Arlington, Virginia, September 20, 1952
Joan Black stood in front of a dark walnut desk, its matching inbox empty, its outbox full of straightened papers. Other than a freestanding nameplate with “Mrs. M. C. Casperson” etched in block letters, which Joan guessed could be seen from twenty yards away, there were no adornments. A standing fan droned in the corner; its spinning face recirculated the musty gasps of file drawers infrequently opened and stuffed with decades of moldering papers. There was no other movement in the room.
“Can I help you?” a trim woman appeared from the endless rows of gray file cabinets that stood sentry behind the desk. Her brown fitted suit had the creaseless look of military wear. She stayed standing behind the desk, looking at Joan through thick-rimmed black glasses, her hands folded and held at her waist. She looks like she’s either going to conduct a funeral service or pull out a ruler and rap my knuckles, Joan thought.
“Mrs. Casperson? I’m Joan Black, and, ummm, have I found the Office of Archival, Personnel and Departmental Records…ummm, for the army? I already went to the wrong one,” Joan gave a nervous laugh, “and I think I’ve been on a hundred different stairways here….”
“Then you have thirty-one to go. And yes, I am Mrs. Casperson, and yes, as it says on the door, this is the office you want. Now, what do you want from this office?”
Joan had the awful feeling that this was not going to go well. Damn it, she thought. Couldn’t I get some nice, helpful, friendly young clerk? This had to work. She would just have to make it work.
“Well, I guess this may be a bit irregular, but I need a record from a file…”
“We have forms that you will need to fill out,” Casperson opened one of her desk drawers as she talked, “for archival records.”
“Well, it’s probably a record in the personnel part. I mean, I’m sure it is, and…”
“Those are not available except to the person for whom the file is kept, their immediate supervisors, and certain persons with appropriate clearances.” Casperson had closed her drawer with enough force for Joan to be sure that it was now joined in perfect harmony with the face of the desk.
“Yes. Yes, of course. That makes perfect sense, but…”
“There are no ‘buts’ in the matter of personnel files.”
“Maybe I should start over,” Joan said, noticing that Casperson’s hands were again folded, her look inscrutable.
“This has to do with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.” Joan thought she caught a slight widening of Casperson’s eyes. “I work for her.” Joan placed a card on the desk in front of the unmoving woman.
“She’s the former First Lady. Of course, you know that. Sorry, I just meant that when she was First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt had some correspondence with General Eisenhower during the war. And then after her husband died,” Joan paused as Casperson licked her lips with the tip of her tongue and bobbed her head with a slight motion, “when Mrs. Roosevelt was going through her papers, she sent back to many well-known people the letters they had sent her. So, she sent General Eisenhower several letters like that, that he had written her, for his historical file, of course. And well, now you know, of course, she’s running against him for president, and she thought she remembered that he had written her a letter about her husband’s death,” Joan began embellishing on the story she had planned to give, “a letter that was really very kind, and she felt that it would contribute to the bipartisan spirit she’s trying to foster if she could quote from that letter, so,” she started talking faster, “Mrs. Roosevelt asked me to see if I could just look in the file and see if I found the letter and could just copy what the kind thing was the general wrote.” Joan’s heart pounded as she finished. The slow tick-tick of the plain black wall clock’s giant minute hand sounded like the prelude to a bomb.
Casperson unfolded her hands. She pulled out her chair with studied care and lowered herself into it. Then, lips tight, she motioned for Joan to sit down. Casperson looked at her lap for a moment, smoothing her skirt. She pulled Joan’s card toward her and studied it.
“I met Mrs. Roosevelt,” she said, without looking up. “It was April 20, 1945, not long before VE Day. My husband was at Walter Reed Hospital. He had only just gotten there. His wounds were so…” she paused and smoothed her skirt again. “He was wounded in the Apennine Mountains near Florence, in Italy. Mrs. Roosevelt came to his bedside, even though her husband had been buried only days before. She sat on his bed and she spoke to Thomas. He just lit up so.” Joan could see her eyes had misted. “She stayed a long time. She’d been to Escanaba, you see. That’s where we’re…we were, from, in Michigan. I didn’t say much, but Thomas, he talked to her quite a while. And it was so hard for him to speak. But she was patient, so patient and kind. You would have thought she had the whole day to be with him, as if he were her own son.” She stopped and tucked her chin down as she swallowed hard. “Thomas died the next day. That’s how I remember the date so well, you see.” She took a deep breath, and Joan could hear the puff of exhalation, as if some part of the shrapnel-sharp memory had been released.
“Miss Black, is it? Follow me.” Casperson stood up with a quick turn, and Joan hurried behind. They wound through the maze of shelves and file cabinets to a small, windowless room with a table and one chair. Joan waited, glad to have an ashtray. Thirty minutes later, Casperson returned, showing the effort as she pulled two large boxes on a trolley behind her.
“These are nonclassified correspondences between General Eisenhower, high-ranking military personnel, and government officials during the war years only. You have exactly twenty minutes, Miss Black, that’s all I can give you. Do not remove anything. I will check.”
Joan struggled to get the first box on the table, and stood up to see inside. From what Henry had said, it must have been a letter to Marshall, but when? She figured it would have been toward the end of the war, since Henry said Ike wanted Kay Summersby to come back to the States. The files were chronological. She knew Ike had returned to the States in November, so she started with October 1945. Nothing. September 1945. Nothing, and the clock had ticked off more than half her time. She knew Casperson would return to the minute.
Joan picked up the folder for August and noticed that there was an unmarked sleeve file next to it that looked like a placeholder. She assumed it was empty, but it seemed out of place, so she pulled it out anyway. It was so thin that she had to slide her nail along the opening to see inside. There were just two letters, written on the personal stationery supplied by the military and placed in the exact middle of the file, their corners aligned. She blew inside so the file popped open and gently pulled the papers out.
The first was dated August 20, 1945, from General Eisenhower to General Marshall:
Dear George,
I am writing about a matter of great personal importance to me. I do this with reluctance and regret. I hope and trust you will understand that I have agonized over writing to you in this way.
I am asking that I be allowed to return to the United States as quickly as possible and be relieved of duty. I am planning to divorce Mamie so that I can marry that Englishwoman you met, Kay Summersby. Understand that I would never do anything to dishonor you or the army we serve. This is strictly my decision, and I intend to proceed with the utmost discretion.
Sincerely,
Ike
The second was dated a week later, in reply:
Ike,
Your request is denied. You will return to the United States when needed and ordered to do so. Further, if you even come close to instigating divorce proceedings, I will bust you out of the army and see to it that you will not draw a peaceful breath for the rest of your life. Do not mention such a thing like this to me again or I will make your life a living hell.
George
By the time Casperson returned, Joan had copied the letters on a page in the middle of her notebook. On a page at the front, she made up a couple of lines that might have come from the letter she was supposedly looking for. But Casperson never checked; she returned looking agitated and took Joan to a back stairway to leave. An officer from the army chief of staff’s office was on his way, and she didn’t want any questions to be asked.
Just as she seated herself and put Joan’s card in her drawer, the man appeared. “Mrs. Casperson,” the hurried-looking major said as he handed her a letter. “As you can see, this request is from the president himself.”
She saw the eagle-emblazoned seal first. That was shock enough. But President Truman was requesting two letters from the wartime nonclassified files of General Eisenhower. She read the instructions, tensing from the strain of hiding the tremors that shot through her. Mrs. Casperson did not believe in coincidences.
“This may take a few minutes, Major. Please feel free to sit down.”
She wasn’t surprised to find the letters in an unmarked file envelope. She was even less surprised at how easily it opened and how hurriedly the letters seemed to have been replaced. She scanned them to be sure they were the right ones, and then willed herself to forget what she had read, along with the young woman who had lied to her. Mrs. Casperson was a professional and a patriot, but she was also a woman who lost all the love in her life to a terrible war. The president had asked for two letters, and she would supply them.