by Alice Arlen
The final stage of the trip was a three-day visit to Poland, an Iron Curtain country still under the thumb of the Soviets. Soon after their arrival in Warsaw, they were met at their hotel by New York Times correspondent A. M. Rosenthal, who said he was surprised to learn (from Patterson’s niece) that Stevenson and his group had no plans to visit the relatively nearby Auschwitz concentration camp, and promptly went to Patterson urging that all of them, though especially Stevenson, make the trip. Patterson agreed and tried to persuade Stevenson, seeing that they had a free day on their schedule. But the Guv begged off, couldn’t, wouldn’t; he was too tired, didn’t want to get sick. Naturally the more he ducked, the more Patterson pushed. “All I want to do is sit under an olive tree and watch the young people dance,” he said more than once, quoting a line he probably thought came from somewhere else but was in fact from a popular movie. In the end Patterson let the Guv off the hook, or at least on his own hook, but pointedly took herself, her niece, and Stevenson’s two sons to Auschwitz, to wander awhile in the remains of the awfulness, tour its newly opened “museum,” paying their respects, as she told them, to the victims of the Holocaust; meantime, the Guv, for lack of olive trees, spent the afternoon on a nature walk, strolling in a pine forest outside Kraków with Ruth Field.
· 73 ·
BY NOW PATTERSON was something of a major player, not only an important publisher, an outspoken editor, also that even rarer avis, a female executive in a predominantly male world. Her opinions were sought, her public appearances noted, and if some doors were still closed to her—as a woman she was still excluded from the list of journalists invited to the prestigious annual “Gridiron Dinner” in Washington—many new ones were opening up. Hofstra University, a rapidly growing institution on Long Island, asked her to be a trustee, and she was instrumental in helping to find a new president. In New York, where the Guggenheim Museum had recently opened, with its controversial design and contentious new management, Harry Guggenheim, stepping briefly out of character, actually begged her to come on the board so she might bring her “people skills” to help sort out, preferably fix, some of the Guggenheim’s early problems. As a museum board member, in those early days she met often with the gifted, opinionated architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, also with the erudite, opinionated James Johnson Sweeney, the museum’s first director, neither man able to stand the other, both men on the verge of quitting in a fury, and somehow brought the two of them close enough together to get the museum’s design finished and the first galleries installed. She was asked to give talks, addresses, lectures to audiences of knowledgeable men and women, always conscious of that empty space in her own curriculum vitae, of not herself having gone to college, achieved “higher learning.” In October she journeyed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the heart of the Ivy League, where she gave a packed auditorium of Radcliffe alumnae and undergraduates a brisk earful of her idiosyncratic brand of no-nonsense feminism. Provocatively titled “Can Women Afford a Career?” the speech showed her evolving views on the slow pace of female empowerment: “The reason everyone talks about it is that men hate taking orders from women, they’ve never had to do it, they don’t want to do it now. Of course, that’s prejudice plain and simple. Men need to get over that….But at the same time women have sheltered behind their own strong biases and predispositions….For centuries, women have been taught modesty, helplessness, even flirtatiousness as life tactics, and I think we need to get over that too…and it all takes time, doesn’t it?” She then went over some of the familiar statistics: “Out of 1,700 newspapers in this country we find only sixty-seven women listed as editors…and only seven of these women edit papers with circulations over 20,000.” But then Patterson took her audience on a somewhat unexpected ride, given that in those days, when fewer than one-third of female high school graduates went on to college, those who did were subjected to two opposing rallying cries: on the one hand those of the traditionalists, guardians of “family values,” who insisted that a woman’s place was in the home, side by side with (and if possible a little to the rear of) her breadwinner husband; on the other hand those of the new feminists, articulate and sometimes strident, who insisted to ambitious young women (for instance, Radcliffe undergraduates) that they should and could “have it all.”
Patterson characteristically took her own tack. “For those of you who are used to thinking in terms of wicked men versus long-suffering women,” she told her audience, “let me suggest another way of looking at things….If a woman can’t make up her mind whether she wants a career more than marriage, then maybe she shouldn’t expect equal consideration in the job market…with a man who will stay on the job whether married or single.” And: “To have a career is a splendid thing but be advised that it can be a lonely life. It requires sacrifice, and the more important the career almost surely the bigger the sacrifice….To put the thing in plain English, you have to really want it.” And: “In the end it’s not about the degrees you earn, it’s about the fire within you, the ambition. If you have it, then nothing is impossible. Go forth and do battle in the male jungle. But if as a woman you’re ambivalent, you’re not sure, you’re on the fence…then perhaps our world might be better off if such a woman can proudly accept her sex and the responsibilities that go with it.”
· 74 ·
ANOTHER BIG MEDIA SPLASH came in the Saturday Evening Post, one of the few remaining giants of print, with close to five million in biweekly circulation. The five-thousand-word piece, a profile in the form of an extended interview, was written by an old friend, the journalist Hal Burton, and titled, This Is the Life I Love, “by Alicia Patterson as told to Hal Burton.” There she is, in a large black-and-white photo, on one of the magazine’s outsize pages: eyeglasses slightly askew atop her head, flecks of gray in her hair, furrows on her forehead; a smart inquisitive face, maybe a bit worn and wary, dark eyes staring right back at the reader.
In long columns of text, the story she told was casual, confident, an often surprisingly personal account of her life as she then seemed (or chose) to remember it, going back to early times, childhood; which, as we have seen, had actually played out in the shadow of alienated, warring parents, with a succession of nannies, mam’selles, Fräuleins, shifting domiciles, to say nothing of being shipped back and forth across the wide Atlantic, installed in pensions, hotels, boarding schools, institutions of lower and medium learning, Berlin, Lausanne, Rome; all of which jumbled, tumbled narrative she now breezily replayed for the benefit of Hal Burton as a mostly picaresque fable, with her own long-gone, youthful self reimagined as a kind of ugly-duckling antiheroine (“As a child I was not attractive, my hair a mess, my face often sulky”), a trial and burden to both parents and teachers (“I was rarely on time, had no patience for schoolrooms, schoolwork…don’t know why anyone put up with me”). Of her early adult years, during which she had excelled as a horsewoman, big-game hunter, and pioneer aviatrix, she now wrote dismissively: “My specialty was little more than making a business out of pleasure, my days filled with pointless preoccupations.” In six pages of print her mother received but a single mention: “Alice Higinbotham, whose father was president of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.” Sister Elinor was remembered for her “cold, withdrawn beauty and lovely hair”; though more kindly treated was sister Josephine (“We are as close as sisters can be”), also second husband, Joe Brooks, described as “a big-hearted aviator and all-around sportsman…who taught me much about the natural world.” Not surprisingly the major focus of the article was on Newsday, its humble origins and hard-won successes. For the umpteenth time she described the little Hempstead car dealership, the cramped offices, the youthful staff, the bumptious pranks; the lengthy learning curve from amateurishness to scrappy journalism to substantial investigative exposés, in turn leading to awards, prizes, serious circulation numbers.
She was characteristically generous in praise of her staff, finding time and space to honor by name the contributions not only of top editors but also her bu
siness manager, comptroller, advertising manager, and even typographical designer. But once again, as if some bad magic stayed her hand whenever the opportunity arose to extend a comparable accolade to her copublisher and husband, to share parenting honors, so to speak, she simply couldn’t or wouldn’t get beyond a chilly muttering of faint praise; as in, “my husband Harry F. Guggenheim, a businessman and philanthropist, who believes everybody should have a job.” More interesting, considering the bleak estrangement that once existed between Alicia and Joe Patterson at his death, was the warmth and intensity with which she now remembered her father: “A wonderful guy, big-hearted, tough, and born to understand what makes people tick; why they laugh and cry and hate and love, and why they buy some newspapers but ignore others,” she told Hal Burton. “I gladly admit it, living up to Father, getting his praise, in whatever ways it sometimes came, was always my greatest ambition…being his companion was my only real education.”
But along with these testaments of daughterly love, there was now a new note, a perhaps belated acknowledgment of a more problematic dimension to their intense relationship. “When I wasn’t in trouble on my own,” she recalled, “I seem to remember Father was usually brewing some up for me. Long after I had grown up, you could say that he continued to exert an almost hypnotic influence over me…and I would have died rather than fail him.” Then she recounted the dangerous fishing trip she had made with him to Panama in 1929, when Joe Patterson (who knew she was recovering from surgery) had pushed her beyond her physical limits to the point of serious internal injury. “I sometimes wonder,” she now wrote, with an almost childlike bewilderment, “if it might have been possible that Father felt an ambivalence towards me, a mixture of love as well as hate which somehow made him want to push my nervous system to the snapping point?” But even with that open-ended question on the page, she was still Poppa’s girl (Who else’s could she be?) and quickly backed away from where those thoughts might take her. “All I know,” she briskly concluded, “is that it was Father who taught me to be unafraid, not an easy lesson to teach a scatterbrained girl.” And not for the first time she retold the old family story about the Spartan boy and the fox—his story.
· 75 ·
ALICIA PATTERSON came from people (which is to say, family and forebears) who were no strangers to a number of U.S. presidents, beginning in those far-off, plainspoken, republican days before the White House became a fortress, its occupant a kind of emperor—not exactly friends; who after all is a friend to a president? At any rate some kind of familiar; a footnote in the histories, sometimes more than just a footnote.
First, and perhaps most vividly, had been her paternal great-grandfather, Joseph Medill, still a youngish man, not quite thirty, into whose cramped second-floor office, in the little Chicago Daily Tribune’s wood-frame building on State Street, one afternoon in May 1855, had appeared the elongated, ungainly form of the new congressman from the Seventeenth District, Abraham Lincoln, cash-money in hand as Joe Medill always told the story, wishing to sign for a subscription, then making it a point, each time he came up from Springfield, to drop in at editor Medill’s office to shoot the breeze and talk a little politics. Medill, already one of the founders of the Republican Party, would soon become a Lincoln familiar (one of the original “Lincoln men” from Illinois), sometime useful adviser, sometime singleminded critic, and a frequent White House visitor until the president’s death.
Three years after Lincoln, there was another Illinois downstater in the White House, a failed storekeeper though a more successful military man, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Medill and his wife, Kitty, by then prominent figures in Chicago society, found homespun President and Mrs. Grant hard going, but their older daughter, Kate, was the same age as Nellie Grant and the two girls became friends, with Kate a frequent White House visitor; there’s an old photo of little Kate Medill, all frills and frowns, seated on President Grant’s thick knees, in what is presumably the Oval Office.
Some years later, with Joe Medill by then an old man—bent over with arthritis, hard of hearing, with a foot-long ear trumpet, wintering in the humid warmth of Thomasville, Georgia—he was courted by another Midwestern congressman anxious for the presidency, William McKinley of Ohio. The Medills and the McKinleys became Thomasville friends after a fashion, sometimes taking “constitutional” walks with down-the-road neighbor Thomas Edison; the wives liked one another, more or less. Medill later threw his paper’s support behind McKinley, though he never quite forgave McKinley for once refusing to attend an afternoon’s Schubert musicale at the Thomasville Inn because the excessively pious Ohioan only allowed himself to listen to hymns.
When McKinley became president, Alicia’s paternal grandfather, the ill-fated Robert Patterson (married to Joe Medill’s younger daughter, Nellie), then editor of the Chicago Tribune as well as a bigwig in the Republican Party, became a frequent visitor to the McKinley White House; there’s a photo of tall, handsome, seemingly straight-arrow Robert Patterson and short, glinty-eyed McKinley, seated together on what is probably the presidential yacht, sweating together in the sun, in white linen suits, with their celluloid collars tightly buttoned.
Robert Patterson was apparently on easier terms with a later president, William Howard Taft; he was regularly in and out of the Taft White House, close enough to the huge, mostly good-natured president to send him a lengthy unusually personal letter, essentially blocking an attempt by his bullying sister-in-law, Kate Medill McCormick (the one once sitting on President Grant’s knees), to wangle an important ambassadorship for her McCormick husband, claiming Tribune support, which Patterson told Taft did not exist. The editor was on especially friendly terms with President Theodore Roosevelt, who once deployed a special presidential train to speed him from Washington to Cleveland in time for the wedding of Alicia’s uncle, Medill McCormick. As a footnote, it was Uncle Medill who in 1912 proposed offering the editorship of the Tribune to Teddy Roosevelt; a project quashed by her father and her uncle Bertie McCormick, who admired Roosevelt but had their own plans for the paper. (Another family footnote: In 1927, during the presidency of Calvin Coolidge, when the White House had to be vacated for repairs, Alicia’s aunt Cissy Patterson offered Coolidge her own Dupont Circle mansion as a substitute, which thus became the temporary White House for six months.)
As for the other Roosevelt, the Democratic Party’s FDR, young Joe Patterson and the slightly younger Franklin Roosevelt had been boarding schoolboys together at Dr. Endicott Peabody’s school in Groton, Massachusetts. They were not close in youth but later friends, or at least friendly, as Patterson threw his paper’s support behind the New Deal, and Roosevelt was grateful for the support, the president and the publisher exchanging countless notes and letters over many years, with many invitations to the White House, summer weekends at Hyde Park, boat rides on the Potomac; until as we saw, Joe Patterson overplayed his hand as a freethinking isolationist (if that is what he was doing), and the relationship did not survive Pearl Harbor.
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WHICH BRINGS US to a morning in April 1960, just before noon. A limousine drives up to the entrance of Newsday’s offices in Garden City, Long Island, and out steps a young—or at forty-three—still very much a youngish man, whose tousled hair, boyish face, and Boston-Irish-Harvard accent are fast becoming familiar to the country at large: Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, not yet president, though trying hard to be, for which he would first need the nomination of the Democratic Party, convening in Los Angeles in three months’ time.
Ostensibly the purpose of Kennedy’s pilgrimage to Newsday’s headquarters is to thank Alicia Patterson for her paper’s so-far-friendly coverage of his presidential campaign, especially for its editorials arguing that his Roman Catholicism shouldn’t be viewed by voters as an automatically disqualifying issue, not yet a mainstream position. But surely a secondary reason for Jack Kennedy’s visit, in many ways his more-pressing mission, which is probably why he came alone, a busy man in the middle of a busy schedule, t
aking a hired car from New York’s Carlyle Hotel to have lunch with a newspaper publisher out in the sticks of Long Island, was that this particular newspaper publisher, in addition to being able to deliver the numbers, the demographics, and so on, in an important market, was also a key voice in the ear of Adlai Stevenson.
The truth was that in the spring of 1960, Governor Stevenson, still the party’s popular standard bearer, after two lost elections against the even-more-popular Eisenhower, had apparently not entirely abandoned the idea of a third attempt. Granted he had not yet formally announced; he had assembled no serious campaign staff; besides, he wasn’t really campaigning; as he kept telling everyone, his hat wasn’t in the ring. And yet he knew there were loyalists still out there, true believers, party faithful, with their “Madly for Adlai” buttons ready to be dusted off and pinned on again. Who could tell what might or might not happen at a deadlocked convention? For instance, a “Draft Stevenson” movement? Stranger things had happened at two in the morning, at deadlocked conventions. And if so, how could he refuse? This characteristic Stevensonian coyness drove the tough-guy Kennedy people crazy. All spring JFK had been pulling inexorably ahead of Minnesota’s senator Hubert Humphrey, rapidly becoming the Democratic Party’s front-runner; he was popular, a strong campaigner, the party bosses were behind him. However, the final outcome was still in doubt, with Catholicism always a divisive issue, and the Republican vice president Richard Nixon a formidable foe. Worried Kennedy staff kept asking how much longer the ambivalent, indecisive, aggravating Adlai Stevenson would stay on his fence, obviously not in the race and yet unwilling to endorse Kennedy.