Welcome to cspan2 in depth. The author of seven books and counting. Including the most recent, the kidnapping crimes and the trial of patty hearst. I want to begin where you ended the book. End of the book. You wrote this without her cooperation. I didthat . Guest there were several things that were different. This was the first book that was at the border of journalism and history. All the other books that i wrote i had sort of covered the underlining story in real time and then wrote about it. This is something i was alive in the 1970s but i was a kid. I didnt follow the stuff so it was starting from scratch in terms of my research. In particular theres 150 about the army and its trials that bill harris one of the survivors had and i managed to obtain access to that so i knew i had a great deal of material no one had seen before but obviously to answer your question, i would have liked to have talked to patty. She made clear through intermediaries and then indirectly she wanted no part of this. But i realized i had so much material from her and about her and her own book and testimony and fbi interviews that she had given to the fbi and others i have her perspective and i got to speak to many people who knew her during the period and subsequently i was able toas report around her in a way that i think i was able to get a fair impression of her perspective os the event. Thi this probably explains why you wrote the book you say the kidnapping foretold what would happen in society in a diverse number of fields including eliminating the future, the culture of celebrity, criminal justice and even sports. Guest i sometimes thought of the case when i was writing the book as a trailer for modernity like a coming of attractions that we begin to see him big and small ways. But it was the first of the great modern celebrity criminal event that participated the o. J. Simpson case. The shootout on may 17, 1974 where six of the kidnappers tied was the first live broadcast of the breaking news event that anticipated so much of how wewe cover news and even smaller things like participants in the big news story seeking out book deals during the event. Here you had one of the people who sheltered trying to get the book written and you had the defense attorney trying to write a book while he was the defense attorney. So many things that became commonplace started or becamee visible in the kidnapping. And of course ran off and catherine, their newspapers wer on television and you made a reference, by . Guest one of the important back stories of the kidnapping and the aftermath was the difficult relationship with her mother. In there was nothing particularly, or there was and is, let me just take a sip. Guest by the way, patty hearst is still alive. Guest very much alive, 62yearsold. A homemaker, social life, she has two daughters and raises show dogs which she does a lot of the time but to answer the question as i think this is important like a lot of 19yearolds she was 19 when she was kidnapped and had a contentious relationship with her mother especially in the 70s where people used to talker all the time that the generation gap and patty at the time of her kidnapping was living with her boyfriend which was called living in sin. There was a lot of contention. When patty was kidnapped and there were all these press conferences that her parents held in front of their house in hillsborough, patty said in one of the communiques, get out of that black dress. Thats not helping anyone. It was an interesting signal of how she was bringing her rebellion against her parents into her life with the sla. Part of the reason she joined us because she was alienated from her parents. Not a big deal in the ordinary circumstances a lot of these women are alienated from their mothers but here under these circumstances it turned out toao be significant. Guest as a way to get her released you write it was without American History no one had tried on short notice to feed thousands of people. May the moment even more extraordinary is it took place because of a political kidnapping. This is a piece put in place. Guest just back up a little bit, when patty was kidnapped initially there was no demand. There were these bizarre communiques that unlike most kidnapping state stated and saye us money and we wil will give yu the person that. Eventually it was chaotic and disorganized and he has millions of dollars letbillionsof dollad the poor. That will be the initial ransom demand. It was run out of a big warehouse in the San Francisco they were feeding the poor and it didnt go very smoothly with some of the distributions there were riots and so many people wanted the food and they were seeking it out but hes one of the heroes of the story and wanted to get his daughter back and he had less money than they thought he did but he spent millions to set up the organization that did get out a lot of food. This is a picture after the kidnapping. He doesnt come across as a very strong character. Guest one of the things i learned in doing this story is the only thing that the fbi, the Hearst Family and patricia herself had in common is that none of them could stand him. It was the one point of view anonymity. He was a 23yearold, this isnt a bad person or a bad guy he was a graduate student in philosophy but he was kind of air against and he thought he knew better than anyone how to handle the situation and he succeeded in annoying everybody. And if they were particularly resentful of the fact during the kidnapping itself on the night of february 4, 1974 after he was hit by bill harris, one of the kidnappers he ran off instead of staying to protect patricia. Host we will spend the next three hours with author and lawyer Jeffrey Toobin. Phone lines are open and you can join us on facebook. Com booktv. Send us a message on booktv twitter booktv or you can send an email booktv cspan. Org. On average, how long does it take to write a book . Guest i have a simpleminded system for writing books, which is related to the fact that i am a staff writer at the new yorker command by editor gives me a limited amount of time off. I dont have the bandwidth and capacity to write the new yorker articles and continue my work at the new yorker but my name the writing portion of the bookk after ive done enough reporting to feel like i have enough material, i. E. Write five pagess a day. I pray 1250 words a day and that is i find a significant amountnt but not an overwhelming amount to write. And it accumulates if you keep up at that pace. Thats 100 pages a month, and in find that gets me to an appropriate clanks. Thats just the right thing. If i view the reporting and research if not more important than the writing that is a little harder to measure how long that takes as i said in these other books ive written i was sort of reporting in realtime so that wasnt a separate research period. The old in at least a year would probably somewhat more. Host you have a picture of the house where it took place in San Francisco and you pointed out that its changed significantly from the 70s to where it is now today. Guest this to me was one of the revelations in writing this air i here is how differene 1970s were especially in Northern California from the way that things are today. To give you one statistic in the 1970s, there were a thousand political bombings a year in the United States. Think about what i would be like today. Al most of them did and caused injuries or deaths that this was just a time of tremendous Political Violence and the epicenter was San Francisco and berkeley. There had been the summer of love in 1967 and the Free Speech Movement in berkeley in 1965 but by the 1970s those movements which began with a good deal of idealism had curdled into real anger and resentment and San Francisco was written by terrible crime including the zodiac killers, the zebra killers. I think people forget, everybody remembers the famous detective. He was a San Francisco detective because San Francisco at the time of those movies was aos symbol of all that was horrible and dangerous in the United States. Of course today it is Silicon Valley, hightech prosperity. Then it had a completely i different reputation which was interesting to me as someonene coming up in the story new. Host 202 7488920 for those who live in eastern or thr central time zones and 208201 mountain and pacific time zones. Also our conversation as we view the first sunday of every monthn let me go back to the 1997 interview on in the dateline with Patricia Hearst. Missin host hell are we to view this year of your life after you could have left at any number of points. Its not true that i could have left at any point. Ny i couldnt even think thoughts for myself anymore because i had been so programmed that the fbi was looking and i shouldnt even try to think of that rescue because they were calling inse psychics to find me and thats the kind of thing that i believed. Host what led her to basically stay within . Guest sheen was part off the group. She took the name because the partner and fellow revolutionary was an east german woman. One of the things i try to stay away from him writing this was the jargon associated in the story and brainwashing, stockholm syndrome all of which are journalistic terms. I try to look at the facts of the story and what actuallyy happened. When you see what her life was like during that year between may of 74 in september of 75 when she is arrested, used cds tremendous opportunities for her to leave. Ison oak a she needed to get treated and used a fake name. Er she traveled across the country with his parents and basically begged her to go back to her f family. And my simpleminded view, and i think that its good to look ata things in a simpleminded way is that she didnt go back because she didnt want to go back. She had joined like a lot of young people did in the 70s, they joined with revolutionary groups that they later thought how in the world could i have been involved with those crazy people i have no doubt that she wouldnt do it today like most wouldnt, but then she did. Host and you are very descriptive. Heres somebody that grew up in wealth and privilege and she was in an apartment house that waset dirty. She met with whom she called her comrades and they welcomed her and so it was a differentsay lifestyle to say the least. Guest to call the way they lived a lifestyle, they were desperadoes on the run and they had no money. R do sometimes people ask were they on drugs. The answer is no. The answer in part they had no money to buy a drugs if they were inclined to. They robbed three banks for the simple reason thats where the money was. S. They needed money. Need money. They were living on an enormous of 20pound bag and they bought and ate horse meat and containers of black beans and the cheapest food they could have thats the life she was living for much of this time and it was very toughi host where was she, what was she doing and how did thissi become synonymous with thefrom t situation . Famo guest this is the most famous one. Remember she does get at february 4, 1974. On march 31, said or so weeks later she issued a communique into two weeks later on apri april 15, the robbery that we are looking at now is the bank and the very quiet section of San Francisco. They go in as a group and remember how shocking this was. The bank robbery as scary as it is is usually committed by one or two people. Its basically all six were all eight kidnapped the Liberation Army members that were involvedd in the robbery and they hadic discovered the location and noticed a relatively new innovation Security Camera and as you can see right now, she was told to stand where she knew she would be photographed with the Security Cameras as in fact she was because the bbc didnt grow a theater. They came from the university t Theater Program and they wanted to show off the prized recruits srecruitso thats why they put t that part of the bank so the camera would take her picture. Host inside of the Supreme Court. How are they doing with a . Guest the Supreme Court can clearly function with people. It is not the zion and i dont think most people realize historically the constitutionse does not set a number of justices. And until just after the civil war, the number fluctuated actually because congress can raise or lower the number of justices at any given time. That to state the obvious, there is a reason why there is an odd number of justices on the court because the votes are that is not an effective way for the courts tcourt to operate. This is not ideal but it is certainly it doesnt mean that court isnt functioning but its just indicative of the political dysfunction that we live with thabut no vote has taken place. O host is the chief justice the umpire that he said he wanted to be . Guest chief Justice Roberts is an extremely impressive person and a very good symbol and custodian of the course of the public persona. He is fighting someone who takes very seriously how the court is perceived in the country and does his best and it is a great job to make sure that they are seethe beer scenein the best po. He is also a serious conservative and someone who like the other eight justices was appointed by the president who wanted him to represent a certain ideological perspective on the court and he has donene just that. He now faces a very unusual and extraordinary situation where the chief justice may be in the minority and a great number of cases Going Forward if in fact barack obama or Hillary Clinton wins the appointees representing the majority on the court. One final question do you suspect that the senate will go back on its pledge not to have i hearing if Hillary Clinton is elected and it appears as if she will announce her success in appointment after she becomes president in january next year guest when Mitch Mcconnell says the president should fill the next feat i think he means the next president should fill the seat. By no means is that if Hillary Clinton wins she will have an easy glide path to confirm whoever she appoints. M but i dont see any realany real possibility that the senatepo which is so politically polarized and includes people like ted cruz and tom caught in who will not stand for any sort of vote on the obama nominee and can gum up the works given a very tight timeframe. I just think. They might renominate Merrick Garland and that would be an entirely different situation. But in terms of an obama nomination i dont think thats going to happen. First quickly i would like to thank you for your coverage of both of the conventions. Nk it was outstanding. Sorry to interrupt what they might as well add my voice of praise. My question is was there a precedent for what the associate justice did in speaking out on the political president ial campaign in such a way that became very controversial. Obviously she apologized but i think that in your book, its refreshing to get to know the justices more and i applaud you for that. And i would like to know more about the justices. E i like the fact that she spoke out. Guest the answer is in the modern era there is no precedent for an explicit endorsement or nonendorsement by the Supreme Court justice in the middle of the president ial race. Interestingly during the 40s and 50s, William Douglas was considered as a possible Vice President ial candidate for three truman and others. So why dont i think people can be too shocked that the Supreme Court justices have political opinions. They are very smart and savvy people. N. They live in washington and they were appointed and very aware and interested in the president ial elections. There is a naivete about the nature of the Supreme Court. The court is a deeply ideological body and there is not, the idea that they are separate from politics is i think unduly naive. Thats why Ruth Ginsburg was criticized across the ideological spectrum for the statement. I think that she recognized she had made a mistake. She apologized and moved on and i dont think that we will hear anymore comments about her moving to new zealand if donald trump wins the election. Ob host so not only questions about whether or not he was boru during feet 2008 campaign but then in 2009 senator barack obama taking the oath of office from the justice of the United States, here is how it unfolded i barack obama do solemnly swear that i will execute the office of president of the United States faithfully. That i will execute n faithfully the office of president of the United States. And will to d the best of my ability preserve, protect andit defend the constitution of the United States, so help me god. Congratulations, mr. President. [cheering] host you watch his body language because he had memorized the oath of office. Guest just to refresh, not Everybody Knows that thats watching, i wrote a book, this is a sequel and its called then oath. Beginning in the opening chapter is about why it was botched between the two of them there. I watched it many times but i havent watched it for a number of years. Its startling again just to see how badly. And the real reason was a classic bureaucratic snafu which is that chief Justice Roberts, his assistant sent a copy of the oath with the clause marked off for how he was going to divide it up, send it to the inaugural. Committee but not the office. The document i have a copy of was never forwarded to the transition office. Ow how so, obama didnt know how roberts was going to divide up the words and