The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  With Patterson’s brisk informality a good match for Kennedy’s own polished casualness, she took him to lunch at Nino’s, down the street from her office, bringing along a pack of reporters and editors to share the moment. Predictably the Newsday staff (including the often obstreperous Hathway, who remained sober and polite throughout the event), as well as its more-or-less worldly editor, were easily susceptible to the Kennedy charm, and the Newsday lunch ran on convivially for several hours. But when it came to the unofficial agenda, Patterson wasn’t yet ready to lean on Adlai, to give up on the Guv. She liked Jack Kennedy, politically as well as personally, and told him as much; she said she thought he would make a good president. However, when a private moment occurred toward the end of the long lunch, with Kennedy pressing her for an endorsement, a public commitment (which might be especially useful in the signal it would send to Stevenson), at first she said nothing; then, as the reporter Bob Greene remembered it (and as noted in Robert Keeler’s book Newsday), she told the young senator: “If anything happens out there, you’re definitely my second choice.”

  · 76 ·

  BY “OUT THERE,” Alicia meant Los Angeles, site of the Democratic National Convention, already by mid-July its usual sun-bright, high-Fahrenheit, otherworldly self, the nation’s recently tabulated Second City, lately edging past Chicago in population, though struggling through one of its periodic slumps, with the Big Studios in various stages of collapse and with Big Television not yet ready for prime time.

  As it happened, the Stevenson campaign was also not ready for prime time, with its candidate still not publicly declared, and thus with no official status despite an influx of hundreds of bright-eyed Stevenson Volunteers, who swarmed the lobby of the stodgy downtown Biltmore Hotel (Democratic Party headquarters), where party managers, politely and otherwise, declined to provide office space for a noncandidate. By the Saturday before the convention opened, a solution of sorts had been found by the Volunteers, who took over the top floor of the abandoned Paramount Studios building, right across from the Biltmore on Pershing Square, and due to be demolished in a month’s time, from whose grimy windows they unfurled a one-hundred-foot-long, hand-painted banner proclaiming “Stevenson For President” for the benefit of party stalwarts and conventioneers assembling at the Biltmore. Stevenson himself flew into town that weekend, accompanied by his eldest son, Adlai, Jane and Edison Dick, and Marietta Tree, all of whom put up in the pink-and-green, palm-and-stucco fineness of the Beverly Hills Hotel (a fair distance from the dreary downtown), with Stevenson himself installed in one of the hotel’s famous poolside bungalows, where on Sunday afternoon he gave tea to Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s eighty-four-year-old widow.

  With the indomitable Mrs. Roosevelt (“the Conscience of the Party,” as everyone was always describing her) out poolside in Beverly Hills—doing her earnest, queenly best to light a fire under Stevenson, urging him to at least offer himself as a possible draft candidate to the convention delegates—some twenty miles away, in her cluttered hotel room in the Biltmore, Patterson was getting herself up to speed at what she’d long considered one of the great kicks of the newspaper business: working a convention, as it was called back in the days before those once shambly, sweaty, smoky, loosey-goosey political assemblies became sanitized and tightened up for television, when convention floors, hotel rooms, and corridors provided an unscripted, often rowdy, garrulous mass of delegates and mostly print reporters, on the prowl for stories, not sound bites. Patterson had brought Newsday’s political editor, three reporters, and a photographer with her to Los Angeles, whose assignments she was trying to sort out and orchestrate in the hit-or-miss fashion of those days before cell phones. She was also trying to figure out what, if anything, she might be able to do, at this late stage in the drama, to help her friend Adlai.

  The truth of the matter, as she understood it, was that weeks before the convention opened, despite all the chanting Stevenson Volunteers, despite gallant Mrs. Roosevelt, despite the sentimental loyalty of some party elders, pretty much every poll and delegate count pointed to an almost certain Kennedy nomination, probably on the first ballot. Patterson herself had gamely stayed loyal to Stevenson through much of the spring, no matter how strongly Kennedy performed in the primaries. As late as May 31 she had signed an editorial endorsing Stevenson for president on the grounds that he was “most qualified to stand up to the totalitarian powers.” But two days before the convention she had bowed to the inevitable, and without explicitly endorsing Kennedy (or ditching Adlai), she had signed another editorial, this time suggesting that “the ideal Democratic ticket would contain a promise of Adlai E. Stevenson for Secretary of State.”

  Stevenson “at State,” a senior member of the new cabinet, wasn’t such an unexpected or farfetched proposition. He and Patterson had discussed it often over the years, on their walkabouts in Georgia, in the course of long travels overseas, more notably since his last signal defeat in 1956, when it began to appear as a kind of theme in their endless chatty correspondence, with his finding a variety of thinking-out-loud ways of saying that State was a prize he would be happy to receive, not the Great Prize he had been vainly seeking for a decade but still a worthy satisfying substitute. After all, this was still the heyday of American internationalism, when foreign affairs, foreign policy, foreign news, foreign anything-and-everything was where the action was, the moral goal and career destination for so many of the nation’s best and brightest. The question was, Could Stevenson now be realist enough, sufficiently decisive, to seize the chance if it was offered?

  Granted, it hadn’t yet been offered, but Patterson thought she had a plan, a way of moving the idea along in a manner of speaking. The Kennedys at the time were down the street, two blocks away, in the businesslike Roosevelt Hotel, all of them, Father Joe and Mother Rose, all the brothers, daughters, in-laws, assistants, advisers, a mighty army, taking up most of one of the big hotel floors. One of the Newsday reporters out in Los Angeles, Bob Greene, supposedly was on friendly terms with Kennedy’s tough-guy younger brother and campaign manager, Robert Kennedy.

  Late Sunday afternoon Alicia reached Greene by phone, asked him to find Bobby Kennedy in person, and find out on her behalf what it would take to guarantee the State Department job for Stevenson. Greene made his way to the crowded Kennedy suite at the Roosevelt, found Bobby Kennedy, and asked him Patterson’s question. Neither then nor afterward was Bobby Kennedy much of a fan of Adlai Stevenson; moreover the Kennedy camp sensed victory, probably on the first ballot. And yet the Kennedys knew there might be problems: A Draft-Stevenson motion could gather momentum; Stevenson himself might siphon off some of the Illinois delegates. As narrated in Robert Keeler’s book, Kennedy told Greene that the campaign could make no firm commitment to Stevenson, but if Stevenson swiftly and decisively withdrew his name as a potential nominee, then threw his support behind JFK, such a decision would certainly be viewed favorably by his brother.

  Call it preference or habit, nature or nurture, Patterson was a woman who believed firmly in getting on with it, especially if it was something that so obviously needed decision. No sooner did she hear back from Bob Greene as to Robert Kennedy’s response—not a definite yes, though not a no, apparently a serious maybe—than she lost no time in sending Greene out again into late-afternoon Los Angeles, now in a taxi speeding down the freeway to the Beverly Hills Hotel, with a hastily handwritten note for Stevenson, the gist of which was that she had just been in contact with Bobby Kennedy, and if Adlai still wanted a chance to be secretary of state, as she knew he did, he needed right then to get out of the race and back John Kennedy, and to do this soon, now.

  But of course Stevenson’s own temperament, equally well honed over the years (as was Alicia’s), inclined him just as surely in an opposite direction, toward a determined (and what some had come to see as an almost pathological) avoidance of choice, an avoidance often made easier by the language of high-minded indecision. By the time Greene reached Stevenson’s poolsi
de bungalow, the governor was out or inaccessible, and so he left Patterson’s letter in the care of a senior aide, with pressing instructions that Stevenson read it immediately when he came in. Then he returned to the Biltmore, where the lobby and corridors were buzzing with the increasing certainty of Jack Kennedy’s nomination, and upstairs to where Patterson was waiting, if not for some personal response from Adlai, then at least for some indication on the nightly news that Stevenson had finally terminated his quixotic noncandidacy.

  However, by the next morning, Monday, when the Democratic National Convention officially opened for business in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, it was clear from newspapers and news channels, by omission as well as commission, that there had been no change in Stevenson’s position. Toward noon a letter was delivered to Patterson from “A.E.S.” saying simply, “I know that Kennedy has the votes but in the end I couldn’t disappoint Eleanor and Herbert who still think I have a chance, although I know I don’t. I’m sure that Bobby and the Kennedy crowd will appreciate my situation.”

  To the extent that people remember the 1960 Democratic convention, they remember it first for the acclamation of the youthful, glamorous John Fitzgerald Kennedy (with beauteous Jackie beside him, and the whole Kennedy family entourage), and perhaps also for the Kennedy brothers’ tough, offstage horse-trading that brought Lyndon Baines Johnson aboard as vice president. But then, in that zone between not quite forgotten and not really remembered, save as a strange elegiac footnote, was Adlai Stevenson’s final appearance on the big political stage. On Tuesday night, in the lull before the nominating speeches, with nothing still theoretically decided, when Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois was introduced and stepped onto the platform, there erupted in the auditorium a literally unprecedented twenty-seven whole minutes of applause and cheers and waving placards and parading in the aisles; no one could remember the equal of such a demonstration, and the fact is there’s never been one since. And then the Guv stepped to the microphone, almost hesitantly so it seemed, with the huge crowd expectantly hushed (with Patterson looking on from the press section, with the Kennedys in their hotel room watching on TV), and said in effect…nothing: a few softly graceful words of thanks, how touched he was, how undeserving and so on, and then made a small mild joke, and was gone, without so much as a murmur about the Kennedy tsunami that everyone knew was about to overwhelm the convention. Back in the Kennedy suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, Robert Kennedy was heard to say: “My God, the man still can’t make up his rabbit-assed mind.”

  · 77 ·

  PATTERSON WAS NOW FIFTY-SEVEN, not young, not that old, on the whole feeling pretty good; seemingly no more endemic, soul-sapping bouts of weakness, no more existential weariness. She still kept Epictetus by her bed in Georgia, though by now layered under other books, more a talisman to keep the room safe than a life preserver. Besides, she wasn’t down in Kingsland all that much; one week in the fall, ten days in spring.

  Mostly, she was busy.

  Newsday was humming, still growing, achieving heft both in journalistic substance as well as circulation numbers. Profits also meant more and better hires, in all departments. Twice, or maybe more, she’d made up her mind to fire the rough-edged, still-incorrigible Hathway; but each time she’d backed away from getting rid of someone whose talk and walk and pretty much everything about him reminded her not only of her own paper’s plainspoken origins but also of the rough-and-tumble “Front-Page” school of newspapering she’d grown up with. As a kind of compromise, she steadily signed on a cohort of young, smart, matter-of-factly college-trained journalists: editors who could think as well as make decisions, reporters who could cover local crimes as well as national stories.

  Things were even okay, fairly stable, in the copublisher arena. True, the bitterly contested Kennedy-Nixon campaign hadn’t made for an easy time, with Harry legally entitled to write and run (which of course he did) his horrible, sour, scaremongering pro-Nixon editorials on the very same page as her closely reasoned, New Frontier arguments for JFK; and it obviously didn’t help things that the election had been so close, down to the wire: in the end stolen by those thugs in Cook County, as Harry angrily averred; fairly decided by tough Chicago politics, as she defiantly explained. But by now this was old ground between the two of them, old news; she might still blow off steam to anyone who’d listen, sister Josephine probably at the top of the list, but there didn’t seem to be that much heat in the steam anymore.

  Speaking of Josephine, her oldest son, Joseph Albright, a recent Williams College graduate (homage to Joe Brooks), was now rising in the ranks at Newsday; her older daughter, Alice, veteran of the trip to Russia, more or less amicably bullied by her aunt Alicia into going to Radcliffe instead of Wellesley, was currently the first female elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson.

  Patterson was somewhat sad but mostly realistic about the Guv, who of course was never seriously in the running for JFK’s secretary of state (why would an energetic president want a “rabbit-assed” secretary of state?), but who had found some salve for his pride in the fine-sounding though decidedly less consequential post of ambassador to the United Nations—just how inconsequential, how far down the totem pole, he would ruefully discover come April 1961, when as a result of being deliberately kept out of the loop by the Kennedys on the Bay of Pigs debacle, he was forced to stand before the General Assembly of the UN (an institution he had helped found) and tell a series of palpable lies about United States involvement.

  Her own relationship with the new president got off to a fine start a few months after his inauguration, at which time he had famously declared, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” But with Kennedy soon running into a headwind of obstacles at every turn, Patterson helpfully tossed him a softball, writing a public “Letter to the President” editorial in Newsday, asking him to “Spell out for the American people, many of whom wish nothing better than to respond to your call and to do something for our country…exactly what you think must be done…what actions we should take…where we need to sacrifice…?” Kennedy responded quickly to Patterson’s editorial with his own lengthy “Letter to Mrs. Alicia Patterson,” which Newsday naturally ran with much fanfare, spread out over two pages, as did the New York Times and Time, which titled its story “Alicia’s Pen Pal.” Unfortunately Kennedy’s reply was not one of his speechwriters’ more graceful or memorable efforts, full of earnest presidential boilerplate about “the needs of citizens to support our national defense…and strive for excellence at home,” but a rapport of sorts had been created between “the President and the Publisher,” as the media played the story for a while.

  A few months later Patterson’s connection to the new president kicked into an even higher gear, providing a number of tangible benefits to both Newsday and the Long Island communities it served. The matter at issue was the fate of Mitchel Field, a military airfield commissioned back in 1917, during World War I, on eleven hundred acres of what was then little-used farmland in sparsely populated Nassau County. Over the years several obvious problems had arisen with this arrangement, notably the building boom that now surrounded the once-little rural airfield (where both Alicia and her father had learned to fly) with residential structures great and small, along with the dangerous challenges of new aircraft trying to use an increasingly outdated facility.

  There were also two competing solutions: The one favored by Alicia and her Newsday editors was to close the field and use the substantial acreage for the expansion of Hofstra University and a local community college; the rival plan, supported by the local chamber of commerce (also by Harry Guggenheim) was to close Mitchel as a military base but reopen it as an airfield for business aircraft. The situation seemed to be stuck in one of those almost-deliberate bureaucratic limbos, even after the especially alarming crash of an air force bomber, which resulted in the death of two airmen while narrowly missing a housing development. With the Federal Aviation Authority se
emingly unwilling or incapable of coming to a decision, Patterson asked one of her editors, Bill Woestendick, to phone Kennedy’s office and request an appointment to discuss the problem. Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, remembered the request, which he passed on to the busy president, expecting to be told to schedule something in the usual two or three months’ time. Instead (as reported by Bob Keeler), Salinger recalled the president saying, “Let’s do it right away. Ask her to come down for lunch tomorrow.”

  Patterson was sufficiently excited by the sudden invitation to forgo the customary shuttle flight from LaGuardia, with its possible delays, and instead arranged to be driven down (with Woestendick), leaving Falaise just before dawn. On arriving at the White House she and Woestendick were shown into the family quarters, where the president soon joined them, cheerfully reminding Alicia of her earlier hospitality to him at Nino’s. They had Bloody Marys together and then went into the family dining room for lunch (which Alicia remembered as ending with ice-cream cake), in the course of which many subjects were discussed: the hazards of presidential press conferences; an imminent steel strike; the pros and cons of young Teddy Kennedy’s political ambitions; Jackie Kennedy’s imminent trip to India.