Dwight D. Eisenhower And Kay Summersby
Library of CongressDuring World War II, Eisenhower allegedly found comfort during the conflict in the arms of his driver, Kay Summersby.
As Kay Summersby tells it, her affair with then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower started when he was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II and she was his chauffeur.
“We found ourselves in each other’s arms in an unrestrained embrace,” Summersby explained in her 1976 posthumous memoir, seven years after Eisenhower’s death. “Our jackets came off. Buttons were unbuttoned. It was as if we were frantic, and we were.”
The relationship, she said, was not consummated. Summersby wrote, “He snuggled his face into the hollow between my neck and shoulder and said, ‘Oh God, Kay, I’m sorry. I’m not going to be any good for you.'”
Summersby’s allegations sent a shockwave through the American public. After all, Eisenhower and his wife Mamie had always seemed the picture of marital bliss. Mamie even publicly stated that she liked sharing a bed with her husband because she could “pat Ike on his old bald head anytime I want to” during the night.
National Archives and Records AdministrationIn official versions of this photo of Eisenhower accepting the German surrender, Summersby, standing over his shoulder, was airbrushed out.
A review of Summersby’s book in The New York Times cast doubt on her account. Noting that it had been ghostwritten, the review panned the book’s style as a “mixture of rosemary and rue that women readers are thought to find irresistible but which strikes me as devoid of true emotion.”
Nevertheless, Summersby herself claimed that she only came forward with the story because someone else had alluded to it first — former President Harry S. Truman. In 1973, Truman had allegedly told his biographer Merle Miller that Eisenhower had had an affair with Summersby.
In fact, Truman claimed that Eisenhower had even tried to leave his wife for her in 1945. But George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, told Eisenhower that if he left his wife for Summersby “he’d not only bust him out of the Army, he’d see to it that never for the rest of his life would he be able to draw a peaceful breath.”
Some historians doubt Truman’s account because of the animosity that formed between him and Eisenhower. But according to Eisenhower’s biographer, Jean Edward Smith, rumors of the president’s affair with Kay Summersby hold some weight.
“Whether he and Kay were intimate remains a matter of conjecture,” Smith wrote. “But there is no question they were in love.”
