This is a remarkable a book about an extraordinary man who was Dwight Eisenhower's “right hand” for foreign policy.
Robert Cutler, known as Bobby, was born into a prominent Boston family, the fifth of five sons whose friends had names like Cabot, Lowell and Lodge. He attended Harvard, fought in the first world war, graduated from Harvard Law School and served as corporation counsel for Maurice Tobin, a Democratic mayor of Boston. Then he became an army general, a senior strategist on Eisenhower's presidential campaign and America's first national security adviser
He was also a banker, a poet, a cross-dresser who loved the female roles in amateur theatrical productions and a closeted gay man at the center of a gay White House love triangle.
Ike's Mystery Man is the perfect title for Peter Shinkle's fine biography, from which the big headline is about Cutler's shepherding of a disastrous 1953 executive order under which the lives of thousands of federal employees were destroyed just because they were gay.
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