Hearst jury selected

I started last time to write a letter about what it was like to see things from the west coast of the United States instead of from the east, but I got sidetracked – as one does in letters – with other things that came to mind, though mostly they were about the difficulty of talking from California without having the listener go off into a daydream of preconceptions about sun, beaches, sex, Hollywood etc. etc.

When I rudely interrupted myself I was saying that California stretches from north to south the distance from Edinburgh to Naples and that even that apart from latitude, the picture of California life from the Pacific coast west to east can be greatly scrambled by the fact of two mountain ranges, the Coast Range and then the Sierra which can produce wildly different modes of life by way of climate and occupation, even 50 miles apart. 

Anyway, if it's understood that nothing is to be found surprising in California, here you're in parkas and snow boots watching men chopping down timber in great forests, there you're mooching around in slippers and a bikini watering your parched garden. One morning you're in San Francisco, whose hilly streets have not seen frost, and the same afternoon you're standing in a snowy ridge in the foothills of the Sierra looking west into the Central Valley where cattle are staggering or dying from lack of food. 

The 'Long Valley', as John Steinbeck called it, and not unreasonably, since it's about 300 miles long and has 20 million acres in pasture and food crops, well, it's been without rain since October. Even the mild coast, San Francisco, for instance, which expects to get its modest 12 inches or so mainly in December, January, February, has had half an inch since October. So, while blizzards went whistling across the mainland and buried New England, while an ice storm hit New York so quickly that, within a couple of hours, it was not possible to drive cars, buses, anything, on the streets, while all this was going on, I was, every day, hearing about the ranchers and the fruit growers of the Central Valley going bankrupt and the animals dying and the coming hideous prices of beef and fruit. 

No matter what's going on in the world, people are most concerned with what affects their livelihood and health – if it comes to disasters as large as earthquakes, hurricanes and so on, with their survival. So while I was in San Francisco, the morning greeting, the shopkeeper, the cab driver, librarians, restaurant keepers, they all started by wondering if the rains would ever come. Southern California was as badly off and there you could hear about a group of people who were in dire heartbreaking distress. They are people who cannot get a new swimming pool finished before 1 April. 

I do not jest. After a television aerial, the next thing a southern California householder thinks of is a swimming pool. As your income goes up, the pool's dimensions increase from that of a sunken tub in the garden to a chic Olympic model, usually glistening there by sunlight and moonlight, its scrupulously filtered waters rarely disturbed by the splash of a human body. For, with the very rich, a swimming pool is like a church steeple to a wealthy suburb. It's not for use, but for pious display. 

Well, an innocent stranger might think they have swimming pools in southern California, and it's much the same in Florida, because, in both places, the sun is the main natural features, the chief selling point to tourists. But it seems that the more genial the climate, the more casually you can stroll out of the house and dip in the pool, the more fastidious you get about the exact conditions under which you will consent to stroll out of a house and drop in a pool. You'd expect that in southern California they'd boast that the water temperature of their pools rarely fell below 60 degrees which, if left to nature, that's what would happen, but they regard 60 degrees as a form of torture. 

To give you the ridiculous truth, the fact is that no people, anywhere, in this land, are more petted than the Floridians and the southern Californians about the temperature of the water in which they will take their daily float or swim. And the California Public Utilities Commission has decreed that, from 1 April, it will be illegal to provide natural gas for the heating of new swimming pools. Now California, as you know, is the most populous of the 50 states and it uses more electricity, what we call 'energy', than anybody. What with air-conditioning, three cars to every two of the population, more refrigerators, washing machines, ice crushers, blenders than half the rest of the states in the West, not to mention heated swimming pools. And there's the rub. 

There was a quick dip in the consumption of fuel when the Arabs first slapped on their embargo and then hiked the price of oil and there was a rash of good citizenship by way of observing the new federal speed limit, 55 miles an hour – it's still there, by the way, even on eight-lane freeways that go slamming and winding through six or seven hundred miles of bare Texas or Kansas landscape – but since the well-advertised energy crisis, we have consumed more fuel per person than ever before. 

Still, there is a limit to the personal sacrifices a southern Californian can be asked to make and the commission's cruelty has set off an uproar from the companies who build swimming pools and a howl of pain from the people who won't be able to finish their pool in their backyard before the end of March. If this obsession, in a world of earthquakes, nuclear threats and hideous religious wars seems obscenely frivolous, so be it. Until the earthquake comes to you, it's amazing how het up we can all get about our local inconveniences. 

So in California last week the general anxiety spanned the gamut from the despair of bankrupt ranchers to the fury of householders who will have to take a dip in pools only ten or fifteen degrees warmer than the temperature of the sea at almost any English seaside resort in summer. 

Dr Kissinger came through San Francisco to make not a speech so much as a foreign policy sermon, perhaps as reasoned and reasonable a case for his policies as he's ever made but, by this time, reason is not called on by most of us when we come to arguing about détente or Angola or what to do in the Middle East. And outside the hotel where he was talking, there was a large troop of demonstrators as grim as any you could have seen in the riotous Sixties but, now, very orderly, very quiet, earnestly padding back and forth. 

And, also, they were the damndest mixture of protestors. Ten years ago, they would have torn each other apart long before they'd made common cause and gone after Dr Kissinger. There were predictable posters bobbing around, 'Get America out of Angola' – it's not in – and 'Kissinger, Out of San Francisco' There was 'Down with Imperialism' from leftists and 'Keep the Money for America's Defence' from rightists who fear that the Soviet Union is getting a military jump on the United States. There was a variety of crank protestors – vegetarians, organic food freaks – who somehow thought that Dr Kissinger was either a threat to their cause or could help it. 

Strangely enough, and I met a reasonable variety of San Franciscans in a fortnight's stay, none of the natives I ran into even mentioned the event which had corralled over 350 reporters from all over the United States, and several other countries besides, this was for the opening, two years to the day of her kidnapping, of the trial of Patty Hearst. I suppose if you've lived all your life in Oberammergau, the last thing you'd want to talk about would be the Passion Play and Patty Hearst's mother and father live in San Francisco. She was kidnapped from a house across the bay in Berkeley. Since February 1974, the San Francisco papers have milked the mystery dry of news, shock value, speculation and theories of guilt, innocence and brainwashing. 

So, whereas the Hearst trial was front-page news around the world, it wasn't in the San Francisco Chronicle the day the jury was finally chosen. 

Choosing a jury in the United States is a most telling reminder that Americans, no matter what they will settle for in the end, always begin with a theory of perfection. It can take months to pick a jury in a criminal trial. The lawyers on each side are allowed a great many challenges to the integrity and impartiality of every person who comes up for jury service. Hundreds of potential jurors appear in the courtroom the first day. They are quizzed as mercilessly as spies to establish that they have no preconceptions about the defendant's guilt, that they feel, in this case, no envy of the wealthy Hearsts, that they can impartially consider the politics of the Symbionese Liberation Army, that they are willing to be convinced, or not convinced, about the possibility of brainwashing, that everything they've read and heard and seen about the case has done nothing to prejudice them one way or another. 

What the two sides are seeking, in theory, is blameless and judicially disinterested saints. What the two sides are seeking in fact is 12 people who might seem to be favourable to one or the other view of the case. The prosecuting lawyer, for instance, was most jealously concerned to see that the jury was composed of men and women who had children so they would temper their final judgement with compassion for the stoical couple who, millionaires or not, have had a rough, sad, two years of it. 

Well, in the end, 36 were picked as a shortlist, from which finally emerged seven men and five women. The judge had not allowed the press in on the jury picking because he thought that the leading questions put by counsel would appear in the papers and prejudice, frighten or otherwise arouse jurors still coming up for questioning. The press raised a hullabaloo about this, screaming about violations of press freedom, but any interference these days, whether with pornographic films of the most horrendous clinical detail, down to the freedom of a reporter to dig out state secrets 24 hours old, all such interferences are branded as attempts to crush or enslave the press. 

Well, never having been in the hundred or more going nations that really do enslave or crush the press, we have, in this country, no way of knowing the difference between freedom and hair-raising licence. In spite of the saintly hopes of the jury pickers and the rage of the press, I have no doubt that, at last, the jury in the Hearst case consists of 12 human beings.

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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