Ike’s Mystery Man: The Secret Lives of Robert Cutler
(Steerforth, $30) Robert “Bobby” Cutler was “an extraordinary man,” said Charles Kaiser in TheGuardian.com. America’s first chief national security adviser was a Harvard
Law School graduate, a former brigadier general, a former bank president, a poet, and—throughout his long career—a closeted gay man. That secret, revealed in this book by his great-nephew, is striking because Cutler, as Dwight Eisenhower’s right-hand man, helped draft a 1953 executive order that triggered a massive purge of federal workers suspected of “sexual perversion.” Only decades later did author Peter Shinkle, an ex-reporter, find a 725-page diary that revealed Cutler had been deeply in love at the time with a young male staffer, Skip Koons. But that’s not Shinkle’s only theme, and the portrait he’s created of Washington during the so-called Lavender Scare has to be “one of the most rewarding books of popular history I have ever read.” It may seem outrageous that the sexual orientation of civil servants was considered a national security issue, said Joseph Goulden in The Washington Times. Back then, though,“the security fears had some basis: that closet homosexuals could be blackmailed into spying.” Cutler himself avoided being outed by the investigators he’d unleashed. Though Harvard classmates had known he was gay, he was a cipher to the White House press corps, revealing little about himself or his work as he guided Eisenhower through various