Dealing with disappointment

[_aussieguy55]

Eisenhower R - accused of having an affair with Kate Summersby. This one is unclear.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/06/us/ei ... -aide.html

A previously unknown collection of wartime letters from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to his driver, Capt. Kay Summersby, appears likely to stir renewed debate over whether the two were lovers during the last year of World War II.

Both General Eisenhower, who was married, and Captain Summersby initially denied the long-rumored romance. But in 1976, as she was dying of cancer, Miss Summersby published a second book of memoirs of the war years, "Past Forgetting: My Love Affair With Dwight D. Eisenhower," in which she described a passionate but frustrating affair with the Supreme Allied Commander.

"I feel free to talk about it now," she wrote then, 16 years after the end of Mr. Eisenhower's Presidency and seven years after his death. "The General is dead. I am dying. When I wrote Eisenhower was my boss in 1948, I ommitted 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."
In her second book, Miss Summersby, a former model, wrote of how her friendship with the general had developed into passion.

"I suppose inevitably, we found ourselves in each others' arms in an unrestrained embrace," she wrote. "Our jackets came off. Buttons were unbuttoned. It was as if we were frantic, and we were." But, she added, the general had difficulty consummating the affair.

Historians' interest in the relationship was spurred by remarks of former President Harry S. Truman during an interview with Merle Miller for an oral biography published in 1974. Mr. Truman said then that General Eisenhower had written to General of the Army George C. Marshall, saying that he wanted to return from Europe to the United States to get a divorce from his wife, Mamie, and marry Miss Summersby. According to this account, General Marshall threatened to run General Eisenhower "out of the Army" and prevent him from "ever drawing a peaceful breath."

[_aussieguy55]

What proof is there that Obama and Baker had an affair?

None that we have seen thus far.

Reportedly, there are videos of Obama in compromising positions with Vera Baker, but no one has seen them yet

There are also unsubstantiated reports that a team of software engineers have found incriminating e-mail exchanges between Obama and Vera Baker. Again, no one has seen them yet.

An unnamed National Enquirer reporter is said to have confirmed with the limo driver that he did, in fact, drop Vera Baker off at Barack Obama’s hotel on the date in question, adding that he waited in the lobby while Baker changed her clothes upstairs.

ABC News and NBC News reportedly interviewed the limo driver at the time, who verified his account of what occurred.

For a full account of how one journalist checked out this rumor when it first appeared in 2008, and details on exactly what this journalist discovered, click here to read the journalist’s blog post entitled “The Lady Vanishes.”

There is currently a reward of $1, 000,000 being offered to anyone who can confirm that an affair between Barack Obama and Vera Baker actually occurred. It’s not unheard of for people to lie when large sums of money are involved, but I find it interesting that so far no one has come forward with solid proof.
http://www.examiner.com/celebrity-infid ... d-straight

[_richardMdBorn]

Eisenhower R - accused of having an affair with Kate Summersby. This one is unclear.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/06/us/ei ... -aide.html

A previously unknown collection of wartime letters from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to his driver, Capt. Kay Summersby, appears likely to stir renewed debate over whether the two were lovers during the last year of World War II.

Both General Eisenhower, who was married, and Captain Summersby initially denied the long-rumored romance. But in 1976, as she was dying of cancer, Miss Summersby published a second book of memoirs of the war years, "Past Forgetting: My Love Affair With Dwight D. Eisenhower," in which she described a passionate but frustrating affair with the Supreme Allied Commander.

"I feel free to talk about it now," she wrote then, 16 years after the end of Mr. Eisenhower's Presidency and seven years after his death. "The General is dead. I am dying. When I wrote Eisenhower was my boss in 1948, I ommitted 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."
In her second book, Miss Summersby, a former model, wrote of how her friendship with the general had developed into passion.

"I suppose inevitably, we found ourselves in each others' arms in an unrestrained embrace," she wrote. "Our jackets came off. Buttons were unbuttoned. It was as if we were frantic, and we were." But, she added, the general had difficulty consummating the affair.

Historians' interest in the relationship was spurred by remarks of former President Harry S. Truman during an interview with Merle Miller for an oral biography published in 1974. Mr. Truman said then that General Eisenhower had written to General of the Army George C. Marshall, saying that he wanted to return from Europe to the United States to get a divorce from his wife, Mamie, and marry Miss Summersby. According to this account, General Marshall threatened to run General Eisenhower "out of the Army" and prevent him from "ever drawing a peaceful breath."

Another perspective is

Since the Clinton-Lewinsky allegations became public six weeks ago, the rich and noble history of the presidency has been reduced to the trivial pursuit of salacious details about every previous president's alleged peccadilloes. Dredging up this rogues' gallery of philandering presidents feeds the modern "anything goes" mentality -- as well as the "everybody does it" defense that we've heard from some Clinton supporters. It, however, also has done Dwight Eisenhower a disservice.

Some reporters have blithely included Gen. Eisenhower on their list, citing a wartime affair with his driver, Kay Summersby. In fact, the evidence has always been murky and many historians now doubt that Eisenhower and Summersby had a sexual relationship.

For much of the three years he led the Allied forces during World War II, Eisenhower lived in Telegraph Cottage, a villa south of London, with a colorful cast of characters. The multiethnic crew included a New York Irishman (Mickey McKeogh), a black valet (John Moaney), an Irish driver (Kay Summersby) and a Scotty pup (Telek). Portrayals of Eisenhower's wartime household enhanced the image of the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Western Europe as a father figure protecting millions of GIs. Unfortunately, the more reporters played up the domestic angle in covering Eisenhower's entourage, the more his wife, Mamie, stewed back home in Washington.

Eisenhower clearly took a shine to the wispy Kay Summersby. In correspondence, he talked of his "rather lonely life" abroad and how he yearned for "feminine companionship." The witty, gay, aristocratic Summersby may have reminded Ike of the Mamie he met in 1916. Almost three decades later, Mamie was frail, Kay was vigorous; Mamie was 3,000 miles away, Kay was next door. In her memoirs, Kay would recall Eisenhower saying to her: "Kay, there's nobody . . . I can talk to freely. They all ask to be promoted, or if I talk to the wrong person, what I say is reported all over the world. I know that I can let my thoughts flow with you." There was speculation on both sides of the Atlantic about a sexual relationship, but one general tried to quiet down the gossip by saying, "Leave Kay and Ike alone. She's helping him win the war."

Mrs. Eisenhower always said that nothing untoward happened between her husband and his chauffeur. Reacting years later to gossip about the relationship, she told one friend, "Of course, I don't believe it. I know Ike." But during the war, Ike had to reassure her repeatedly. "I love you all the time," he wrote her in February 1943. "Don't go bothering your pretty head about WAACs -- etc. etc." In another letter, he moped in the age-old lament of husbands, whether innocent or guilty, "apparently you don't choose to believe anything I say."

When the war ended, Eisenhower retreated from Summersby. Kay, who had fallen for her boss after her American fiance died during the war, was shattered. In 1948, she published "Ike Was My Boss," a wholesome account of their relationship that described herself as his friend and colleague but did not intimate a sexual relationship.

The tone of the book fit with the ethos of the time. Throughout the war, the rumors about the general and his driver were relegated to hints in gossip columns or insinuations in articles that placed Kay prominently at his side. But reporters had no inclination to knock down the all-American hero they had created. Besides, talk of sexual affairs was not suitable for mainstream newspapers in the 1940s. America's fragile wartime morale was in no shape to sustain an honest conversation about illicit liaisons on the battle front or the home front.

Only later -- after the sexual revolution of the 1960s undermined many Americans' faith in the private probity of public figures -- did the Eisenhower-Summersby "affair" become a topic of widespread public conversation. In Merle Miller's 1973 bestseller "Plain Speaking," Harry Truman claimed that Ike planned to divorce Mamie to marry Kay. Three years later, desperate for cash as she lay dying, Kay wrote a second book, "Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight Eisenhower." Published posthumously under her married name, Kay Summersby Morgan, this version was a steamier account of their relationship -- describing a friendship that was more flirtatious, more intense and more intimate.

But significantly, even she said the "love affair" was "unconsummated" and made no mention of any plan for Ike to divorce. Nevertheless, an ABC miniseries in 1979 portrayed her as the general's mistress.

To counter these claims and perceptions, Ike's son John Eisenhower published his father's wartime letters to his mother. Ike's son acknowledged that "no one alive can say that isolated incidents as described by Mrs. Morgan did not happen." Still, he considered Summersby's stories exaggerated. He told his daughter Susan that he compared his father's relation ship with Summersby to Lou Grant's relationship with Mary Richards on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

Most historians, myself included, tend to agree with John Eisenhower. The available evidence makes it hard to believe that a man with Ike's sense of honor and concern about public appearances would court disaster with a wartime romance. He constantly worried about what he called, in his diary entries, "the danger of misapprehension or misunderstanding" of his actions. It is even harder to believe that he would be so cruel as to send his son John (then 22) to be his mistress's escort during Kay's visit to the United States and meeting with Mamie later in the war.

Men in positions of power like Eisenhower often had "surrogate" wives such as Summersby. In the White House, Ike's secretary Ann Whitman also triggered Mamie's jealously. For years, Whitman worked closely with "the boss" at great personal sacrifice, and ended up feeling abandoned by Eisenhower.

One can fault Eisenhower for being insensitive to appearances and for committing a kind of psychological adultery -- that is, for developing a relationship with Summersby that was certainly intense, even if it wasn't sexual. It is easy to imagine Eisenhower's situation in England: Lonely, overworked, in need of the kind of grounding that many men of his generation received only from women, he turned to Summersby for companion ship and support. "Some men are so built that they like to have a different drag for every hop," Ike wrote elliptically to John in 1943. "I think the whole family from which you spring is a bit on the intense side and centers on one thing at a time, be it a girl, a horse, a game or just loafing." This stick-to-itiveness may have explained Ike's concentration on Kay as well as his fidelity to Mamie.

When the Eisenhowers entered the White House in 1953, they -- like all modern presidential couples -- recognized their role as America's leading family. Their desire to preserve this public image, as well as the intimate isolation of White House life, allowed them to repair whatever damage had been done to their relationship during what Mamie often called "my three years without Ike." When it became a matter of public discussion that the president and the first lady often slept in the same bed -- although they formally maintained separate bedrooms -- Mamie explained that she liked to be able to reach over in the middle of the night and "pat Ike on his old bald head anytime I want to."

Of course, reporters in the 1950s preferred to collaborate in building public fictions about the president rather than revealing private failings. The warm domestic image of "Ike and Mamie" laid the rumors of Ike and Kay to rest, and allowed Americans to see marriage as a remarkably resilient institution, able to ebb and flow, heal and thrive. Four decades later, the willingness to turn the uncertainties about Eisenhower and Summersby into fact says more about us than about him, and suggests that when presidents fail to act according to a higher standard, they can indeed damage the nation's moral fabric.

Gil Troy, chairman of the history department at McGill University in Montreal, is the author of "Affairs of State: The Rise and Rejection of the Presidential Couple Since World War II" (Free Press).

http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/history/faculty/TROYWEB/WithIkeRumorsWereSteamierThanFacts.htm

[_richardMdBorn]

What proof is there that Obama and Baker had an affair?

None that we have seen thus far.

The hillbuzz perspective is that the affair is unlikely since Obama's not very interested in women.

As American Standard recently wondered, there are no former girlfriends, either on the scene or noted in any of the books William Ayers or Jon Favreau wrote for Obama. No high school girlfriends. No college sweethearts. But, there sure are plenty of men he’s spent an odd amount of time with.

Baker was a red herring in the campaign — but it was strange she disappeared to Martinique. We have no idea what she was doing down there, but she’s one of the top fundraisers for black political candidates in the world. She’s smart, she’s the best there is in her field, and she’s actually a very nice lady.

In the spring of 2009, one of us accidentally had lunch with Baker, at a little sandwich shop in Bronzeville called Munchie’s. We were there to brainstorm fundraising and visibility ideas for a black candidate we like very much — and we had no idea who the woman sitting next to us was. But, we shared a pot roast pizza with her, and at the end of the lunch meeting, everyone exchanged emails and she looked at ours, we looked at hers, and it was like that scene in Batman Returns where Bruce Wayne and Selena Kyle were dancing and realized who each other really was.

“Oh, we need to talk,” is what Baker said.

And, so we did.

We are 100% convinced this wonderful young woman had no romantic relationship with Obama.

Because she is a woman, for one, but also because she’s happily married, and has a darling baby too.

There’s been a huge uptick in searches for “Vera Baker” on Google in the last two days, and we could not figure out why — until we saw that Globe magazine is running the old Obama affair story again. There’s nothing new to report — Globe’s just rehashing the same story from 2008, but now alleging Baker was given a job with Roland Burris as some sort of hush money to keep from talking about an affair with Obama.

That’s ridiculous.

Baker works for Burris because she’s damn good at what she does, is incredibly bright, and Baker’s well-connected with Burris’ team in Chicago. And, we repeat, she did not have an affair with Obama

This is all really suspicious, though, because during the campaign we truly believe the Obama team pushed the Baker affair story because they wanted people not to talk about Obama’s gay relationships.

Larry Sinclair, Reggie Jones, Kal Penn, Donald Young, nameless men at Man’s Country. You name it.

http://hillbuzz.org/2010/04/30/leave-vera-baker-alone-she-did-not-have-an-affair-with-obama/