In 1917 he bought a Curtiss flying boat and moved to Manhasset, New York. In September 1917 he joined the United States Navy Reserve and served overseas in France, England and Italy as a member of the First Yale Unit during World War I. In 1924, his parents established the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation and he was made a director and later president. He sponsored Robert H. Goddard's private research into liquid fuel rocketry and space flight. He provided funds for the establishment of the first Guggenheim School of Aeronautics at New York University in 1925. He became president of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics a year later. This fund, totaling $3 million, included an equipment loan for operating the first regularly scheduled commercial airline in the United States. It also provided for the establishment of the first weather reporting exclusively for passenger airplanes.
Public service
He was the United States ambassador to Cuba from 1929 until his resignation in 1933. According to his obituary, "much of his time during that period was devoted to prevailing on the Cuban dictator‐president, Gen. Gerardo Machado y Morales, "not to murder too many of his political enemies," as Mr. Guggenheim later put it. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover appointed Guggenheim to serve on the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, a position that he held until 1938. In 1948, as president of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, he continued to support United States aviation progress when he helped organize the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center at the California Institute of Technology and the Guggenheim Laboratories for Aerospace Propulsion Sciences at Princeton University.
Guggenheim, with his third wife, Alicia Patterson, founded the newspaper Newsday in 1940. Guggenheim was president of the company, while his wife was editor and publisher until her death in 1963, then he assumed those duties until 1967. The circulation of Newsday reached 450,000 and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. In 1967, he turned over the publisher position to Bill Moyers and continued as president and editor-in-chief. But Guggenheim was disappointed by the liberal drift of the newspaper under Moyers, criticizing the "left-wing" coverage of Vietnam War protests. The two split over the 1968 presidential election, with Guggenheim signing an editorial supporting Richard Nixon, when Moyers supported Hubert Humphrey. Guggenheim sold his majority share to the then-conservative Times-Mirror Company over the attempt of newspaper employees to block the sale, even though Moyers offered $10 million more than the Times-Mirror purchase price; Moyers resigned a few days later. Guggenheim, who died a year later, disinherited Moyers from his will.
Personal life
On November 10, 1910, Guggenheim was married to Helen Rosenberg at the Rosenberg residence on 166 West 78th Street. Helen was a daughter of Herman Rosenberg. Before their divorce in 1923, they were the parents of two daughters:
Nancy Guggenheim, an author and ballet teacher who first married George T. Draper, a grandson of Charles A. Dana. She later married lawyer Thomas J. Williams.
Diane Guggenheim, who married four times; first to singer John Meredith Langstaff, then Robert Guillard, followed by the Irish journalist William Meek, and, lastly, to John Darby Stolt.
