt will galvanise the Congress into doing what Mr Buckley proposes, namely disqualifying him from proving his courage by banning the primitive ritual of 'pressing the flesh.' 

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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