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.