by Alice Arlen
As the summer unfolded, Patterson tried not to think about the cover story she knew was in the works, but also could be endlessly postponed or cancelled. “Apparently I’m still on the Time cover list,” she wrote her mother in July, “though I shudder to think what they may be digging up. Of course my chief fear is that Harry will somehow feel slighted.” Alice Patterson might have replied, though she didn’t, that if her daughter was worried about her husband’s feelings, all she had to do was make sure that Dick Clurman knew not to slight them. As to worrying about what the magazine might be “digging up,” Patterson was doubtless well aware (as was any savvy reader of Time cover stories) that the magazine’s major profiles, especially of consenting subjects, were invariably positive, approving, enhancing, like the cover paintings themselves, save for the seemingly obligatory inclusion of one or two minor flaws, thrown in as if to keep the profile credible. The truth was, that with the winning of the Pulitzer and now the attentions of Time, Patterson was moving into a new place. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in the public eye, had her photo in a magazine, but what was happening lately was on a whole different level, not only as an individual but as a woman. In mid-August she chaired a week of staff meetings in Garden City, trying to map out Newsday’s post-Pulitzer future. Late in the month she went out to Josephine’s Wyoming ranch, hoping to relax, feel normal once again, which she did, until another Time photographer showed up, shooting more rolls of film: Patterson on horseback, with her sister; Patterson knee-deep in the Wind River, fly casting for trout.
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THE TIME STORY CAME OUT on September 13, with Patterson’s face—handsome, self-possessed, attractively weathered—right there on the cover of two million magazines, above the terse caption, “Publisher Patterson.” Inside a lengthy four-thousand-word profile was everything its subject might have wished for: “In creating her own highly successful Newsday, Alicia Patterson has also created a new form of U.S. journalism. It is as perfectly in step with the new trend in American life—the flight to the suburbs—as tabloids were in the 20’s.” Time described Patterson as having “a touch of the journalistic genius of her late father, Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson,” and someone who, “set out to violate every canon of sedate, well-mannered and deadly dull suburban journalism.” It traced her life story in attentive detail, approvingly noting her expulsions from “two of the world’s fanciest finishing schools for general obstreperousness.” It recounted Alicia’s long, tomboyish, hot-and-cold relationship with her father, and placed her squarely in the Joseph Medill newspaper dynasty, making sure to explain that, “On national and international affairs Newsday smashes every Patterson-McCormick political tradition. Newsday is as liberal and internationalist as the family’s Chicago Tribune is hidebound and isolationist.”
Time’s densely written, admiring narrative made appropriate mention of Alan Hathway (“balding former News staffer with a police reporter’s instincts”) and several other Newsday personnel. The name of Harry Guggenheim, however, was harder to find, not impossible; he appeared briefly, in what might be called cameo roles, as rich husband (“the mining and mineral heir”) and dour, de facto owner, lacking everything but a green eyeshade, “who keeps tight control over the paper’s finances.” But if Patterson’s presence on the cover and in the text of the hugely prestigious newsmagazine, might fairly be described as something of a star turn, then Harry Guggenheim’s role was barely a speaking part, little more than a walk-on. Patterson received an early copy of the magazine, hot off the presses, hand-delivered at ten at night, courtesy of Dick Clurman. She read and reread it for hours, falling asleep close to dawn. Then later the next day she flew off to Paris, by prearranged plan, to join her mother for a few days. Apparently one morning, the two of them were walking down the rue Saint-Honoré, and there at a newsstand kiosk was a display of Time, with “Publisher Patterson” on the cover; indeed it seemed to be at all the kiosks, everywhere in Paris. It often took a lot to please Alice Patterson, especially when it came to her second daughter, but as Alicia remembered, even she was pleased by this.
An even bigger splash, the 1954 Time cover.
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AS IT HAPPENED, Harry Guggenheim had once been on the cover of Time himself. But that was long ago, back in 1929, when he’d been ambassador to Cuba (the U.S.’s man on the spot during yet another regime change in Havana), when so much of everything was different, with him a thirty-nine-year-old, up-and-coming progressive Republican, in the seemingly solid Herbert Hoover Republican era, and Time, a relatively new magazine, neither widely read nor yet a significant national presence. Today, as a sixty-four-year-old, a business leader, an important voice in yet another supposedly Republican era, he was little pleased by the now widely read magazine’s cover story on his wife; in his view, little more than a fawning fan letter to her, at the same time puzzlingly and deliberately dismissive of him. After its appearance across the country, all over the known world, Harry prided himself on being wise enough not to make a public row about it, doubtless also mindful that favorable publicity from Time’s story could only make his majority stake in Newsday worth more in the end.
But what Patterson did next made Guggenheim, a self-described most reasonable man and model of imperturbability, demonstrably furious. She hired Richard Clurman, Time’s “Press” editor, author of the “Publisher Patterson” cover story, to be Newsday’s “editorial director,” a position that hadn’t previously existed, and that Patterson more or less invented ad hoc, mostly, it seemed, as a way of getting Clurman onboard.
Why did she want Clurman so badly at Newsday? On the surface there were certainly some plausible reasons for the hire. As a youthful, savvy thirty-one-year-old, in addition to being a talented writer and editor, bright and well credentialed (with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago), Dick Clurman was also someone who could speak the new emerging languages of media and communications, who knew his way around Madison Avenue and Rockefeller Center. Then, too, there was the matter of Newsday’s own outmoded editorial infrastructure. Even after its Pulitzer, the paper still didn’t have a regular copy desk, a separate department as at other serious newspapers, which received and processed raw reporting from the field, then turned it into finished stories; instead, in an informal hit-or-miss arrangement, carried over from its Hempstead garage days, reporters phoned or brought their stories in to Alan Hathway personally, if they could find him, and what happened next—and when it happened—depended greatly on Hathway’s mood, sobriety, enthusiasm of the moment, and so on.
Patterson’s stated ambition, to push the new post-Pulitzer Newsday to a higher level of professionalism, “in a new direction,” as she declared to the staff, made a good deal of sense and was hard to quarrel with as an institutional goal. In fact her first “new direction” hire, some months before Clurman, was a twenty-eight-year-old North Carolinian, William McIlwaine, who was dropped cold into the day-by-day chaos of the paper’s editing procedures and asked to put together a suitable copy desk for a paper now wishing to be taken seriously. Bill McIlwaine was soft-spoken, easygoing, almost professorial in manner, and while Newsday’s reporters hadn’t taken happily to seeing their own copy rewritten, they were soon appreciative of how much the new system improved their colleagues’ stories. Dick Clurman, however, was a bird of a different feather, a horse of another color: confident to the point of arrogance, impatient, not one to waste time on people who didn’t matter, an emissary, as it seemed to many, from an alien and condescending Manhattan magazine culture. Also, given Patterson’s stated wish to make Newsday’s operations more professional, it was quickly noted that Clurman himself had no newspaper experience, nor seemed to think he needed any. Indeed, some of the old hands took their griping even further, wondering if it was a case of Miss P. having decided one day that Newsday lacked specific capabilities, and that only Richard Clurman could provide them, which would have been odd enough; or whether there might exist a more complicated personal attra
ction, or at least connection, between the young interloper and their editor, which would be even more unsettling.
During the three years Clurman was employed at Newsday, Patterson’s relationship with him was consistently professional, observing proper boundaries, no hint of anything extraneous. At the same time she was an intensely personal, strongly ambitious woman, Clurman likewise was intensely personal, strongly ambitious; as such they hit it off on any number of levels: likes, dislikes, jokes, and perhaps above all politics. Alan Hathway was naturally a problem; his early response to Clurman’s arrival had been a predictable stew of anger, jealousy, sulks, and drunken misadventures. By then Patterson had decidedly mixed feelings about her urban cowboy managing editor. She knew enough to be grateful for the old-style newsman’s energy he’d brought to the operation; she also knew enough to realize that Newsday was outgrowing Hathway. But perhaps not right away, not just yet. Thus her first task for Clurman was to send him to Washington to set up a Newsday bureau in the nation’s capital; everyone else was doing it, and while Newsday was late to the party, the party seemed only to be getting started. Clurman set up a small three-person bureau, renting the office space and making the hires, whose duties were defined as developing congressional or governmental stories with a particular relevance to Long Island readers, a mission that over time would prove easier to define than to achieve. On his return to Garden City, Patterson gave him his next assignment, editorial director, another newly minted position, which put him in charge of the editorial page: the editorials themselves, plus political cartoons, columns, and op-eds.
Harry and Alicia with her spaniels at Cain Hoy, Thanksgiving, 1955.
From a number of perspectives this was a smart move. Patterson now had a kindred spirit in an important editorial role, personally sympathetic and politically astute. It also took the heat off Hathway, who had no interest in editorials and fancy-pants political columning, and could now continue running the reporting staff in his own unbuttoned fashion. But Patterson’s copublisher, and needless to say husband, was very far from being on board with the new program. From the start Harry Guggenheim had been dismayed by Clurman’s hiring, not even bothering to conceal his almost visceral dislike for the new arrival from Rockefeller Center. He didn’t like his attitude, which he considered disrespectful to the majority owner. He didn’t like his know-it-all manner on pretty much every subject. He especially didn’t like it that Patterson had installed him in a big new office right next to hers. To Stan Peckham, Patterson professed surprise at Harry’s opposition to Clurman, who she claimed was just the sort of confident, well-spoken, properly dressed, suitably educated young man Harry usually seemed so fond of (moreover, such an improvement over the ill-spoken, disheveled Hathway), but even such a pro-Alicia stalwart as Peckham was of the opinion that Miss P. had developed something of a blind spot when it came to her new editorial director. On one notable occasion, a dinner being given by Patterson at Falaise, Harry showed up late, took one look around the room he was about to enter, then spotted Clurman, and disappeared upstairs for the rest of the evening.
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HARRY GUGGENHEIM might be majority owner of Newsday but Patterson was clearly running things at the paper, and running them well. It had taken ten years to grow it from “a little Hempstead daily,” with ten thousand readers to a county-level newspaper with a circulation of one hundred thousand and a Pulitzer Prize. Now, in a relatively few years, its circulation was bumping up against the three-hundred-thousand mark. Regular editions sometimes came in at an advertising-heavy 120 pages, heftier than New York’s Daily News, and the Garden City building was in a constant state of expansion. Obviously some of this came with the nature of the territory, the still-surging growth of eastern Long Island. But if Nassau County’s population growth had a certain inevitability, not all businesses automatically keep up, sometimes least of all newspapers, whose owners choose to hoard money at the wrong moment, whose editors don’t like to change habits, patterns, ways of doing things.
The fact was that Harry Guggenheim—that most reasonable, most prudent man—made expansion, change, “new directions,” as difficult as possible. He fought Alicia inch by inch, or rather dollar by dollar, and she fought him back, winning enough of the battles to keep moving things forward, and she kept hiring new people on the edit side to keep the paper just far enough ahead of its readers so they’d want more of it rather than less. Around this time she admitted to Josephine what might be guessed at anyway: that if she couldn’t actually own the paper outright, in a legal, 51 percent kind of way, she was damn well going to own it in the only real way an editor owns a paper—her people, her kind of stories, her stamp on the page.
Then, in the mid-fifties, Adlai Stevenson came back into her life; not that he’d been entirely away. There were always letters, gossipy travelogues, from here and there, as he drifted across the political landscape, the “standard bearer” and “titular leader” of the Democratic Party, the opposition voice to President Eisenhower. The days of romance between the two seemed long past, with Stevenson now happily attended, in various ways, by what seemed like a touring company of geisha-like society women, Ruth Field, Marietta Tree, Jane Dick. Instead of lovers’ billets-doux from “Dear Rat” to “Dear Cockroach,” there remained a steady, almost businesslike friendship. Stevenson himself seemed to have put aside his congenital ambivalence and indecision about running for president, and after the congressional midterms in 1954, when the Democrats picked up more seats, he professed himself eager to take on Eisenhower in the 1956 election. “I think I can do it,” he wrote Patterson in January 1955. “I know I can do it. Arthur (Schlesinger) says Ike is a hollow man and I agree.” In fact Stevenson’s second presidential campaign had its unofficial beginnings at a November 17, 1955, gathering at Patterson’s Georgia retreat, when she hosted Governor Stevenson, his new campaign manager, the Chicagoan Willard Wirtz, and several others, for a five-day planning session, during which he wrote his first three speeches.
Three years earlier, partly from her belief in Eisenhower’s potential for leadership, also partly after being pressured by Harry, she had officially committed Newsday to endorse Ike for president, despite her many-layered feelings for Stevenson. This time around, disappointed by what she saw as Eisenhower’s muddled leadership in office, also by his reliance on his intransigent secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, she felt free to support Stevenson, both personally and with her ever-more-substantial newspaper. “Of course you can do it,” she wrote him after the Georgia meeting. “This is your moment….Just don’t get pushed around by pols and polls….To thine own self be true!”
But as the months of the presidential race began to unfold, Stevenson’s moment once again proved elusive; indeed in many ways his 1956 campaign turned out to be a rockier road than 1952. For one thing, the folksy Kentucky senator Estes Kefauver made the Democratic primary race uncomfortably close, causing Stevenson to blur his own message in finally gaining the nomination. For another, while it was true that Stevenson had shed much of his personal indecisiveness, his actual campaign performance lacked focus and consistency, and his campaign staff, burdened with academics and well-meaning intellectuals, often suffered from a disorganization and amateurishness bordering on the dysfunctional. Throughout the heated electioneering months of late summer and early fall, Patterson and her editorial writer, Clurman, watched with dismay as Stevenson’s numbers fell farther behind Eisenhower’s; then with greater dismay as Stevenson sought to reverse the drift by personally attacking Eisenhower on age and health issues, when the sitting president’s personal popularity was still unassailably high. All the while Newsday’s editorials and coverage fought hard for the Democratic program and Stevenson in an important crossover market. At the end, when it came time for the paper’s official endorsement, Patterson thought to play fair by instructing Clurman to write competing endorsements, one for Eisenhower, the other for Stevenson, and then choosing between them. Needless to say, when she cho
se the Stevenson endorsement it surprised nobody, save perhaps her husband, copublisher, majority owner, Harry Guggenheim, who hadn’t been consulted in the matter, and who as an active and loyal Republican assumed that his paper would once again support Eisenhower.
Alicia lunches with Adlai Stevenson, the two-time Democratic candidate for president, at the United Nations, 1956.
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THE STEVENSON 1956 ENDORSEMENT caused a huge ruckus between the Guggenheims. Not that Newsday’s support made an appreciable difference one way or the other: Eisenhower easily won a second term, by a wider margin than in 1952, with Stevenson’s campaign collapsing badly in the final weeks, not helped by the Democratic candidate’s controversial speech in Boston’s Faneuil Hall suggesting that Eisenhower might not live out another term in office. But it turned out that Harry had made a very personal promise of an Eisenhower endorsement to Leonard Hall, chairman of the Republican Party, also a neighbor, friend, and prized political contact, and he was now doubly furious at his wife, first for endorsing Stevenson without consulting him, let alone asking for his approval (which of course they both knew he wouldn’t have given), second for making a fool of him with his big-shot political pal Len Hall.