Ike and Kay

by James MacManus

  The gossips loved the fact, and it was a fact, because the papers had reported it, that Ike had taken his driver to North Africa after the Torch landings a year back in 1943 and introduced her to Churchill and Roosevelt. The story that Ike had lost his temper when General Marshall tried to exclude her from a lunch with the president circulated with relish in the salons of Georgetown.

  To general amazement, not least that of King George VI, Ike had even insisted that she took her place in the line to meet the British monarch when he’d arrived in Tunisia to congratulate Ike and his generals. The King, mindful of the royal scandal that had resulted in his brother’s abdication only a few years earlier, had ignored her proffered hand, which was, in any case, a breach of protocol. He had looked straight through her and moved swiftly on to the next in line.

  That story had been discreetly ignored by the British press, but the American gossip columns had no such regard for the unwritten rule in Fleet Street that one did not embarrass the monarch. Newspapers from coast to coast and across a great swathe of America in between had carried almost identical stories. “King snubs Ike’s Irish driver” was the common headline over a photograph showing Kay Summersby in a line-up of top brass with George VI some way down the line talking to a general.

  The American papers described Summersby as “attractive”, “bob-nosed” and “young”. At the age of thirty-five she was hardly young, but in Mamie’s eyes that made her all the more dangerous.

  Her friends assured Mamie that the gossip about Kay Summersby was just that – the idle chatter of shallow people with little else to do but invent salacious nonsense about the lives of the rich and famous. It was not true and they all knew it.

  Faced with such gossip and her friends’ less than convincing attempts to persuade her that the rumours were groundless, Mamie often wondered whether the real Eisenhower had eluded her in their long marriage. The idea of her husband having an affair with anyone, let alone a bob-nosed Irish girl almost twenty years his junior, was so uncharacteristic as to be preposterous. But did she really know the character she had lived with for so long?

  They had met at an army post in Texas where Second Lieutenant Eisenhower had been posted after graduating from West Point. He was officer of the day, a largely honorary title which gave him certain formal duties, and smartly dressed in olive drab uniform with campaign hat and sidearm. She had been visiting a friend, the wife of an army major.

  It was October 1915. A distant war in Europe had hardly ruffled the surface of life at Fort Sam Houston. When talk turned to war, it was of the need for cross-border raids into Mexico to deal with banditry. Mamie was eighteen and Second Lieutenant Eisenhower was twenty-four. He was much taller than she and took himself very seriously; at least that was the impression he gave as he strode around the post with a slight frown. He looked hard at the men he passed and occasionally paused as if to allow the world to take notice of the sharply creased trousers, the polished boots and the shiny buttons on his uniform.

  She knew he was trying to make sure that everyone knew he was officer of the day. She was small, vivacious and had what her friends called a slightly saucy attitude that seemed to reflect a carefree spirit not overly impressed by officers, or by the conventions of the day.

  Her friend had whispered as Eisenhower approached, “Oh look, here comes the woman-hater of the post.”

  Mamie Geneva Doud was immediately interested. She knew how to deal with woman-haters. When they were introduced, the second lieutenant bowed, took her hand and tried to kiss it as he had seen in films, and since she had had seen the same films, she knew to withdraw her hand just before the brush of his lips. She allowed him to show her over the post, and when she bade him farewell kept her hands firmly by her side. Then she found herself too busy to come to the phone when he called two to three times a day.

  She finally relented when one night she found him sitting on the porch of the house her parents had taken that winter in San Antonio. They were Denver people, but the wealth from the meatpacking business allowed them to escape the harsh northern winters for the warmth of Texas. He wasn’t just sitting there; he and her father were sipping ice-cold drinks while discussing the latest raids across the Mexican border by the bandit Pancho Villa.

  America was staying well clear of the latest war in Europe, but taking a military interest in banditry over the border. To a second lieutenant anxious to put his military training to good use, Pancho Villa seemed the next best opportunity.

  Her father agreed. He liked the second lieutenant, and so, in truth, did his daughter. He hadn’t got a penny to his name, and his family came from the wrong side of the tracks in a hick town called Abilene in Kansas, but opposites attract, she told herself. He proposed and she accepted.

  They set a date for the wedding, but Pancho Villa almost galloped right through their plans. Lieutenant Eisenhower was caught up in preparations for a retaliatory cross-border raid after the Mexican bandit murdered sixteen Americans near the town of Chihuahua.

  It looked for a while as if the marriage would have to await a long military campaign across the border, but the army relented, they married on time, and the elegant, coquettish Mamie Geneva Doud, who had been raised in a mansion in the fashionable suburb of Denver, Colorado, settled down to life as a second lieutenant’s wife in the bleak surrounds of Fort Sam Houston.

  Looking back now, as her husband was about to command the invasion of Europe, Mamie could count twenty different homes they had lived in as he’d climbed the long ladder of military promotion. They were not really homes, merely addresses on army bases where the identical married quarters had clearly been designed by a man who did not understand that a kitchen needed to be somewhat larger than a walk-in wardrobe.

  She had given birth to two children and lost one to scarlet fever. “We lost a child,” was how she put it when people asked. It was a cold and emotionally neutral way of stating a fact without having to reveal the anguish and pain that lay behind it.

  They had stood absolutely still at that moment in their lives, on the second day of the new year 1921, when their first child, nicknamed Icky throughout the three years of his brief life, died in his father’s arms. She had not been there at the end; she had been in bed with suspected pneumonia. Briefly, at that time, he had lowered his eyes from the career peaks before him, and she had forgotten the mantra of all service wives: PHT – push hubby through.

  When they resumed their lives after months of mourning, he was enslaved by the long hours required by a staff officer on the rise, and she was bound by the rigid social rules of life on an army post. Neither talked about their loss. They did not have to. Icky’s death formed an unspoken conversation between them for the rest of their lives. It was as if a third person had entered the marriage.

  Their second son John was now a twenty-one-year-old about to graduate from West Point. The ceremony would be in June, but she knew his father would not be there.

  She was never told exactly where her husband was in England. Officially all they told her was that he was somewhere “in the European theater of operations”. She did know, because he told her, that as a four-star general he had his own train, plane and personal staff in Britain. He had been given offices and offered large apartments. He lunched with Churchill at Number Ten and dined with senior British and American commanders in expensive restaurants.

  She, on the other hand, was living in a small stuffy apartment in Washington. She had no servants, and for company the same coterie of Pentagon wives who met regularly for cocktails and dinner at which the same conversation about distant husbands played like a gramophone record. To relieve the boredom, Mamie took small jobs helping with war charities.

  The distance between them was far greater than the three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean.

  Ike had come home after eighteen months’ absence a couple of months ago for a ten-day furlough. This was the year when the war
against Nazi fascism would be won. He would lead the Allies to victory and liberate Europe. He had assured her of this with a self-confidence she had found surprising. He had never talked like that before, always taking care not to promise what might not be achieved

  Now he seemed to be brimming with a self-confidence that leant urgency to everything he did. The old Eisenhower would move slowly and maintain a watchful silence while others rushed around him. He liked to say he boiled at a different temperature from men like Patton, Clark and Spaatz. She didn’t like the change she saw in him.

  He would break off conversations with her, look at his watch and rush off to meetings. She had given him that watch for his thirtieth birthday. Now it was being used to divide them. From morning to midnight he moved from one meeting to another: with the president in the Oval Office, with George Marshall at the Pentagon, with the Free French, the British ambassador, and so it went on.

  To make matters worse, he wasn’t supposed to be in Washington at all. The press thought he was still in London planning an invasion that would be launched in the first week of May, or so it was whispered in the corridors of Congress, but Roosevelt had secretly called him back for a final round of briefings and to make sure that Churchill’s doubts about the perilous cross-Channel operation did not loom too large in his general’s mind. So Ike wore civilian clothes and always left her apartment in the Wardham Park Hotel by the back entrance. They would occasionally meet for lunch or coffee in discreet restaurants like adulterous lovers.

  When they finally managed a two-day break in White Sulphur Springs he had ruined it completely. Twice he had called her Kay, and then quickly corrected himself. He had spoken the name casually, once while asking for more ice in his drink, and the second time, which was much worse, in the bedroom. They hadn’t made love, nor intended to, but he had called out “Kay” from the bathroom. She had been furious the first time, but stifled her anger. This time she had gone straight to bed without a word.

  He had taken her in his arms and apologised profusely, kissing her and explaining that he hardly saw any other woman in London but his driver, but that made matters much worse. Mamie kept back her anger, though, and suggested it might be a good idea if he got another driver.

  He had shaken his head, sighed, lit another cigarette – he must have been smoking three packs a day, and this was supposed to be a relaxing break – and begun talking about his sorrow that he would be missing John’s graduation in June.

  He had smiled then, looked at her and said, “I shouldn’t have even told you that. Crazy, isn’t it?”

  She knew she had lost her husband to the army. That was understandable. Her second lieutenant had become a four-star general commanding huge forces in a global conflict. No woman would expect to see much of her husband in such circumstances.

  But she was not going to lose him to a woman he described as “just my driver”.

  When Eisenhower had taken the plane back to the coming battlefields of Europe, Mamie had gone to see him off at La Guardia airport. It was 15 January 1944, a date she had circled in her diary. She had hardly seen him in the ten days they were supposed to have spent together. Indeed she had hardly seen him for the last two years. The war had consumed her husband, and now “Overlord”, the top-secret code name for the invasion of Europe, seemed set to spirit him away for the foreseeable future.

  Mamie told her friends that he hadn’t really been with her in Washington at all. He’d been back in London all the time, planning, talking to the troops, arguing with the British and allaying Churchill’s doubts about the invasion. And all the time he was with that woman.

  At the airport she had kissed him goodbye and said, “Don’t come back till it’s over, Ike. I couldn’t stand losing you again.”

  7

  June 1943

  President Roosevelt was sitting in a high-backed cane chair reading a file of documents in the main room of a whitewashed villa when Kay entered. A fan turned lazily overhead. Eisenhower was the only other person in the room. Slatted shutters left the room in half-light. The president put aside the papers and looked up.

  She immediately noticed his clothes. The beautifully tailored double-breasted dove-grey suit was matched by a tie and handkerchief peeking from the breast pocket. His face had a chiselled beauty about it, a face that was too large for the shrunken body below, a face that beamed the warmth of a personality that had been shaped and strength­ened by paralysis, and most certainly a face that looked with evident interest on the attractive lady who had just walked into the room.

  “Mr President, this is Kay Summersby, the British member of my staff you asked about,” said Eisenhower.

  Roosevelt leant forward with a slight smile and said, “I’ve heard quite a lot about you, Miss Summersby. I thought when I left the plane yesterday you might be there to drive me.”

  Kay blushed and stammered out words to the effect that the secret service would not allow it.

  “Well, we will have to change that,” he said and turned to an aide beside him.

  “Miss Summersby will drive me on this trip,” he said.

  The aide nodded and made a note.

  “Thank you, Mr President,” Kay said.

  “Good. That’s settled. Tomorrow we have lunch in the desert.”

  The picnic with President Roosevelt, in fact everything about that extraordinary day, was a complete surprise. The boss always liked to surprise her with little things, a sudden change of plan, the opening of a bottle of champagne, a small gift, and then watch her face. But this was a surprise like no other.

  The president’s visit to North Africa had been a tightly held secret. He crossed the Atlantic on a battlecruiser, making landfall in Algeria before flying to a desert airstrip where Eisenhower had set up his forward headquarters.

  The day before Roosevelt arrived, Kay was told about the visit in such detail that she became curious.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” she asked.

  “Because you will be driving the president. In my Cadillac.”

  “But surely he has a secret service driver?”

  “Maybe, but he’s asked for you.”

  “But he doesn’t know me!”

  Eisenhower smiled: “Just do as you’re told, Kay.”

  The tide had turned in North Africa. Defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps had opened the way for the president to visit his victorious general. The Pentagon, the State Department and the White House staff had all argued forcefully against the idea. No one dared say outright that a semi-paralysed man confined to a wheelchair simply could not make such an arduous journey. But that was what everyone was thinking.

  Roosevelt listened to the arguments in the Oval Office. He smiled, nodded, put a cigarette in the holder and placed it between his teeth at the customary jaunty angle. This was always the signal for a decision.

  “I am going to see Ike. He’s won our first battle of the war. Thank you for your opinions, gentlemen.”

  They drove into the desert the day after his arrival, Kay driving the Cadillac with Roosevelt and secret service guards in the back. A convoy of military vehicles stretched a quarter of a mile behind.

  A picnic area had been selected and surrounded with troops. Roosevelt chose otherwise and directed her to drive on.

  “Child,” he said tapping her on the shoulder, “There’s a nice grove of palm trees over there. Let’s stop and have lunch there.”

  Kay swung the Cadillac off the highway and drove over hot hard sand to an oasis of palm trees. The entire convoy followed, flashing headlights to protest against the change of plan.

  Ike, the president and Kay, together with aides and security, watched as the secret service team transformed a small dusty corner of the desert into a suitable place for a presidential picnic.

  That’s what the president called it: a picnic.

  He liked the word a
nd repeated it, asking about its derivation and how and when it had entered the American vocabulary. Nobody knew. The consensus of opinion held that the word was French.

  Whatever its origins, picnic was an absurdly understated name for the lunchtime arrangements that day. A huge tent was set up under the shade of the palm trees. A long table, covered in white linen and laid with silver and crystal glass, was placed beneath the tent. White House staff, not Arab waiters, served the food and drink.

  Roosevelt was seated at the table in his customary wheelchair. A table flap had been raised to conceal the lower half of his body from view, conveying the impression he was sitting at the table like anyone else.

  Roosevelt patted the table in front of an empty place next to him and looked down to where Kay was sitting at the far end.

  “Come here, child, and sit by me,” he said with a smile that turned all heads in Kay’s direction. Kay froze. She was terrified. She had been introduced to him only briefly the previous day. They had spoken not a word in the car that morning until he had ordered her to break with the planned route.

  Roosevelt patted the table more firmly.

  “Won’t you come back here, child, and have lunch with a dull old man?”

  She looked questioningly at Eisenhower across the table, hoping he would step in and recommend a more senior and appropriate official as the president’s lunchtime companion, but he merely nodded and grinned. She moved up the table and sat down.

  Roosevelt was charming and very flirtatious, leaning over to draw her chair back, smiling, his head held slightly to one side, his grey eyes searching her out; she had heard so often about the president’s charm, his ability to disarm even the most hostile critics with a smile and a breezy, folksy manner, that she had discounted the stories as the exaggeration of sycophants.