A NOTE ABOUT Joe Patterson’s evolving (or devolving) politics: While Alicia (and Harry) were launching their little Hempstead daily, the wider world, especially the world across the Atlantic, was in an awful mess, and a mess that was only getting worse. Earlier, in June, France had fallen to Hitler’s armies; by late summer the Battle of Britain was taking place in the skies over southern England, with Edward R. Murrow broadcasting his rallying, sympathetic radio commentaries, which began “This is London,” back to a mostly East coast audience. Joe Patterson, alas, was not a fan of Murrow or his broadcasts. “The man employs a fine, upperclass, baritone voice, trying his best to persuade farmers, factory workers, ordinary Americans to come and fight Great Britain’s war,” read one of his increasingly sour Daily News editorials, perhaps not actually written by the editor but certainly approved by him.
Patterson was even less a fan of the man he had once, and even lately, admired: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was campaigning in the fall of 1940 for an unprecedented third term, and campaigning to a great extent on his repeated promise to “keep us out of war.” Patterson couldn’t stand it that the president, whom he had done so much to support with his enormous Daily News readership (and early, too, when he needed it, before his popularity hardened into iconic statuary) was obviously bent on taking the country once more into a European war. Worse still, as Patterson saw it—one Old Grotonian critiquing another for not “playing fair”—he wasn’t being straight about it but trying to sneak the country into war under the cover of unavoidably antineutralist policies, such as the proposed Lend-Lease agreements with Britain. As he continued to berate the president in print throughout the 1940 campaign, Patterson seems to have assumed that his own patriotic credentials were unassailable: he was a combat veteran of the Great War, widely referred to as Captain Patterson, someone whom FDR himself, as recently as 1938, had briefly talked with as to his becoming secretary of the Navy, an offer Patterson had politely declined. That was one mistake; another was less understandable: Patterson seems also to have assumed that his long-standing political differences with, and editorial independence from, his ultraconservative cousin, Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, along with his own self-described seriousness about foreign policy, somehow immunized him from being lumped together by an embattled and angry White House with McCormick—often derisively referred to by the president as “Colonel McCosmic”—and the rest of the isolationist horde.
IN THE COURSE of that same 1940 presidential campaign, it turned out that Alicia and her new husband were having their own political differences. Her deputy Stan Peckham described a meeting one afternoon in her “library” at Falaise, a little downstairs room she had been allowed by Harry to decorate as she pleased, in this instance nothing medieval, mostly comfortable chintz. He and Alicia had been working on a forthcoming Newsday editorial, one strongly endorsing FDR, when Harry Guggenheim appeared. “I think he was surprised to see me there,” Peckham remembered, “as if I belonged in Hempstead and not at Falaise. But then he started reading the editorial, and you could see there was a problem. I forget exactly what was said, and I tried at first to leave seeing there was going to be a row. I think she reminded him they had an agreement. What agreement? he might have said. It was one of those times. But it was true, she was Editor and so she had the right to set editorial policy. Newspaper people know that, but Harry wasn’t a newspaper person, then or ever. He figured he was the owner, it was his money, really his paper, and it would reflect his views. In they end, they worked something out. I think it was something her father had devised when he and McCormick were disagreeing in the Tribune years ago. She and Harry wrote “His” and “Hers” editorials, running side by side. That was for the 1940 election. She really wanted Roosevelt, Harry hated him and wanted Wendell Wilkie [sic]. I guess we all know how that worked out.”