The General's Women

by Susan Wittig Albert

  On their way back to the hotel through the darkness, Ike reached for Kay’s hand. “You have to know how much it means to me to see this with you,” he said. “I wish—” He broke off. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “Let’s not be sorry.” She gripped his hand and turned to smile at him. “This is what we have. This is now. It’s enough.” She said the words bravely, but she wasn’t sure she believed them.

  Back at the hotel, the group had a nightcap together and then said goodnight. She had her own room and had thought—no, she had hoped—that he would come to her. Everyone seemed to be in a different part of the hotel, so there would be little danger of discovery.

  But that isn’t what happened. As they walked down the hall to their rooms, he slipped a piece of paper into her hand. You know what I am thinking, he had written. Good night. Sweet dreams.

  She lay awake for a long time, hoping he might change his mind. Finally, she drifted to sleep, thinking that he must know he was going to Washington. He was keeping the truth from her to spare her feelings. This was his way of saying goodbye.

  The next day, they drove across the Nile and into the Valley of the Kings. It was blazing hot, and the old cars in their caravan often boiled over. When that happened, they got fresh water pumped from wells where water buffalo plodded in circles. In the villages, donkeys hung their heads out of doorways, and clouds of flies swarmed over goat carcasses hanging in the bazaars. But when they reached the great valley in the hills behind Deir el-Bahri, all these sights were forgotten. There, sunk deep into the stone of the mountain, were tombs of pharaohs, designed with descending corridors that opened out into pillared chambers. At the end of the main corridor was the burial chamber: the royal mummy in its stone sarcophagus, surrounded by all the things he would want in the next world. The walls were covered with pictures of the dead king and with illustrated texts to help him find his way through the underworld.

  It had been a long, hot, hard day, but Kay would never forget a moment of it. Back at the hotel that night, all they wanted was a cold drink, a quick supper, and a warm bath. Ike kissed Kay quickly in the hall and went to his room. She was sure of it now. This was all they would have, ever. Was it enough?

  No! she cried into her pillow. No, not enough, not nearly enough!

  But it was all. All there would ever be.

  • • •

  On the last day of their trip, the group flew to Jerusalem, where they had lunch in the grand King David Hotel, strolled through the bazaar, and walked through the Garden of Gethsemane. The garden was closed to the public, but Ike’s four stars opened the gate for the two of them, and they strolled along the quiet paths, away from the noisy crowds. In a remote corner of the garden, behind a gnarled olive tree, he bent to kiss her quickly, impulsively—and almost reluctantly, she thought, as if he had been trying all day not to kiss her and had finally given in. She felt inexpressibly sad.

  Leaving the garden, they stopped at a crowded bazaar, where she admired a small olivewood box with a hand-carved lid and Ike bought it for her. That night, back at the villa in Cairo, he handed her a postcard he’d bought in the bazaar. It had a photograph of the Garden of Gethsemane on one side. On the other, he had written, There are lots of things I could say—you know them. Good night.

  In the room she was sharing with Ruth and Nana, she slipped the card into the little olivewood box. That night she dreamed that Ike came to her in the dark and made love to her, a love so sweet and slow and altogether lovely that she awoke, breathless, her heart beating fast, her skin tingling. The urgency of the dream had been so powerful that she could almost convince herself that the experience had been real. But the moments of imagined intimacy were sharpened by her waking awareness that Ike would likely be returning to his wife very soon, and she began to cry—silently, so as not to wake the others.

  It was a long time before sleep came again. It brought no more dreams.

  • • •

  Back at Allied headquarters, there was still one more important visit to prepare for. The President would be arriving in Tunis on December 7, on his way back to Washington from his conference with Churchill and Stalin at Tehran. When they met his C-54 at El Aouina Field, Kay thought he looked terribly gray and tired and years older than when they had said goodbye just two weeks before.

  But his cigarette holder was still cocked at a jaunty angle and he was still flashing that Roosevelt smile. “Ah, Kay,” he said. “I’ve given orders that you’re to drive me, so don’t let Mike Reilly pull any of his Irish tricks.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kay said happily. “Thank you, sir!”

  Eisenhower joined the President in the backseat of the Cadillac. “I trust that the Tehran conference was a success, sir.”

  “A mixed bag, as usual,” FDR said. He raised his voice over the roar of their motorcycle escort as Kay swung into the cavalcade of vehicles. “Stalin got that second front he’s been demanding. We committed to the cross-Channel invasion in May.” He hesitated. “I don’t suppose you’ve got the news yet, have you?”

  “What news?” Eisenhower asked, and Kay, at the wheel, half-turned her head to listen.

  “Well, then, I see you haven’t,” the President said briskly. “So let me be the first to congratulate you, General Eisenhower.” He raised his voice—deliberately, Kay thought so that she could hear him. “You will have full responsibility for Operation Overlord and for the liberation of Europe from the Germans. Your title will be Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces. You will be based in London for the planning phases of the operation. I will be making the joint announcement with the Prime Minister as soon as I get back to Washington.” He thrust out his hand. “Congratulations, Ike.”

  Ike seemed stunned. He looked up and Kay met his eyes in the rear view mirror. “Congratulations, General,” she said. “Wonderful news.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Ike said to the President. “I’ll do my best. My very best.” His grin was so wide it nearly split his face, and Kay was unspeakably happy for him and for herself. The Allied command was the capstone of his military career, what he had wanted, what he had dreamed.

  For her, it was a breathtaking reprieve. Ike would be going to London. And she would be with him.

  They would be together.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  Things Not Mentioned

  Washington, D.C.

  July–November 1943

  In Washington, the wilting heat of the summer had continued well into the autumn. Whenever they could, housewives sat in front of electric fans draped with damp towels, sipping glasses of iced tea. Men took an extra white shirt to the office and changed after lunch. People who had showers showered twice a day, and those with a front porch sat on it in the evening, hoping to catch a breeze.

  There were other challenges in this second year of America’s war. A shortage of cigarettes forced smokers to roll their own or smoke a pipe, when they could find tobacco. (The Anti-Cigarette Alliance helpfully suggested chewing gentian root instead.) Sugar was hard to get and coffee even harder—unless your neighbor was secretly selling it out of his basement. Chocolates were next to impossible. And even cars with an “A” sticker were limited to four gallons of gas a week.

  If people had known the truth about the war—the heavy price paid in human lives and equipment for every foot of ground gained against the enemy—they might have stopped complaining about the shortages. But they knew only what the government told them, and that wasn’t much. Every scrap of war reporting was filtered through the Office of War Information, where Ike’s brother Milton was in charge.

  The OWI controlled the content of newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, and films. Readers, listeners, and viewers heard the good news—the bad news (and there was a lot of it) went deliberately untold. For instance, Americans read that Operation Husky was a swift summer success that ended with the taking of Sicily from the Axis. True enough. But the full cost—the Allied wounded, missing, and dead—wasn’t tallied in the n
ewspaper reports. And what wasn’t reported until after was the fact that 110,000 Axis troops managed to escape the island, taking with them ten thousand vehicles, forty-seven tanks, ninety-four guns, and eleven hundred tons of ammunition. They retreated to Italy and dug in to oppose the Allied advance to Rome. Americans also heard that General Clark had successfully landed at Salerno. But they didn’t hear that the Allied divisions under his command—the British Forty-Sixth and Fifty-Sixth and the U.S. Thirty-Sixth—had hit a beach defended by a full-strength panzer division, and that the Allies had barely gained a toehold.

  Milton made sure that Eisenhower was given plenty of space in the papers, and when he faced the press, the General was bold and confident: “The time has come to hit the Germans where it hurts. Our object is to trap and smash them.” But Ike was concealing what he knew about his army’s terrible vulnerabilities. From his headquarters at Amilcar, he cabled the Combined Chiefs that Clark’s landing at Salerno had been touch and go, with many losses. “Our greatest asset now,” he wrote, “is confusion.”

  Even the reporters who covered the actual fighting did their part in hiding the truth rather than telling it. After the war, John Steinbeck—then a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune—would write:

  Our obsession with secrecy had a perfectly legitimate beginning in a fear that knowledge of troopship sailings would and often did attract the wolf packs of submarines. But from there it got out of hand. . . . We went along with [the effort to keep things secret], and not only that, we abetted it. Gradually it became a part of all of us that the truth about anything was automatically secret and that to trifle with it was to interfere with the War Effort. By this I don’t mean that the correspondents were liars. They were not. . . . [But] it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.

  As in every war, the things not mentioned far outnumbered the mentioned, and untruths and lies were the order of the day.

  But back home, Americans didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps, like the journalists, they agreed that secrecy was important or feared that the truth would be too painful to face. Or maybe they simply wanted to go on about their business and not be reminded that their brothers and sons and husbands were facing disaster and death on the other side of the globe. In any event, most seemed buoyed by faith in their military leaders—in FDR on the home front, Eisenhower in the Mediterranean and later in Europe, MacArthur in the Pacific. Americans knew their armed forces had never lost a war. They weren’t going to lose this one.

  By the autumn of 1943, however, the Roosevelt administration had begun to realize that keeping the public in the dark was not an entirely smart idea. The uninformed populace was becoming too complacent to dedicate itself totally to the war effort. The Office of War Information was directed to lift the ban on images showing the real cost of war.

  The change was immediate, graphic, and disturbing. In the September 20, 1943, issue of Life magazine, readers saw photographs of American corpses, ravaged and bloated, sprawled on a New Guinea beach. These images were the first real truths about the terrible price of victory that American civilians had seen in the twenty-one months since Pearl Harbor. A few months later, the War Department produced a documentary film called With the Marines at Tarawa, which contained footage of actual combat scenes more horrific than anything Americans had ever viewed. There were too many mutilated bodies to clear the Hollywood censors, and only FDR could grant permission for the film’s release. He asked the advice of Time-Life photographer Robert Sherrod, who had been at Tarawa.

  “Our soldiers on the front want people back home to know that they don’t knock the hell out of the enemy every day of every battle,” Sherrod told the President. “War is a horrible, nasty business. To say otherwise is to do a disservice to those who died.”

  FDR agreed to release the film uncensored, a triumph for truth.

  But that was the exception that proved the rule. Deception was still the name of the game, and most Americans knew very little about what their generals were up to on the other side of the earth.

  • • •

  Mamie Eisenhower was in the dark, too.

  But at least she was cool. At her insistence (her vehement insistence), the management of the Wardman Park had installed an air conditioning machine in the window of her bedroom. The machine’s mechanical whir was irritatingly loud, its motor turned itself on and off with a shuddering thunk, and it produced a musty odor that Mamie so detested that she sprayed the machine with perfume. But air conditioning transformed her apartment into a cool, dark cave—a refuge from the debilitating heat and humidity that blanketed Washington.

  For Mamie, the idea of the cave was more than a fanciful metaphor. She had fled to San Antonio to escape from the nerve-rattling gossip about her husband and Mrs. Summersby, and her weeks away had allowed her to regain at least some of her equilibrium. She had Ike’s letters and his repeated protestations of love to bolster her confidence. She trusted him to do the right thing—didn’t she? And what difference would it make if she didn’t? All she could do was worry, and she was already doing that, constantly. Determined to put the best face on the situation, she took the train back to Washington. She would simply stay home, stay out of sight, keep her head down and ignore the gossip, and all would be well.

  Easier said than done. While it might be difficult for the ordinary American to hear real news of the real war, the army wives’ gossip network was humming. Through summer and into the autumn, Mamie’s telephone rang almost daily with concerned calls from friends who wanted to let her know that their husbands had spotted Ike and his “pretty Irish driver” in Algiers, or Tunis, or Amilcar, or Constantine. They had been seen driving together, riding together, boarding an airplane together, boarding a ship. Together.

  From all reports, Mrs. Summersby did not appear to be in mourning for her dead fiancé—although Mamie thought that particular social standard was probably relaxed at the front. The woman seemed to lead a remarkably active social life, and in star-studded company, at that. Audrey Hamer (whose husband was with the Army Transportation Corps in Algiers) called to report that Ike’s driver was a regular guest, with Ike, at dinner parties where the celebrities included Prime Minister Churchill, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow—not to mention Bob Hope, Vivien Leigh, Kay Francis, and Noël Coward. Why, she had even driven King George and the President of the United States!

  Most distressingly, Maria Ayers (her husband was the co-pilot on the General’s C-54) phoned to tell Mamie that Mrs. Summersby had flown with Ike to Cairo. In fact, she had stayed in the very same luxurious Cairo residence to which Eisenhower had been assigned. When the conference was over, Ike and Kay had flown to Luxor to see the Egyptian temples—and then to Jerusalem, spending the nights in the same hotel. “I’m sure there was nothing at all improper,” Maria said judiciously. “But it does seem that somebody should have thought of appearances.”

  Mamie was undone. She had always wanted to see the pyramids, and touring Jerusalem was also high on her list—and now Ike had been there with that woman. But she could only murmur, “I’m sure they were part of a group, Marie. The General is always very careful about such things.” She took a deep breath and changed the subject. “Now, tell me about that new grandbaby of yours. You must be very proud.”

  In addition to Mrs. Summersby’s exploits, she appeared to be the lucky recipient of several gifts. Janice Cooper, whose husband was serving with Patton in Palermo, reported that Mrs. Summersby had visited there and that Patton had poured some very fine champagne for her and had given her a bottle of Arpège.

  And then there was the distressing matter of the uniform, which Cookie mentioned at the mah-jongg table one afternoon. “I suppose you’ve heard that your husband created quite a sensation with his new jacket design. It’s waist-length. They’re calling it the ‘Eisenhower jacket.’”

  Mamie hadn’t heard it, and was pleased. “Oh, really? I can’t
wait to see it. Ike looks so handsome in his uniform.”

  Cynthia frowned. “I heard that Mrs. Summersby has one exactly like it. Made of the very same material, too. Marvin said it came from what was left on the bolt after the General’s uniforms were cut.” She cast a half-guilty, half-triumphant glance at Mamie. “Oh, Mamie, do forgive me, please! I didn’t mean to suggest . . .”

  Mamie pushed her chair back and stood up. “Who would like another glass of iced tea?” she asked brightly.

  Except for the friends who came in to play cards, Mamie was alone. Every day, she spent several hours answering letters from Ike’s friends, admirers, and those who wanted a favor. She kept the radio on, listening to daytime soap operas, evening comedies, and the news on WTOP at noon, six, and ten. And she worked on Ike’s scrapbook, which was rapidly filling with newspaper and magazine articles. At the OWI, Milton was obviously doing a good job promoting his brother. EISENHOWER: “ALLIES READY TO GO AGAIN” trumpeted one newspaper, describing Ike’s confidence that the Italian campaign would be a short-run affair. TROUBLE-TORN ITALY WEIGHS EISENHOWER BID FOR PEACE said another. And yet another: BOND BUYING AIDS WAR EFFORT, REPORTS EISENHOWER. In that one, Ike was quoted as saying, “The success of the third war bond drive will be proof of every American’s devotion to our cause.”

  Mamie cared for the cause, of course, but it was the commander who was nearest her heart. She added fresh flowers and a candle to the arrangement of his photographs on the top of her piano, a shrine to her valiant soldier. But no matter how hard she tried to keep his image real, it had become elusive, a shadow fading into some distant realm where she was not welcome. At night, her loneliness often became so great that she cried herself to sleep. On other nights, she was pierced by stabs of bitter jealousy—not just of Kay Summersby (although she would have cheerfully wrung that woman’s pretty little neck) but of each and every member of Ike’s official family. They were there, with him, and she was here, by herself.