Fighting Judge

One August day in 1918, Captain Robert Porter Patterson, 306th Infantry, U.S.A., led a patrol into the German lines in France, surprised and wiped out an enemy outpost, killed several men in a second one, and then, singlehanded, covered his patrol's retreat. That day won him the Distinguished Service Cross. Before his death at 60, in the Elizabeth air crash last week (see above), the nation was to pay him many another tribute. For Bob Patterson never stopped fighting.

Call to the Jungles. The son of a Glens Falls, N.Y. lawyer, Patterson was educated at Union College (Phi Beta Kappa) and Harvard Law School, organized his own law firm in Manhattan in 1922. In 1930, President Hoover made him a district court judge; he presided with the stern sense of duty of his Yankee forebears. President Roosevelt promoted him to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in 1939. Prior to World War II Judge Patterson fought the unpopular fight for a military-conscription law, and personally enrolled in an officers' refresher course at Plattsburg, N.Y. There he was emptying garbage cans on a K.P. detail in the summer of 1940 when he heard that Roosevelt wanted him in Washington.

As Under Secretary of War and boss of the Army's $100 billion procurement program, Republican Patterson urged a sweeping draft of civilian manpower, wanted to bar millions of automobiles from the highways to save rubber and gasoline. His explosion over the sight of valuable trucks delivering soft drinks in Washington was so noisy and prolonged that it got to be known as "The Battle of Seven-Up." He was bullheaded, and his violent temper became a capital legend; but he produced. In 1945 President Truman made him Secretary of War, succeeding Henry L. Stimson.

Brass Knuckles. For two tempestuous years, close-cropped Bob Patterson was a central figure in the postwar upheaval in Pentagonia. His behind-the-scenes battle with Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal on unification of the armed forces was a brass-knuckled epic; Patterson wanted a total merger, with all services under a "Generalissimo." He raised a vigorous, though lonely, cry against disarmament in, 1946, helped generate the idea of the North Atlantic Treaty.

In 1947, Patterson returned to his New York law practice and his 70-acre farm at Cold Spring, N.Y., but he kept fighting. He became a leader of the Atlantic Union movement, headed a commission on organized crime for the American Bar Association, railed against abuses of individual rights by congressional committees.

He went to Buffalo last week to wind up a client's antitrust action. The hearing was shorter than he expected. Lawyer Patterson canceled an afternoon train reservation, boarded the doomed Convair.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.