Ike and Kay

by James MacManus

  Scandalous tittle-tattle in the salons of Washington was one thing, but any press story that speculated on a break-up of Eisenhower’s marriage to Mamie would bring disgrace on the army while young Americans were dying in their thousands in Europe. It was unthinkable. Marshall resolved to stop it happening.

  First he needed to get Ike back on his feet and fit again. A wealthy American expatriate had offered his villa near Cannes in the South of France for just such a purpose. The villa was perfect, with a heated pool, sea views, a good staff including a decent cook, tight security and maybe even a little winter sunshine.

  He would send Ike down there for a few days by plane with orders to rest up and get some sleep. He would have liked to fly Mamie in to join him, but long-standing presidential orders were clear: no wives were allowed in the theater of operations – with no exceptions.

  As for Summersby, Marshall considered himself a military man trained in a methodology that was almost a religion in army circles – the solution to all problems lay in careful planning. She was a problem, and he would need a plan. But first he needed the approval of the man facing him in the Oval Office.

  “So it’s okay if I fix for Ike to take a break?” asked Marshall.

  “Sure, but go over and tell him yourself – and make sure he gets those oysters.”

  Like most women, Kay could gauge men by the looks they gave her. A man’s eyes often told a story more clearly than his spoken words. Even a momentary glance, a sideways look or a full-beam stare over a pair of glasses could instantly communicate surprise, jealousy, lust, curiosity or sometimes a heady mix of all of them.

  But she had never before experienced the cold look of distaste that George Marshall gave her as he swept through Eisenhower’s outer office on a late January morning. The American chief of staff had flown in from Washington for a private meeting. No secretaries or staff were to be present. Those were the orders.

  The way Marshall had looked at her seemed to suggest she should not even be in the same building. On reflection, she realised he had not in fact looked at her at all. He had simply looked through her as he passed without even a curt nod of acknowledgement.

  The meeting had lasted for ninety minutes without a coffee break. The two men emerged looking grim. Kay had not heard raised voices, but the mood was obvious. She watched from the window as Eisenhower walked George Marshall to the front door of the building where they shook hands with only a brief a word of farewell. Minutes later he was back in the outer office looking serious.

  “They want me to take a few days’ break,” he said. “There’s a villa down on the French coast, apparently. Very fancy. I’m supposed to take only Tex with me and a small security team. They’ve laid on a plane. They want me to have time to rest up. Time alone. Time to think. That’s what George said. What you do you think?”

  “I think the rest will do you good. Let the war wait for a while.”

  Eisenhower smiled. “You’re right, but I’ll need company. Make travel arrangements. I’m taking General Bradley and Tex with me – and you.”

  “I thought you said General Marshall wanted you there alone?”

  Ike laughed as he walked back into his office. Kay felt a surge of satisfaction. The chief of staff of the US Army had tried to cut her out of Ike’s trip and probably wanted to cut her out of his life altogether. Well tough luck, George Marshall, she said to herself. You can take that hardboiled bullyboy act of yours back to the Pentagon. Just leave Ike and his team to get on with the war. And by the way, just remember the next time you come calling that I’m on Ike’s team and he likes it that way.

  She lit a cigarette and smiled. She had been around Americans too long. She was beginning to think like them.

  17

  February-May 1945

  Washington knew the president was dying. Death had stamped his face with the mask of a man not long for this world. The smile, the jauntily angled cigarette in its holder and the spirit that occasionally flashed from his dark grey eyes were still there, but the flesh was visibly failing.

  At the end of February, Roosevelt returned from the Yalta conference to address the joint houses of Congress. The speech heralded a new dawn in world affairs based on a United Nations organisation that would discuss and arbitrate international differences.

  Undertakings had been given by the Soviets at Yalta which would redraw the map of Eastern Europe. Nations such as Poland, which had been enslaved by the Nazis, would be free to decide their own future.

  The response to this major announcement, framed in the characteristically optimistic language with which Roosevelt had inspired the American people for so long, shocked the White House.

  An exhausted president had misread the mood of war-weariness across America. People were less concerned about a new map of Eastern Europe and far more interested in when the war was going to end, and above all when the boys were coming home – the question that showed up most frequently in opinion surveys of what the nation was currently thinking.

  Everyone could see Germany was beat and Hitler finished. So when would the war be over and the boys on their way home?

  The answer from Eisenhower did not improve the mood of the White House. The war was far from over.

  Worn out by reports of Allied infighting and anguished over the plight of his friend and confidant Harry Hopkins, who was once again seriously ill in the Mayo clinic, Roosevelt left for Warm Springs, Georgia, and the sanctuary and comfort of his own home, known as the Little White House. His motorcade left the White House on March 30th. He would never see Washington again.

  In the capital, Mamie Eisenhower waited, as she had for two and a half years, for the end of the war and reunion with her husband. In that time she had seen him for only those few hurried days of home leave that had been ruined by his calling her Kay.

  Despite all the assurances of her friends and the inner conviction that her husband would never throw away twenty-nine years of marriage, nothing allayed the gnawing doubt, nurtured by long absence and fuelled by regular evenings when one cocktail rather too readily led to the next, that Kay Summersby had won her man and taken her husband.

  General Marshall, over tea in her apartment, had just told her that Ike was tired and would take a break without his immediate staff in the south of France. He had said that her husband would be accompanied by General Omar Bradley and one other member of the general’s staff – no one else. He had looked straight at her when he’d said those three words: no one else. He did not mention Summersby’s name, but the meaning was clear.

  “Where will Ike be staying?” Mamie asked.

  “I wish I could tell you,” Marshall replied. “It’s a private house on the coast. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “That’s good – he really needs to rest, by the sound of his letters. But who will take the calls and do the admin down there? He’s going to have to stay in touch with headquarters, isn’t he?”

  Mamie needed further reassurance.

  “No,” he said. “I made him agree: no cables, no telexes, no calls. Just peace and quiet.”

  Mamie leant forward to pour more tea. She was satisfied. Briefly she had thought of asking if she could fly out to be with him for a few days, but quickly dismissed the idea. Marshall would never agree. Army wives knew their place, and it was not at the husband’s side in the field.

  For a moment after that teatime visit she was reassured. Marshall was fiercely loyal to her husband. She knew from the Washington grapevine that he deeply disapproved of Kay Summersby and wanted Ike to drop her. But at the usual round of evening cocktails with fellow army wives, all the rumours resurfaced. The gossip clung like ivy, coiling tentacles of doubt into every fibre of her being.

  Sous le Vent was a lavish villa outsides Cannes built in the 1930s by an American millionaire who wished to emulate the expatriate lifestyle on the Riviera caught so accurately by Scott
Fitzgerald in Tender is the Night.

  When Churchill heard that the Allied commander intended to leave his duties and take a brief vacation in the south of France, he was amazed. His view of a break from work was a longer than usual lunch.

  Kay Summersby had been at Eisenhower’s side for so long that her presence on the plane had not surprised Bradley. Like most of those who worked closely with Eisenhower, he supposed that the two were lovers – certainly her presence late at night in his sleeping quarters wherever they were based would suggest that – but it didn’t bother him. The woman was important to Ike, she made him happy, and if she did so in bed at night as much as at his side by day, then so what?

  Bradley shared the view that the imperative for the Allies was that a man careworn by overwork and stress should be restored to health in time for the last phase of the war. When Kay moved into the Sous le Vent villa Bradley raised no questions. Nor was he surprised when Eisenhower, after two long nights of sleep, asked Kay to join him every day for lunchtime drinks, usually chilled white wine on his private terrace. He invited no one else.

  Her bedroom was on the floor below his, connected by a carpeted wooden staircase that creaked as she went up taking the steps two at a time. Ike had retired to his room for the night. Dinner had been served early that evening. Only Bradley and an aide had joined them and neither played bridge.

  He was sitting in a chair by open French windows that led to a balcony. On the beach below men were folding deck chairs and raking the sand. On one side large yachts of the rich and smaller fishing boats sheltered in a harbour enclosed by stone piers.

  A calm sea stretched to a horizon lost in the dusk. The war did not seem to have touched this part of the Riviera. The aroma of lavender, jasmine, rosemary, thyme and juniper, the timeless piny scent of the south of France, drifted in from the plants on the balcony and the garden below.

  She wore the same black dress as at dinner but had taken off her make-up and jewellery. His jacket lay on the bed and his shoes lay scattered on the floor. He looked up as she entered and smiled.

  “I came to say goodnight,” she said.

  “We could have a nightcap downstairs if you like, I’m not sleepy.”

  She picked up his shoes, placed them beside the bed and sat down.

  “You look about ten years younger,” she said.

  “I feel it. Let’s have a drink.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s too nice here. Let’s enjoy the view. Breathe the air. You can almost taste it.”

  They stood on the balcony watching the beach, the boats and the harbour slide into the night. They lit cigarettes and breathed smoky plumes into the aromatic night. She put her arm around him and he around her. They stood for a while looking up at the first of the stars.

  “That’s the evening star,” he said, pointing to the brightest in the constellation above them. “Lets raise a glass to him. There’s a bottle of cognac downstairs.”

  “It’s a she. Stars are female,” she said.

  “All the more reason for a toast.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” she said.

  They made love quite differently this time, no scrambled shedding of clothes, no awkward fumbling on that leather sofa. It was a warm night for so early in the year. They lay naked on the sheets and kissed. He was relaxed at first, softer to her touch, surrendering slowly to the uncontrollable pulse of pleasure.

  She felt like a hostage, held tightly in his arms, watching the unmistakable intimations of a man rising to climax and closure.

  Later she tiptoed out of the room, holding her shoes, looking back at his sleeping figure. They had shared their satisfaction, he with a groan and she with a cry that must have been heard in the garden below.

  She wondered if anyone had been listening, then told herself, as he had often told her, that it was only worth worrying about the really big things: life, death, victory and defeat. And what about love?

  Lust has no contract with love. The white flash carries with it the seeds of life, not love. All that sweaty shuddering and juddering of flesh and bone leaves the human heart far behind, lost in the slipstream of desire.

  She was no more than one of those birds that mate on the wing, two feathered creatures that meet high in the sky, fuse as one for a few brief seconds and then part, never to meet again. A one-flight stand, the perfect metaphor for ephemeral love.

  They smoked afterwards and drank glasses of fizzy mineral water. He wanted her to stay at least until dawn. She knew they would oversleep. She didn’t want to be there when the orderly came in with the breakfast tea. The possibility didn’t worry him at all.

  That was very Eisenhower, she reflected as she went back to her room. He felt no need to explain her presence, nor his decision to exclude everyone else from the lunches. Bradley accepted the arrangement and was gratified to be invited to join the general in the evenings when the whole party gathered in the big villa.

  Everyone there could see that with the good food and the unseasonal sunshine, the man who had directed the Allies’ armies across Europe and to the borders of Germany was recovering fast.

  The visit lasted a week and was a closely kept secret, known to only a handful people in Supreme Headquarters in England and in Washington. General Dwight Eisenhower had taken time out from the war to spend a week in a lavish Riviera villa in the company of one of his senior commanders – and a woman widely regarded as his mistress – it was not a story that would look good in the press; nor would the presence of Summersby have much appeal for the disciplinarian chief of staff in the Pentagon.

  Eisenhower remained in the villa, refusing suggestions that he might dine at local restaurants or even play the tables at the nearby Monte Carlo casinos. As he recovered, Kay was at his side, arranging the menus, pouring the evening drinks, partnering him at two-handed card games.

  Bradley thought they looked and acted like a married couple. But he knew, because he organised the secure communications from the Riviera hideaway, that Ike had been writing to Mamie in Washington, and had used the elegant Sous le Vent writing paper to do so.

  He wondered whether he told his wife of the warm days and chilly evenings on the French coast, or of the grandeur of the villa, or merely remarked on the excellence of the cuisine. Perhaps he ended by saying how much he missed her.

  Eisenhower seemed to see no incongruity between his obvious love and need for Summersby and his deep affection for his wife in Washington. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Perhaps Ike merely felt affection for Summersby and retained deep marital love for his wife in Washington. It was a puzzle that neither Omar Bradley nor anyone else at Sous le Vent that week cared to consider too closely.

  Battles are the hinges on which the doors of history swing back and forth, said Clausewitz. Throughout the months of April and May in 1945 those battles closed doors on the Nazi past and opened them to the victory that was finally achieved with Hitler’s suicide on April 30th and the German surrender a week later.

  It was 2 a.m. when General Alfred Jodl, the German chief of staff, walked into a small recreation room on the second floor of a school in Reims which had served as Eisenhower’s war room for the last weeks of the fighting.

  Kay bent over her desk to note down the words that would put the seal on the surrender.

  “Do you understand the terms of the surrender you have just signed?” said Eisenhower.

  “Ja,” said the German.

  “You will get detailed instructions at a later date, and you will be expected to carry them out faithfully.”

  There was a pause. The German bowed, then stared blankly at the wall.

  Eisenhower said, “That is all.”

  Jodl turned round and left. Kay rose from her desk as he marched past. She looked at her watch. It was 2.41 a.m.

  Ike poked his head out of the office.

  “I want to send
a message to Marshall. He’ll still be at his desk.”

  Kay took out her notebook.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “‘The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 02.41 local time.’”

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  “It’s enough, isn’t it? Get it sent straight away. “

  She turned to go.

  “Oh, Kay ...”

  “Rustle up a bottle of champagne?”

  He laughed and nodded. An army photographer was called to capture the moment as Eisenhower held up, in a V-shape, the two pens with which the Germans had signed the surrender. There, just over Eisenhower’s smiling right shoulder, and between him and the British Air Marshal Tedder, was the equally smiling face of Kay Summersby.

  It was a time of endings. The curtain had fallen on a play whose actors had been stripped of their lines. Roosevelt’s death at his Warm Springs home on April 12th was followed on April 30th by the single shot that Hitler fired from his revolver in the Berlin bunker. It was an end of the horrors found in the concentration camps which left those who witnessed the aftermath of such slaughter lost for words and cursed with memories that would never fade.

  Eisenhower had received the news of Roosevelt’s passing at his Reims headquarters and was remarkably unmoved, Kay thought, by the demise of a man who had propelled him to the pinnacle of authority in a conflict that was nearing its end.

  “I can’t say I liked him or agreed with everything he did, but I admired him,” she heard him say to George Patton. The two men were meeting to plan where and when the Allied armies would meet the Russians, and she, as usual, was sitting at a desk in the corner taking notes.