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Books So Bad They're Good: Kay Summersby's Wartime Mystery [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-19
My parents’ engagement almost ended before it really began.
Their relationship had not had an auspicious beginning — my father had taken my mother to what he thought was a jazz club, not knowing that it was under new management and was now a gay bar — but had blossomed after Dad had gotten up the courage, vetted the next venue to make sure it was actually a jazz club, and asked her for a second chance. This time they had hit it off almost at once, and soon enough Dad had asked her if she wanted to make things permanent and she had said yes.
He then took her to a jeweler, where she picked out a ring she liked. It was modest, a small but nice stone set in white gold, but my mother was not a flashy person and a modest ring was just what she wanted. The ring needed to be sized to fit Mum’s small, slender fingers, but the jeweler assured them that this would not be a problem. Soon it would be ready, and when it was Dad could make the official presentation and they could begin to plan the wedding.
That was when my father laid plans that nearly derailed the whole thing.
The evening began innocuously enough. Dad had called Mum and told her the ring was ready, so they made reservations at a favorite restaurant and he picked her up. They were young, in love, and very happy, and I’ve no doubt that the conversation on their trip to the restaurant and the initial chatter as they took their seats and ordered their food was bubbly and excited and just a tiny bit impatient as they prepared to make the biggest commitment of their lives.
The waiter had taken their menus and they were waiting for their drinks when Dad smiled and reached into his pocket. “Martha? Close your eyes and hold out your left hand.”
”Close my eyes?” Mum frowned, puzzled. “Why? I know what the ring looks like.”
Dad leaned closer. “Just close your eyes you’ll find out.”
Mum rolled her eyes but did as she was told. “This is so silly, we picked it out together and — “
She stopped at the sound of a box snapping open, then began to smile as she felt something cool slide onto her finger. “Walt?”
“Open your eyes,” said my father, and Mum did so, expecting to see the ring they’d picked out together…
Except that on her finger, carefully balanced on her beloved’s fingertips, was not her engagement ring. It wasn’t a ring at all.
It was one of these:
My mother’s first engagement ring (the Daring Domestic, used for this diary only)
Yes. Really.
Mum sat there in shock, mouth open, staring down at the doorknob on her finger. Dad, grinning, said, “Martha? I know it’s not what you expected, but will you marry me anyway?”
What happened next is not clear — Dad never actually spoke of it, possibly due to mild PTSD — but Mum told me that if Dad hadn’t whipped out the actual ring just as she began to raise her voice she wasn’t sure what she would have done. She knew he had a slightly warped sense of humor, but it had never occurred to her that she had fallen in love with a man who would spend the time to scour the local junk shops until he found a suitable antique doorknob, drill a hole in it, and then fashion a piece of thick wire into a makeshift ring, all for a five second joke.
Fortunately the real ring, and slightly nervous apology that accompanied it, were enough to convince Mum that yes, Dad was still a keeper even if he was a goofball with whacky taste in pranks. She proudly wore the actual engagement ring when she married him several months later, and it’s in my jewelry box to this day.
She also kept the glass doorknob. I’m not sure what happened to it — we moved a lot when I was kid and it probably was lost during one of them — but the fact that she did is proof that true love does indeed conquer all, even when an ardent swain nearly wrecks his own engagement for a laugh.
Alas for romance, not all loves are true, and not all lovers willing to put up with their beloved’s foibles. Love is a fickle and lightsome thing, and what seems heartfelt and meaningful at the time can seem ridiculous or downright stupid with the benefit of hindsight. The stories we tell about a past love are not always the stuff of which dreams are made, as much as we would like them to be.
This is particularly true when one hires a ghostwriter to share the tale of a long-past love with the adoring masses, either out of hopeless romanticism, spite over being dumped, or the desire to make a few extra bucks because the former objection of one’s adoration is famous and we aren’t.
Such is the case with tonight’s selection, a largely forgotten but influential book extracted from the Badbookistan Lonelyhearts Library Annex. Written almost entirely by a ghostwriter, it was hailed by absolutely no one when first published but sold well enough that the general public believes it to be true. Whether it was an accurate account of a wartime romance, or a rumor as close to reality as my father’s glass doorknob to an actual diamond, will never be known:
Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower, by Kay Summersby and ghostwriter Barbara Wyden — there was little to indicate that Kay Summersby would become famous as the wartime mistress (?) of one of the greatest generals in history. Born to a respectable Anglo-Irish family in County Cork, she was a striking woman, elegant and poised enough that she worked as a movie extra and fashion model. She married just before the war, to a poker playing accountant, but the relationship soon fell apart, and the outbreak of war did not help.
Like all good patriotic Britons, Summersby enlisted soon after Britain declared war on Germany in the fall of 1939. Women were not allowed in the ranks but they were welcome in support jobs, and Summersby joined the Motor Transport Corps as a driver. She drove ambulances during the height of the Blitz, later comparing the experience to a glimpse of hell, and by 1942 she had been posted to Scotland as a military driver.
That included American general Dwight Eisenhower, whom she met in 1942 when he visited Scotland during a fact-finding mission to assess the preparedness of the British military.
Summersby, pretty and vivacious, must have made quite an impression on Eisenhower, because he promised to request her as his driver during future visits. He was as good as his word, and soon she was accompanying him to North Africa during Operation Torch, the Allied invasion that was the first test of the American military in the Mediterranean.
Eisenhower and Summersby were no more than good friends at this point; her divorce was final, and she quickly fell in love with one of the staff officers, Richard Arnold. Romances tend to flourish during war, when life is uncertain and emotions at their height, and it surprised no one when Summersby and Arnold became engaged.
Their happiness did not last. Arnold, an engineer, died in June of 1943 clearing mines, and the distraught Summersby turned to her boss for comfort. Their friendship deepened, and by the time Eisenhower and his driver returned to London several months later, he was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force that was preparing to invade France, and she was his official driver.
She was also his unofficial hostess/plus-one during the run-up to Operation Overlord (aka D-Day in 1944) and one of his closest confidantes. The two were photographed together often enough that Eisenhower’s wife, the long-suffering Mamie, who was not happy that her husband was being seen in public with someone else while she was stuck in America. Eisenhower mollified her by assuring her that he was not in love with Kay Summersby or anyone else, and certainly was not in the market for a replacement wife, but the rumors persisted. Powerful men attract pretty women, and Eisenhower was at the age when a man who wishes to shed one woman for another.
Whatever was going on did not last. The war ended in 1945 and Eisenhower went back to America alone. Summersby moved there as well, but initially to California rather than the East Coast, where Eisenhower had finished up his Army career and become President of Columbia University. They evidently met briefly after the publication of her wartime memoir, but the old closeness was gone, and soon she had married someone else and he had become President.
The rest of Summersby’s life was something of an anticlimax. Her second marriage failed after only a few years, and she worked as a publicist and in the fashion industry for the rest of her career. There was a brief and unflattering mention of her in Plain Speaking, a 1973 oral history of Harry Truman by journalist Merle Miller, but otherwise she stayed out of the public eye.
That changed when she was diagnosed with cancer in the early 1970’s. Cancer treatment was expensive and she was not rich, and so she decided to write a second memoir in hopes of paying her medical bills. She hired Barbara Wyden, a former Newsweek staffer and veteran ghostwriter for Dr. Joyce Brothers (among others), and the rest of her life was devoted to finishing the book as her strength ebbed.
Summersby died, what became Past Forgetting still in manuscript, in January 1975, so it fell to Barbara Wyden to finish the book and preparing it for publication. How much of the book was Summersby’s work and how much was her ghostwriter’s is not completely clear, but Wyden herself later admitted that Summersby was so weak that her input into the final product was minimal.
Wartime rumors aside, Summersby’s first memoir, 1948’s Eisenhower Was My Boss, had been a reasonably conventional account of a standard secretary-boss relationship. There were definitely hints that they were close friends, but Summersby was not the only woman on Eisenhower’s staff and the hints could easily have passed for a young employee admiring his boss. His own memoir, Crusade in Europe, only mentions her once, in passing, and whether this was a conscious attempt to keep any relationship with her quiet or not, surely there would have been some trace of anything more in Eisenhower’s best known book.
That was why Past Forgetting hit with the approximate force of a Bouncing Betty when it was published several months after Summersby’s death: it claimed that Summersby and Eisenhower, far from being close friends, had had a fervent albeit unconsummated affair during the years between Richard Arnold’s death and the end of the war. She had not mentioned this in 1948 to protect his reputation, which was at its height in the years after V-E Day, but now that he was dead she wanted the truth to be known. As she put it just before she died in January 1975:
"The General is dead. I am dying. When I wrote Eisenhower Was My Boss in 1948, I omitted many things, changed some details, glossed over others to disguise as best I could the intimacy that had grown between General Eisenhower and me. It was better that way."
That Mamie Eisenhower, elderly, frail, and in fragile health, might not take kindly to her husband’s old driver claiming she was his mistress did not seem to factor into Summersby’s decision. Summersby wanted to make what used to be called “a clean breast” before her own death, and so hired a ghostwriter to shape her thirty year old memories into a book.
The scandal shot Past Forgetting straight to the top of the bestseller lists, and never mind that the reviews were generally scathing. Historians pointed out that there was very little hard evidence to support Summersby’s claims, and a fair amount suggesting that she had exaggerated a wartime crush into a swoon-worth grand romance. Worse, the book itself was written in a syrupy, uber-feminine style that British critics compared to the Mills & Boon romances that Barbara Cartland used to churn out every couple of weeks, especially when describing Summersby and Eisenhower’s attempts to consummate their relationship (spoiler: they couldn’t thanks to Eisenhower’s age, even though he was only in his 50s).
None of that mattered. The public, hungry for juicy gossip and primed by similar books about the love affairs of famous men, accepted Past Forgetting without question despite Mamie Eisenhower's potential distress and critical dismay. A miniseries based on Summersby’s books, Ike: The War Years, managed to tone down the breathless romanticism enough to receive several Emmy nominations, and by the time fuss died down and the book went out of print, the idea that Eisenhower had had an affair with his driver was common knowledge.
But was it true?
There is some evidence to suggest that yes, they were more than friends. Remember that Merle Miller quoted Harry Truman as saying that Eisenhower was so besotted with Summersby that he actually requested permission from the Army Chief of Staff to get a divorce and marry her, while Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Ike claims that he told Summersby to her face that it was impossible to rekindle the flame when they ran into each other by chance after the war. General Montgomery, who was still alive when Past Forgetting came out, was appalled by what it purported to reveal about Eisenhower’s character but claimed that Summersby’s views on European leaders were so close to Eisenhower’s own that there had to have been something between them. Eisenhower’s own son, John, said Summersby was “perky [and] cute” and compared her to Mary Tyler Moore, while soldiers who saw them during the war were convinced that something was going. One soldier even claimed to have seen her kiss him when she picked him one morning.
This would all seem to make a convincing case for the two of them having a wartime fling...except that there is plenty of evidence to the contrary:
A concerted search of the tapes Merle Miller made of his conversations with President Truman, turned up no evidence of any sort to suggest that he actually told Miller that Eisenhower had asked for permission to get a divorce. Not only that, Eisenhower actually requested permission to bring his wife Mamie over to Europe during the war, which not only is not the norm for a man in the throes of a passionate love affair, it would criminally stupid if he actually was committing adultery.
Adultery was (and still is) grounds for a court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. This rule is certainly violated (see: David Petraeus) but again, Eisenhower would have risking not only his career but the success of the entire invasion if he’d been caught having a fling with someone on his staff unless the Wehrmacht officer corps had died laughing at the idea of the mighty Allied commander losing his job over a lowly chaffeur.
All of Eisenhower’s aides, without exception, stated categorically that no affair took place. This included his valet (who was adamant that Eisenhower slept alone) and his son John, who said that he had no idea if the cute perky driver had any plans to become his stepmother.
The same goes for visitors and volunteers at SHAEF, none of whom believed that Ike had the time for much besides planning the greatest invasion in human history, reining in George Patton after he slapped a soldier with malaria, and keeping Generals Montgomery and De Gaulle from murdering each other.
Perhaps most important was the fact that Summersby herself was too ill to write the book or do much more than give Barbara Wyden a few interviews. Most of the book was neither her words nor written with her input, and several reviewers accused Wyden of either completely fabricating the romantic parts of Past Forgetting, or at least embellishing a dying woman’s memories for dramatic effect.
At this point the historical consensus seems to be that Summersby and Eisenhower might have had what’s now known as an emotional affair, but that any feelings were much stronger on her part than his; aside from a single meeting in New York when Eisenhower Was My Boss came out in 1948 (which Summersby seems to have deliberately engineered), they had minimal if any contact after 1945. Whether there was more, on any level, simply cannot be known at this point.
It’s a real shame, because Kay Summersby’s actual life was colorful and interesting enough that she would be worth a look regardless of whether she ever met Dwight Eisenhower. Actress, model, fashion executive, publicist, war veteran — this is the stuff of which history is made, period, and it’s a pity that Summersby’s story has been neglected because of a relationship that lasted, at most, eighteen months.
As for whether that relationship was more than two lonely people becoming close during a stressful and dangerous time, we can never be entirely certainly. As David Eisenhower later wrote, “the truth was known only by them, and both are gone.”
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Did you ever read Past Forgetting? Watch the miniseries? Read Merle Miller’s oral history? Do you think Eisenhower cheated, or was Kay Summersby simply a besotted subordinate? It’s a refreshing and pleasant night here at the Last Homely Shack, so pour yourself a cool one and share….
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