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 seemingly 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.
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.”