Jean Edward Smith’s new
Eisenhower In War and Peace has been widely praised,
including by columnist George Will. Likely this latest biography
about Ike as general and President has many virtues. But its
inordinate attention to Ike’s war-time chauffeur and fulsome
portrayal of her as mistress based on almost no credibly presented
evidence undermines the book’s credibility.
Kay Summersby was an attractive British army officer who
chauffeured Eisenhower for much of three years through London, in
North Africa, and later in Europe, while also serving as a
secretary. Her looks and constant proximity to Ike during the war
raised some eyebrows but not sufficiently to inhibit his later
political successes. He had virtually no contact with her after he
returned to America at war’s end. Her initial memoir about her work
for Ike never claimed romance. But her ostensible second memoir
published posthumously claimed physical intimacies with her
war-time boss.
The index of Eisenhower in War and Peace allots
more page mentions to Summersby than to five-star General Omar
Bradley, Ike’s close subordinate and a friend across 50 years
starting at West Point. She also eclipses British Field Marshal
Bernard Montgomery, Ike’s most important military ally and frequent
nemesis. She’s mentioned more often than Richard Nixon, Ike’s vice
president and political mentee. Likewise, Summersby gets more
mentions than Eisenhower’s only child and son, who graduated from
West Point in time to serve in Europe, spending time with his
commander and father, and who also worked for his father after the
President’s retirement to Gettysburg. Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles, arguably Ike’s most influential cabinet member
across seven years and whom he admired tremendously, similarly is
overshadowed by Summersby, at least in page
mentions.
General George Patton, Ike’s flashiest subordinate, just
barely gets more page mentions than Summersby. So does General
Douglas MacArthur, for whom Ike worked before World War II. The few
others who merit more attention than the chauffeur are Ike’s wife
of over 50 years who served as First Lady, President Franklin
Roosevelt and General George Marshall, who together elevated Ike to
greatness, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Ike’s
chief partner in the liberation of North Africa and Europe.
Seemingly only these global figures are more important than
Summersby in the life of Eisenhower.
No doubt Eisenhower appreciated Summersby’s company across
three tumultuous years, during which Ike chain-smoked and tersely
plotted the destruction of the Third Reich. Possibly a tense and
lonely Ike betrayed his wife and succumbed to her charms. But other
biographers like Stephen Ambrose and Carlo D’Este have doubted it.
So too have surviving members of Eisenhower’s closest staff, who
emphasize that he was almost never alone throughout the war,
constantly surrounded by staff, fellow generals, and supplicants
for his attention. Ike’s war-time orderly recalled physically
putting his commander to bed every night and getting him out of bed
every morning, with no sign of Summersby. Eisenhower’s son also
rejected the claims of adultery, believing his father would never
have embarrassed his only son by asking him to escort Summersby
during his U.S. visit if she had been a mistress.
Smith liberally quotes from Summersby’s purported 1975
memoir, Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D.
Eisenhower, without fully mentioning it was ghost-authored by
a professional novelist and published after Summersby’s death. The
book admits the chauffeur was rarely alone with her boss but
recalls quickly stolen intimacies in an affair that was never
successfully consummated. Smith also quotes from Merle Miller’s
Plain Speaking, a popular but ultimately discredited 1973
remembrance of interviewing former President Harry Truman more than
a decade earlier for a television series that never aired. Miller
claimed Truman told him of personally destroying or returning
correspondence in which Ike supposedly told General Marshall he
wanted to divorce his wife and marry Summersby, to which Marshall
responded by threatening to kibosh Ike’s career. The tapes of these
interviews survive but there’s no such conversation. Miller safely
published his book right after Truman’s death. But when he earlier
sought permission from Truman to publish excerpts, Truman alleged
“misstatements” and threatened litigation. Smith mentions no
reasons for skepticism about Miller, himself a novelist.
In a more tortured fashion, Smith relates that an elderly
professor told him of a since deceased colleague who, as a young
naval intelligence officer, had supposedly perused Marshall’s
rebuke to Ike. Would the famously discrete and disciplined Marshall
have put such a rebuke on paper and had it transmitted through
channels for censorship review by a low ranking serviceman? And
would Marshall have left such incendiary correspondence in Pentagon
files, as Miller claimed, knowing they could be exploited by
countless political hacks? No trace of such letters has ever
surfaced in the Truman, Eisenhower, or Marshall archives. Smith
also bases his assumption of an affair by Ike and Summersby with
his longtime-acquaintance with General Lucius Clay, about whom he
also wrote a biography. But he provides no supporting quotes from
Clay, who died over 30 years ago, instead only noting that Clay
“blushed” when asked about Summersby and changed the
topic.
Smith even oddly cites Fawn Brodie’s ridiculous 1974
psycho-babble “intimate biography” of Thomas Jefferson, which
conjectured an affair between Jefferson and his slave Sally
Hemings. Smith asserts Brodie’s fictional speculations carry the
“ring of reality,” similar to the lore about Ike and Summersby.
Somberly, Smith recounts Ike’s “cold-blooded and ruthless” good-bye
letter to Summersby at war’s end. By comparison, he declares that
FDR would have been “incapable” of writing such a thoughtless
farewell. Although Smith has written a lengthy biography about
Roosevelt, he seems to forget that the famously ruthless FDR, whose
wife once wondered if he truly cared about anyone, coolly neglected
his own secretary and sometimes alleged mistress of over 20 years
after her stroke. She was devastated by his neglect. (In fairness
to FDR, he was an ailing paraplegic leading a great war against two
enemy empires with limited personal time and emotional energy.)
Ike’s letter to Summersby is only “cold” if she was in fact a
mistress. If she was instead a trusted and close subordinate, the
letter is in fact rather gracious, especially by Ike’s detached
standards.
Eisenhower in War and Peace mostly
lauds Ike’s leadership and accomplishments. As to the details of
Ike’s relations with Summersby, Eisenhower’s son once likened it to
the platonic, teasing and fatherly association between Ed Asner’s
Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore’s character in Moore’s popular 1970s
sitcom. This comparison probably better and more succinctly
captures the essence than Smith’s nearly one column of index page
mentions that mostly cite idle speculations.
