The Odd Couple

'Ike and Dick,' by Jeffrey Frank

It may be the closest of political relationships, but it rarely ends
well. Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged President John Adams
for the top spot in the vicious campaign of 1800. President Andrew
Jackson mused sardonically about executing Vice President John C.
Calhoun. In the modern era, Lyndon Johnson seethed at slights real and
perceived during John Kennedy's thousand days, then turned around and
humiliated his own vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Even Dick Cheney
and George W. Bush fell out by the end of their tumultuous terms. But
perhaps the most intriguing — and dysfunctional — political marriage
in history was the one between the subjects of Jeffrey Frank's
meticulously researched "Ike and Dick."

Franklin Roosevelt's vice president memorably said that being No. 2
was in effect not worth a bucket of warm spit. Dwight D. Eisenhower's
vice president may have considered that assessment overly generous
after spending eight years under the heel of a war hero whose sunny
smile hid the soul of a cold, calculating politician. Frank, a former
editor at both The New Yorker and The Washington Post, examines how
Ike's cool nature and detached management style left Richard Nixon
insecure and embittered through the remainder of his political career.

"Ike and Dick" is a highly engrossing political narrative that
skillfully takes the reader through the twisted development of a
strange relationship that would help shape America's foreign and
domestic agenda for much of the 20th century. The two men's political
paths first crossed in 1952 after Eisenhower's advisers listed Nixon
as a potential running mate. (When later asked to explain the pick,
Eisenhower would say dismissively, "He was on the list.") But once his
choice was made, Ike found himself tied to a political brawler whose
aggressiveness on the campaign trail embarrassed him even when he
benefited from those rough-and-tumble tactics.

Eisenhower, whose legacy was assured by the victory in World War II,
harbored a quiet disdain for ambitious politicians like Nixon,
preferring instead the company of a coterie of self-made, accomplished
and influential business leaders. Throughout his public life, Ike was
not simply a member of the club — he was the club, whether on the
course at Augusta National or playing bridge at Camp David with the
most powerful men in the country. The resentful Nixon, by contrast,
was in constant battle with an East Coast establishment that would
never fully accept him. But as "Ike and Dick" vividly shows, nothing
written in a New York Times editorial or caricatured in a Herblock
cartoon could sting Nixon like the rejection he faced repeatedly from
his own boss.

During the 1952 presidential campaign, after the press reported on a
secret Nixon fund, Eisenhower had the New York governor Thomas Dewey
deliver the news that he wanted his running mate off the ticket. Nixon
later said the episode "left a deep scar which was never to heal
completely." Four years later, Ike once again considered dumping
Nixon, and once again the vice president survived the near-death
political experience, but he called it "another period of agonizing
indecision." The deepest wound inflicted by Eisenhower, however, came
in the middle of Nixon's own tough 1960 campaign against Kennedy, when
the aging president was asked to name one policy position taken over
eight years that Nixon had influenced. "If you give me a week, I might
think of one," was Ike's cold response.

Those betrayals left a lasting mark. Frank writes, "Nixon could never
be sure what Eisenhower really thought of him, but it never ceased to
matter, and his restive pursuit of Ike's good opinion remained one of
the few constants in an extraordinary life." Like Lyndon Johnson's
after him, much of Nixon's pathos sprang from his painful
contemplation of his boss's public slights.

"Ike and Dick" begins on the day General Eisenhower arrived in
Manhattan for a ticker-tape parade celebrating his leadership in the
victory against Hitler's Germany — and with a young Navy Lieutenant
Commander Nixon straining to get a better look at the great general
through 30 stories of confetti. The book ends a ­quarter-century later
inside Nixon's own Oval Office, with the president bitterly sobbing at
the news of Ike's death, knowing that the acceptance he always craved
would never come. Nixon eventually created his own mythic deathbed
scene, in which the dying general slowly lifted his right hand in
final salute to his able No. 2.

Through it all, Nixon tempered his burning ambition. He remained the
loyal soldier in a continuing attempt to prove his worth, while
seeking Eisenhower's trust and confidence through persistent public
demonstrations of his subordinate position. In the process, he
redefined the office of vice president for the modern era.

A fascinating subplot in Frank's story details Nixon's role in pushing
the administration on the issue of civil rights. Long criticized as
the author of the Republican Party's racially tinged "Southern
strategy," Nixon is shown by Frank to be a determined advocate for the
Civil Rights Act of 1957, as well as a trusted ally of Martin Luther
King Jr. and Jackie Robinson. Robinson wrote to Nixon after passage of
the bill, stating, "I and many others will never forget the fight you
made and what you stand for." King was even more effusive, saying how
"deeply grateful all people of good will are to you for your assiduous
labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the civil rights bill a
reality."

Nixon's support of King's cause angered Southern conservatives and
further distanced the vice president from his disapproving president.
He would even be attacked by Lyndon Johnson, then the Senate majority
leader, for heading a "concerted propaganda campaign" in support of a
stronger voting rights bill. Despite this abuse, Nixon argued that
Republicans should remain the party of Lincoln on civil rights.
Because Eisenhower disagreed, Republicans ceded the issue to a
converted Johnson and the Democratic Party, losing the
African-American vote for at least the next 50 years.

After Eisenhower's presidency — in the period Nixon referred to as his
"wilderness years" — Ike began to show a more personal interest in
Nixon. Having taken a well-paid position at a prestigious Wall Street
law firm, Nixon had temporarily become the kind of man Eisenhower was
always drawn to — a wealthy member of the establishment. But to the
end, the legendary war hero from Kansas remained little more than a
distant figure to his vice president, who always wanted to believe
that he had more value to Ike than simply being "on the list."
NYT