When Peter Shinkle was on a family vacation in 2006, his mother and aunt revealed to him that his great-uncle Bobby, who died in 1974, was gay. To most, the info would be nothing of note. But the Uncle Bobby here is Robert Cutler, who would go on to hold the post that later became national security adviser under President Dwight Eisenhower.
“Untouchable, unreachable, unquotable” is how a 1955 issue of the New York Times Sunday magazine described the reserved Cutler. But there might have been a reason: Eisenhower is the president who issued Executive Order 10450, which banned gay people from working in the federal government.
Shinkle, who spent nearly two decades as a reporter, began interviewing family members about Cutler. A contact at the Eisenhower Presidential Library sent him to an archivist who was able to give Shinkle his great-uncle’s secret diary. Now Shinkle has penned Ike’s Mystery Man, an intimate look at Cutler’s time advising Eisenhower—as well as his affair with a young National Security employee, Skip Koons. It was crucial to find the book. “It’s one thing to have my mother and sister assert that their Uncle Bobby was gay," Shinkle says. "It’s another thing entirely to be able to prove it. Especially given the tremendous tension surrounding homosexuality in those days and how people had to keep it secret. That’s why receiving the diary was so important."
It also proves that Cutler wasn’t really untouchable, unreachable, unquotable. “I took his hand, our fingers for a moment interlaced,” he wrote in his diary of a 1957 date with Koons. “It was at that moment the greatest adventure of my life began: the best, the purest, the most penetrating emotion I ever knew.” But would he want it out there?
As Shinkle writes, “after studying Bobby’s life and letters for more than a decade, I am confident that his love for Skip was so great that if he were alive today—with our era’s liberated view of homosexuality—he would want this story told.”
