The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  As expected, the president was behind his desk, the large presidential desk covered from end to end with folders and papers; he was seated somewhat at an angle, his crippled legs extended to the side, in the act of reading something, a paper, a document, periodically making notations with a pencil, his signature cigarette holder (with cigarette) between his lips, tilted upward at its familiar angle. Grace Tully stayed in the room but was now seated at her own small desk in the back. Patterson remained where he had stopped, standing erect, more or less in a soldier’s posture, on the blue-and-green carpet near the center of the room. The president continued working at his papers, turning over some, making notes on others, seemingly unaware of Patterson standing there, ten feet away. Finally, after about ten or so very long minutes, Franklin Roosevelt raised his large head, his face still reddened with windburn from a recent outing on the Potomac, squinting through the smoke from his cigarette, and as if surprised that Patterson should be in the room, said: “Well, Joe, what brings you here?”

  Most certainly this was not the question Patterson expected to be asked. Hadn’t reliable Fred Pasley assured him, then reassured him, that the president wished to see him? Only thirty minutes before, hadn’t Steve Early, the president’s own man, welcomed him as an expected guest?

  “I am here to offer my services, Mr. President,” is what Patterson said. No matter how often Roosevelt had urged him to call him “Frank,” Patterson knew better; a president was always “Mr. President.” There were two empty chairs nearby, between where he was standing and the president’s desk, but Roosevelt didn’t ask Patterson to sit down; in fact, his quizzical squint seemed to be turning hard. “You’re offering me your services, Joe?” he asked.

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  What Joe Patterson had no way of knowing, standing there, an old man trying to keep a military bearing, literally on the carpet in the Oval Office, was that just then he was at the center of a disastrous sequence of miscommunications. Whatever Fred Pasley may have thought he’d originally communicated to Steve Early, as to his boss’s desire to pay a patriotic call on the president, offering his military services, the actual memo that Early sent to Roosevelt’s appointments secretary for the president’s review, clearly stated: “Captain Joe Patterson, publisher of the Daily News, will be in town for the day, Dec. 10. Patterson is coming to town, Fred Pasley tells me, with the hope of seeing the President, for the purpose of saying that he has been wrong in his isolationist policy and wishes to admit his error to the President.” Grace Tully’s office then replied: “Tell Early to inform Pasley that the President is standing by.” But no one had passed the word to Patterson that the president was expecting an apology, and that the mere act of Patterson offering his services would be nowhere near enough for Franklin Roosevelt, still smarting from vicious attacks only a week before in Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, also in Cissy Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald, and who was not likely to disassociate the Daily News editor from the hostility and opinions of the family’s other newspapers.

  The president’s voice began to rise. “Do you know how your newspapers have held back our war effort? Do you know how much harm you’ve caused, what trouble you’ve made?” He called out to Grace Tully: “Grace, bring me some of those editorials!” But even before she could come over with the folders, already lying on her desk, the president started to recite from memory, one after another, the latest sharply worded criticisms from the Chicago Tribune, the Times-Herald, and then finally from Patterson’s own editorial, earlier in the year, telling the nearly two million readers of the Daily News that the president of the United States was himself no better than a dictator, trying to push the country into a European war. When Roosevelt was finally done with his recitation (Grace Tully in her memoir wrote that she had never heard the president “lay it on the line” as he did with Patterson that morning), far from offering Patterson some role, active or inactive, in the armed forces, he coldly asked: “What do you have to say for yourself, Joe?”

  “What I wrote was published in peacetime, Mr. President,” Patterson replied. “Now it’s wartime and I should like to serve my country.”

  “I’ll tell you what you can do, Joe,” said the president. “You can go back home, and you can read over your editorials. That’s what you can do.” Then Roosevelt turned back to his work, the interview was over, leaving Patterson to make his way out of the room with as much bearing as he could manage; and while in fact the editor outlived the president by a little more than two years, in some core, crucial sense, it would turn out that Joseph Patterson’s life was never the same after that meeting.

  NOTE: Accounts of Patterson’s December 10, 1941, meeting with President Roosevelt appear in Fred Pasley’s papers; in Grace Tully’s memoir, Grateful to Serve; and in Steve Early’s memoir, With the President. Patterson himself, no slouch as a reporter, wrote out a detailed, verbatim report of the interview as soon as he got back to Dupont Circle.

  · 42 ·

  WELL BEFORE THE PEARL HARBOR ATTACK, Alicia Patterson’s sympathies had been internationalist, even interventionist, when it came to the war in Europe. How she escaped the pull of isolationism, with her mostly beloved father regularly preaching it from the pulpit of the Daily News, her uncle and aunt declaiming it on the pages of the Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald (itself a deceptively complex belief system, with elements of both nativism and pacifism, that for a while even sucked in sister Josephine, a spirited, freethinking young woman who nonetheless was active in the isolationist America First movement) can be somewhat explained by her earlier decision to leave the landlocked, conservative Midwest, the nativist heartland, where isolationism was especially entrenched, for New York, a city with its toes in the Atlantic, its mind attuned to Europe.

  True, Joe Patterson also lived in New York, had been living there for twenty years or so, and published an astonishingly successful newspaper for New Yorkers. But Joe Patterson’s New York was an odd blend of that older, still-mainstream, mostly WASP establishment of boardrooms, law firms, private clubs (a world defined and defended by the dominant “culture” of Ivy League colleges and private schools) which he’d grown up with, and at the lower end, his blue-collar circulation base, the “little guys” who filled the seats at the Daily News’s Golden Gloves boxing tournaments, the “little women” who eagerly sought out the Daily News’s “Helpful Hints for Housewives,” one of Mary King’s contributions. In contrast, Alicia’s version of New York, pretty much from the time she moved there, a refugee from Lake Forest, had increasingly been the “new” Manhattan: smart people, talky people, talented people, many of them part of that emerging amalgam (mostly men, though quite a few women) that would later be known as the media; perhaps above all “cosmopolitan” people, which is to say Jewish people, such as her close friends Heywood and Gertrude Broun, Bennett and Phyllis Cerf, to say nothing of the new world of the Guggenheims (which in some ways was deeply Jewish, in other ways barely Jewish at all). As much as anything, though, what probably freed Alicia from her father, from the tidal tug of his “political philosophy,” was something emerging, solidifying, in her nature: what might be described as a growing (if largely unexamined) sense of who she was and what she wasn’t. On the one hand she was curious, quick-witted, direct, responsive, prone to surface likes and dislikes; what she wasn’t was a deep thinker, an intellectual. Joe Patterson was also a quick study, impulsive, intuitive, indeed owed much of his success to his flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants proclivities; but at the same time, in another corner of his brain, so to speak, he lived what might be called another life, a parallel vocation: that of a determinedly, earnestly, sometimes obsessively deep thinker, but with the quotes around it: a “deep thinker,” caught up in theories and abstractions, sometimes seemingly for their own sake. To a great extent, isolationism was an abstraction, a worldview based on the interplay of abstract forces. His daughter Alicia, however, who once wished so much to mimic him, traveled lighter, with little
propensity for abstraction. What she saw was what she saw, her instincts unimpeded by theory. Pundits might describe her response as internationalism or interventionism; what she would probably have called it (if asked) was common sense.

  · 43 ·

  ALICIA’S FIRST ATTEMPT to “do her bit,” as people called it in the English manner, came in 1940, with the Battle of Britain under way. At the time, in the close-knit world of women’s aviation, the dominant, larger-than-life figure (since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart) was Jacqueline Cochran. As was the case with Alicia (and perhaps fewer than one hundred other women), Jackie Cochran had earned her transport pilot’s license in the early 1930s, and had then gone on not only to fly the mail but, as she described it, to “fly as far and fast and often as I could,” setting women’s speed and distance records across the country.

  After the fall of France, with Britain’s survival hanging in the balance, a small group of volunteer (male) American pilots migrated to England, to help out flying transport planes for the hard-pressed, undermanned British air services, under a program called Wings for Britain. Jackie Cochran proposed forming a squadron of qualified women pilots, an adjunct to Wings for Britain, also to go to England and assist the American men, who already had more work than they could handle. One of the first American women pilots Cochran contacted was Alicia, who was thrilled to be asked. They exchanged letters; then she and Cochran met several times, once in Washington with one of Alicia’s old flying mentors, now Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. Alicia also took herself out to her old training grounds, Curtiss Field, not that far from Falaise, where she signed on for some brush-up instruction, familiarizing herself with new instruments and larger aircraft. Needless to say, all too soon there were obstacles put in the way of this fine, potentially dangerous, potentially useful adventure; not least by Harry Guggenheim, who one evening, at one of his Aeronautical Foundation conferences, was accosted by General Doolittle, who warmly congratulated Harry on his wife’s “spunk and spirit,” this regarding a project Guggenheim himself knew virtually nothing about. He promptly put his foot down, both as husband and copublisher, not only giving a sharp no to her notion of decamping to British airfields, even for the purpose of flying tinned beef to troops in Cornwall, but also pointing out the obvious, that as editor and copublisher of Newsday, she had an obligation, in his words, “to stay home and mind the store,” not least for the 130 employees who might need their paychecks. She was sore about Harry’s husbandly disapproval—the magisterial, voice-of-reason tone he took with her, a girl only trying to do her bit—but she also knew he was right, at least about Newsday, which didn’t make her any less sore. In any event, Jackie Cochran’s “Women’s Wings for Britain” never did get off the ground, not even after Pearl Harbor. When Alicia ran into Jimmy Doolitle later in the war, he told her, “Wait a few years.” For female pilots in the U.S. military, the wait would be about fifty years.

  —

  ANOTHER AREA in which Alicia tried to contribute something useful, with little result to show for it, was the politically charged one of Jewish immigration. Back in 1939, the worse-than-sad, truly horrible journey of the SS St. Louis had demonstrated, at least to those of a mind to look, that something was seriously wrong with U.S. immigration policy for European Jews. In brief, the St. Louis had departed Hamburg with nine hundred Jewish passengers, not steerage passengers either but passengers paying full fare, trying to escape from Hitler’s Germany. Once at sea, however, it turned out that no country would receive them; not Britain, not France, Spain, Portugal; not the United States, and so on, down the list. Possibly Cuba? The St. Louis slowly traversed the Atlantic, entered Havana’s harbor, but none of the passengers was permitted to disembark. One man tried to commit suicide by jumping overboard, and was taken under guard to a Cuban hospital. Only eighty miles from the United States, impassioned cables were sent by the St. Louis to American authorities, in effect to the Roosevelt administration’s State Department; but entry was still denied, with the ship then forced to return across the ocean, redepositing en route the remaining 899 Jews in Allied ports. With little public outcry, or even passing notice being taken of this debacle, a private committee was formed in May 1940, to “promote expanded immigration quotas for Jews,” in which Alicia Patterson Guggenheim took a prominent part, along with fellow publisher Marshall Field 3d, specifically calling for the rapid admission to the country of thousands of orphaned, destitute Jewish children from various parts of Europe. Alicia persuaded her mother-in-law, Mrs. Daniel Guggenheim, to turn over a large section of her nearby North Shore mansion for use as an orphanage, and work was begun transforming the Guggenheim Castle (as it was known) into a home for soon-to-be-appearing Jewish children. But none appeared. The reason eventually given was “political realities,” which in rough translation referred to the unwillingness of Congress to pass, or the Roosevelt administration to push the Wagner-Rogers Child Refugee Bill for increased Jewish immigration.

  NOTE: After old Mrs. Guggenheim died, two years later, during the war, her vast, empty, splendidly turreted and crenellated castle was deeded to the U.S. Navy, to which it still belongs.

  —

  IN THE END, Alicia did find two children to take in, certainly Jewish and assuredly refugees, though far from typical victims of the period. Back when she had first spoken to her husband about wanting to do something for Jewish refugee children, her thought had been to take in some of them at Falaise, but Harry opposed the idea: Ordinary Jewish children, he said—that is, children from typical backgrounds—after spending any time in Falaise, would only look on their postwar post-Falaise lives as a dreadful comedown. Soon after that odd conversation, while at a cocktail party in Washington in June 1940, she heard from the British ambassador of two young Jewish children who seemed to need a safer home, and whose background could hardly fail to pass muster with Harry Guggenheim. The children, Patrick and Janka de Koenigswarter, aged five and three, were described as currently living with elderly grandparents just outside London, where bombs were falling and a German invasion was anticipated any month. Their father, a brave and glamorous young Frenchman, Baron de Koenigswarter, was away fighting with Free French forces in North Africa; their mother, the baroness, apparently also brave and glamorous, perhaps a spy or not a spy, after dropping off the children, was also on her way to North Africa, to join the Baron and fight the Germans. And who were these elderly grandparents? Their name was Rothschild, they were the English branch of the Rothschild family, whose residence, if you could call it that, close by London, where bombs were falling, was known for its 120 rooms, its five thousand acres, and its fine gallery of Titians and Rembrandts. Alicia quickly said yes to the ambassador, who set the paperwork in motion, confident that Harry would or could make no objection. Later that summer, when the two children arrived at Falaise (accompanied by their nanny, the formidable Miss Davenport), little Patrick de Koenigswarter was heard to remark politely, in his high, British schoolboy’s voice, “Oh, what a nice little house.”

  Patrick and Janka de Koenigswarter, two Rothschild grandchildren, war refugees of a kind, at Falaise, Long Island.

  · 44 ·

  AND THEN HARRY GUGGENHEIM decided to go to war.

  He was fifty-one years old, an age at which no man was required to serve; besides which, he had just signed on as coguardian of the little Koenigswarter children; besides which, not that long ago (at least as wifely memories ran) he’d sternly and rather stuffily reproved the latest Mrs. Guggenheim for even thinking about flying off with Jackie Cochran’s putative air force, telling her to “stay home and mind the store.” Even so, these were heady, enervating months in wartime America, especially for men, who were the ones (for better or ill) who were mostly and visibly in motion, enlisting, being drafted, sent here and there for training. Back in 1917 Harry Guggenheim, then twenty-seven, had volunteered his services in World War I as part of the First Yale Aviation Unit, and was sent to France as a U.S. Navy pilot; he flew escort and bombing missions on
the western front and at the end of the war was discharged as a lieutenant commander.

  Now, in early 1942, he was allowed to reactivate his commission, and was first assigned as executive officer at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn before being promoted to full commander and placed in charge of operations at Mercer Field, near Trenton, New Jersey. There’s no doubt that Cmdr. Harry Guggenheim made a solid contribution to the war effort. His responsibility at Mercer Field was to receive Avenger fighter-bombers, coming off the assembly line at the nearby General Motors plant in Rahway, then make sure they were properly tested and equipped before being flown to California and their eventual destination on the aircraft carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. But there’s also little doubt that his eagerly managed deployment, proceeding from some then fairly common mixed motives of patriotism, male competitiveness, and who knows what else, posed a number of challenges for the Wife He Left Behind.

  Granted, Guggenheim was not deployed very far, not overseas but in New Jersey. Even so, Trenton in those days was far less accessible to New York and Long Island than it is today. While Harry was on duty, which appeared to be much of the time, he lived in officer’s quarters near Mercer Field, sometimes on weekends came in to the Savoy-Plaza apartment, rarely to Falaise. At first Alicia seems to have found herself in a novel position; during her years married to the genial Joe Brooks she had often complained, to him and others, that he never did much of anything, had no ambition. Her current husband was indeed doing something, doing his bit, perhaps more than his bit, and there was a strong part of her that liked men to come up to the mark, respected them for doing so; and so she respected Harry, while at the same time feeling, as she so often had when it came to the vast gulf between men and women, How come you and not me?