by Alice Arlen
Her private life was also showing signs of normalcy. She was back on speaking terms with sister Josephine. She had repaired friendships with such of her New York friends who had been down on her for leaving Joe Brooks, although some still drove her a bit crazy, telling her how they missed Good Old Joe, providing unhelpful sightings of her ex-husband at some teary or beery occasion. All things considered, it was not a bad time; even her mother, the newly minted Mrs. A. H. Patterson, while never exactly cozy with her middle daughter, seemed reassured, perhaps soothed, by the all-too-evident rightness (at least in certain respects) of Mr. Harry Frank Guggenheim, a man who obviously knew his linen and china. What remained a sad, sore point, however, were her relations with her father; or rather, her notable lack of relations. When in April 1941, Max Annenberg, one of his oldest friends in the world, died in a car accident, she sent him numerous messages of sympathy and consolation but never heard back, save for another brief, impersonal acknowledgment, via secretary. Granted, with FDR’s reelection, she knew from reading the Daily News each morning that he’d taken his strange, somehow personal (without of course his seeming to know or acknowledge how personal it was) battle against Roosevelt to new levels of animosity. When the president unsurprisingly (perhaps to anyone except Patterson) signed the Lend-Lease Bill, delivering his famous “garden hose” speech, likening his action to those of a neighbor helping another neighbor put out a fire by lending him a garden hose, Patterson was in a fury, accusing the president of “assuming dictatorial powers,” writing that the Lend-Lease Bill should “rightly be called the Dictatorship Bill.” In September 1941, when Roosevelt bent the facts of an encounter between a U.S. Navy destroyer and a German U-boat to justify his order that navy ships “shoot on sight” at any perceived threat, Patterson wrote an editorial making matters even worse (were that possible) between himself and the White House: “Perhaps a great leader, inspired with a cause he thinks to be sacred, can consciously distort truth in hopes of making his people see things that way,” declared the Daily News on September 17, “but we are afraid the record shows that President Roosevelt has not an overwhelming respect for truth.” One morning, spotting a Daily News headline, “Figures Don’t Lie!” above a story championing one of its own straw polls, which asserted that a majority of Americans opposed intervention in the worsening European war, Alicia wrote a rebuttal editorial of her own, cheekily titled it “Liars Sometimes Figure!” and sent it off to him; mindful that Newsday, with its fifteen thousand circulation, was not in much of a position to banter with the big boys, but somehow hoping that at least on a personal level she might draw her father out of his lair (or wherever he was hiding out) and back into a well-remembered, more playful relationship. When she still got no response, not even a scolding, she composed herself and wrote a dutiful, daughterly letter, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Patterson in Ossining, New York, inviting her father and Mary King to Cain Hoy on the first weekend in December. Back came an acceptance, promptly, correctly, on Mrs. J. M. Patterson’s stationery, in her small, neat hand, proposing an arrival date of December 5.
· 40 ·
FIRST, A NOTE ABOUT CAIN HOY. In the mid-1930s, after he’d returned from four years in Havana, as U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Harry Guggenheim began buying acreage in Berkeley County, South Carolina, twenty miles north of Charleston, and by the end of the decade he had a landholding of roughly eleven thousand acres, which he called Cain Hoy Plantation (“Cainhoy” being an old Gullah name for the region, probably having to do with sugarcane, although nobody was quite sure or could remember if or when sugarcane had been grown there). This was a time when land in the South was especially cheap, and many large estates were being bought up or created, often primarily for show. Harry Guggenheim, grandson of the industrious Meyer Guggenheim, was determined to be a different type of plantation owner, and from the start he devoted much of his acreage to moneymaking enterprises, notably yellow-pine timber production and raising Hereford cattle. Even so, there was plenty of room for luxury. Harry left standing the old planter’s house, which he used as a business headquarters, but then built a far grander, white columned and porticoed mansion, which stood at the end of an imposing tree-lined allée, paved with crushed oyster shells instead of gravel; and he turned the surrounding woods into a preserve for shooting quail and wild turkey, accompanied by all the necessary infrastructure: stables for the horses, kennels for the hunting dogs, and housing for the staff.
Joe Patterson and Mary King took the train down from Washington, where he’d spent a couple of days conferring with the Daily News Washington bureau staff, arriving at the Charleston railroad station on the afternoon of Friday, December 5. Alicia and Harry were on hand to meet them, prepared for the worst, hoping for the best, and were relieved to find their guests in more-or-less normal family-visitation mode, Mary King as always a bit hard to take with her businesslike briskness, but all the same not trying to make any trouble, and Patterson for whatever reason more friendly, less gruff than usual. It probably helped that Cain Hoy itself was especially inviting just then, an island of soft Southern comfort in a trouble-strewn world, with its wide lawns, its great trees hung with Spanish moss, in the pewter sky a gently setting sun, and fires blazing in the many fireplaces. In her later recollections of that historic weekend, Alicia sometimes spoke of the at-least-temporary conversational rapprochement at the dinner table between her father and Harry Guggenheim, mainly on the subject of the war in Europe, both men concerned over the imminent fall of Stalingrad to the Germans; however, it couldn’t have been Stalingrad they were worried about (which wasn’t attacked until much later) but Moscow itself, which in early December 1941 was seemingly encircled by Hitler’s rampaging armies. If anyone there was worried about rising tensions in the Far East, between Japan and the United States (which by then had become almost a newspaper cliché), they kept it to themselves. At some point Mary King asked, or said, something about radio—was there news on the radio?—which made an opening for Harry Guggenheim to give his little speech about Cain Hoy and its closeness to nature, about its soul-improving virtues of solitude, tranquillity, reflection, all surely enhanced by an absence of such man-made interferences as radio (a déclassé invention he privately despised) and even telephones, of which there was only one at Cain Hoy, some distance away in the business office.
Harry Guggenheim’s Cain Hoy Plantation, Charleston, South Carolina.
On Saturday, December 6, Alicia and her father went out in the woods to shoot some quail, accompanied by dogs and a gamekeeper, the soft damp ground beginning to steam in the morning sunlight as the hunters trod over it. Joe Patterson was an excellent shot, had been hunting all his life, and enjoyed the sport, as did his sportswoman daughter. So also did Harry Guggenheim, who had surely bagged his share of game birds, and in some of the world’s best shooting venues—the Venetian marshes, the moors of Scotland—but that morning, out of his odd mix of gallantry and diffidence, had chosen to stay back in the main house, making small talk with Mrs. Patterson. Alicia and her father were probably at their best together outdoors, where they could each concentrate on externals—birds, guns, dogs. They stayed out for hours, walking about, standing around, taking their shots, talking to the dogs, conferring with Clyde, the gamekeeper, who had worked for the Vanderbilts in the next county and thought that Mr. V.’s dogs could use a little more training. The afternoon and evening went well, too; another fine dinner (including some grilled quail the hunters had shot earlier) around Harry’s impressive Georgian dinner table, where nobody (that is to say father or daughter) drank too much or got into unpleasant arguments.
The next day, December 7, began unremarkably, with a cool mist outside drifting through the hanging moss on the live oak trees; while inside Harry, Alicia, and her father (Mary King took her breakfast on a tray upstairs) grazed peacefully through an impressive early-morning meal of grits, biscuits, and smoked turkey before the hunting party made ready to go out again. With Harry joining his wife and father-in-law
, there were three of them walking the woods that day, with their hunting vests, boots, khakis, treading the soft, leafy ground, each of them focused on the business at hand, happily mindless of what was happening thousands of miles to the east, in the Pacific, where the first waves of Japanese airplanes were coming in over the coast of Hawaii. Hours later, close to two in the afternoon, they stopped for lunch, a typical Cain Hoy hunters’ picnic, with hampers, a cookstove, good wine, proper china, silverware, canvas chairs, and numerous attendants trucked in from the big house. What did they eat? It was something Alicia thought she should remember, an identifying marker, but never could; fried chicken would have been obvious, but Harry never liked being obvious. But she did recall they were all sitting around on the canvas chairs, legs stretched out, almost hot in the sun, when they heard a new sound, a car being driven hard down a bumpy dirt road. Then they saw the Cain Hoy station wagon, with its bleached wood panels (“Cain Hoy Plantation” elegantly lettered on the doors), saw it stop, and out of it step the tweed-suited figure of Mary King Patterson, now coming toward them almost at a run, quick long strides, trying not to stumble.
It seems that despite Harry Guggenheim’s prohibition of radio on the premises, there was in fact such a device, the secret property of the cook who kept it out of sight in the kitchen and took a listen whenever the boss was off somewhere else. All that morning the airwaves—pretty much every station, most of them usually devoted to Bible readings and hymn singings on Sunday—had been so loud, even clamorous, with talk of an imminent speech by President Roosevelt himself, that the old cook had decided to walk himself into the front of the house and tell whoever was there something about it. Thus it happened that Mary King and Mr. Walter Tyree, both of them seated at the enamel kitchen table, listened together to President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous “Date of Infamy” speech before a hastily assembled and hushed joint session of Congress; and she was now there before her husband and the Guggenheims—this normally trim, tidy, gray-haired lady, currently hatless, still out of breath—to tell them, “The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” and, “We’re at war.”
· 41 ·
AND SO: THREE PUBLISHERS, one of them of a most important newspaper, stuck in the South Carolina woods, with a lot of dead quail at their feet and the country suddenly at war. What to do next? On their way back to the house, Harry Guggenheim, no stranger to executive decisions, proposed that he charter a plane to fly them all from Charleston back to New York. But Joe Patterson, not for the first time in a longish life, was already listening to his own different drummer. The man who had been preaching, indeed bellowing, in print for the past two years against the country being drawn into war seemed now to be taking the Japanese attack personally, and produced a characteristically personal response. On the primitive telephone in Cain Hoy’s business office, waiting to be connected to an operator in Charleston, herself obviously new to national emergencies, trying in turn to connect to other operators up the long line to New York, Patterson finally reached his deputies at the Daily News, who confirmed the disaster in Hawaii and Roosevelt’s declaration of war.
At that point, Alicia recalled, everyone present expected to hear him arrange an immediate return to his office in New York. Instead he asked for a plane to fly him to Washington, also for a message to be sent to Fred Pasley (the paper’s Washington bureau chief) telling him that he wanted an appointment “right at the top,” so that he could offer his services to the army. If anyone then, such as the normally commonsensical, even prudent, Mary King, thought to second-guess this plan, no one apparently spoke up; besides, despite his self-proclaimed, regular-guy mannerisms, Joe Patterson was someone who rarely invited disagreement, least of all from family. His daughter Alicia, in fact, despite what happened, always remembered the odd sweetness of that moment, saw it as another of Poppa’s romantic gestures: Captain Patterson of Battery D, who at thirty-eight had proudly volunteered for World War I, now at sixty-one an even older soldier, but once again patriotic, positive, showing up to defend his country when attacked. They said their good-byes at the little Charleston airfield, she and Harry taking Mary King back with them to New York; Joe Patterson standing tall and rumpled beside his old leather valise, waiting for the Daily News plane to fly in and take him on to Washington.
—
JOE PATTERSON’S LAST RIDE (if we may call it that) was surely a sad and sorry affair, one whose outcome in retrospect, and even at the time, mightn’t have been all that hard to predict. We present it here as part of Alicia’s story, because that’s what it was too, a wildly ill-considered venture that he seems to have allowed, or perhaps willed, to define his final years, his relations with life, with the world at large, the world in small, and certainly with Alicia; and also, because as part of the public record, many of the details are still accessible.
Patterson apparently landed in Washington on the afternoon of December 9, with Fred Pasley on hand to meet him. Pasley wasn’t one of the Daily News isolationists; he was a World War I veteran, smart, hardworking, and he and Patterson got on well together. According to Pasley’s recollections, Patterson’s preoccupation from the start was “his desire to get back on active duty, no matter the rank, no matter the posting.” Pasley more or less had to interrupt his boss’s patriotic outpourings, saying that he’d “already spoken with Steve” (Steve Early, President Roosevelt’s press secretary), who told him that the president would see Patterson on December 10—in fact, the next morning. Such a quick response from Roosevelt might not be totally unexpected; over the years of FDR’s presidency the Daily News editor had been a frequent visitor at the White House, an honored guest at numerous official dinners, a summertime guest at Hyde Park as well as on the presidential yacht; Patterson had personally raised the funds to build a swimming pool in the basement of the White House, where Roosevelt could exercise his crippled limbs. However, it was also true that, for at least the past year and a half, Patterson and the president had been publicly and often angrily at odds, on what might superficially be called the war issue, on foreign policy, but which in fact reflected a deeper argument: isolationism versus internationalism, Roosevelt trying to save the world (or at least the European world), Patterson combatively challenging him for, as he saw it, betraying American interests. Perhaps momentarily conscious that he would be taking up the time of a president suddenly at war, Patterson pressed Fred Pasley, did the president really wish to see him? Pasley said that he had confirmed the meeting with Steve Early: the president wanted to see him.
Patterson spent the night with his sister, Cissy, at her house on Dupont Circle: in fact the same grand, white-marble mansion that his mother, Nellie, had built as soon as she had come into her Chicago Tribune inheritance, where Henry Adams and Henry James had come to tea and which President Calvin Coolidge had used as a substitute White House when the real one was being repaired. Over the years Joe Patterson and Cissy had weathered a long, bumpy relationship: as she saw it, he was the sometimes overbearing though adored older brother, who could mainly do no wrong; for him she was the glamorous, provocative, often too-smart-for-her-own-good younger sister who couldn’t seem to help making trouble for others as well as for herself.
That evening, with the nation only three days into war, with no reason for anyone to be confident about the outcome, or where or when some new attack might next occur, Cissy, with too much to drink as usual, and with her fondness for conspiracy theories, launched into her own anti-Roosevelt tirades, accusing the president of dishonesty, deception, having advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, and much else besides. Her brother, himself no stranger to alcohol-fueled outbursts, commonly reacted to Cissy’s harangues, indeed to most female displays of emotion, by retreating into his own alternate universe of almost prim, pained withdrawal. Later that night he sat at his desk in the guest room composing a letter to the director of recruitment at the War Department: “I have the current rank of Major in the U.S. Army Reserves, although I would serve at any rank….My preference w
ould be for active service with the troops….I am sixty-two years of age, am in good health, and am licensed to operate a motor vehicle.”
Fred Pasley showed up at 15 Dupont Circle at nine thirty the next morning, and the two men set off on the short walk down Connecticut Avenue to the White House. Pasley noted that Patterson’s suit was smartly pressed for a change, his white shirt crisp, his shoes shined. From the light traffic on the broad avenue, the usual flow of men and women walking to work, it was hard to see that anything much was different from any other Wednesday, though as they drew closer to the White House it was clear there were more police in place, more activity near the entrance. Pasley steered Patterson around to a side door, away from possible reporters, prying eyes (a maneuver Patterson noticed noncommittally), where the president’s press secretary, Steve Early, stood waiting for them. Early shook hands warmly with Patterson, while Pasley took his leave; then Early led Patterson into the White House, down a narrow corridor, opening the door to an antechamber just outside the Oval Office and left him there in the empty room.
Joe Patterson had been inside that room many times before (first when Theodore Roosevelt had been president), with its stiff-backed chairs, blue carpeting, Olivet landscapes on the walls, but he had usually not been kept waiting, at least not for long. This time the minutes ticked by slowly—ten minutes, twenty minutes, maybe longer. He lit a cigarette, tried not to look at his watch, shifted his weight in the small chair, and as he was wont to do, bounced his legs up and down, hands on his knees. Should he get to his feet? Should he assume the president was understandably too busy to see him, make a tactful exit? Just then the wood-paneled door in front of him opened; Grace Tully, the president’s private secretary, stood in the doorway. “Captain Patterson?” she said crisply, something between a question and a statement. “The president will see you now.” Joe Patterson put out his cigarette, pushed himself to his feet, tried to throw back his congenitally slumping shoulders, and marched briskly into the big room.