The only gender-related dispute they had was when she tried to drag the trash cans out to the curb. He felt pulling the cans to the curb was a man’s job.
The Bruce family did well. Jim had an excellent career in the postwar industrial economy, and so did Dot’s brothers. Teedy, once declared missing in action, is still alive. In Dot’s family, there are so many Jims and Jamies and Jameses, sons and grandsons and great-grandsons, named after her husband, that I found it hard to keep them straight. There are Virginias as well, and a little boy named Braden. Every year, Dot treats the whole family—some twenty people—to a big holiday meal at Richmond’s posh Jefferson Hotel. Every year they come, flying in from New Orleans, New York, California, bringing babies in snugglies, dressing little cousins in matching outfits. Many photos are taken. It is the happy family tableau she longed for as a girl. She complains about the cost, but she is not really complaining. During some of our many interviews, she had a file case containing her stock holdings under her chair. Her broker had died and she was shopping for a new one. She let several candidates take her to lunch.
Looking back, Dot wonders sometimes why she decided to marry Jim Bruce rather than George Rush. “My life could have turned out very differently,” she reflects. Make no mistake; she felt she made the right choice. George Rush was a perfectly nice man. But she didn’t want to move to California. She is so glad she took the train to Washington and embarked on her code-breaking service, together with her friend Crow Weston Cable. “I wouldn’t take anything for it,” she says. She thinks what tipped the balance in favor of Jim Bruce was the fact that he was steady and kind. And persistent. And he had a good sense of humor. Dot’s favorite song has always been “Somewhere, My Love,” and after they married Jim used to tease her when she played it. “Haven’t you found your love yet?” he would say.
And, she reflects, “he wrote me all those darling letters.”
After the war, Dot told nobody what she did. At some point, maybe fifty years after the war ended, she started giving hints. They did not believe her—her brother Bubba said it was “just a little job and I was trying to make it a big deal,” she remembers now. But then they started to believe her, or sort of. It became a tenet among her grandchildren that Dot single-handedly broke the Japanese codes. And yet, nobody really took it seriously.
Memories come at odd times. Dot was reading aloud to one of her great-grandchildren a children’s book called The Mitten, in which forest animals take refuge from a snowstorm by climbing, one by one, into a cast-off woolen mitten. So many animals climb in that one sneeze is enough to eject all of them. Reading it, she could not help but think of the Arlington apartment and all the girls who stayed in that one-bedroom place.
Her son Jim has always been intrigued by her wartime code-breaking service. As kids, he and his sisters used to go up in the attic and read the letters their dad wrote to their mother. His sentimental side was a revelation. But they never could get their mother to tell details about what she did. Now she has gotten the okay from none other than the NSA and has been assured that it’s fine to tell her story: The long-ago ban was lifted several decades ago. The government would like her to tell her story. But she still has her doubts. She cannot quite believe it. Then again, what would they do to her? At her age? Put her in prison?
On a Wednesday afternoon in 2014, during the first interview for this book, Jim, her son, is sitting in an upholstered wing chair in her one-bedroom apartment. “Let it rip, Mom!” he urges. By now so many male code breakers have written their memoirs: Edwin Layton and Frank Rowlett and others, with book titles like And I Was There and The Story of Magic. Dot relaxes, a bit, about telling the part she played in this dramatic story, and Jim listens as his mother begins to talk. She mentions Miriam the overlapper—awful Miriam! with her yellow diamond!—and claps her hand to her mouth. Never has she uttered the word “overlap” outside the confines of Arlington Hall.
Even now, it has the feeling to her of something illicit, something forbidden, something dangerous and important, no matter how long ago this all occurred. It feels as if an enemy might still be at the window, listening in.
Agnes Meyer Driscoll, a former Texas high school math teacher, became one of the great cryptanalysts of all time, cracking Japanese Navy fleet codes during the 1920s and ’30s. Courtesy of National Security Agency
Elizebeth Smith Friedman, another ex-schoolteacher, took a job in 1916 at an eccentric Illinois estate called Riverbank, where she helped found the U.S. government’s first code-breaking bureau. She later broke the codes of rumrunners during Prohibition. Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia
Genevieve Grotjan aspired to be a math professor but couldn’t find a university willing to hire a woman. In September 1940, after less than a year as a civilian Army code breaker, she made a key break that enabled the Allies to eavesdrop on Japanese diplomatic communications for the entirety of World War II. Courtesy of National Security Agency
Japan’s ambassador to Nazi Germany, Hiroshi Oshima, was a confidant of Adolf Hitler. Oshima communicated with Tokyo
using an enciphering machine the Allies called “Purple.” Grotjan’s break enabled the United States to monitor these missives, yielding some of the best wartime intelligence out of Europe. The Allies called it “Magic.” Courtesy of National Security Agency
The German military forces used their own enciphering machine, the portable Enigma. Courtesy of National Security Agency
America in the Depression was still a rural country. By 1940 only about 4 percent of women had completed four years of college, in part because many colleges would not admit them. Dot Braden, shown here as a girl with her nanny and brothers, was steered to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College by her spirited and determined mother. Courtesy
of Dorothy Braden Bruce
Dorothy Ramale, shown here in her 1943 yearbook photo, grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania and wanted to be a math teacher. But the dean of women at Indiana State Teachers College called her in and told her the U.S. Army had another idea for her. Courtesy of Indiana University of Pennsylvania Special Collections
Women’s colleges in the 1940s were a mix of cerebral inquiry, marital ambition, and hallowed rituals. The 1942 May Court at Goucher College included Jacqueline Jenkins (fourth from left) and Gwynneth Gminder (second from right). Their lives changed when they received a secret summons from the U.S. Navy, as did Fran Steen, shown in the headshot. Courtesy of Goucher College Archives