The General's Women

by Susan Wittig Albert

  IKE: To hell with the White House. I’m no politician and I never want to be one.

  MARSHALL: What are you, Eisenhower? Don’t you understand your country may need you? It needs you right now. Because you stand for something. You stand for 116,000 American dead; you’re the only one who has come out of this war with the respect of the mothers and fathers who gave you their sons to kill. Respect. Remember that word. It isn’t yours. It was given to you by your country. By the soldiers and sailors and airmen who died for it.

  He is pacing now.

  MARSHALL: (cont’d) And if you want to throw it away so you can climb in the sack with some girl half your age, you go and do it, because you’re going to live in history, right next to Benedict Arnold.

  IKE: That’s hitting below the belt.

  MARSHALL: Where do you want me to hit you? How do I make you come to your senses? Your life is not your own any more. It belongs to the United States. Now, I order you to go back to Mamie and forget everything that’s happened in this office and so will I.

  The theme of Ike’s life “belonging to the United States” is threaded throughout the film, as is the theme of Kay’s willing (if reluctant) renunciation of the hero. Before Ike returns to the States for his victory lap, Kay tells him, “You are free of me. I went into this with my eyes wide open, knowing I was to be swept under the rug when this moment came. I shall mind, of course, but it’s been—oh, such a lovely rug.” Good Hollywood stuff, but in reality, of course, Kay never got a chance to surrender. When she was swept under the rug, she was given no memorable lines.

  After the lawsuit was filed, Shavelson continued to work behind the scenes, revising parts of the screenplay he felt might offend John and Mamie Eisenhower, selecting shooting locations, and obtaining war footage from the army, which cooperated readily. It took a year of negotiations before the family and the network arrived at a compromise. The family dropped the suit and the network agreed to represent Mamie favorably and (most importantly) play down the Ike-Kay romance. Shortly afterward, Shavelson, who had been involved with the project from the beginning, was replaced as director by Boris Sagal.

  Shavelson doesn’t say whether his removal was one of the requirements the family imposed for dropping the suit. The network insisted that the Eisenhowers—and their corporate friends who threatened to pull their advertising from the network—had nothing to do with the script and personnel changes. But when filming began again, the network’s announcement of the project avoided any mention of romantic elements: “The story follows Eisenhower’s role in the war as he rose to supreme Allied commander and five-star general,” and the “romance” was reduced to a “relationship.” It is tempting to see the resulting diminishment of the film character of Kay as another instance of the airbrushing that began with the V-E Day photograph in 1945.

  Ike: The War Years was aired in May, 1979, and earned five Emmy nominations and an Eddy (for editing). No longer the story of the Eisenhower-Summersby romance, the muscular war saga was widely praised, even in the New York Times, which had initially opposed the project. Some reviewers, however, were disappointed that Kay’s story had been abridged and the long-whispered love affair reduced to a few meaningful glances, a kiss on the cheek, and a surreptitious cuddle. Susan Anthony, an internationally syndicated New York reviewer, observes:

  Although the question of whether Ike and Summersby actually had an affair is raised constantly in the show, no definitive answer is given. Instead, the conclusion is a resounding “maybe.” While this may be comforting for Ike’s family, it is irritating for viewers . . .

  Shavelson, an admirer of Kay Summersby and a believer in the truth of her memoir, was intent on having the last word. He novelized his screenplay under the title Ike; the book was published in a mass market paperback edition in America and England in 1979. In his author’s afterword, he considers the question of just where, in this complex, multilayered story, the truth lies (surely one of the most interesting juxtapositions of words in the English language):

  What is truth? I do not know. . . . [But I] honestly believe that Dwight Eisenhower was human being enough to have felt what any of us might have felt, given that war and that time and that woman. By those who were there, I have been told that he did feel, “deeply and honestly” and so did Kay Summersby.

  Both Ike and Kay have now gone on. The truth, the absolute truth, if such a thing ever can exist, died with them.

  And that, I think, is the last true thing that anyone can say about this story.

  * * *

  [*] Readers of the ebook edition will find documentation for the nonfiction sections at www.TheGeneralsWomen.com.

  Author’s Note

  In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

  Winston Churchill

  The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

  E. L. Doctorow

  I first met Kate Summersby in her 1976 memoir, Past Forgetting, which I read in the 1980s. The book challenged my view of Eisenhower, the president of my childhood and young adult years. The bald, bland, inarticulate, golf-playing president actually had a lover? At the time, the fact that the Supreme Commander turned out to be impotent (not just once but twice in the book) seemed to me a marvelous example of dramatic irony. I even wondered whether Kay was at last getting even with him, snarkily, for dumping her at the end of the war. After all, Ike couldn’t very well rise up out of his grave and say, “It is not true! I did have sex with that woman!”

  Then, just a few years ago, I encountered Kay again. This time, she was played by Lee Remick in the DVD edition of the TV miniseries Ike: The War Years, which was widely advertised as “based on” Past Forgetting. The film bothered me. For one thing, the book’s highly charged sex scenes had been deleted from the script, and the film’s star-crossed lovers acted like two well-mannered adolescents conscious that Mom was looking on saying, “Now, kids, behave.”

  The lack of sexual tension was bad enough, but the real problem was the portrayal of Kay. Lee Remick’s Kay was a charmingly kittenish version of Mary Tyler Moore, and her lines could have come straight from that comic-relief heroine of sixteen years of American sitcoms. (This may have been John Eisenhower’s idea; he is quoted years later as saying that Kay had been “the Mary Tyler Moore of headquarters, perky and cute.”)

  But a pert, sassy, comic-relief Kay doesn’t carry enough emotional weight to make us believe that Robert Duvall’s heroic General Ike could have fallen for her. Even more disturbingly, Remick’s Kay of the film (and of Shavelson’s later spinoff book) doesn’t give Ike the chance to break it off. She takes care of that herself, telling him that he owes her nothing, that she won’t hold him to promises made in the heat of battle. He is the war hero, free to go into his future unfettered. “I’m a big girl, Ike,” she says, yielding the field. “I know when I’m out of my class.”

  But wait! This isn’t the Kay of Past Forgetting, who was inexplicably and humiliatingly dumped by the man she had loved, who went back to his wife and the Pentagon with only a brutal letter to axe their affair. Of course, an adaptation is an adaptation and Hollywood is Hollywood. (Lee Remick herself once said she wouldn’t make another Hollywood movie until Hollywood started making movies for grownups.) Still, it seemed to me that something had happened during the production of this film that made it necessary to massively rewrite the love affair and completely recast the main character—to create a story that revised and trivialized and sanitized the love affair. I began to read, to ask questions, to dig into the Summersby story, which is also the story of the war in North Africa and Europe. Then I became fascinated by the way Kay’s story has been told—and altered—in two memoirs, in film, in Eisenhower biographies, and more recently, in posts on the Internet.

  The more I learned, the more I wanted to know, not just about Kay Summersby but about the man she had fallen in love with—Dwight Eisenhower—and the General’s wi
fe, Mamie. Who were Ike and Mamie before they became President and Mrs. Middle America? I began to sense that the golf-playing President and the Mamie-pink First Lady with the weird bangs were two very real people who had had a very hard time of it during a very hard war, and that their marriage had been seriously jeopardized by Ike’s falling deeply in love with another woman.

  This novel represents my effort to learn about those real people and their real wartime love affair. Writing historical fiction, I am always mindful that I am working along a continuum that places documented fact on one end and pure invention on the other, with many points between. As I wrote this book, I was dealing with things that really happened and things that might also have happened—and occasionally with what happened instead.

  For example, Ike and all of the characters in his wartime command are historical people. Their interactions and the settings in which they worked and fought are described as they appear in Kay’s two memoirs, in Harry Butcher’s minutely detailed war diary, My Three Years with Eisenhower, and in the references listed in the bibliography. I have fictionalized Ike’s role in the Darlan affair (exactly what part he played is not known) and throughout have created an Eisenhower consistent with the picture developed in Fred I. Greenstein’s masterful study of Ike’s duplicities and behind-the-scenes maneuvers, The Hidden-Hand Presidency, a book that gives us a very clear look at a man who played his cards close to the chest. “Ike is Don Corleone, the godfather,” says Daun van Ee, an editor of the Eisenhower papers, speaking about Eisenhower’s behind-the-scenes destruction of the political influence of Senator Joe McCarthy. “He knows how to take somebody out without leaving any fingerprints.”

  I have portrayed Ike’s 1936 dalliance with Marian Huff (his golf and bridge partner in Manila, of whom Mamie was very jealous) as a precursor to his affair with Kay. The key events of the developing romance with Kay—Ike’s gift of Telek, Ike’s gift of a uniform, Ike’s taking her with him to North Africa, to Egypt, and to Europe after the Normandy invasion—are documented in one or both of Kay’s memoirs and in Butcher’s diary. Also true: King George’s chilly snub, Winston Churchill’s interest, and the desert picnic with FDR.

  For Mamie’s characterization, I have stayed close to the details that Susan Eisenhower gave us in her sympathetic biography of her grandmother, Mrs. Ike: Memories and Reflections on the Life of Mamie Eisenhower, and in several other First Lady biographies. I have somewhat fictionalized Ike’s determinedly reassuring letters to her, but they are based on the real letters published in Letters to Mamie, which are indeed stilted, defensive, and thoroughly unconvincing. Where Kay Summersby was concerned, Ike’s protestations must have caused Mamie a great many more doubts than they resolved—especially after Mamie realized that he had brought Kay to North Africa.

  Also real: Mamie’s 1979 interview with Barbara Walters; a copy is available at the Eisenhower Library. Mamie’s comment about Ike’s “old bald head” is reported by J. B. West, Chief Usher at the White House during the Eisenhowers’ tenure there. Her reaction to Ike: The War Years (“Oh, how ugly they’ve made me look!”) was reported in the Indiana Gazette after her death. And her well-known jealousy of Ann Whitman, Eisenhower’s Oval Office secretary, is documented in Confidential Secretary, Robert Donovan’s biography of Whitman, which also reports Mamie’s efforts to get Whitman fired during the 1952 campaign. “I tried to keep out of Mrs. Eisenhower’s way,” Whitman said after she was finally forced to leave Ike. “It was clear that she did not want me around.”

  Mamie’s friend Ruth Butcher is real, but to serve the fiction, I have invented a number of Greek-chorus friends. They give voice to Washington and Stateside fact and opinion and allow me to get some of the goings-on in the Pentagon on the record. Cookie, Diane, and Pamela are fictional creations, and their discussion in chapter 20 of the arrival of Ike’s divorce letter at the Pentagon is fictional. However, Doris Fleeson is real, and her Evening Star column about Kay’s Washington visit—which I have quoted accurately—was published at the time Kay was there. Fleeson was a highly regarded journalist, and her column could very easily have produced the fictional result I have described in that chapter: Mamie’s call to General Marshall, asking him to keep Kay in Germany, and Marshall’s order to Eisenhower, directing him to return immediately to the States.

  Now to the complicated matter of Eisenhower’s “divorce” letter and Marshall’s reply. In the fictional conversation in chapter 20, I have invented “Marv’s” reported glimpse of Marshall’s scolding cable to Ike. But I based this incident on a real event related by Eisenhower biographer Jean Edward Smith. Garrett Mattingly, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Columbia University history professor, served as a junior naval officer in the Washington censor’s office during the war and was assigned to read outgoing cables. In the early 1950s, well before Truman placed the letters into the public record, Mattingly told Columbia colleagues that he had seen Marshall’s cable to Eisenhower in Germany.

  In addition to Mattingly’s corroboration of Truman’s claim, there are other confirmations. Dr. John R. Steelman, a close Truman aide, said in a 1996 interview that he actually accompanied Marshall to the Oval Office to discuss Eisenhower’s divorce letter with the president. (Truman’s calendar contains two meetings between Marshall and Truman where this issue might have been discussed: May 16 and May 28, 1945. Steelman is not shown to be present, but since he was frequently in the Oval Office, he would not necessarily have been listed.) At the meeting, Truman instructed Marshall to burn the correspondence. Steelman recalls, however, that Marshall told him that “he was going to put it in the files, because he [Marshall] didn’t trust Eisenhower as much as Truman did.” That is, there was some doubt in Marshall’s mind as to whether Ike would end his relationship with Kay. He obviously wanted the correspondence in case Ike defied him and went on with the divorce.

  In 1973, after Plain Speaking was published, General Harry Vaughan, Truman’s military aide, told an AP reporter that at Truman’s order, he had retrieved the documents from the file “to keep them out of the hands of Eisenhower’s political opponents” (in the 1952 run-up to the GOP nomination) and gave them to the president. Jean Edward Smith surmises that Truman destroyed them and finds evidence that Eisenhower knew what he had done and was grateful. Stanley Weintraub sums it up wryly: “Documents, if any, have disappeared. That itself was not unique in the self-protective bureaucracy.”

  In any event, copies may have been made, for both the Taft primary campaign staff and the Democratic campaign staff threatened to use them in the 1952 election. I haven’t been able to find any evidence that the Taft campaign actually had the letters. But years later, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson wrote that the late Senator Olin Johnston (D-SC) told him that the Democrats had compiled a dossier on the Eisenhower-Summersby affair. Johnston claimed to have personally seen Marshall’s correspondence “admonishing Ike to forget Miss Summersby.” Columnist Drew Pearson also refers to Eisenhower’s divorce plans in his diary entry for December 4, 1952, when he notes a conversation with John Bennett, a Pearson staffer who reported that he had talked with Eisenhower in Paris in late 1951. Ike had wanted to know “what the effect on the public would be” if word got out about his affair with Kay. Eisenhower “seemed chiefly worried because apparently Mamie didn’t know he contemplated a divorce,” according to Bennett, and feared that General George Patton’s letters to his wife might contain references to the affair.

  Some biographers have attempted to explain Truman’s startling announcement in Plain Speaking by saying that the former president confused the divorce correspondence with another exchange of letters between Eisenhower and Marshall regarding Mamie. On June 4, 1945, nearly a month after V-E Day, Eisenhower wrote Marshall asking permission to bring Mamie to Europe. The wartime separation, he said, was causing serious personal problems for him and his wife. Four days later, Marshall sent a sympathetic refusal, saying that the request couldn’t be approved when other similar requests were denied. Jean Edwar
d Smith remarks that, in fact, this incident actually offers “tangential corroboration” of the divorce correspondence. He concludes that Eisenhower was using this letter to signal to Marshall that he had given up his plan to divorce his wife. Stanley Weintraub, too, finds the letter “suspicious on its surface,” especially since Mamie would have to travel by sea (she refused to fly), as well as give up her apartment and store her belongings, only a few months before Ike was due to return to the United States.

  My conclusion: at the time of V-E Day, Ike did intend to divorce Mamie and marry Kay. Marshall—a strong father figure, as well as Ike’s boss—persuaded him otherwise. Ike signaled his altered intention with his June 4 request to bring his wife to Germany. Ike hadn’t told Kay of his intention to marry her, so he didn’t have to retract an offer or a promise.

  But he hadn’t necessarily agreed to give her up, either—he had only agreed not to marry her. I believe that, as late as November 1945, he intended to bring Kay to the States with the rest of his staff. In fact, it may have been his decision to send her to Washington in October 1945 to pursue her citizenship that set the subsequent events in motion.

  With regard to Ike’s impotence, as it is portrayed in the two “failure” scenes in Past Forgetting: as a writer of fiction, I have a wider latitude than a historian or a biographer. I feel that both Ike and Kay deserve to wrest at least a little passionate pleasure out of those dark days, so I have given them that, at times and places where I think it might have been possible. In offering this fictional satisfaction to my fictional lovers, I have trusted to my own romantic imagination and to the testimony of Sigrid Hedin, the first ghostwriter on Past Forgetting, who told a reporter that Kay told her the affair was consummated and that she (Sigrid) had the manuscript to prove it. (I can’t help but wonder who might have bought Hedin’s manuscript, how much was paid for it, and what happened to it. That’s a story in itself.) I’m guessing that Hedin was removed from the project for the same reason Shavelson was removed as director of the film. Each of them had a different story to tell, and they were paid not to tell it.