Cissy Patterson (1881-1948)

She was one of the most formidable women in the history of the American press. Born in Chicago to a powerful, very wealthy family, she was the granddaughter of Joseph Medill, founder of the Chicago Tribune, and a first cousin of Colonel Robert R. McCormick. Her early life was marked by a famously disastrous marriage to a dissolute Polish count, Jozef Gizycki, which ended in a bitter international custody battle over their daughter. She later (1925) married a Jewish lawyer from New York, Elmer Schlesinger, but remained anti-semitic and sympathetic to the Nazis. He died four years later, and in 1930, she legally changed her name to Mrs. Eleanor Medill Patterson.

Someone observed that Cissy's, “life is filled with more backstabbing, social climbing, and decadence than a season of Dynasty.” After years as a socialite and successful novelist, she turned to journalism, persuading William Randolph Hearst to let her edit the Washington Herald in 1930. She proved a natural, and eventually purchased both the Herald and the Washington Times, merging them into the Washington Times-Herald in 1939, which became the capital's largest-circulation newspaper. Like her cousin McCormick, she was fiercely isolationist and used her paper to oppose Roosevelt's foreign policy. The three cousins - McCormick, Patterson, and her brother Joseph Medill Patterson of the New York Daily News - were collectively dubbed by their critics as the "Three Foes of Liberalism".