About this item
Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon had a political and private relationship that lasted nearly twenty years, a tie that survived hurtful slights, tense misunderstandings, and the distance between them in age and temperament. Yet the two men brought out the best and worst in each other, and their association had important consequences for their respective presidencies. In Ike and Dick, Jeffrey Frank rediscovers these two compelling figures with the sensitivity of a novelist and the discipline of a historian. He offers a fresh view of the younger Nixon as a striving tactician, as well as the ever more perplexing person that he became. He portrays Eisenhower, the legendary soldier, as a cold, even vain man with a warm smile whose sound instincts about war and peace far outpaced his understanding of the changes occurring in his own country.
About the Author
IKE AND DICK: PORTRAIT OF A STRANGE POLITICAL MARRIAGE is a narrative history that explores the complicated political and personal relationship between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon--a sometimes painful association that lasted nearly twenty years. The years I spent working on it were enormously interesting, not least because I had a chance to interview dozens of men and women who knew and worked with both men, as well as family members. IKE AND DICK was published by Simon and Schuster in early 2013 and is now out in paperback. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, in a front-page review,called it "meticulously researched....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." Russell Baker, in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, called it "an elegant example of how pleasurable political history can be when written by a skilled teller of fictional tales who has a careful reporter's respect for facts. It is top-drawer as political history, unusually well written, and stuffed with forty pages of notes providing sources for an extraordinary variety of information." Thomas Mallon in THE NEW YORKER called it "one of the best books ever written about Richard Nixon." There's a terrific audio version of IKE AND DICK on Tantor Audio, read by the award-winning Arthur Morey. As SoundCommentary put it, "...the depth of his talent is revealed when he reads in the voice of Ike, Dick, JFK, or any of the other historical figures that people this work, because he ingeniously imbues his voice with subtle changes that only hint, without mimicking, those well-known voices." A bit more about me: I've also written four novels, three of which--THE COLUMNIST (2001) , BAD PUBLICITY (2004) , and TRUDY HOPEDALE (2007) --comprise the Washington Trilogy. I'm also the co-author, with Diana Crone Frank, of a fresh translation of Hans Christian Andersen's stories. And I'm a journalist: I was deputy editor of the Outlook section at The Washington Post as well as a senior editor at The New Yorker for more than thirteen years.My Web site: www.jeffreyfrank.comFacebook page: wwww.facebook.com/IkeandDick
