Give It a Rest!

In June 1942, Dwight Eisenhower was appointed Commanding General of the European Theater of Operations for the U.S. Army. Eisenhower was a well-respected thinker and had risen rapidly through the Army’s senior ranks in 1940 and 1941, and his new position required overseeing planning for the Army’s invasion of North Africa, working with his British military counterparts, and fielding Winston Churchill’s demands for faster American action. When he arrived in London, the war in Europe had already been going on for nearly two years, and Eisenhower found a command badly in need of reorganization and rejuvenation. By early August, according to his aide Harry Butcher, Eisenhower was working “15 to 18 hours a day” and had become a man “whose problems frequently [kept] him awake at night.” Eisenhower ordered Butcher to find “a ‘hideout’ to escape the four forbidding walls of the Dorchester,” the London hotel where the two shared a suite of rooms.

After scouting locations around London, Butcher found Telegraph Cottage, a “small, unpretentious” house “remotely situated on a 10-acre wooded tract.” That summer and fall, while planning Operation Torch, the U.S. invasion of North Africa, Eisenhower would escape to Telegraph Cottage whenever he could. There he played golf, read cowboy novels, played bridge, went riding in nearby Richmond Park, and simply enjoyed the country. Shop talk was strictly forbidden. Only a handful of people outside Eisenhower’s staff knew the cottage’s location. “If anything saved him from a mental crack-up,” his driver, Kay Summersby, later said, “it was Telegraph Cottage and the new life it provided.”

This kind of break from work — the kind that allows what sociologists call , the ability to put work completely out of your mind and attend to other things — turns out