They only had one suspect theyd in tell the American People the rose and others suspect and chairman dempsey and general clapper head of the director of National Intelligence had both told the president they couldnt be sure they had a case against him that it is not a slam dunk for what we know to be in the arsenal so i dont like not telling the truth the reason why what he may not have done i dont know why gsa the story is told by the white house is like liable you cannot get too close in Congress Today he is hated like hiller. I will take a second to say he is fighting a lifeanddeath more if those isis people get in power he and his wife and children will be hung up like mussolini in the square yes uses beryl bombs but i know a country that use that for seven years in which our National Security was not at stake. It was as. And no we use it because it is cheaper a barrel bob is 63 gallons and it is cheaper than to drop of 500pound bomb. At first we did i wonder about al gore morality but is a really better to use the 500 lb bomb that would have even more power . I dont make as a case for him but is he any worse from the guy in saudi arabia it chopping off the heads right now . Any worse than the uae that happens to the shia minorities . I dont think so. So there we are. Ascii about the president not getting involved assyria with those special forces and as far as i know peshawar as sadr is recognized by the u. S. Says the iranian power with approval by the Syrian Government the areas in there with approval and then the group from lebanon they are there with the approval but we are not. The president put 250 special forces casually . No. The world does vides the devil to you if you think the number of american troops into iraq is three 1 4 thousand they announced time telling you this four or five times that amount if you killed the pilots or the crew from the ocean. So that is not telling the truth to the people and that is sad but on the other hand, i dont think he will be the brightest president for the next 50 years. That is a lobar but thanks for your time i enjoyed the discussion is there then kinky is a genuine patriot fans saw some anythings going on that he manipulated he said something to the effect if we dont do this now will be too late spinnaker Radio Networks bureau chief moderates race in america with a Panel Discussion with race and american culture. The author of many books including the old too close to call in his most recent, american heiress area. Toobin, welcome to cspan2s in depth. The authors of seven books and counting including your most recent book american heiress, wild side of the kidnapping, crimes and trial of patty hearst and i want to begin where you end the book. Youwrote this without her cooperation. I did quite how was that . Guest there were several things different about this book then my other book. This is the first book ive written that was really atthe border of journalism in history. All the other books that i wrote, i had sort of covered the underlying 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 this stuff so it was starting from scratch in terms of my research and i discovered that there was a tremendous volume of printed material and in particular 150 boxes of material about the Liberation Army and its trials, that one of the survivors had and i managed to obtain access to that though i knew i had a great deal of material no one had ever seen before but obviously to answer your question, i would have liked to have talked to patty hearst. She may have through intermediaries wanted to know part of this but i realized i had so much in her material about her own book, her own testimony, or fbi fbi interviews that she had given up to the fbi and others, i had her perspective and i got to many people who knew her during that period and subsequently i was able to report around her in a way that i think i was able to give a fair impression of her perspective on the events area and this quote further explains why he wrote the book. Use a quote, the kidnapping foretold much that would happen to American Society in a diverse number of fields including illuminating the feature for the media, the culture of celebrity, terminal justice and even sports. Guest i sometimes thought the hearst case when i was writing the book as a trailer or modern he, like a coming attraction for so many things that we began to see in big ways and small ways area it was the first of the great modern celebrity criminal events that of course anticipated the o. J. Simpson case area the shootout on may 17, 1974 where six of the eight sla kidnappers died was the first live broadcast of a breaking news event that anticipated so much of how we cover news and even smaller things like participants in a big news story seeking out book deals during the event. Here you had stephen leader, her former fiancc, you had jack scott was one of the people who sheltered the sla trying to get a book written. You had f lee bailey her defense attorney trying to write a book while as defense attorney. So many things that became commonplace started or became visible in the hearst kidnapping side. Host of course randolph and Catherine Hearst, their pictures were in newspapers, they were on television and you may not reference to the black dress that she would often wear, why . Guest one of the important back stories of the whole kidnapping and its aftermath was Patricia Hearst difficult relationship with her mother. There was nothing particularly or there is, there was and is, excuse me, let me take a sip here. Host by the way, patty hearst is still alive. Guest very much alive, living in the new york suburbs. Hes 52 years old. Mostly a homemaker, social life. Shes got two daughters, a couple grandchildren and she raises show dogs. Thats what she does a lot of the time but to answer your question about the black dress because i think this is important. Like a lot of 19yearold, patty was 19 when she was kidnapped, he had a contentious relationship with her mother, especially in the 70s where people used it to talk to all of the time about the generation gap, Catherine Hearst came from a conservative georgia family and patty at the time of her kidnapping was living with her boyfriend, what used to be called living in sin with stephen weed, her fiancc area there was a lot of contention there and when patty was kidnapped, there were all these press conferences that her parents held in front of her house in hillsboro, patty said in one of the early communiqucs that mom, get out of that black dress. Thats not helping anyone. And it was an interesting signal of how she was bringing her rebellion against her parents into her life with the sla, that part of the reason she joined the sla was that she was alienated from her parents, not a big deal. In ordinary circumstances, a lot of 19yearold young women are alienated from their mothers but here under these extraordinary circumstances it turned out to be significant. Host and as a way to get her release, you write the following. The event was without precedent in American History. No one had tried on short notice to feed thousands of people. What made the moment so extraordinary was it took place because of a political kidnapping. Lets make him feed the poor. That will be our initial ransom demand and randy hearst, remarkably, actually set up an entire Organization Called people in need ran out of a big warehouse in San Francisco and they did in fact spend millions of dollars feeding the poor. Didnt go smoothly and some of the food distributions there were riots. So many people wanted the food that the people were injured seeking it out. Brut randy hearst, who i think is sort of one of the few heroes in the story, randy really wanted to get his daughter back and he had less money than the sla thought he did but he spent millions to set up this organization, which did in fact give out a lot of food. Host this apicture of Katherine Hearst and stephen weed after the kidnapping. He does not come across as a very strong character. Guest one of the things i learned in doing lots of interviews about this story is that the only thing that the fbi, the sla, the Hearst Family, and patricia herself had in common was that none of them could stand stephen weed. That was the one point of ewan national it in. Stephen this is not a bad person, bad guy. He was a graduate student in philosophy but kind of hautey and arrogant and he thought the knew better than anyone how to happen the situation and succeeded only in annoying everybody, and the Hearst Family, and patricia, were particularly resent. Of the fact that during the kidnapping itself, february 4, 1974, after he was hit by bill harris, one of the kidnappers, he ran off instead of saying to protect patricia. Host well spend the next three hour with author and lawyer, Jeffrey Toobin, our phone lines are open. You can also join us on facebook at facebook. Com booktv. Send us a tweet at book tv. Our twitter is, booktv and send us an email, booktv booktv cspan2. Org how long does it taker now you right a book . Sunny have a simple system which is related to the fact im a staff writer at the the new yorker and my editor gives me a limited amount of time off. Dont have the bandwidth, the capacity to right boat new yorker articles and continue my work the the new yorker. What i do is when im in the writing portion of the book, after ive done enough reporting to feel like i have enough material, i write five beiges pages a day. 1255 words a day and thats a significant amount put not an overwhelming amount to write, and it really accumulates if you keep up at that pace. Its 25 pages a week, 100 pages a month, and i find that it gets me to an appropriate book length in somewhere around six to eight months. That just the writing. Now, i view the reporting, the research, as equally, if not more important than the writing. That is a little harder to measure, how long that takes. That varies. As i said in these other books ive written issue was reporting in realtime, so it wasnt a sort of separate research period. But all in, at least a year, but probably somewhat more. Host talk about the kidnapping that took place in 1974. You have a picture of the house writ took place in San Francisco, and you also guest in berkeley. Host you also point out how San Francisco has changed significantly from the 70s to where it is today. Guest it is remarkable, this a real revelation in writing american heiress, how different the 1970s were, especially in northern california. From the way things are today. Just give you one statistic. The mid1970s there were a thousand political bombings a year in the United States. Think about what that would be like today. Most of them didnt cause injuries or death. Although some did. But this was just a time of tremendous political violence, and the epicenter was the bay area. San francisco and berkeley. There had been the summer of love in San Francisco in 1967. There had been the Free Speech Movement in berkeley in 1965. But by the 70s, those movementses which gap with a good deal of idealism had curdled into real anger and San Francisco in particular was rid by terrible crime, including the zodiac killer, the zebra killer. I think people forget everybody remembers dirty hari, Clint Eastwoods famous detective. He was a San Francisco detective because San Francisco, at the time of those movies, was the symbol of all that was horrible and dangerous in the United States. Today, of course, San Francisco is Silicon Valley and the hightech and prosperity and high rent. Then it had a completely different reputation, which was just interesting to me as someone who was just coming at the story new. Host we want you to join the conversation. 2027488920. Eastern or central time zone. 2027488201 in the mountain and pacific time zones. We welcome our listeners on chance radio. Our conversation with Jeffrey Toobin. Let me go back to an interview on dateline with pa trish that heart. How do we understand this missing year of your life, after the shootout, the sla members are killed. You could have left at any number of points. No, i think its not true could i have left at any point. Couldnt do anything at any point anymore. I couldnt even think thoughts for myself anymore. Because i had been so programmed that the fbi was looking for the sla, shouldnt even try to think about rescue because they would call in psychics to find me, and thats the kind of thing i believed. Host what led her to basically stay with them . Because she joined in. Guest she was part of the group. Her nameas tania. Guest she called herself tania. She took the name tania because the guevaras partner and fellow revolutionary in bolivia was tania, an east german woman. One thing i tried to stay away from in writing american heiress was the jargon thats associated with the story. Brain washing, stock home syndrome, all of which are journalism terms. I try to look at the facts and what actually happened. When you see what patricias life was like during that year between may of 74 and september of 75 when she is arrested, you see these tremendous these repeated opportunities for her to leave, that she accounted she went to hospitals, she had poison oak and needed to get treated and gave a fake name. She traveled across the country withjack pot and his elderly parents who begged her to go back to her family. And my simpleminded view, and i think its good to look at things sometimes in a simpleminded way, is that she didnt go back because she didnt want to go back. She had joined the sla, like a lot of young people did in the 70s, they joined in with revolutionary groups who later rolled their eyes and say how could i get involved with those crazy people . I have no doubt she wouldnt do it today, like most of the people wouldnt do it today, but then she did. Host youre very descriptive in her conditions. She grew up in wealth and privilege and she was in an apartment, house that was salad, dirty. She took the name, tania, met with who she called her comrades as they welcomed her into the sla. So a very different lifestyle to say the least. Guest to call the way they lived a lifestyle, almost inflates it. They were desper rad doughs on the run and they had no money. Some people asked were they on drugs . The answer is, no. The reason is because they had no money to buy drugs. They robbed banks. Three banks forks the very simple reason that, as willy suton said, that is where the money was. They needed money and they were living on enormous 20pound bags of chicken parts. At one point they ate horse meat and bought contains over black beans, the cheapest food they could have. That is the life she was living for much of this time and it was very tough. Host you have a picture, take a look at this film from one of the Bank Robberies. One of the iconic photographs. Where was she and why did this become synonymous with her situation . Guest this video is from the first bank robbery, the most famous one. She was kidnapped february 4, 1974. On march 31, six or so weeks later shark issue others noone okay she says she is tania. Two weeks later on april 15th, this probably were looking at now is the Hibernia Bank in a quiet sunset section of San Francisco. They go in as a group remember just how weird and shocking this was. The bank robbery, as scary as it is, is usually committed by one or two people. This was this basically all six of the eightactually, kidnapped this sla members were involved in some way in this bank robbery, and they had scouted the location of this bank robbery and noticed a relatively new innovation. Security camera. And they stationed patricia, as you can see, she was toll to stand where they knew she would be photographed by the security cameras as in fact she was, because the sla believed in guerrilla theater. Sever of them came from the Indiana University theater program, and they wanted to show off that their prize recruit. So thats why they put her at that part of that part of the bank so that she would be so the camera would take her picture. Host another book the nine inside the secret world of the Supreme Court. How are they doing now with eight . Guest the Supreme Court can clearly function with eight people. It is not designed to function with eight people. I think most people dont realize historically the constitution does not set a number of justices, and until just after the civil war, the number of product fluctuated because congress can raise or lower he number of justices but to state the obvious, theres a rope why theres an odd number of justices on the court, because tie votes are thats not an effective way for the court to operate. This is not ideal, but it is certainly a doesnt mean the Supreme Court is not functioning but just indicative of the political dysfunction that we live with, that no vote has taken place. Host is the chief justice, john roberts, umpire he said he wanted to be . Guest well, chief Justice Roberts is an extremely impressive person, and he is a very good symbol and custodian of the courts public persona. He is, i think, someone who takes very seriously the court how the court is perceived in the country, and i think does his best and does a very good job to make sure the court is seen in the best possible light. He is also a serious judicial conservative. He is someone who, like the other eight justices, was appointed by a president who wanted him to represent a certain ideological perspective on the court, and roberts has done just tha