The General's Women

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Kay Summersby, on the other hand, had gotten exactly nothing, except for that silly little dog with the ridiculous name, and whatever she was paid for her story. But she didn’t live to enjoy that, either. She had died of cancer almost two years before her book was published, and it was said that her earnings went to pay her medical bills. And of course, people would eventually get tired of talking about her memoir and it would disappear from the bookstores.

  But that didn’t happen. The book had only been out a few months when the newspapers announced that ABC TV had paid a quarter of a million dollars for the film rights and were planning to make a six-hour miniseries. Six hours of her husband and that woman, on national television! The thought filled her with horror, and she immediately telephoned John.

  “I’m sure it will be just dreadful, John,” she said, in her most steely voice. “You have to put a stop to it.”

  John got an early look at the script. And then, as indignant as his mother, he ordered the family lawyers to sue ABC TV. The project was put on hold while the lawsuit was pending, and after almost a year, the network knuckled under. They directed the screenwriter, Melville Shavelson, to rewrite the script and take out the bad parts. Mamie shuddered to think what the movie could have looked like if she and John hadn’t put their foot down. Robert Duvall and Lee Remick might have ripped their clothes off and jumped in bed together.

  But they had their way. The program was aired in May, 1979, and Mamie watched the whole thing. “Of course, the story is all very silly,” she said to her maid, Beatrix, who watched it with her. “There isn’t a blessed thing true about it, except for the war scenes.” She supposed they were true, since that part was all documentary footage provided by the army. And even though the credits said that the script was “based on” Past Forgetting, it wasn’t anything like the book, thank heaven. Robert Duvall was properly military, Mamie thought. Lee Remick, a flirtatious little kitten of a girl, had to make do with an arm around the shoulders.

  Mamie was upset about one thing, though. “Oh, how ugly they’ve made me look!” she exclaimed to Beatrix. “But then, they had to, I suppose,” she added. “After all, I’m the villain of the piece.”

  She thought about that for a moment. Yes, she supposed that—if what you were after was a lovers’ triangle—the wife would have to be the villain of the piece.

  She frowned. Did that make Kay the heroine?

  • • •

  Two months after the movie (and just four months before her death), Mamie telephoned ABC and said that she would be glad to talk to Barbara Walters, who had been pestering her for years for an interview. During the interview, which was taped at the farm, Barbara asked if her marriage to Ike had ever been in jeopardy. Pertly, Mamie replied, “All marriages are in jeopardy, of course. That’s where your good sense comes in.”

  “Well, yes,” Barbara agreed. She leaned forward, showing her teeth in a beguiling smile, and popped the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “But didn’t you ever worry that while Ike was away at war, he might be with someone else? After all, you were apart for three whole years.”

  Mamie lifted her chin. “I wouldn’t have stayed with him five minutes if I hadn’t had the biggest respect for him,” she replied. It was the last word she would say on the matter.

  Barbara didn’t seem to notice that she hadn’t answered the question.

  A Biographical Epilogue:

  Kay Summersby, Missing Person

  Omission is the most powerful form of lie.

  George Orwell

  The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.

  Harry S. Truman

  I think one of the most interesting things about autobiography is what the autobiographer leaves out. . . . We look at a chair and we see the solid: We see the chair’s shape in the wood. In looking at an autobiography, it’s as if you’re looking at the voids in the chair in order to see the form. Look at what the author is not telling you.

  David McCullough

  If Eisenhower’s family, friends, and followers had their way, Kay Summersby would have become a missing person.

  We know all about Ike and Mamie. Their lives have been documented in literally hundreds of memoirs, biographies, histories, and films. But Kay’s personal postwar history is much less well known and difficult to trace, perhaps because, as Ike’s biographer Jean Edward Smith wryly remarks, “The burnishers of Eisenhower’s image have worked overtime to eradicate her from the record.”[*]

  She was airbrushed out of the official photograph taken in Eisenhower’s office after the signing of Germany’s surrender. Harry Butcher mentions her only five times in the 876 pages of the published version of his detailed war diary, My Three Years with Eisenhower. Mickey McKeogh, Ike’s orderly, doesn’t mention her once in his personal memoir, Sgt. Mickey and General Ike, even though McKeogh and Kay spent a part of almost every day together from July 1942 to July 1945. And in his military memoir, Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower mentions her just once (page 133), as a member of his personal staff: “Kay Summersby was corresponding secretary and doubled as a driver.”

  It is true that Kay is mentioned frequently in almost every book about Eisenhower in World War II. But while biographers turn to her memoir, Eisenhower Was My Boss, as a valuable source of detailed information about the General’s wartime life, they generally reject her claim in Past Forgetting of an intimate relationship—denials that seem to be based on little else than the intuitive conviction that Dwight David Eisenhower could not have cheated on his wife and the belief that he could have had no intention of marrying Summersby. Carlo D’Este’s dismissal is typical: “It is extremely improbable that this affinity ever developed into something deeper.” Stephen Ambrose is willing to acknowledge a “close relationship” (whatever that means) but rejects the idea that Ike might have wanted to make it more permanent. While Kay was “the third most important woman in [Eisenhower’s] life, behind only his mother and his wife,” Ike “never thought of marrying [her].”

  Some biographers venture further. In a lengthy, four-page discussion of the relationship, Geoffrey Perret explains obligingly that “Eisenhower needed [Kay] and he indirectly admitted as much and . . . she read into his admission a passion that was not there and never would be. . . . For all that Kay Summersby wrote about love, she knew little about it, for throughout her unhappy life it eluded her.” Fine stuff if you’re writing a novel—much less helpful in what is supposed to be a biography.

  It is certainly true that, after the war, Kay Summersby became persona non grata in Eisenhower circles. But while she may have been airbrushed out of the picture, she never quite disappeared. In fact, for the rest of her life and beyond, she lingered like a threatening ghost in the margins and footnotes of the Eisenhower epic, telling first one story and then another about her three years with the Supreme Commander. And while each of her memoirs—Eisenhower Was My Boss (1948) and the posthumous Past Forgetting (1976)—tells a different and overlapping part of her story, neither tells the whole truth. Nor is it clear what the truth is, for as David Eisenhower remarks in his biography of his grandfather, the truth is “known only by them, and both are gone.”

  But it is possible to know some things. For example, it isn’t true (as some have said) that Ike and Kay never saw or heard from one another again. Quite the contrary, in fact. There was frequent contact between them, at least by letter, until Kay’s marriage in 1952, just two weeks after Dwight David Eisenhower became the thirty-fourth President of the United States.

  And it’s possible to know other things. What follows is an account of the arc of Kay’s postwar life that I have pieced together from official documents, letters, diaries, and contemporary newspaper stories, along with my own inferences and speculations.

  • • •

  When Eisenhower’s staff was sent to Washington in November 1945, Kay was ordered to Berlin. Taking her faithful Scottie Telek with her, she worked from January to September 1946 under General Lucius Cla
y, the deputy governor of the U.S. Zone. (A close friend of Eisenhower’s, Clay would become an adviser in his 1952 presidential campaign, help assemble his first-term cabinet, and serve in his administration.)

  Kay was promoted to the rank of WAC captain in early 1946. Around that time, Ike wrote to ask her to type the official diary she had kept for him during the European campaign, and they exchanged several letters about the project. In one letter (January 15, 1946), he sympathizes with Kay’s desire to leave her position on General Clay’s Berlin staff and offers help in finding her a job at the United Nations. In a note on the typed letter, he wrote:

  This scrawl is just to say that whatever I can do for you will be done—I don't know whether the citizenship thing [Kay was still a British citizen] will enter the picture, but all we can do is try to get you a job. I believe the organization will be stationed near N.Y. City. In any event, don’t get downhearted.

  The letter continues the theme of “I want to help,” which persists throughout their correspondence. In another letter (March 11, 1946), he says, “Our pups are doing splendidly. The one that I call ‘Telek’ looks exactly like his dad.” The puppy Telek must have been a constant reminder to him of the Scottie he and Kay had shared, and the reference to “our pups” may be a coded statement to Kay that she was remembered. In fact, the last sentence in the dictated and typed letter is even more explicit: “All of us miss you and send you our warm regard.”

  Kay’s Berlin job—she managed the visits of military and civilian VIPs—seemed routine and she must have missed the daily excitement and sense of urgencies of the war. She had already (in October 1945) initiated citizenship proceedings; a year later, she left Telek temporarily in the care of General Clay and sailed to the States aboard the army transport ship General SD Sturgis. She arrived in New York on October 10, 1946, and renewed her citizenship effort in the District Court of Washington, D.C., on November 18. Telek flew to California four months later, making the trip on an American Overseas Airlines plane in the personal custody of the pilot. At a layover in New York, newspaper photographers snapped his picture. There were more photographers waiting in California; wire-service photographs of Eisenhower’s little dog and the attractive Kay, still in uniform, appeared in many newspapers around the country, raising the question in many minds of a possible postwar relationship.

  If Kay and Ike got together when she arrived in New York or when she went to Washington to pursue her citizenship, there is no record of the meeting. This isn’t surprising since, by this time, Eisenhower would have been made aware of the hazards of a continuing association with her and was being closely monitored. As biographer Michael Korda notes, from the time he returned to the States in late 1945, the General was completely “protected” and “insulated” by a staff “whose primary purpose was to make him look good.”

  However, this is not to say that Kay and Ike did not manage to meet privately. In fact, after Kay’s death, one of her friends told a magazine writer that the pair privately “trysted for the final time” in her New York apartment after the war, perhaps when Kay arrived from Germany. Seeing her without the knowledge of his staff and/or his wife might have presented a certain challenge, but Eisenhower could no doubt have done it if he chose. It is also not a surprise that there are no meetings (other than a brief office encounter with Telek and another on the Columbia campus) described in Past Forgetting.

  At the time of her return to the United States in 1946, Kay was still in the service. She was ordered to Hamilton Field, north of San Francisco, as inconveniently far from Washington (and the General) as possible. Her job as an assistant public relations officer was even less eventful than her assignment in Berlin—until one night in February 1947, when a man entered the women officers’ quarters, picked Kay’s room at random, and attempted to rape her. She screamed for help and he was apprehended almost immediately. He confessed to other attempts and the matter dragged out until September, when he was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years.

  The publicity created by her attacker’s arrest and trial proved difficult for Kay. She applied in May for a compassionate discharge and was separated in July 1947. In April, her mother came from England for a visit, apparently stopping off in Washington to see Eisenhower. Replying to a letter from Kay in May of that year, he wrote, “I know that your mother’s visit must be a real treat for you both.”

  Kay had kept in touch with Harry Butcher, Ike’s naval aide, after the war. Butch had divorced his wife Ruth (Mamie’s wartime roommate) and married Molly, the Red Cross worker whom he met in Algiers. In the spring of 1947, Kay visited Butch and Molly at their home in Santa Barbara, where Butch had just launched Radio KIST. During the visit, she likely told Butch that she was considering writing a book about her wartime experiences. She still had in her possession the two wartime diaries that she and Eisenhower had maintained in 1944 and 1945, which Eisenhower had already suggested she might use for a book. Butch, whose gossipy diary of the war was published by Simon and Schuster in 1946, may have referred her to his literary agent, George Bye. (Bye, a well-known New York agent, had a number of high-profile clients, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Rebecca West, and Rose Wilder Lane and Lane’s mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder). Butch also wrote to Ike to let him know that Kay was considering writing a memoir. It’s fair to say that this news would not have been greeted with enthusiasm by Eisenhower staffers, whose experience of Butcher’s book had not been positive.

  Back on the East Coast in the summer of 1947, Kay took Telek to visit Eisenhower in his office in the Pentagon, the first opportunity to reunite Ike with their dog since the Scottie had arrived from Germany in March. Eisenhower, Kay says, invited her to bring Telek back to see him and—once again—offered to help her find a job.

  There’s something of a mystery about what happened next in Kay’s life. I haven’t been able to find any direct documentation, but we can reconstruct the narrative from a letter Eisenhower wrote to her and an entry in his diary. She seems to have written to Eisenhower sometime in early November from the Commodore Hotel in New York, letting him know of a change in her “wedding plans.” Eisenhower replied on November 12 that he was grateful to her for informing him of the change and sent his regrets. Three weeks later, he wrote in his diary (a diary he intended for later publication):

  I heard today, through a mutual friend, that my wartime secretary (rather personal aide and receptionist) is in dire straits. A clear case of a fine person going to pieces over the death of a loved one, in this instance the man she was all set to marry. I’ll do what I can to help. . . . Makes one wonder whether any human ever dares become so wrapped up in another that all happiness and desire to live is determined by the actions, desires—or life—of the second. I trust she pulls herself together, but she is Irish and tragic.

  This cannot be, as some have suggested, a reference to the 1943 death of Kay’s fiancé, Colonel Richard Arnold, and it cannot be a reference to Kay’s 1952 marriage to Reginald Morgan, who was at this time still married to his second wife. Taken with the letter of November 12, it seems to suggest that Kay planned to marry in late 1947, but that the “man she was all set to marry” unfortunately died. If this is true, it would be the second such tragedy in her life. Whoever the man was and whatever happened, the details have dropped out of the records, and all we have left are hints of this tragedy—and Ike’s unusual (for him) personal reflection on the high cost of emotional involvement.

  In early December, living in a New York hotel and looking for options, Kay considered the possibility of reentering the service. But by the end of 1947, she had taken a job with Tex McCrary, a well-known American journalist and public relations specialist. McCrary, widely hailed as the creator of the talk-show format on radio and television, was organizing a worldwide news service for radio and television, with correspondents anchored at strategic spots around the globe. Kay may have met McCrary in Algiers, where he served during the war as a public relations officer for the M
editerranean Allied Air Forces. Or Eisenhower or one of his staffers (making good on the promise to help her find a job) may have recommended her.

  In the early months of 1948, Kay was sharing an apartment on East Sixty-Ninth Street in New York with Anita Roberts, a former WAC who had occasionally been a fourth at Eisenhower’s bridge table. At work on the wartime memoir that would be published as Eisenhower Was My Boss, Kay had fired her first ghostwriter and replaced him with Frank Kearns. Her work on the project was interrupted in May 1948, when her sister Sheila died unexpectedly and she went to England to care for her mother, who had suffered a nervous breakdown. She wrote to Eisenhower to tell him of Sheila’s death and let him know about her book. The next day, he wrote sympathetically to both Kay and her mother: “It is distressing to learn of the tragedies in your family.” He also expressed surprise to hear about the book (he believed that Kay had returned to military service), but complimented her on her choice of George Bye as an agent: “I feel you are possessed of a fine adviser in George Bye.”

  The publisher (Prentice-Hall) wanted to call the book Eisenhower’s “Girl Friday” but Eisenhower objected. In a July 1948 letter to George Bye, he said he didn’t see why the book had to have his name on it and proposed the title A WAC in SHAEF. He also wrote to the editor at Prentice-Hall, Myron L. Boardman. To Kay, he summarized his concern and added: “You know, of course, I wish you the best of luck in this publishing venture.”

  Kay returned from England in time to receive the British Empire Medal, awarded by the British consulate in a ceremony on board the Cunard’s Britannic. On her return, she handed over her notes, diaries, and manuscript drafts to her new ghostwriter, Frank Kearns, an American-intelligence-officer-turned-journalist who had been based in London during the war. A skilled writer and researcher with a comprehensive understanding of Eisenhower’s campaigns, Kearns was recommended to Kay and to her editor at Prentice-Hall by Edward L. Saxe, who also served in London with Eisenhower. It seems likely that Kay knew both Kearns and Saxe; she certainly knew Saxe’s wife, Anthea Gordon Saxe, who had also been a civilian driver in the Mechanised Transport Corps. Both of the Saxes later became her literary executors.