AND SO: THREE PUBLISHERS, one of them of a most important newspaper, stuck in the South Carolina woods, with a lot of dead quail at their feet and the country suddenly at war. What to do next? On their way back to the house, Harry Guggenheim, no stranger to executive decisions, proposed that he charter a plane to fly them all from Charleston back to New York. But Joe Patterson, not for the first time in a longish life, was already listening to his own different drummer. The man who had been preaching, indeed bellowing, in print for the past two years against the country being drawn into war seemed now to be taking the Japanese attack personally, and produced a characteristically personal response. On the primitive telephone in Cain Hoy’s business office, waiting to be connected to an operator in Charleston, herself obviously new to national emergencies, trying in turn to connect to other operators up the long line to New York, Patterson finally reached his deputies at the Daily News, who confirmed the disaster in Hawaii and Roosevelt’s declaration of war.
At that point, Alicia recalled, everyone present expected to hear him arrange an immediate return to his office in New York. Instead he asked for a plane to fly him to Washington, also for a message to be sent to Fred Pasley (the paper’s Washington bureau chief) telling him that he wanted an appointment “right at the top,” so that he could offer his services to the army. If anyone then, such as the normally commonsensical, even prudent, Mary King, thought to second-guess this plan, no one apparently spoke up; besides, despite his self-proclaimed, regular-guy mannerisms, Joe Patterson was someone who rarely invited disagreement, least of all from family. His daughter Alicia, in fact, despite what happened, always remembered the odd sweetness of that moment, saw it as another of Poppa’s romantic gestures: Captain Patterson of Battery D, who at thirty-eight had proudly volunteered for World War I, now at sixty-one an even older soldier, but once again patriotic, positive, showing up to defend his country when attacked. They said their good-byes at the little Charleston airfield, she and Harry taking Mary King back with them to New York; Joe Patterson standing tall and rumpled beside his old leather valise, waiting for the Daily News plane to fly in and take him on to Washington.
JOE PATTERSON’S LAST RIDE (if we may call it that) was surely a sad and sorry affair, one whose outcome in retrospect, and even at the time, mightn’t have been all that hard to predict. We present it here as part of Alicia’s story, because that’s what it was too, a wildly ill-considered venture that he seems to have allowed, or perhaps willed, to define his final years, his relations with life, with the world at large, the world in small, and certainly with Alicia; and also, because as part of the public record, many of the details are still accessible.
Patterson apparently landed in Washington on the afternoon of December 9, with Fred Pasley on hand to meet him. Pasley wasn’t one of the Daily News isolationists; he was a World War I veteran, smart, hardworking, and he and Patterson got on well together. According to Pasley’s recollections, Patterson’s preoccupation from the start was “his desire to get back on active duty, no matter the rank, no matter the posting.” Pasley more or less had to interrupt his boss’s patriotic outpourings, saying that he’d “already spoken with Steve” (Steve Early, President Roosevelt’s press secretary), who told him that the president would see Patterson on December 10—in fact, the next morning. Such a quick response from Roosevelt might not be totally unexpected; over the years of FDR’s presidency the Daily News editor had been a frequent visitor at the White House, an honored guest at numerous official dinners, a summertime guest at Hyde Park as well as on the presidential yacht; Patterson had personally raised the funds to build a swimming pool in the basement of the White House, where Roosevelt could exercise his crippled limbs. However, it was also true that, for at least the past year and a half, Patterson and the president had been publicly and often angrily at odds, on what might superficially be called the war issue, on foreign policy, but which in fact reflected a deeper argument: isolationism versus internationalism, Roosevelt trying to save the world (or at least the European world), Patterson combatively challenging him for, as he saw it, betraying American interests. Perhaps momentarily conscious that he would be taking up the time of a president suddenly at war, Patterson pressed Fred Pasley, did the president really wish to see him? Pasley said that he had confirmed the meeting with Steve Early: the president wanted to see him.
Patterson spent the night with his sister, Cissy, at her house on Dupont Circle: in fact the same grand, white-marble mansion that his mother, Nellie, had built as soon as she had come into her Chicago Tribune inheritance, where Henry Adams and Henry James had come to tea and which President Calvin Coolidge had used as a substitute White House when the real one was being repaired. Over the years Joe Patterson and Cissy had weathered a long, bumpy relationship: as she saw it, he was the sometimes overbearing though adored older brother, who could mainly do no wrong; for him she was the glamorous, provocative, often too-smart-for-her-own-good younger sister who couldn’t seem to help making trouble for others as well as for herself.
That evening, with the nation only three days into war, with no reason for anyone to be confident about the outcome, or where or when some new attack might next occur, Cissy, with too much to drink as usual, and with her fondness for conspiracy theories, launched into her own anti-Roosevelt tirades, accusing the president of dishonesty, deception, having advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, and much else besides. Her brother, himself no stranger to alcohol-fueled outbursts, commonly reacted to Cissy’s harangues, indeed to most female displays of emotion, by retreating into his own alternate universe of almost prim, pained withdrawal. Later that night he sat at his desk in the guest room composing a letter to the director of recruitment at the War Department: “I have the current rank of Major in the U.S. Army Reserves, although I would serve at any rank….My preference would be for active service with the troops….I am sixty-two years of age, am in good health, and am licensed to operate a motor vehicle.”
Fred Pasley showed up at 15 Dupont Circle at nine thirty the next morning, and the two men set off on the short walk down Connecticut Avenue to the White House. Pasley noted that Patterson’s suit was smartly pressed for a change, his white shirt crisp, his shoes shined. From the light traffic on the broad avenue, the usual flow of men and women walking to work, it was hard to see that anything much was different from any other Wednesday, though as they drew closer to the White House it was clear there were more police in place, more activity near the entrance. Pasley steered Patterson around to a side door, away from possible reporters, prying eyes (a maneuver Patterson noticed noncommittally), where the president’s press secretary, Steve Early, stood waiting for them. Early shook hands warmly with Patterson, while Pasley took his leave; then Early led Patterson into the White House, down a narrow corridor, opening the door to an antechamber just outside the Oval Office and left him there in the empty room.
Joe Patterson had been inside that room many times before (first when Theodore Roosevelt had been president), with its stiff-backed chairs, blue carpeting, Olivet landscapes on the walls, but he had usually not been kept waiting, at least not for long. This time the minutes ticked by slowly—ten minutes, twenty minutes, maybe longer. He lit a cigarette, tried not to look at his watch, shifted his weight in the small chair, and as he was wont to do, bounced his legs up and down, hands on his knees. Should he get to his feet? Should he assume the president was understandably too busy to see him, make a tactful exit? Just then the wood-paneled door in front of him opened; Grace Tully, the president’s private secretary, stood in the doorway. “Captain Patterson?” she said crisply, something between a question and a statement. “The president will see you now.” Joe Patterson put out his cigarette, pushed himself to his feet, tried to throw back his congenitally slumping shoulders, and marched briskly into the big room.
As expected, the president was behind his desk, the large presidential desk covered from end to end with folders and papers; he was seated somewhat at an angle, his crippled legs extended to the side, in the act of reading something, a paper, a document, periodically making notations with a pencil, his signature cigarette holder (with cigarette) between his lips, tilted upward at its familiar angle. Grace Tully stayed in the room but was now seated at her own small desk in the back. Patterson remained where he had stopped, standing erect, more or less in a soldier’s posture, on the blue-and-green carpet near the center of the room. The president continued working at his papers, turning over some, making notes on others, seemingly unaware of Patterson standing there, ten feet away. Finally, after about ten or so very long minutes, Franklin Roosevelt raised his large head, his face still reddened with windburn from a recent outing on the Potomac, squinting through the smoke from his cigarette, and as if surprised that Patterson should be in the room, said: “Well, Joe, what brings you here?”
Most certainly this was not the question Patterson expected to be asked. Hadn’t reliable Fred Pasley assured him, then reassured him, that the president wished to see him? Only thirty minutes before, hadn’t Steve Early, the president’s own man, welcomed him as an expected guest?
“I am here to offer my services, Mr. President,” is what Patterson said. No matter how often Roosevelt had urged him to call him “Frank,” Patterson knew better; a president was always “Mr. President.” There were two empty chairs nearby, between where he was standing and the president’s desk, but Roosevelt didn’t ask Patterson to sit down; in fact, his quizzical squint seemed to be turning hard. “You’re offering me your services, Joe?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
What Joe Patterson had no way of knowing, standing there, an old man trying to keep a military bearing, literally on the carpet in the Oval Office, was that just then he was at the center of a disastrous sequence of miscommunications. Whatever Fred Pasley may have thought he’d originally communicated to Steve Early, as to his boss’s desire to pay a patriotic call on the president, offering his military services, the actual memo that Early sent to Roosevelt’s appointments secretary for the president’s review, clearly stated: “Captain Joe Patterson, publisher of the Daily News, will be in town for the day, Dec. 10. Patterson is coming to town, Fred Pasley tells me, with the hope of seeing the President, for the purpose of saying that he has been wrong in his isolationist policy and wishes to admit his error to the President.” Grace Tully’s office then replied: “Tell Early to inform Pasley that the President is standing by.” But no one had passed the word to Patterson that the president was expecting an apology, and that the mere act of Patterson offering his services would be nowhere near enough for Franklin Roosevelt, still smarting from vicious attacks only a week before in Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, also in Cissy Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald, and who was not likely to disassociate the Daily News editor from the hostility and opinions of the family’s other newspapers.
The president’s voice began to rise. “Do you know how your newspapers have held back our war effort? Do you know how much harm you’ve caused, what trouble you’ve made?” He called out to Grace Tully: “Grace, bring me some of those editorials!” But even before she could come over with the folders, already lying on her desk, the president started to recite from memory, one after another, the latest sharply worded criticisms from the Chicago Tribune, the Times-Herald, and then finally from Patterson’s own editorial, earlier in the year, telling the nearly two million readers of the Daily News that the president of the United States was himself no better than a dictator, trying to push the country into a European war. When Roosevelt was finally done with his recitation (Grace Tully in her memoir wrote that she had never heard the president “lay it on the line” as he did with Patterson that morning), far from offering Patterson some role, active or inactive, in the armed forces, he coldly asked: “What do you have to say for yourself, Joe?”
“What I wrote was published in peacetime, Mr. President,” Patterson replied. “Now it’s wartime and I should like to serve my country.”
“I’ll tell you what you can do, Joe,” said the president. “You can go back home, and you can read over your editorials. That’s what you can do.” Then Roosevelt turned back to his work, the interview was over, leaving Patterson to make his way out of the room with as much bearing as he could manage; and while in fact the editor outlived the president by a little more than two years, in some core, crucial sense, it would turn out that Joseph Patterson’s life was never the same after that meeting.
NOTE: Accounts of Patterson’s December 10, 1941, meeting with President Roosevelt appear in Fred Pasley’s papers; in Grace Tully’s memoir, Grateful to Serve; and in Steve Early’s memoir, With the President. Patterson himself, no slouch as a reporter, wrote out a detailed, verbatim report of the interview as soon as he got back to Dupont Circle.