The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  —

  AS TO ALICIA’S MASTER PLAN for the future of Newsday—a work in progress that consumed much time and energy as well as generating handsome legal fees (and which seemed to have at its core some varying degree of ownership sharing among Josephine’s children)—needless to say, her persistent and combative yearning for Harry’s crucial 2 percent had been predicated on the expectation of his dying first. Upon Alicia’s death, Harry took over as sole publisher, and also editor, and for seven years by general agreement continued to run Newsday as a successful and respected newspaper. To nobody’s surprise, he quickly got rid of Alan Hathway. But then in 1967 he surprised a good many people, possibly even himself, by turning over the job of publisher to young Bill Moyers, while staying on as editor in chief. Moyers was not only young but a Democrat; he had been a well-regarded press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson. But he was smart, astute, politically moderate, and personally appealing; sufficiently so for Guggenheim soon to regard him as “family” and even include him in his will. But as the Vietnam War split the country into opposing camps, Harry (more and more feeling his age and natural conservatism) came to view Moyers’s still-moderate-though-antiwar position as a betrayal, and fired him from both the paper and his will.

  In 1970 Harry sold Newsday to the then-conservative Los Angeles Times-Mirror, under whose distant ownership it continued to flourish, extending itself into greater New York, first with a Queens edition, then a stand-alone Manhattan daily, New York Newsday. However, in 2000, as an early symptom of the challenges that newspapers would increasingly face in the Internet era, the Times-Mirror sold itself to the Chicago Tribune, with the result that for a few years Alicia Patterson’s little garage start-up became a subsidiary of the giant Midwestern monolith created by her ancestors, and which for generations had continued both to enrich and to devour them. Eventually even the once-mighty Tribune was forced to declare temporary bankruptcy, and in 2008 Newsday was purchased for $680 million by the cable television conglomerate Cablevision. Its current headquarters are still on Long Island in Melville, New York, about twenty miles from Garden City. At present writing, Newsday is sold throughout the New York metropolitan area, though its focus is back to Long Island. Its weekly circulation is the eleventh-highest in the country, the largest among suburban newspapers. Since its inception, Newsday has won twenty-two Pulitzer Prizes and has been a finalist in nineteen additional entries.

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  While we have tried to make our account of Alicia Patterson’s eventful, idiosyncratic life reasonably brief, even untome-like in the telling, in keeping with our subject, we would like the reader to know that the narrative, facts, details, and so on in this volume derive from a proverbial storehouse of research material: privately held family correspondence, library collections, books and manuscripts (some unpublished), photographs, newspaper and magazine archives, etc. A substantial resource has been the Papers of Alicia Patterson, originally part of the Estate of Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, later augmented by the Papers of Josephine Patterson Albright (made available by the heirs of Josephine Patterson Albright): a compendium of personal and official correspondence, documents, memoranda, photographs, and published and unpublished journalism. Other valuable sources have been the Joseph Medill Patterson Manuscript Collection, Donnelley and Lee Library, Lake Forest College; the Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University; the Papers of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, First Division Museum, Cantigny Park, Illinois. Also “Joseph Medill Patterson: Right or Wrong, American,” by Joseph M. P. Patterson, undergraduate thesis, History Department, Williams College, 1958; and “Alicia Patterson Profile,” by J. M. Flagler, The New Yorker (unpublished manuscript), 1963. Last but by no means least, the authors wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to Robert F. Keeler, author of the masterful Newsday: A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid (William Morrow, NY, 1990), who also generously provided Alice Arlen with extensive research materials, letters, documents, interview tapes relating to Alicia Patterson, Harry F. Guggenheim, et al., from his own files and Newsday archives.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Alice Arlen is the author of Cissy Patterson. For many years, she was a successful screenwriter: among her credits are Silkwood (cowritten with Nora Ephron), nominated for an Academy Award; Alamo Bay; Cookie; A Shock to the System; Then She Found Me; The Weight of Water. She is the niece of Alicia Patterson and (until her death in March 2016) lived in New York.

  Michael J. Arlen was for thirty years a staff writer and television critic at The New Yorker. He is the author of many books, including Thirty Seconds, An American Verdict, Exiles, which was short-listed for a National Book Award, and Passage to Ararat, which won a National Book Award.

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