Ike and Kay

by James MacManus

  “Of course I do.”

  “You chose it.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “No one could ever work it out, could they?”

  Eisenhower shifted uncomfortably and looked down at the dog.

  She laughed then, and felt a little better. There was silence.

  “Kay – it’s impossible. You know that.”

  “What if I said I don’t know that?”

  “What?”

  “What if I said I just don’t understand why you behaved like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll never let you go – remember?”

  “Kay, that was then, it was wartime.”

  “And this is now and it’s peacetime – is that it?”

  “Kay, it’s different now.”

  “You mean you never meant all those things you said to me, that ... you ... that ...”

  Her voice rose as the words trailed away. She blew into her handkerchief.

  “I was under a lot of pressure. You know that. You were a huge help. You kept me going. I owe you more than I can say, but ...”

  “But what?”

  “Things change. You must understand that.”

  There was a long silence in which Kay held his gaze until Eisenhower bent down to pat Telek.

  “Yes, I do. I do understand. I understand very clearly,” she said. There was an angry edge to her voice. The room seemed colder. Telek whimpered.

  “I’ve still got the gun, you know.”

  Eisenhower straightened up. “The gun? Oh yes, the Beretta.”

  “Do you think I should hand it in?”

  “Well that’s up to you, Kay. I mean you don’t have to.”

  “It was a personal gift, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was personal. For your protection.”

  “I think I’ll keep it then. Old times and all that.”

  “Of course. Kay, I’ll look into your posting. Drop in again, but right now I have –”

  “A meeting.”

  “Yes.”

  Kay walked to the desk and ground out the cigarette, twisting the butt until ash spilled onto the shiny wooden surface.

  “Goodbye, sir,” she said.

  She saluted again, the snappy salute he had taught her, then turned and left. At the door she turned back. Telek had planted himself at Eisenhower’s feet and showed no inclination to move.

  “Here, boy,” she said, patting her thigh.

  Reluctantly, the dog ambled slowly cross the room. Eisenhower stood motionless, watching them leave.

  A week later Kay Summersby was given orders to take up her new posting. She had hoped to be assigned somewhere in Washington to a role in the hospitality or public relations departments, where her contacts and her knowledge of the European theater background could be useful. She was ordered to report instead to an army press relations unit in San Francisco.

  The typewritten order came with a warrant for air travel and information that shared accommodation would be available with another female member of the unit. Kay smiled as she read the orders. The US Army was nothing if not obvious. Her new posting was as far from Washington as it was possible to be while remaining in the continental United States.

  Within two weeks of arriving on the west coast, she resigned from the army and booked a flight to New York.

  If General Eisenhower could shake off the past and find a new life in America after the war, so could she.

  23

  Spring 1947

  Kay Summersby had never been to New York. In the spring of 1947, the city seemed to be gripped in a frenzy of excitement for which there was no apparent reason. Perhaps the end of the hard winter or the return of some of the troops from overseas had made the neon lights in Times Square seem brighter and more colourful; perhaps that was why everyone moved faster, talked louder, ate more quickly, drank more deeply, blasphemed more openly, dressed more colourfully than anywhere else she had been. Or perhaps this was just the way New York had always been.

  Kay’s mother had written often to tell her of the misery of rationing, power cuts and lack of transport in bombed-out London. Everyone was saying that life had got worse rather than better after the war, her mother reported, almost happily, Kay thought. Her mother was never one to see the bright side of life.

  In New York no one ever saw anything else. The city moved to a rhythm dictated by happy, greedy, money-driven people. From the first cup of coffee in the morning to the last groggy yawn at night, everyone was in a hurry. Get up and get ahead was the unofficial civic motto.

  New Yorkers moved through the day with a brash self-confidence born of the knowledge that the rest of America was looking to their city for news of the latest fashions, the most popular Broadway shows, the most sought-after restaurants and the latest celebrity gossip. Marlon Brando wasn’t filming in Hollywood, he was on Broadway in A Street Car Named Desire. After the show he was often seen at El Morocco, the city’s most glamorous nightspot.

  America’s most celebrated editor, Harold Ross, didn’t correct page proofs in a newspaper office in Washington or Los Angeles; he could be seen every morning hurrying into the Fifth Avenue offices of the New Yorker magazine he had founded and edited for twenty-one years.

  Famous for his business feuds, his failed marriages and his obsession with commas, Ross had become as well known as the magazine he had created, as much a celebrity as the writers, critics and wits he made famous.

  New York loved them all. To satisfy the city’s delight in its nationwide celebrity, and to feed the craving for hot news and gossip, ten daily newspapers in and around the city churned out new editions almost every waking hour.

  The sheer excitement of her first days in the city lifted Kay. She felt, like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, as if she’d been caught in a tornado, plucked from the ground and whirled around.

  In her case she found she had been giddily deposited in a small second floor walk-up on a narrow street in Greenwich Village. She liked the address. Wooster Street sounded very English and grandly foreign amid the grid of numbered streets in Manhattan.

  The apartment was not as comfortable as her old army quarters in Frankfurt, but that didn’t matter. She had swapped the cold grey ruins of Europe for a city that painted with its own colours, made its own music and rejoiced in nothing more than the sight of Benjamin Franklin on a hundred-dollar bill.

  The Wooster Street apartment had not been easy to find. The difficulty was Telek. Even the cheap-rent landlords on the Lower East Side would not allow a resident dog on their premises. In the end she simply smuggled Telek into the apartment in her handbag and agreed to pay more than half the rent to the woman with whom she shared.

  Once again she wished Charlotte could be with her. She would love New York. She would become the cocktail queen of Fifth Avenue, dressed in designer silk and trailing admirers in a slipstream of French perfume.

  The fact that with so many troops still overseas single women outnumbered men in Manhattan by a factor of ten to one would not have bothered Charlotte. She would have acquired and discarded lovers as if trying on new clothes, always moving on when the new man in her life showed signs of falling in love.

  Kay longed to hear the news from London, but Charlotte had never written a letter in her life and Kay had heard nothing from her for months. The letter from her mother one morning in May, therefore, was a shock. It contained a newspaper clipping from the Daily Express, across the top of which was written, “I thought you would be interested. She was a good friend of yours, wasn’t she?”

  Kay sat down in amazement. There was a picture of Charlotte Victoria Montagu, of Eaton Square, Belgravia, leaving a church beneath an arcade of swords held aloft by army officers with her new husband, the Right Hon. James Arbuthnot Wilberforce of Thornberry Hall in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
The wedding had taken place at St Peter’s Church, Eaton Square, London S.W.1.

  Charlotte married? It seemed so unlikely. Kay looked at the date of the clipping. The wedding had taken place a month earlier, April 16th. What a shame they’d lost touch. She would have loved to have been there. And who was James Arbuthnot Wilberforce, and how had he managed to pin down “this most exotic specimen of London’s social butterflies”, as a gossip column had once described Charlotte?

  Kay examined the photograph closely. Charlotte looked exactly the same, laughing as she left the church. Kay read the piece again. The honeymoon was to be spent at the Grand Hotel, Nice, in the South of France. The happy couple would make their new home at the family estate in Yorkshire, it said.

  Charlotte living in the country surrounded by servants, dogs and horses? Charlotte waking up for the rest of her life with the same man by her side? It didn’t seem possible.

  It was just further evidence that the world had turned upside down since the end of the war: there was a socialist government in London, Russia had the A-bomb and was blockading Berlin, the Middle East was giving painful birth to the new state of Israel, and Charlotte Victoria Wilberforce, née Montagu, had settled for matrimony. Whatever next, thought Kay: a man on the moon?

  Kay had little money, but she didn’t have to look far for work. The years of snickering mentions and pictures in the newspaper gossip columns opened the door to several publishing houses. They wanted a book that would tell the inside story of her life with Eisenhower.

  A substantial advance of ten thousand dollars was offered, together with the services of a ghost writer. The message from every publisher who approached her was clear: the more Kay revealed of her relationship with Ike, the higher the price they’d pay.

  The photographs of Kay and Eisenhower together in Britain and Europe had been widely published. There were two that had caused most comment. The first was taken at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London when she and her mother joined Ike and his party in the royal box. The second showed Kay walking side by side with Ike through the ruins of Frankfurt. Once the New York press discovered that Kay Summersby had moved to the city, they happily reprinted such pictures over the objections of the Pentagon press office.

  The newspapers hadn’t yet stumbled on the fact that the official army photograph taken moments after Eisenhower had signed the German surrender document had been doctored. America saw a photograph of a group of smiling military faces at the centre of which, with the biggest smile of all, stood Eisenhower holding up two pens. The original photograph, showing Kay standing just behind him, had been released and published in Europe. No American journalist had yet made the connection between the two.

  “Welcome to the programme, Miss Summersby. You have resigned from the US Army after a long tour of duty as General Eisenhower’s driver and, what shall I say, his personal assistant in Europe during the war. Can you tell us about those years?”

  Kay was sitting in the studio of a local New York radio station in the first of what would prove a series of broadcast and newspaper interviews. They said they wanted to hear first hand what life was like as a member of Eisenhower’s wartime family.

  She knew that what they really wanted was rather more personal. She had planned her response to the inevitable questions about her relationship with care.

  “I would like to tell to tell everyone in New York what they, I am sure, already know: General Eisenhower is the greatest soldier in American history and led the alliance with Great Britain to a great victory. But the war is over and I would like to talk about the future.”

  Kay shifted in her chair, pressed the large headphones firmly against her ears and glanced briefly through the glass window of the studio to where her agent was sitting, together with an executive from the Prentice Hall publishing company.

  “And what is your future here, Miss Summersby?”

  “Well, thanks to the general, I have American citizenship, and I plan to make my home here in New York.”

  “Any other plans? We hear you might be writing a book.”

  Kay laughed. “You are well informed. Yes, I have been commissioned to write a book.”

  Kay could see her agent waving at her through the glass. She couldn’t remember if she was supposed to reveal the commission or not. What the hell, she thought – just tell the truth.

  “Can you tell us more?”

  “A publisher here in New York has asked me to give an account of my time with General Eisenhower during the war – three and a half years.”

  “You were his driver, I understand.”

  “That’s how I started, yes.”

  “And he promoted you?”

  “Yes, but I would rather not say any more. My publisher has asked me to be discreet.”

  “Wow! Is there much to be discreet about, Miss Summersby? You know, I guess, that there’s been quite a lot of talk about you two in the papers here?”

  She looked at her interviewer, a young man who was reading from a file of typewritten notes.

  “I have the greatest admiration for General Eisenhower and worked closely with him, but those years are over.”

  “With respect, that doesn’t answer the question, Miss Summersby.”

  “With respect, if anyone is looking for tittle-tattle in this book, they will be disappointed.”

  “Does the general know you are writing this book?”

  “No, but I am sure he will after this programme goes out.”

  “Can I ask the title?”

  “Sure: Eisenhower Was My Boss.”

  Kay looked through the glass again. She could see her agent and the man from Prentice Hall smiling.

  The news that Kay Summersby was to write a book about her wartime experiences was not well received in the Pentagon. For Eisenhower it was just another reminder that there would be no easy way to put the war behind him. He did not wish to become trapped in endless talks and lectures about tactical triumphs such as D-Day, the fall of Paris and the final assault on Germany.

  For one thing, the inquest into the failure to take Berlin was beginning to raise questions. It was Churchill and Patton who had urged the Allied commander to seize the German capital before the Red Army did so, and it was Churchill in Fulton, Missouri in 1946 who warned that an “iron curtain” had fallen across Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.

  The inference was cruel but clear. If the Allies had taken Berlin before the Russians, the iron curtain would have fallen far further east than it did, and millions would have been living in freedom rather than under communist dictatorship.

  Eisenhower had perfectly good answers to those questioning his strategy and his failure to take Berlin. He planned to lay his reasons out, and to refute critics, in his own memoirs.

  Eisenhower knew his own account of the war years would be matched by those of his staff. He’d been told Kay Summersby would join Mickey McKeogh, Harry Butcher and others in his wartime family telling their story. Kay was a free agent now she had left the army. He was sure she would do nothing to embarrass or hurt him. Others close to him, especially Mamie, were not so sure. His wife had warned him that Summersby would seek to profit from her presence in his team and would distort their relationship to help sell her book.

  In due course, Eisenhower planned to make clear in his own memoirs exactly what Kay Summersby’s contribution to his European command had been. He wouldn’t address the continuing rumours and the gossips; he’d ignore them. But he would record that her service had been that of a loyal, hardworking driver and aide, someone on whom he depended for the efficient working of his office, just as he had been helped and supported by others in his team.

  There would be plenty of people to suggest there was more to it than that. He could hardly deny it to himself; but why admit it to others? There had probably been an emotional involvement not quite in ke
eping with a professional relationship, but hell, he was fighting a major war, launching millions of men into battle. He had very nearly broken under the strain.

  Marshall had understood that when he’d organised the trip to the South of France.

  That was then, back in Europe. The world had changed. He would make that clear. He needed to put Summersby and the war behind him.

  Now his army career was over, a political career beckoned. Eisenhower had weighed up the prospect and, for public consumption at least, had said that he did not find the prospect especially appealing. As he had told a reporter when asked about his presidential ambitions, “Any man who wants to be president of the United States is either an egomaniac or plumb crazy – maybe both.”

  The seemingly casual remark had been crafted with care. The old army rule was never to reveal ambition for promotion because it created enemies among one’s peer group and did not impress superiors. Allow facts and actions to speak for themselves, that was the army rule.

  He just wished he hadn’t written that letter to George Marshall. It had been a mistake, a rare moment when his heart had ruled his head.

  But nobody knew about the letter. Except George Marshall. After Marshall’s angry and contemptuous response, the letter would surely have been destroyed.

  He had never told Kay Summersby about it. He had planned to surprise her. But that was in the past, back in the war. And the past, they say, is a foreign country to which you can never return.

  24

  Autumn 1948

  Morningside Heights on the upper side of Manhattan had been potato fields before the first of the great modern buildings of Colombia University were built in 1895. The Low Library was designed in neo-classical style with steps rising steeply to ten fluted pillars above which a granite lintel carried an inscription:

  Kings College founded in the Province of New York by royal charter in the reign of George II. Perpetuated as Columbia College by the people of the State of New York when they became free and independent. Maintained and cherished from generation to generation for the advancement of the public good and the glory of Almighty God.