by Alice Arlen
Finally, the subject of Long Island’s development came up, and of Mitchel Field in particular. Alicia had a number of talking points written out on a notebook in her hand, but after listening for no more than a few minutes Kennedy pushed himself away from the table in his back-friendly rolling chair, reached for a phone, and said (as Woestendick remembered), “Get me Jeeb Halaby,” referring to Najeeb Halaby, the head of the FAA. A moment later the president said into the phone, “Jeeb, we don’t need Mitchel Field, do we? Let’s shut the damn thing.” Then he put the phone down, pushed himself back to the table, and said, “It’s closed.” As Najeeb Halaby remembered the exchange: “Actually, closing Mitchel was a very complicated issue, with many loose ends. But she had convinced him to skip the loose ends and just do it. She was a very persuasive and powerful woman.”
· 78 ·
FOR MUCH OF HER LIFE Alicia Patterson liked to present herself as a proudly, briskly unsentimental woman, almost an antisentimentalist, averse to kitsch, what she called gooey feelings, nostalgia, and so on, all of which helped her get along so well with tough-guy, wisecracking, mostly male newspaper people, to say nothing of the smart, cynical, sophisticated Manhattan crowd. Nonetheless, as her closest friends—the “Gunners” of old, sister Josephine, and very few others—well knew, her own past, with its soup of vague and vivid memories, with its powerful and sometimes deafening tribal music, was of huge and inescapable consequence to her, especially as she grew older.
Thus (although there’s no record one way or the other on the matter), when she had her White House moment, so to speak, hanging out with young JFK, the nation’s thirty-sixth president, shooting the breeze, doing a little business around the lunch table, then given a brief presidential walk-around ending up in the always-imposing Oval Office, it’s hard to believe she didn’t register, somewhere beneath her no-nonsense, newspaperwoman’s exterior, all sorts of tugs and tidal pulls, proverbial mixed feelings, to say nothing of raw, daughterly emotions, remembering her long-gone-but-never-forgotten Poppa, Capt. Joseph Patterson of Battery D, whose own muddled, complex, misguided interactions with the nation’s thirty-second (and original triple-initialed) president, FDR, had ended so painfully, disastrously, almost exactly twenty years ago; on that same blue carpet, in that same Oval Office, though now without secretary Grace Tully’s desk in the back of the room.
The new Publishing Patterson, with her newfound, modest White House access, tried to keep things simple; and for a while Alicia’s Kennedy connection produced some nice, positive results, both for Long Island as well as Newsday’s standing in the area, a community of now more than two million people. With Mitchel Field supporters overruled, the base was soon closed, and the land became available for residential and educational development. Soon afterward the president stepped forward with help on another problem that Patterson had raised in her lunchtime meeting at the White House, in this instance directing the air force to channel new contracts to Republic Aviation, an important Long Island aircraft manufacturer lately threatened by order cancellations and employee layoffs. In fact the years 1961 and 1962 represented a high point for Newsday, in terms of the paper’s growing advocacy and influence, helping to push Long Island in both a popular and progressive direction; with one of its most significant accomplishments being the creation of the Fire Island National Seashore, a hotly contested and at the time controversial piece of environmental legislation that in the end succeeded largely (as most sources agree) because Patterson not only took up the matter person-to-person, face-to-face with the secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, who had been inclined to decline the project, but was at the same time willing to fight for it despite the defiant opposition of an old friend, the powerful New York State Public Works Commissioner Robert Moses (The Power Broker of Robert Caro’s fine biography), who strenuously opposed it.
—
MEANTIME, THE FORMER GUV, now Mr. Ambassador, hadn’t disappeared, not a bit of it; besides, even though each of them sometimes drove the other crazy, they were too old to disappear on one another, too much like kin, kissing or nonkissing cousins, who finished each other’s sentences, corresponded continually, with Patterson often playing the lean-on-my-shoulders wifely role that was largely absent in her own marriage. In August 1962 she did something unusual for her, took a real holiday, the way other people did, not a “working vacation,” not a Spartan-boy, beat-yourself-up, fact-finding, discomfort-seeking mission to the Third World. She went to Europe. First, as part of a Stevenson-centered gathering of old friends, to Lake Como, north of Milan, where Stevenson’s old Harvard Law School roommate, Francis T. P. Plimpton (founding partner of Debevoise & Plimpton, and now a special representative at the UN) and wife, Pauline, hosted a two-week house party at their elegant hillside, lakeside villa: delicious al fresco lunches, interesting excursions, and in the evenings more good food, better wine, and all that talk, conversazione, between those softly, sleekly powerful East Coast Liberal Democratic rajas and their tart, clever wives, among whom Joe Patterson’s daughter surely by now felt almost at home. Then, on to Athens, part of a smaller group, again including the peripatetic Stevenson, assembling at the hallowed Hotel Grande Bretagne, followed by a leisurely tour of the Greek islands, aboard the stately motor yacht (formerly J. P. Morgan’s) chartered by Agnes Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post, the stately newspaper into which the late Cissy Patterson’s lively, unreliable Times-Herald had been merged. This was the next-to-last trip Stevenson and Patterson would make together, on the whole a happy one; Stevenson teased Alicia for traveling without a valise full of spiral-notebooks, Patterson chided the increasingly portly ambassador for his unadventurousness, for example taking a taxi to the top of Santorini instead of riding donkeys up the hill with the rest of them.
—
THEIR LAST TRIP CAME in late May 1963; both of them flying off together from New York’s still-named Idlewild Airport, bound first for San Francisco; a night at the Fairmont, then down the winding coast highway to Big Sur, where Stevenson’s newest grandchild was to be christened, at a family ceremony where she’d been asked to serve as godmother, an invitation that seemed to surprise even her by how much it mattered. The christenee was John Fell Stevenson’s firstborn—John Fell, the youngest of Stevenson’s sons, was perhaps the warmest, most responsive of the three boys, someone she had long known and felt close to, had bonded with on long overseas trips (as to Russia), and who now had seemingly chosen her, over all the rest of Adlai’s ladies, to be this honored, surrogate-mother figure for his and wife Natalie’s new baby. It was another kind of happy time for her, she who usually managed to be on the outskirts of family life, even when trying to participate after her fashion. The sun shone, as it should; the breeze blew, just the right amount, across the yellow-green meadow high above the Pacific. When she talked with Josephine soon after, she described the rare sweetness of the long afternoon, with its easy warmth, play of affections, multigenerational family bustle, that ancient pagan-churchly ritual, holding Adlai’s tiny grandson in her arms.
—
AND THEN (how else really to put it?) the roof fell in.
· 79 ·
ONE IS TEMPTED TO SAY that roofs don’t fall in all at once; there’s usually a preliminary creaking in the rafters, a warning snowfall of plaster or whatever; and perhaps if we were actually talking about a roof and not a person—a woman, this woman, Alicia Patterson—there might have been some visible warning, some easy-to-notice sign.
—
A FEW WEEKS AFTER returning from Big Sur, she flew off again, this time to Chicago, where she picked up her eighty-two-year-old mother—Mrs. A. H. Patterson, tiny, white-haired, frail and steely at the same time—and drove north with her, back to Lake Forest, eight miles north of the old town, with its Tudor-style storefronts, avenues of Palladian great houses, to the heavyset, nineteenth-century brickwork cluster of Lake Forest College, where Patterson was scheduled to receive an honorary degree at that year’s commencement exercises:
she (as Alicia more than once pointed out to her mother, who didn’t really need reminding) who had been tossed out, asked to leave, by so many schools and hadn’t even been to college. And while Lake Forest might not be Harvard or Yale, or even the University of Chicago, the institution still carried powerful meanings for both mother and daughter: founded in 1881 by Alicia’s other significant great-grandfather, the Reverend Robert Patterson, the charismatic minister of Chicago’s Second Presbyterian Church, coeval of Joseph Medill in the great early days of the city. On that mild, sunny June afternoon, Alicia’s mother sat on one of the hard little folding seats, in the front row of the commencement audience, and watched with quiet pride as Second Daughter, the difficult one, the one who was always somehow making waves, this time received the kind of sound, correct, dignified honor (unlike those always problematic, slightly show-offy magazine covers or journalism prizes) that had always meant so much to Alice Higinbotham Patterson. “I think she finally approved of me,” Alicia later said to Josephine.
—
YEARS LATER, what Dottie Holdsworth best remembered from that frantic yet strangely slow-motion drive through midmorning Long Island Parkway traffic, from Falaise toward the Triborough Bridge, then across the bridge and down the East River Drive to Doctors Hospital, was of her friend and boss, Alicia Patterson, alarmingly pale and weak on the backseat beside her, sometimes slumped over, seemingly passed out, but then struggling to sit up, now suddenly wide awake and talking to her with that familiar intensity, with her trademark husky briskness, about this new book she’d just been reading on the 1840s Irish famine (The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith), which Dottie must also absolutely, without fail, read as soon as she herself was done with it. The date was June 30, barely ten days after her return from Lake Forest; and the reason for Patterson’s pallor and weakness, for the emergency nature of the drive into the city, was that the night before she had begun bleeding again, hemorrhaging from her insides, apparently trying to deal with it on her own, calling no one, letting nobody know; but then during the night bleeding out so badly that she’d been found in the early morning on her bathroom floor, lying in a pool of blood, by her maid, Nan, who phoned Dottie, who in turn (over Alicia’s faint protestations) contacted her Long Island doctor and set the trip in motion.
By the time Patterson entered Doctors Hospital, she’d already lost roughly one-third of her normal blood supply, and was in a sufficient state of shock that she not so much entered the hospital as was carried in by Dottie and her driver, Noel Dean. She was taken first to intensive care and for twenty-four hours was given massive blood transfusions, three full units, plus intravenous feedings, which began to restore her to a “convalescent condition.” By the afternoon of July 1 she was considered well enough to be moved upstairs to one of the large rooms on the tenth floor, where she now reclined (in her own nightgown and bed jacket), fatigued though grumpily cheerful, receiving a steady parade of visitors, many from Newsday; also Josephine, summoned earlier by Dottie from Wyoming, niece Alice from Washington, and Harry Guggenheim arriving from Cain Hoy in South Carolina, all of whom were under the impression (as was the patient herself) that after a few days of rest and recuperation she would be on her way back to home and office.
There were now two doctors on the case: Dr. William Rawls, her regular physician, who had come back early from his vacation; and a Doctors Hospital specialist, Dr. Gere Lord (a former chief of surgery at the NYU Medical Center), both of whom were concerned about their well-known alternately charming and combative patient. The cause of the bleeding, both doctors agreed, was surely an ulcer—a “bleeding ulcer”; the problem was what to do about it. Since the hemorrhaging had stopped with the transfusions, and her general condition showed a return to near-normalcy, Dr. Rawls first proposed to Patterson that if she’d seriously promise to change her lifestyle—that is, reform her “habits” (within the modest parameters of the day) as to eating more nutritious foods and cutting down on cigarettes and alcohol—she might be able to avoid one or another of the then-standard surgical fixes. But Patterson, who liked quick fixes, solutions, action, almost as much as she disliked “goody-goody” diets and virtuous self-denial, surprised the avuncular Rawls by instantly opting for surgery. “Who wants to live on mashed potatoes and skim milk?” she said to Dottie Holdsworth, who, in the absence of visitors, sat in a chair near Alicia’s bed reading aloud to her from Agatha Christie.
Less surprised than Dr. Rawls was Dr. Lord, who had proposed surgery in the first place. He appreciated that Alicia wanted to have the problem fixed, and he didn’t anticipate any difficulties with the surgery, a gastric resection (or removal of a small part of the stomach), which was at the time the standard medical solution to aggressive ulcers, a procedure he had performed hundreds of times before with consistent success. Thus, soon after her go-ahead, on the morning of July 2, she was taken down to the fourth floor, anesthetized with sodium pentothal, and opened up. Lord quickly located the ulcerated area, which was—as he expected it might be, after checking the records of her 1952 surgery—at the juncture where her small intestine had been reattached to the stomach. He performed the resection without difficulty, removing roughly one-third of her stomach, then reattached a healthier part of the intestine (the jejunum), and sewed her up again.
In the recovery room on the same floor, Alicia soon regained consciousness, though the effects of the heavy anesthetic kept her groggy. Dr. Lord looked in on her from time to time, checked the nurses’ charts, and informed Josephine and Harry upstairs that Alicia was coming along well, as expected, and should be back in her room on the tenth floor in a few hours. But around five o’clock a nurse notified the surgeon of an unexpected, and certainly unwanted, development: Blood was showing up in the drainage tube from her stomach. As Gere Lord told Newsday biographer Robert Keeler many years later: “This was extremely unusual, and had not happened before in my experience.” At first they tried to stanch the bleeding with a saline solution, but this didn’t work; in fact the bleeding only seemed to be getting worse. At this point, Lord (now joined by another surgeon, Dr. William Hinton) decided that their best move was to reopen the patient and attempt to suture or somehow block the flow of blood.
At ten o’clock in the evening of July 2, barely twelve hours after her first surgery, Patterson was returned to the operating room for what her doctors cautiously hoped might be a quick repair job. But when they opened her stomach for the second time they saw what Lord described as “massive, widespread and inexplicable bleeding of the stomach lining.” Lord said that he briefly considered a gastrectomy, or total removal of the stomach, but rejected the plan as too extreme, too dangerous and burdensome for the patient. Instead he and Hinton decided on a more moderate solution: a vagotomy, or removal of the vagus nerve in the lower abdomen, which regulates blood flow to the stomach. This they did, or tried to do, a difficult undertaking in the best of circumstances, since the vagus nerve has numerous fibers, each one small and hard to find. By midnight or so they had done what nerve removal they could, patched her up again, and sent her back to the recovery room.
But the bleeding never stopped. Around nine o’clock in the morning, with Patterson glassily pale, weak, and barely conscious, the two surgeons decided—reluctantly, as a desperate measure—to make one more attempt to root out the hidden tributaries of the vagus nerve. For the third time in less than thirty-six hours Alicia was taken back into the operating room and opened up. On this occasion Dr. Hinton was lead surgeon; he and Lord removed such nerve fibers as they could find, also her spleen, which Hinton thought might be contributing to the bleeding. For the third time they sent her back to the little recovery room, and hoped, apparently without much confidence at that point, that the problem had been solved. When Josephine (the only visitor admitted) looked in on her later in the afternoon, Alicia was pale as a ghost but managed a weary smile. Josephine sat by her bed for a while, talked to her of this and that; at one point Alicia looked across at her younger sister. �
��Tell me true,” she said, employing traditional sister-speak. “Am I going to die?” And Josephine, who later remembered she actually didn’t think so, it was so impossible to think, said: “No, you’re not.”
—
BUT SHE DID, later that night. “At 11:25 p.m. July 2, 1963,” as indicated in the hospital records. Dr. Lord’s old files note the cause as “Unexplained and unstoppable bleeding.” She was fifty-six years old; too young, although maybe not for a Spartan.
EPILOGUE
0NE OF THE ALL-TOO-FEW benefits of dying too soon—in fact, pretty squarely in her prime—was that Alicia Medill Patterson Guggenheim (who over the years, at odd moments, had given formal thought to such matters) pulled a big crowd for her funeral: not merely a church-full but a cathedral-full. On a bright, windy July morning, close to one thousand people pressed into the Episcopal cathedral in Garden City, Long Island (her choice)—still-stunned Newsday staff; family, friends and acquaintances; plus a fine showing of politicians, editors, and publishers. As per her wishes, the outside of the cathedral was arrayed with a colorful amplitude of flowers; inside there were thick layers of orange roses covering her coffin; a choir chanting psalms and lustily bellowing Protestant hymns, concluding with her favorite, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which left scarcely a dry eye in the house. Two months later, a second rite took place, this one orchestrated by Harry Guggenheim: a quiet, sad little assembly on the banks of the St. Mary’s, with her family gathered on the lawn beneath the great oak tree that stood (and still stands) between the house and the river, its branches heavy with Spanish moss, and under which her ashes were buried beneath a simple plaque, whose tender inscription (“A beautiful and spirited lady lived on this land, and under this oak tree she watched the river that she loved.”) had been composed by Harry, who seemed truly to miss his lively, quick-witted sparring partner now that she was gone.