Remembering the time John F. Kennedy visited Long Island — and Alicia Patterson

Alicia Patterson came from people . . . who were no strangers to a number of U.S. presidents, beginning in those far-off, plainspoken, republican days before the White House became a fortress, its occupant a kind of emperor — not exactly friends; who after all is a friend to a president? . . .

First, and perhaps most vividly, had been her paternal great-grandfather, Joseph Medill, still a youngish man, not quite thirty, into whose cramped second-floor office, in the little Chicago Daily Tribune’s wood-frame building on State Street, one afternoon in May 1855, had appeared the elongated, ungainly form of the new congressman from the Seventeenth District, Abraham Lincoln, cash-money in hand as Joe Medill always told the story, wishing to sign for a subscription, then making it a point, each time he came up from Springfield, to drop in at editor Medill’s office to shoot the breeze and talk a little politics. Medill, already one of the founders of the Republican Party, would soon become a Lincoln familiar (one of the original “Lincoln men” from Illinois), sometime useful adviser, sometime singleminded critic, and a frequent White House visitor until the president’s death.

Three years after Lincoln, there was another Illinois downstater in the White House, a failed storekeeper though a more successful military man, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Medill and his wife . . . found homespun President and Mrs. Grant hard going, but their older daughter, Kate, was the same age as Nellie Grant and the two girls became friends, with Kate a frequent White House visitor; there’s an old photo of little Kate Medill, all frills and frowns, seated on President Grant’s thick knees. . .

Some years later, with Joe Medill by then an old man . . . he was courted by another Midwestern congressman anxious for the presidency, William McKinley of Ohio . . .

When McKinley became president, Alicia’s paternal grandfather, the ill-fated Robert Patterson (married to Joe Medill’s younger daughter, Nellie), then editor of the Chicago Tribune as well as a bigwig in the Republican Party, became a frequent visitor to the McKinley White House; there’s a photo of tall, handsome, seemingly straight-arrow Robert Patterson and short, glinty-eyed McKinley, seated together . . .

Robert Patterson was apparently on easier terms with a later president, William Howard Taft . . . close enough to the huge, mostly good-natured president to send him a lengthy unusually personal letter, essentially blocking an attempt by his bullying sister-in-law, Kate Medill McCormick, to wangle an important ambassadorship for her McCormick husband, claiming Tribune support, which Patterson told Taft did not exist. The editor was on especially friendly terms with President Theodore Roosevelt, who once deployed a special presidential train to speed him from Washington to Cleveland in time for the wedding of Alicia’s uncle, Medill McCormick. . . .

Which brings us to a morning in April 1960. A limousine drives up to the entrance of Newsday’s offices in Garden City, and out steps a young . . . man, whose tousled hair, boyish face, and Boston-Irish-Harvard accent are fast becoming familiar to the country at large: Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, not yet president, though trying hard to be.

Ostensibly the purpose of Kennedy’s pilgrimage to Newsday’s headquarters is to thank Alicia Patterson for her paper’s so-far-friendly coverage of his presidential campaign, especially for its editorials arguing that his Roman Catholicism shouldn’t be viewed by voters as an automatically disqualifying issue, not yet a mainstream position. But surely a secondary reason for Jack Kennedy’s visit, in many ways his more-pressing mission, which is probably why he came alone . . . to have lunch with a newspaper publisher out in the sticks of Long Island, was that this particular newspaper publisher, in addition to being able to deliver the numbers, the demographics, and so on, in an important market, was also a key voice in the ear of Adlai Stevenson.

The truth was that in the spring of 1960, Governor Stevenson, still the party’s popular standard bearer, after two lost elections against the even-more-popular Eisenhower, had apparently not entirely abandoned the idea of a third attempt . . . He knew there were loyalists still out there, true believers, party faithful, with their “Madly for Adlai” buttons ready to be dusted off and pinned on again. Who could tell what might or might not happen at a deadlocked convention? For instance, a “Draft Stevenson” movement? Stranger things had happened at two in the morning, at deadlocked conventions. And if so, how could he refuse? This characteristic Stevensonian coyness drove the tough-guy Kennedy people crazy. All spring JFK had been pulling inexorably ahead of Minnesota’s senator Hubert Humphrey, rapidly becoming the Democratic Party’s front-runner; he was popular, a strong campaigner, the party bosses were behind him. However, the final outcome was still in doubt, with Catholicism always a divisive issue, and the Republican vice president Richard Nixon a formidable foe. Worried Kennedy staff kept asking how much longer the ambivalent, indecisive, aggravating Adlai Stevenson would stay on his fence, obviously not in the race and yet unwilling to endorse Kennedy.

With Patterson’s brisk informality a good match for Kennedy’s own polished casualness, she took him to lunch at Nino’s, down the street from her office, bringing along a pack of reporters and editors to share the moment. Predictably the Newsday staff, as well as its more-or-less worldly editor, were easily susceptible to the Kennedy charm, and the Newsday lunch ran on convivially for several hours. But when it came to the unofficial agenda, Patterson wasn’t yet ready to lean on Adlai, to give up on the Guv. She liked Jack Kennedy, politically as well as personally, and told him as much; she said she thought he would make a good president. However, when a private moment occurred toward the end of the long lunch, with Kennedy pressing her for an endorsement, a public commitment . . . at first she said nothing; then, as the reporter Bob Greene remembered it (and as noted in Robert Keeler’s book “Newsday”), she told the young senator: “If anything happens out there, you’re definitely my second choice.”

This is excerpted from “The Huntress: The Adventures, Escapades, and Triumphs of Alicia Patterson: Aviatrix, Sportswoman, Journalist” by Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen. Copyright © 2016 by Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.