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Overview
President Eisenhower's National Security Advisor Robert "Bobby" Cutler — working alongside Ike and also the Dulles brothers at the CIA and State Department — shaped US Cold War strategy in far more consequential ways than previously understood. A lifelong Republican, Cutler also served three Democratic presidents. A charming raconteur, he was a tight-lipped loyalist who worked behind the scenes to get things done.
Cutler was in love with a man half his age, naval intelligence officer and NSC staffer Skip Koons. Cutler poured his emotions into a six-volume diary and dozens of letters that have been hidden from history. Steve Benedict, who was White House security officer, Cutlers' friend and Koons' friend and former lover, preserved Cutler's papers. All three men served Eisenhower at a time when anyone suspected of "sexual perversion", i.e. homosexuality, was banned from federal employment and vulnerable to security sweeps by the FBI.
This gripping account reveals in fascinating detail Cutler's intimate thoughts and feelings about US efforts to confront Soviet expansion and aggression while having to contend with the reality that tens of millions of people would die in a first nuclear strike, and that a full nuclear exchange would likely lead to human extinction. And Shinkle recounts with sensitivity the daily challenges and personal dramas of a small but representative group or patriotic gay men who were forced to hide essential aspects of who they were in order to serve a president they admired and a country they loved.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781586422431 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Steerforth Press |
| Publication date: | 12/04/2018 |
| Series: | Truth to Power: Documentary Narratives |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BOSTONIAN REPUBLICANS
In 1635, John Cutler, a native of Norfolk, England, sailed to the New World with his wife and children and settled in the village of Hingham, Massachusetts. By the early 1800s, his Cutler descendants had moved to Exeter, Maine. The fierce independence of Mainers, who embraced Puritanism and thrived on such rugged industries as timber harvesting and shipbuilding, was distilled in the Cutlers. From the Civil War on, they were Republicans and unionists. One of John Cutler's descendants, Lysander Cutler, a general in the Union army, fought at Gettysburg and resigned his command in 1865 at the age of fifty-eight only after he was severely injured by a shell fragment that struck him in the face.
One of Lysander Cutler's great-nephews, George Cutler, owned and operated lumber mills in Maine. He and his wife, Mary, had resided in Bangor for much of their lives. In 1889, George and Mary moved to the prosperous Boston suburb of Brookline, where their five sons grew up in a Republican household and with friends who came from powerful families with names like Cabot, Lowell, and Lodge. While they shared the political party of the Boston Brahmin families, the Cutlers were not part of the Brahmin aristocracy.
George raised his boys to be outdoorsmen, taking them on annual trips to fish for salmon on the Bonaventure River in Quebec and on trips to New Brunswick in the dead of winter for curling on a frozen lake. As a young man, George had been athletic, playing sports at Phillips Exeter Academy. Like his father before him, George went to Harvard, where he played baseball, graduating in 1879. His three older sons — John, Elliott, and Roger — were athletes, too, excelling in sports at the Volkmann School in Boston. George, the fourth of the boys, was less athletic and was given the brutal nickname "Fat." Born into this world of competition on June 12, 1895, the youngest Cutler boy, Bobby, came to view George as a "buffer state" who would shield him from the tough older boys. George and Bobby gravitated toward the arts. Mary Cutler brought up all her sons — but particularly the younger ones — to embrace literature, history, and music. She took them to Shakespeare's plays at the Castle Square Theatre in Boston, first taking care for their proper understanding: On the day before the matinee, she often gathered with the boys and read parts of the play they were to see.
Mary read aloud to her children; by the time Bobby was seventeen, she had read all of Charles Dickens. The books that filled the house included Jack London's White Fang and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. "Little wonder I became an omnivorous reader," Bobby observed, "always with a book in hand." Bobby also took to writing as a boy, producing his own small "newspaper," which he dubbed Cutler's Weekly, featuring the latest opera news and items such as his own retelling of the life of Alexander Hamilton. He delved into politics, too, embracing President Teddy Roosevelt's brand of Republicanism and adopting the president's bully as a phrase of his own.
Mary wanted her boys to appreciate opera, and Bobby came to love it. He haunted the second balcony of the Boston Opera House, exhausting his allowance on cheap seats and standing-room-only tickets. He saw Caruso a dozen times. Bobby noted, "There was always make-believe lurking in me. I didn't see myself as I was, but as I imagined myself to be." And when it came to performances, Bobby often played the role of a woman. In 1911, the year he turned sixteen, he took the role of a married woman in a school play, wearing one of his mother's gowns. When the audience burst into applause, he acknowledged it by singing a portion of his favorite aria in Italian from La Traviata. He recalled that "in the dazzle of the footlights" he was Emma Calvé "in black velvet and diamonds and trailing a long Russian sable stole," as she had appeared to him the previous Saturday afternoon on the stage of Symphony Hall, "her seductive mezzo-soprano sweeping the audience up and to her."
After the famed Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova came to Boston, Bobby took to dressing up in a negligee and white slippers of his mother's, a veil upon his head. He recalled in his memoir: "In our darkened parlor after supper, to incidental Tchaikovsky on the Victrola, I would present an imitation of the Incomparable Anna dancing La Mort du Cygne." His performance featured "tiptoe runs across the room, followed by undulating gestures as I folded into death upon the floor."
The Cutler boys were raised to express their affection openly, kissing each other on the cheek routinely, a common practice in Europe. "It would never have occurred to us, any more at sixty years than at sixteen," he reflected, "not to greet a brother with a handclasp and a kiss. Here was a way to show our parents, long after death, outgoing gratitude for their gift to us of a 'family life.'"
The family suffered a cruel blow when Mary contracted cancer, which tormented her for years. The two younger boys, George and Bobby, would read aloud to her in bed, as she had read to them. Mary Cutler had her second operation for cancer in the summer of 1912, and that fall Bobby entered Harvard.
The younger Cutler boys faced great expectations at Harvard engendered by the achievements of their older brothers. The eldest, John, was quarterback and captain of the undefeated Harvard football team of 1908 and rowed crew with his brother Elliott. John roomed at Harvard with Teddy Roosevelt Jr. and stayed at the White House for the wedding of his sister Alice Roosevelt. The middle Cutler brother, Roger, captained Harvard's crew team.
When John became engaged to the daughter of a prominent New York political family, the society pages of local newspapers mythologized the couple. "Football Goal Won Bride for Harvard Star," said the headline of one article. "A romance of the gridiron involving one of Harvard's greatest athletes and an heiress, the daughter of one of the richest men in the United States, was revealed today through the announcement of the engagement of Miss Emily Rosalind Fish, daughter of Hamilton Fish of Washington and New York, and John W. Cutler, a member of the famous Cutler family of Harvard athletes." Emily Fish, who went by the name Rosalind, had visited her brother, Hamilton Fish III, the captain of the Harvard team that year, at practice, where she made the acquaintance of John Cutler. As the society pages account had it, Rosalind Fish accepted John Cutler's proposal of marriage on the condition that Harvard defeat Yale in their annual game. Harvard won, and the couple wed two years later in October 1910; four private railcars carried guests from Grand Central Station to Garrison, New York, for the event.
Rosalind was the granddaughter of Hamilton Fish, whose father had named him after a close friend, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton Fish served as New York's governor from 1849 to 1850, then as US senator from New York. A Republican supporter of Abraham Lincoln, Fish later served as secretary of state under President Ulysses S. Grant. His son, Hamilton Fish II, Rosalind's father, was a lawyer and real estate investor in New York who also served as a US congressman. Rosalind's first cousin, also called Hamilton Fish, was among the volunteers who died while fighting with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in Cuba in 1898. Rosalind's brother, Hamilton Fish III, the All-American football captain, would go on to prominence as a Republican US congressman.
When Bobby arrived for his freshman year at Harvard in 1912, a newspaper sports section carried a story headlined, "Another Cutler Comes to Harvard." "Young Cutler is the fifth of a famous rowing family. He has been rowing in the Volkmann second boat and shapes up well." Bobby was welcomed at Harvard's Newell Boathouse "like an heir apparent," but it soon became obvious that he was not on par with his older brothers. "It was like a sudden death in the family, cruel, not to be mentioned: a Cutler who just couldn't row," he admitted wryly in his autobiography.
Bobby followed all four of his brothers into the Porcellian Club, which dated to 1791 and was among the elite Harvard student societies. Its members included Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and President Theodore Roosevelt. The club derived its name from the tale of an eighteenth-century student who brought a pig into a classroom to squeal in order to upset a much-disliked professor. The Cutler brothers amassed a collection of small pig ornaments and figurines, which they kept on shelves just inside the front door of their house in Brookline. Later in life, whenever Bobby met other members of "the PC," they had an instantaneous bond of common experience.
In his freshman year, Bobby met an older man, Owen Wister, who would become a mentor, someone he greatly admired and with whom he would forge an extremely close bond. Wister wrote The Virginian, published in 1902 and widely considered the first great cowboy novel. Wister was thirty-four years older than Bobby, and yet the two discovered they had many common interests, including profound loves of literature, drama, and music. Wister, also a PC member, insisted on being called Uncle Dan, and Bobby gladly agreed. "Easy and agreeable with younger men, his meticulous, matchless courtesy disarmed shyness and drew comradeship," Bobby wrote.
The son of a wealthy Philadelphia financier and his wife, Wister was schooled in music as a child. At Harvard, he befriended Teddy Roosevelt; both were members of the PC and would remain close friends for life. Wister was a gifted pianist and performed in university theater groups. After graduating in 1882, he traveled to Europe and played one of his compositions for Franz Liszt, whom Wister met while visiting the home of Richard Wagner. A sensitive aesthete who had reached the heights of Europe's cultural elite, Wister suddenly found himself ordered back to a more banal reality when his father summoned him to a job in finance in Philadelphia. He acquiesced and worked in Philadelphia until his health "broke down," as he vaguely described it. Seeking a recovery, he traveled to a Wyoming ranch in 1885.
In Wyoming, Wister discovered his deep admiration for the manly directness and unadorned machismo of cowboys, who often had strained or distant relationships with women. In The Virginian and other writings, his cowboy characters often recite their troubles with women and marriage, an avowal that typically opens the door to greater intimacy among the men. Indeed, The Virginian is often noted for its homoerotic aspects, which emerge on the book's very first page, when the narrator, an East Coast dandy who has come west for the first time, sees "a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures." The dandy, recounting the experience in a first-person narrative, admires this cowboy's body, which has "the undulations of a tiger, smooth and easy, as if all his muscles flowed beneath his skin." This "ungrammatical son of the soil," as the dandy describes him, is the Virginian. The conversation immediately turns to the failures of cowboys to find women to marry them, and the dandy says of the Virginian, "Had I been the bride, I would have taken the giant, dust and all." The narrator goes on to tell an enraptured tale of the Virginian's physical beauty, his feats of courage and strength, and his righteous struggles with rustlers and other ne'er-do-wells. Ultimately the Virginian is married to a schoolmarm who barely plays any role in the novel, romantic or otherwise. Instead, accounts of swimming naked together with the narrator and other adventures in the open Wyoming spaces provide the romance.
Wister was a close friend of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Republican from an abolitionist family who had been wounded while fighting for the North in the Civil War. He also was close to Henry Adams, an author and scholar descended from two presidents, and Henry Cabot Lodge, a US senator and ally of Teddy Roosevelt's known for supporting America's intervention in Cuba. All three — Holmes, Adams, and Lodge — were Harvard graduates. Holmes and Lodge were Porcellian members like Wister. When Bobby met Wister at Harvard, the freshman student must have felt as if a god had stepped down from Olympus to befriend him. While a student, Bobby wrote a novel, and Wister recommended that the Macmillan Company, which had published Wister's works, publish Bobby's first novel, Louisburg Square. Wister acted as a "kindly midwife to my literary accouchements," Bobby wrote.
Bobby also had at least one close relationship with a fellow student, Oliver Ames, what he called "my first great friendship with a fellow my own age." Ames, too, was a Porcellian member. "Although we were of an age, he used to call me — because I was a class ahead — 'Old Boy' or 'Funny Old Boy'; linking his arm in mine as we walked along. There was no touch of tarnish in Ollie anywhere — in body, or spirit or courage."
Though Bobby failed to follow the family tradition of athletic prowess, he made up for it by excelling academically. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honor society, was chosen class poet, and graduated cum laude. He also wrote for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, a student group known for putting on humorous plays in which male students often dressed as girls and women, an activity that stemmed from the lack of female students on campus but also conveniently coincided with Bobby's delight in cross-dressing.
As a lover of literature, Bobby was likely well acquainted with the homosexual and homophilic inclinations of some of Harvard's leading literary figures, including Frederick Loring, whose novel Two College Friends, published in 1871, featured two Harvard students who loved each other dearly and fought for the Union cause. In 1882, Oscar Wilde gave a speech at Harvard that was attended by a large number of students. Wilde's poems at the time revealed a strong aesthetic appreciation for men, though years would pass before he was convicted in England of "gross indecency" for his sexual relationship with a young man in 1895.
Harvard's gay literary history includes an incident in which the poet of the senior class, E. E. Cummings, gave a speech at commencement in 1915 reading a poem by Amy Lowell, known for her romance with actress Ada Dwyer Russell, in which she laments her lover's absence. The lesbian themes in Lowell's poetry were considered scandalous, and one lady was later overheard denouncing the poem as "lascivious." Cummings made this oration while Lowell's brother, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, notoriously conservative and likely displeased with any allusions to his sister's lesbianic poetry, was sitting just a few paces away. By this time, Amy Lowell had earned a reputation for crossing gender boundaries — including her habit of smoking cigars. She helped found a theater company that put on many avant-garde dramas, including a 1907 production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, a bold statement not long after Wilde, pilloried as a homosexual, had died in exile in Paris.
As Bobby entered his senior year, Mary Cutler's cancer worsened, and she summoned Bobby to her bedside to tell him how short her time would be. She took from her finger the wedding ring of her mother, Mary Elliott Carr, and put it in Bobby's hand. After his mother died in 1916, Bobby had the initials mec-mwc-rc inscribed inside the ring, and had it made large enough to slip over the little finger of his right hand, where he wore it until the end of his life.
As Harvard's commencement ceremony approached in June 1916, Bobby was selected for an unusual trio of honors. First, a hymn he composed was selected as the Baccalaureate Hymn for the class of 1916 and was sung in the university chapel; Bobby's verses urged love of God as the only true way to find a path to success in life. Then, as class poet, he read before the student body his poem gently chastising fellow students for wasting their time and failing to study, and praising the university for enabling students to grow wise and build friendships that would last a lifetime. Finally, a committee of professors chaired by a dean selected Bobby to give a speech at commencement. The committee made sure President Lowell would be spared the embarrassment of Cummings's performance the year before as Bobby was to give a speech that was an exhortation to military preparedness. On commencement day, with painter John Singer Sargent on the stage to receive an honorary degree, before a stadium filled with thousands, Bobby spoke in praise of the "Harvard Regiment" that had gone off to prepare for military service, and he called for universal military training to ensure a strong national defense. "This nation should teach all her sons to defend her, should teach all her sons that the duty of each to serve under arms is as much the part of liberty and manhood as the duty to vote." These three expressions — a hymn on devotion to God, a poetic ode to hard work, and a speech in support of national defense — traced the arc that Bobby's public philosophy would follow for the rest of his life.
Yet if Bobby's public performances were infused with duty, religiosity, and military service, privately Bobby had a soaring romantic spirit that sought expression through literature and crossed the lines of socially acceptable tastes. In early 1917, he published an essay praising Amy Lowell in The Nation magazine for her imagist poetic style. "She has done the world imperishable service; she has cleaned out our old wine bottles and left them pure, sweet and welcoming for new wine," Bobby wrote. His praise of Lowell skirted the issues raised by her sexuality. Soon Bobby's own literary creation would explore what it means to search for love with a member of the opposite sex — but be unable to find happiness.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ike's Mystery Man"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Peter Shinkle.
Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface1. Bostonian Republicans
2. Bachelor
3. Wartime
4. From Old Colony to Psychological Warfare
5. With Ike to Victory
6. Transition
7. The Gay Spy
8. Reforming and Running the NSC
9. Ike’s Peculiar Ban on Gays
10. The Passion of Oppenheimer
11. The Iran Coup
12. Mystery Man
13. The Guatemala Coup
14. The Dr. Dick House, Joe McCarthy, and “Sexual Perversion”
15. Exploiting Soviet Vulnerabilities
16. “Losing My Right Arm”
17. The Return
18. “The Greatest Adventure of My Life”
19. Sputnik, Turmoil, and Love
20. Challenging US Nuclear Strategy
21. Venice, Midnight
22. “I Love Him . . .”
23. Investigations — and Agony
24. Ike’s Man in Latin America
25. “That Which I Am, I Am”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index