Kay Summersby spent the final months of her life making a choice. In 1975, dying of cancer in a quiet house in Southampton, New York, the 66-year-old former driver for General Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to break a silence she had kept for three decades.
From her deathbed, she dictated a confession that would challenge the legacy of one of America’s most revered military heroes. For years, the world knew her only as a loyal chauffeur. She told a different story. She claimed to have been the lover of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and she described a painful, sudden dismissal the moment victory was declared.
Her account would cast a long shadow over the Eisenhower legacy. But the truth of what happened between them remains tangled in memory, politics, and the fog of war.
Kathleen Helen Marie McCarthy Morro was born on November 23, 1908, in Schull, County Cork, Ireland. Her name carried weight. She was a descendant of the McCarthy Reagh dynasty, the ancient princes of Carbery who once ruled southwest Ireland. By the early 20th century, that lineage was more a point of pride than a source of wealth.
Her father, Donald James McCarthy Morra, was a lieutenant in the Royal Munster Fusiliers, a loyalist officer in the British Army. Her mother, Vera Mary, was born in Wales to an English father and an Irish mother. Kay grew up in a world of Anglo-Irish privilege that was already crumbling. The family had status but little money. She was educated by governesses and sent to boarding schools in London and briefly Switzerland.
She learned to ride horses and speak with polish. But there was no dowry waiting for her and no vast estate to inherit. She was being prepared for a world that no longer existed. When she was 16, her parents divorced. The family facade collapsed. Kay and her mother left Ireland for London, not as aristocrats taking their place in society, but as refugees from a broken life, seeking work.
In 1930s London, Kay tried photography and worked as an extra in the British film industry. She eventually became a fashion model, a profession considered borderline respectable at the time. It was work, and it gave her independence. In June 1936, at age 27, she married Gordon Thomas Summersby, a publishing executive and former British Army officer. The marriage offered security and a return to a comfortable, traditional life. She became Mrs. Summersby.
For three years, she lived that conventional life. Then, in September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. The safe world Kay had built evaporated overnight. She ran toward the chaos. She joined the Mechanised Transport Corps, a civilian uniformed organization of female volunteers who trained as drivers and mechanics. Her marriage, already strained, did not survive the war. It was dissolved in 1943, though she kept the Summersby name.
During the Blitz of 1940, Kay drove an ambulance for the American Ambulance Corps under British command. Night after night, she navigated streets plunged into blackout darkness. She drove through rubble, past fires, and under falling bombs. She later described the experience as being in hell. She discovered she was an exceptional driver, calm under pressure, unshaken by explosions or blood. For nearly two years, this was her life.
In the spring of 1942, a new man arrived in London. Major General Dwight D. Eisenhower was a relatively unknown American staff officer. He had been given a monumental task: command the new European Theater of Operations and plan the invasion of France. He needed a driver. The Mechanised Transport Corps sent their expert, the woman who had driven through the worst of the Blitz without flinching.
In May 1942, Kay Summersby received her orders. She reported to U.S. Army headquarters to pick up General Eisenhower. The first impression was professional, not romantic. She was efficient and unflustered by his rank. He was direct and unpretentious. A bond of professional respect formed almost immediately.
Soon, Kay was more than a driver. She became his guide to London, managing his schedule and attending meetings. She helped run his personal headquarters at Telegraph Cottage, a quiet retreat away from the city. To reach Eisenhower, you had to go through Kay. She was with him as he planned Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. She was with him as he dealt with difficult allies like Montgomery, Patton, and de Gaulle. In December 1943, he was named Supreme Allied Commander. Kay Summersby was closer to the center of power than any other woman in the world.
While their professional lives intertwined, their personal lives unraveled. Kay’s divorce from Gordon Summersby was finalized in 1943. She had found new love and was engaged to an American officer, Major Richard “Dick” Arnold. In June 1943, he was killed in North Africa while clearing mines. Kay was devastated. The man she grieved in front of every day was Eisenhower.
He was carrying an unimaginable burden. He was planning the invasion of France. He was separated from his wife, Mamie, and his son, John. He was surrounded by generals and politicians but deeply alone. In this shared space of loss, pressure, and isolation, their relationship deepened. According to Kay’s later account, this was when their love affair truly began.
It was not a stormy public romance. It was a slow, growing intimacy built in stolen moments. Long silent drives back to Telegraph Cottage. Walks with his beloved Scottish terrier, Telek, a dog Kay had found for him. Evenings of bridge and golf. Hidden kisses and clasped hands. Kay claimed it was an intense, passionate love, but ultimately unconsummated. She said Eisenhower was impotent, unable to complete their relationship. She attributed it to stress, exhaustion, and guilt over his wife. This detail, which critics later seized upon as oddly specific, gave her story a tragic ring of truth.
As plans for D-Day consumed every moment, a bureaucratic problem emerged. Kay was a British citizen and a member of the British Mechanised Transport Corps. Eisenhower was about to move his headquarters to France. Under U.S. Army regulations, he could not take a British civilian employee with him into a combat zone. The idea of separation was unacceptable to him. He bent the rules.
In November 1943, Kay Summersby was enlisted in the U.S. Women’s Army Corps. A month later, she was granted American citizenship in a special, expedited process. In January 1944, she was commissioned directly as a lieutenant. She never attended basic training. She was given the rank outright. It was blatant favoritism. Eisenhower had moved mountains to keep her by his side. She was now officially his military aide.
She was with him during the agonizing days of early June 1944, as he weighed the decision to launch D-Day. She moved with him to Normandy, living in a trailer yards from his own. She accompanied him through every campaign. She was decorated for her service, receiving the Bronze Star, the European Campaign Medal with battle stars, and the Victory Medal. In 1945, at the personal urging of Winston Churchill, she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
The war in Europe ended in May 1945. Eisenhower became the most famous and beloved man on Earth. He returned to America, to his wife, and to a future that would include the presidency. Kay, now a captain, was discharged from the army. She settled in America, the country she had adopted to stay with him. She was 36 years old, in love, and abandoned.
The end of the war was not a victory for Kay. It was an amputation. The military family that had been her entire world was gone. Eisenhower returned to his own world, a world with no place for her. According to her account, the separation was brutal. When she tried to reconnect with him in New York, she was met with coldness. The warm, friendly Ike she knew was gone. In his place was General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, a public icon and a married man. He told her, “Kay, it’s impossible. I can’t do anything.” The door closed.
The most painful symbol of the separation was the dog. Telek, the Scottie she had found for him, stayed with Eisenhower and his wife. Kay was left to rebuild her life from the ashes. She moved to California and tried public relations. It failed. She moved to New York and worked as a fashion coordinator at Bergdorf Goodman, then as a costume and set designer for theater and television. The contrast was staggering. One day she was reviewing troop deployments for the Battle of the Bulge. A few years later, she was choosing fabric for a sofa on a TV set.
In 1948, she wrote a memoir. The title was “Eisenhower Was My Boss.” It was a masterpiece of calculated deference. She needed money, and the world was hungry for stories about the great general. But he was already a presidential candidate and a sacred figure. The book was a loyal, platonic tribute. There was not a word about intimacy, not even a hint of a romance. It was a bestseller. It gave her some financial independence and cemented her public image as a devoted subordinate. She later admitted it was a lie by omission.
In 1952, the year Eisenhower was elected president, Kay married again. Her second husband was Reginald Heber Tower Morgan, a Wall Street stockbroker. That marriage also failed. They divorced in 1958. For the next two decades, Kay Summersby lived in relative obscurity in New York. Eisenhower was everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, the embodiment of 1950s morality. Kay watched from a distance.
Eisenhower died in 1969. He was buried in Abilene, Kansas. His legacy as a military genius and American icon was secure. The secret seemed buried with him. Then, in the mid-1970s, Kay received her own death sentence. She was diagnosed with cancer. She was 66 years old, alone, with no husband and no children. She had nothing left to lose.
She began work on a second memoir. This one had a different title: “Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower.” She dictated it in her final painful months. Kay Summersby died on January 20, 1975, in Southampton, New York. She did not live to see the explosion she caused.
The memoir was published posthumously in 1976. America was in a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam mood, cynical and ready to re-examine its heroes. The book was a complete reversal of her safe 1948 account. It was raw, emotional, and shockingly specific. She described the shared loneliness, the grief over her fiancé, the long walks, the card games, the hidden kisses. She made two explosive claims. First, that they were madly in love and that Eisenhower wanted to marry her. Second, and more damaging, that he was sexually impotent.
The reaction was immediate and fierce. Eisenhower’s family, led by his son John, denounced the book as a fabrication. John Eisenhower had served on his father’s staff and witnessed the relationship. He acknowledged his father’s dependence on Kay but denied any affair. He called the book a series of lies motivated by money and a pathetic desire for historical relevance. The impotence claim was seen as a particularly vicious betrayal.
Eisenhower loyalists painted a devastating portrait of Kay. She was, in their telling, a dazzled employee who tragically misunderstood a great man’s kindness. Eisenhower was known as a social, affectionate man who called everyone “my team.” They argued that Kay, lonely and emotionally fragile, mistook professional camaraderie for romantic love. Her 1948 book was presented as proof. That was her true story, they said, told while he was alive and could refute it.
Then, supporting evidence began to emerge. The most dramatic came from an unexpected source: President Harry Truman. In the early 1970s, author Merle Miller conducted a series of interviews with Truman for a book called “Plain Speaking.” Truman told an astonishing story. He claimed that in 1945, General George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, showed him a letter from Eisenhower. In the letter, Eisenhower stated his intention to divorce his wife Mamie and marry a woman on his staff in England.
According to Truman, Marshall responded with a blistering threat. If Eisenhower went through with it and sullied the Army’s reputation with a public adultery scandal, Marshall would reduce him to colonel and destroy his career. Marshall allegedly destroyed the letters but told Truman the story to illustrate the troubles he had to settle. If true, this story confirmed Kay’s most dramatic claim. Eisenhower loved her and was willing to sacrifice his career for her.
But the Marshall-Truman story is itself a subject of intense historical debate. Researchers who analyzed Miller’s original interview tapes found a remarkable discrepancy. On the tapes, Truman does speak of Eisenhower wanting a divorce. He does speak of a letter. He does speak of Marshall putting an end to it. But Truman never mentions Kay Summersby by name. He speaks vaguely of some woman in England. It appears likely that Miller, writing after Kay’s memoir was published, connected the dots himself. No copy of the alleged letter has ever been found in the meticulously preserved Eisenhower or Marshall archives.
There was another voice, quieter and more credible. General Omar Bradley, Eisenhower’s calm and observant friend, was with him throughout the campaign. In his autobiography, published years later, Bradley offered his testimony. He noted how attached Kay was to Ike. That was not surprising. But then he added the crucial line. He said he didn’t know if they were lovers, but he was convinced that Ike was in love with her.
This testimony could not be ignored. Bradley was not a cynical Truman or a desperate dying woman. He was a witness with unimpeachable integrity. He saw the relationship up close. His words supported Kay’s central claim that it was not merely a boss and his driver. This was a man in love.
So where does the truth lie? It is lost in a tragic gray fog. The Marshall-Truman letter almost certainly did not exist in the form described. Kay almost certainly hid the truth in her 1948 book to protect Eisenhower and herself. It is equally certain that the relationship was deeper, more complex, and more emotionally charged than that of a boss and his assistant.
The most likely truth lies in the tragic implications of Kay’s final, desperate confession. A deep, profoundly emotional love affair between two lonely, isolated people. A relationship that was everything except physical, hindered by circumstance, guilt, and the overwhelming pressures of command. A bond that was, for Eisenhower, a wartime necessity that had to be severed so he could reclaim his previous life. For Kay, it became the defining event of her life.
The real tragedy of Kay Summersby’s life is not that she loved a man she could not have. It is that her entire identity, her courage, her tangible achievements, faded completely into his shadow. She is not remembered as Captain Summersby of the Women’s Army Corps. She is not remembered as a Bronze Star recipient for distinguished service in a combat zone. She is not remembered as a recipient of the Order of the British Empire, recommended by Churchill himself.
All of that, her bravery, her skill, her service, has been erased. It was overshadowed, and indeed obliterated, by a single fact that consumed her life: her proximity to Dwight Eisenhower. She is remembered only in relation to the powerful man she served. She is either Ike’s loyal driver, a footnote, or his alleged mistress, a scandal. In both narratives, she is not the hero of her own story.
Her final act, writing “Past Forgetting,” was a desperate, flawed, tragic attempt to reclaim that narrative. It was a last cry to tell the world she was not just a witness to history but a central, emotional participant in the personal life of the man who made it. She refused to die as a footnote. The book, with its painful private details, was her last attempt to prove she mattered, not just as an employee, but as a woman.
The controversy that followed is itself the result. It forces us to humanize our myths and shatter the rigid marble statues of our heroes. Kay’s story, whether believed in whole or in part, portrays Eisenhower as a human being, not a monument. It shows him as tired, lonely, and tempted, carrying a burden that was by any measure superhuman. This does not diminish his greatness as a general. It deepens our understanding of the personal cost of that greatness.
Her story also highlights the brutal, unbridgeable gap in power dynamics. Was this love affair, if it happened, between equals? He was the Supreme Allied Commander, perhaps the most powerful man on the planet. She was his subordinate, a woman who depended on him not only for her job but for her rank and her citizenship. The disparity is starkly visible in their post-war fates. He rose to the top. She fell into obscurity.
We will never know the full, unvarnished truth of what happened in the privacy of Telegraph Cottage or the back seat of the general’s car. The principals are long gone. The evidence, a spectral letter, a vague memory from Truman, a single controversial paragraph from Bradley, is as faint as mist. We are left with two conflicting narratives.
Was Kay Summersby a devoted aide who, at the end of a lonely and disappointing life, misremembered the kindness of a good boss? Was she a dying woman who fabricated a sensational story for a final moment of attention and money? Or was she the great, impossible love of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s life? Was she the woman he was willing to sacrifice his career for, stopped only by the iron will of George C. Marshall? Was she the secret he was forced to bury?
Perhaps it no longer matters. Her story, regardless of its absolute truth, remains one of the most compelling and tragic human dramas of World War II. It is a story about the unbearable weight of secrets, the choices duty forces upon us, and the fragile, complex, often uncomfortable nature of the human heart. Even, and especially, in the midst of total war.
Kay Summersby died of cancer on January 20, 1975, in her home in Southampton. Her final confession, “Past Forgetting,” was published the following year. According to her last wishes, her body was cremated. Her ashes were not scattered in America, the country she had adopted for him. They were returned home, scattered on the grounds of the McCarthy family burial ground at the Church of the Assumption in her native County Cork, Ireland. The girl who descended from Irish princes, who saw the world at the side of its most powerful man, finally returned to where she began.