Monday, August 10, 2015

Jeffrey Frank, Ike and Dick ***

I was hoping and expecting that this Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage between Dwight David Eisenhower and Richard Nixon would show how the two men misunderstood each other due to their vastly different temperaments. However, the book mostly describes how Nixon interpreted Eisenhower's passive/aggressive conflict avoidance without a counterbalancing account of Eisenhower's interpretation of Nixon. And since Ike and Dick is about their feelings, the descriptions of the political events themselves is perfunctory.

The story is strongest during the episodes that most clearly and directly relate to Eisenhower's non-committal public statements: the "fund episode" that led to Nixon's Checkers speech; the choice of VP for the second term (with Eisenhower trying to convince Nixon to take a cabinet post instead); and the 1960 election ("If you give me a week, I might think of one [policy that Nixon spearheaded as VP]"). There is also the time when Eisenhower wanted Nixon to fire his chief of staff Sherman Adams, which showed the same behavior applied to someone other than Nixon.

When describing his sources, Jeffrey Frank notes that historians now consider Eisenhower "a man skilled in the art of forceful indirection... [and] a leader who had patience and purpose, particularly in foreign affairs." You would not get that impression from Ike and Dick. It omits any discussion of his accomplishments, and the general comes across as an amiable timid jerk. 

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