but the objective should not be killing peep. that's not a proper objective. it's just inhumane. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> next on booktv amanda smith recounts the life of cissy patterson, the 20th century's first female publisher and editor-in-chief of a metropolitan daily newspaper. this is about 45 minutes. ..

patients has come to a breaking point. those who would rest on december 11, 1941, a plan prepared by president roosevelt revealed in the united states. according to which his intention was to to attack germany with all of the resources at his disposal of the united states. with a declaration of war that afternoon hitler did not awake a sleeping american giant. rather took a stab at reputation after discovering preparations for battle. for several years they reached berlin suggesting franklin delano roosevelt was less committed to american neutrality in the face of conflicts raging across the globe and he publicly professed to be. having long suspected to be, quote, in sane and despicable

president of the united states promoting, quote, the work of hatred and warmongering throughout the world hitler recently was presented before irrefutable proof his mistress was justified. he was not alone in questioning the sincerity of the president's unwillingness to entangle the united states abroad. before the german declaration of war he galvanized central asian sentiment worldwide. two of the administration members of the american press jointly published in the respected chicago and washington d.c. newspapers what appeared to be confirmation of their own fears that president roosevelt was lying the united states to war with germany. this monumental scooped consisted of excerpts of the top-secret rainbow 5 plan, army and navy testament the united states would be ready to launch its own assault on germany. july of 1943. perhaps more damning a copy of

the president's own letter ordering the assessment. the german embassy wasted no time cabling a copy of the astounding revelations to berlin on the story's publication in washington. on december 4th, 1941. a week later hitler -- despite his many peacemaking efforts published proof of roosevelt's belligerence towards germany left him no alternative but to declare war on the united states. on december 14th, 1941, the german high command presented its radical strategic assessment based on what it described as the anglo-saxon floor plan which became known through publication in the washington times herald. 1946 half a decade after they joined the revelations cabled to berlin collier's weekly magazine, b-movies will doubtless get around to filling the fabulous life of a lenore

medill patterson. she succeeded her brother as chairman of the daily news. after watching the daily news in 1919 joe patterson made it the united states's first viable tabloid but the newspaper was the largest daily circulation of any tabloid in the nation and the largest sunday circulation of any in the world. the choice of the late publisher's sister was not exclusively sentimental. in her own right eleanor medill patterson was publisher of the most widely read daily in the capital washington times herald called by many the inside and out of the profession damnedest newspaper ever to hit the streets. according to popular journalistic axiom, the pattersons like their first cousin had printed in blood. their grandfather, firefight revolution of editor in chief and principal owner of the chicago tribune from the tenth year immediately preceding the

civil war until his death in 1899. in 1940s under three decades of colonel mccormick's anti roosevelt and isolationist thread the tribune grew into a widely read newspaper in the midwest and the most widely circulated in the nation. eleanor medill patterson was the understand only girl of regeneration among boys with her grandfather's darling. she inherited a disproportionate share of tribune co. stock and considerable fortune. by passing a law roosevelt, beth truman, dorr the shift, emily post and every other prominent american woman of the 1940s. colliers weekly said that with her patrimony and attainment and latest at parades cissy patterson is probably the most powerful woman in america. it added perhaps the most hated.

cissy patterson was daughter of chicago board 81 and as a woman born in the late nineteenth century she had no expectation of getting the job or going into the family business at the tribune sochi did what young aristocrats did at the turn of the 20th century and she made one of those unfashionable international matches. in her case with a handsome but dubious khaled named joseph had grown up in vienna whose ancestral states were in the ukraine. she was warned by her family that he was, as one of her mother's friends put it, and infamous bad egg and he turned out to be much worse. she went to live in his so-called castle in the ukraine,

in need of repair. and unmarried an american heiress and provided funds to do that and to allow him to buy a pack of hounds to create an english style -- among other things. finally her parents cut them off and refused to give them any more money. that is when he became violent and started beating cissy up and she finally left him just shy of their fourth anniversary and took their 2-1/2-year-old daughter but decal followed and in effect kidnapped the little girl and held her for ransom for two years. in the meantime the pattersons and their cousins the mccormicks were so connected. her uncle had been the american ambassador in st. petersburg in vienna and as a result she had connections to the russian court so the family was able to prevail on president taft and his republican friends and the

czar of russia to put pressure to return the child. cissy came home with her daughter and after going through a lot of trouble and anxiety and spending a lot of money to get the little girl back cissy ignored her and she grew up neglected and cared for by nannies, one of whom abused her. cissy became notorious. she tried her hand at acting. and gave that up for writing novels and wrote two successful novels. one of them about american girl who married a russian princess -- prince. she gave up writing novels because she wanted to be in the newspaper business. her family had not given her much of a chance to do that but

her brother, joe patterson who founded the new york daily news and her cousin burt mccormick had come to the floor of the chicago tribune. i don't imagine i could tell chicagoans anything they haven't heard about colonel mccormick but joe patterson may be less familiar figure to you. although he seemed to be the heir to a large newspaper fortune it was at the turn of the century and an avowed surge last -- socialist though still an avid polo player. he had been estranged from his family but came back to the tribune fold. when he and his cousin ran the caribbean -- trivia and they made -- i want to read about

their collaboration. in 1909 i was accustomed to the chicago athletic club and taking the plunge in swimming. one day a friend told me there was a man in the harbor, evidently intoxicated citing tribune checks. it proved to be the newspaper's treasurer who rob patterson, one of the former editors of the tribune replaced with his nephew. several -- february of 1909, the republican party began its commemoration of the centenary of lincoln's birth when he was crowned as forbes's greatest newspaper, joe patterson began to outgrow his more extreme views had been welcomed back to the fold as secretary. in march of 1911 the competition between local morning papers devolve into a series of skirmishess on the streets of chicago, board of directors named joe patterson as chairman and burt mccormick voted out of

his district presidency by democratic landslide acting president and chief executive officer. in 1914 the cousins became the joined publishers, fighting their share responsibilities with a written agreement lasting and we are both dead. their diametrically opposed philosophical outlook notwithstanding this unprecedented personal and journalistic leverage between patterson and mccormick prove to be harmonious for a decade and a half. the inventive genius is hereditary robert mccormick would later reflect with characteristic humility. i got it from the mccormick side. in the ascendancy at the they talked about their strengths board to understand why people behave as they do and hate and love and why they buy some newspapers and ignore others. as the daughter a lisa who published long island news put

it. joe paterson revolutionize the content of the tribune while bert mccormick launched a mechanical metamorphosis and initiated the process of turtle integration. he began acquiring tracts of timberland in canada, constructed paper mills in quebec and ontario and assembled a fleet of vessels for the newsprint through the great lakes to the caribbean press. the tribune's future child rearing column lead to crime and divorce recording and color, outstrips expanded and flourished. demonstrated in affinity for the comics and the creation of a number of their most popular sunday offerings. nellie patterson jones, peevish refrain, don't be such gump a lead the named to the strip sidney smith created. joe paterson had overseen the

dumps. no witness during his on going wandering through the working-class chicago prompted him to suggest gasoline alley to frank king. than the main character founded on his doorstep and would grow to adulthood and old age over the decades almost in real time before readers's eyes. the serialized escapade the mother brain children like later the under siblings the working girl and detective dick tracy and little orphan annie attracted and held a loyal and ever-growing following. jell-o patterson attempted to transform the sunday tribune into a comprehensive magazine with an variety of reading materials that eventually his readership would meet no other publication. the caribbean the -- tribune paid medical insurance and sick leave and credit and death benefits and pensions and dental

care to its employees. the streamlined database decision making and operation the cousins split their editorials with a tempered socialist alternating publisher on a monthly basis with his conservative cousin. love and war would threaten their ongoing success. with burt and joe in the newspaper business cissy wanted to go into publishing but there was no outlet for her to do that. in the meantime one of the caribbean -- caribbean --trib e --tribune's great rivals was william randolph hearst. the result was a bloody. people actually died in the circulation wars of 1910. william randolph hearst in a gesture that was to his mind gallant and irritating to her

brother and cousin offered cissy the chance to start writing for his newspaper. he gave her the chance to edit the "washington herald" which was running sixth in the 1920s. so cissy had a number of boyfriend after her second marriage. some were legendary. newspaper men. walter howie was one in particular. very colorful character who is the model for the main character on the front page. and others, one of them was famous for creating huge circulation. with the william randolph hearst's brother and cousin and another deputy a columnist named arthur brisbane who is credited

or faulted with creating yellow journalism, she took the helm of the washington -- "washington herald" in august of 1930. when she first arrived in the city room it was filled with old william randolph hearst curmudgeons who were skeptical about the arrival of a woman at the helm. i think william randolph hearst's attitude was maybe it will work and if nothing else it is a publicity stunt to have a woman at a major mall for paul to newspaper and it was sometimes said that cissy was the first woman editor of a major metropolitan newspaper in american history. it wasn't actually the case though there had been any women at the helm of american newspapers for so long that they had been forgotten and cissy was

the first one. cissy started up and started making changes to the william randolph hearst formula, one of which was to try to focus on local news which william randolph hearst had resisted but which she gradually did. one focus in her life in washington was very social and she knew a lot of gossip and initiated gossip columns and somebody like and it the other day to a 1930s equivalent of blogging. she would sign the editorial box in front of the "washington herald" to attack someone she was angry at. one of whom was her old girl would enemy alice roosevelt longhorn, teddy roosevelt's daughter. the effect of these editorials and general changes to the paper was within six years she doubled

the paper's circulation and made it the leading morning paper in d.c.. at the same time william randolph hearst was starting to go into bankruptcy. he overextended himself. cissy happened to have a lot of cash on hand and with william randolph hearst's mistress, mary and david loaned her $1 million to meet the next week. when his financial advisers were trying to unload is newspapers which was very upsetting to william randolph hearst he didn't want to part with them. william randolph hearst newspapers are not for sale in any sense. but his economic reality forced him to sell. and so cissy bought not all leave the "washington herald" but also the evening paper, the

washington times and merged them in 1929. one reporter described the merger as electric in that washington went for the product like trout for a head. one of the interesting things about the times herald was the damnedest paper to hit the streets. she had the bright idea to make it a locally focused paper but also to use the irresistible elements of the tribune and new york daily news in the along with the william randolph hearst syndicate items and she had taken these elements that usually not at war and put them side by side and created her own sort of irresistible makes. it was a guilty pleasure. people might not admit they read

it the circulation statistics don't lie and it was the leading paper through the end of the new deal and for the war until her death in 1948. this is a small description of what she did. although cissy patterson shed the vitriolic isolationism of other papers proctor in charge of the existence of the mccormick patterson actress for rival press outlets and roosevelt administration it did not share their ownership structure. whereas the tribune co. owns the chicago tribune and the new york daily news cissy alone owned the times herald. in many regards the paper's success is a direct result of its unique corporate structure or lack of it. as sole proprietor they tempestuous redhead who according to one reporter sported an equally read pedicure and temper to match had no board of directors or trustees or

stockholders to hold her accountable. as her editor put it she owned the times herald in the same way in the legal sense as she and her clothes and houses. she wore it that way too and every day we risked her entire property and stubborn neck. as publisher she enjoyed none of the protection the incorporation of the paper would have afforded. the times herald led the capital newspaper market not only in circulation and revenue but the sarge rendered against it. these cissy paid out-of-pocket as she did liability to papers fast incurred in the course of doing business. the civil dockets of the district of columbia from the 1940s are testament to her devil make care attitude toward defamation as the deal of her burly truck driver and completing their appointed rounds. whatever or whoever might stand in their way.

elderly pedestrians or children. in efforts to keep the paper entertaining and improve speculation she devised beauty contests and giveawayss and publicity stunts. at her insistence several members of her personal staff began writing to the paper. a column written in a folksy southern dialect appeared under the byline of cissy's cloak rebecca, antecedent to oprah in that way. to the renewed astonishment of the william randolph hearst group the equine column by her neighbor prove to be popular in the capital situated between the maryland and virginia horse countries. her and contributions give the paper is notorious bite and its readership. she continued to indulge in attacking old friends who had fallen away. and her patients with the new deal and franklin roosevelt particularly american intervention in the european work appeared increasingly likely members of the

administration did not escape her excoriation. so the war cissy had been like her brother joe paterson very enthusiastic about the new deal. had gone to the extreme of pledging the day roosevelt was inaugurated not to criticize the administration for year and the new york daily news renewed that and continued for another year. the rationale being that roosevelt faced unprecedented difficulty coming into office. the records of the 1930s cissy grew suspicious of the new deal and both pattersons began to fear that roosevelt was less neutral with regard to american intervention abroad that he claimed to be publicly.

so they became very vocal and opposed to the administration in late 1941. after pearl harbor, neither paper backed down and continued to attack the administration through the war. at the same time cissy was undergoing some personal struggles. her daughter was kidnapped as a child and had become estranged from her. at the same time cissy was under attack all over the country particular early on the floor of congress where various congress men and senators she felt attacked her with impunity because you can't be sued for slander on the floor of the congress. at the same time cissy's former son in law, her daughter's ex-husband was a famous

political columnist named drew pearson who supported roosevelt through the war who cissy fell out with but he and his new wife basically formed the only family that cissy managed to hold onto so she was very much alone at that point. and seems to have begun to drink more according to reports that her friends made. the paper reflected this and at the same time cissy had fallen in with a colorful and peculiar character in washington during the war, a white russian immigrant doctor called dr. de savage. his credentials were not quite right to practice in the united states but he had a practice anyway that seemed to revolve around giving the ladies lounge in washington injections' for

weight-loss or to feel better or to sleep and he became very chummy with cissy and came to her party's. one night from exhaustion she had heart trouble throughout her life. her staff didn't -- doctors had been mobilized or too old to serve so they were out of town and they called in dr. de savage to move into the house and declared she had a heart attack and wouldn't let anyone see her. he began giving her large doses of various narcotics and kept her in a twilight state in 1943. when cissy came to she noticed scribbled letters to come and save her but they were always thrown out by doctorsde savage. he drank alcohol and champagne when she emerged from her

stupor. one of the friend got the message and got her out. she had something of a nervous breakdown in the meantime. but she recuperated and went on but the attacks continued and she became paranoid and frightened and rightly so in many regards because a bomb was thrown through the front door of the times herald at one point. cissy was a famous lady marksman in her early life. she was an avid do grandeur in the 1910s and 20s. it was said she was the best woman shot in the united states and she was an avid big game hunter. she had given that about was still a very good marksman. she kept a loaded firearm in her purse and her car and her night table and she hired armed guards to sit outside her bedroom door when she slept. at the same time she began to

worry about her mortality. and started buttonholing people at parties. someone she had taken a liking to she would say i keep remaking my will and don't own note to do with my newspaper. i don't want to give up to my daughter because we don't speak any more but she might say i like you. maybe i will give you my paper. she told this to enough people and also told people she had decided to leave the paper in what was really radical and unprecedented request, she wanted to leave the paper not to any member of her family which was traditionally the case believe it instead to her executive staff who had run the paper with her and allow them to divide it equally among themselves. as time wore on she grew suspicious of her executive staff and started announcing at parties she intended to not give it to them and started telling people publicly that she was

going to change her will and made an appointment with her lawyer for the night of july 24th, 1948. or july 25th. the night of july 24th she was at her country house outside washington in the maryland countryside. everything as usual, at this point she had a large pack of poodles who by all accounts were ferocious and badly trained and they protected her but people were terrified of them. they were completely unruly and bit. at 1:00 in the morning she handed them off to an armed guard outside her door and said i am going to bed. don't put the dogs back in after you put them out. her lady's made remembered all through that night they started howling until the morning. the next morning one of the editors began calling say i need her comment on that story.

please have get back to me. staff was too afraid to go into her bedroom and wake her up. she was famous partly for her kind of off with their heads attitude towards human-resources. nobody wanted to wake her up if it wasn't absolutely necessary. the hours went by and finally the butler went in and discovered that she had died during the night. cissy was one of those people who created controversy and upset wherever she went. that was the case even when she was incapacitated when dr. de savage came to her house but even in death. the story of what happened with her will is extraordinary. her daughter felicia from whom she had been estranged came back

not having seen cissy in three or four years and said i think my mother wanted to be cremated. she had the body cremated and a memoir she said only after i did that did i realize there would be no way to do an autopsy. what if she had been murdered? cissy had been telling people i might leave you my newspaper. she also began saying if i die under strange circumstances my cousin colonel mccormick wants my newspaper. colonel mccormick was conveniently absent in paris at the time that she died. there is an amazing story told by mccormick's wife that when he got the call that cissy had died he's a little song and said i am the last leaf left on the tree. the daughter challenged the will. it is a long story and i won't go into great detail but she did manage to secure or to get the

agreement to testify from one of the former secretaries and her former treasurer that cissy had been the victim of coercion and fraud when she made the will that was submitted for probate. as felicia put it accurately and 6 think the she said on the day that i officially brought suit both of my witnesses committed suicide under peculiar circumstances. in both instances whether they were suicides or not has never been clear, both instances the suicides, belongings and papers were rifled through and it seemed documents had been taken. what happened to those documents nobody knows. in any case cissy lived an

amazing life but a very troubled one in a lot of waste. it made for great newspaper reporting. there's a sort of summation that time magazine gave after her death that is the kind of story cissy would have loved to tell on someone else. i am not sure that assessment in the end was a very fair one because after all the editorial motto was if your grandmother gets raped put it on the front page and a lot of her old reporting staff said that when they covered the story of her death they really played it up the way she would have wanted. thank you for coming tonight. if i can answer any questions please let me know. [applause] >> why did you choose to harass the subject?

she is not as well-known as she was 40 or 50 years ago. what compelled you to pick her as your subject? >> the question is why did i pick cissy as my subject? my last book was in addition to the letters of joseph kennedy. in the course of doing the work for that i got really interested in the better known isolationists, joe kennedy and colonel mccormick and william randolph hearst and lindbergh and many others. that is a very colorful of blandish group of people and of that group cissy was by far the most colorful and outlandish. i often felt i came to her because all roads lead to cissy. on the other side of that two of my mother's sisters had worked for cissy. so i always heard about this

lady publisher in d.c. and always had the impression she was that is a socialite who got her newspaper and had a lark but what i'd done deeper i looked up the circulation statistics and one thing people don't tend to mention is the times herald and before that the herald which she ran for william randolph hearst had the widest readership of any paper in d.c.. it struck me that that was an interesting thing that whatever you said about her the paper was doing really badly before, fourth and fifth in a six paper market and she made them the leading paper. that struck me as interesting. and then if you look at the history of the ownership of those papers and some of the most important -- most successful american publishers in the 20th century that don't those papers at that point, william randolph hearst had it

before cissy. after she died she would have been horrified to discover colonel mccormick bought the paper from her executive. but the executive sold it because even though it stuck to her formula, circulation seemed to drop very quickly. she had been running it in the black but her executive staff couldn't maintain that so mccormick tried to squeeze it into the tribunal which did go over in washington very well. finally it was sold to the post. was published as the washington post in large type for the watergate era and in diminishing type over the course of time, times harold. it just wasted away like that. she struck me as a really interesting woman to go from being called the most powerful and most hated woman in the

united states in 1946 to being forgotten by the beginning of the next century struck me as amazing. that is how i got interested. >> i have a louder voice. i read the works of ralph martin and alice hope and familiar with cissy's life. what most intrigues me about her is the similarity between her and her daughter felicia. i meant to save felicia. they were both rebellious, independent, no one could push them around. they both have great travel all over the country in europe. they both married very

impoverished european aristocrats. both marriages made in hell and they both became novelists and had strained relationships with their daughters and they were both alcoholics and very promiscuous. i am wondering to what extent both of them having grown up in an environment where they were deprived of any motherly affection pre dispose them to have the same fate in their lives and tried to overcompensate with the way they were emotionally crippled in that respect. >> you make some really good points. felicia was an amazing woman. i don't know how well known it is but one avenue of that her story in the book took me down

was she was a little girl who was kidnapped and her mother ignored her when she came home to america. not surprisingly felicia when john to have issues with drinking. and becoming the sixth woman ever to join a a in the 1940s. i had not realized it went that far back. phillies's life was extraordinary and comfortable and luxurious. divorced herself from her mother and renounced any claim to any money. her mother had given her a gigantic allowance although she was still in her 30s by then. she cut it off and picked herself up and turned her own living as a writer and kept the state sober and told an end of

her life in 1999. to me one interesting thing about her childhood was if possible it was even more emotionally impoverished that cissy's. cissy's mother was an ambitious socialite who didn't have much time for children. in felicia's case, not that i am a child psychologist but from the book i read a lot of modern theory about children and emotional development of children and our don't think anyone would argue it is not emotionally devastating to be taken away from everybody you know at the age of 2-1/2 and then be returned to them at the age of 4. so felicia started life with a particular deficit. i came to really like her in the

course of writing the book. i know that it is not objective of me to say but she was a really extraordinary woman and it is an amazing thing to pitch yourself up and start fresh and turn over a new leaf but to do it at a time when people didn't acknowledge alcoholism period alone as a disease or something you can't control or might have inherited from your ancestors was a really amazing thing. in some ways she had a difficult relationship with her daughter. but she did get out of that road to some degree and that is extraordinary. >> felicia's daughter who died year ago. he leave any errors? >> i don't know about ellen. >> did she ever marry?

>> she did. she married a couple times and had two sons and a daughter all of whom are still living. [inaudible] >> she does. do you know them? you seem to know a lot about them. >> i do have family connections. >> she does have airs. i can give you whatever contact information i have if it helps. anybody else? >> [inaudible] >> she asked me to comment on the capone story which is a story cissy wrote early on in her publishing venture. she was on her way in 1932,

shortly after she took control of the "washington herald" and she stopped in miami. i don't know why. it was on the way for washington to calif.. she wanted to drive by al capone's house so she did and there he was standing outside so she jumped out and wanted to be a good reporter and said my brother owns the new york daily news. he was not impressed but he was proud of the house so he offered to show her around so in she went and she wrote very eve of actively. unusual for a newspaper story but she wrote about how she went to capone's house and the heavy iron age closed behind her and locked. he showed her around the pool and he had a little compound.

there were the pool and colonnades and arches and menacing figures under the columns. they had an extraordinary conversation where cissy had been a socialite before she took up publishing. she said the butler came running in to offer them a drink and cissy added something like i wish i could get that service from my staff. and she talked to capone about his tax woes. that is how they finally got him, on tax either asian. and his recent arrest. cissy, who had married this horrible crazy counter earlier in her life closed her account by saying why is it bad boys