Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage. By Jeffrey Frank. Simon & Schuster; 434 pages; $30. Buy from Amazon.com

BETWEEN 1933 and 1977 only two Republican presidents were elected, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. They are often seen as opposites: the hero and the crook. Eisenhower (or Ike) was the genial, selfless five-star general who seemed to float above the fray of party politics. Nixon was the cold, conniving liar, paranoid and petty. Jeffrey Frank, a former senior editor at the New Yorker, has written a book about the unlikely duo, which offers a more nuanced portrait of their personalities. Though they disagreed about politics and struggled to get on, Ike and Dick were more alike than is often thought.

Eisenhower picked Nixon as his vice-presidential nominee in 1952 because he had qualities Ike lacked. The old warhorse from Kansas needed someone young and nakedly political. An anti-communist would satisfy the party and a Californian would help to win over the Golden State. Nixon it was. It did not matter so much that the pair squabbled. They won 39 out of 48 states and 55% of the popular vote.

They often failed to see eye-to-eye. Nixon was a hawkish adviser who blamed Democrats for losing China to communism. Eisenhower strove to avoid war at any cost. He ended the Korean war and refused to send soldiers to Vietnam, Hungary and Suez. The two had different views about the space race as well. When Russia launched the satellite Sputnik into space in 1957, Nixon saw it as a failure of Western civilisation. Eisenhower said, “Any of you fellows want to go to the moon? I don’t. I’m happier right here.”

This was a source of tension between them. Nixon would grumble about foreign policy and defence. He could be bitter. “This ‘togetherness’ bullshit,” he said of Eisenhower’s doveish multilateralist defence policy, “I don’t believe in that. I think the time will come when we’ll look back at this era and ask ourselves whether we were crazy or something.” Ike could be standoffish in return.

But Ike needed Dick to be his political hound dog. Nixon savaged the administration’s opponents, which allowed the president to be an apolitical, national figurehead. An aide called this Eisenhower’s “dirty work”. When Joseph McCarthy, a Republican Senator, overreached in his crusade to hunt communists from public life, Adlai Stevenson, a targeted Democratic governor of Illinois, pointedly declared that a “political party divided against itself, half McCarthy and half Eisenhower, cannot produce national unity.” Eisenhower decided it was time to restrain McCarthy. A fervent anti-communist and talented orator, Nixon was well placed for this. He laid into McCarthy on Saturday-night television, logically unweaving his illiberal argument. “It was just right, Dick,” Eisenhower said over the telephone.

Eisenhower could be ignoble, too. After the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954, he wrote, “No other single event has so disturbed the domestic scene in many years.” Martin Luther King observed that Nixon did more for race relations than Eisenhower. Nixon spoke passionately about civil rights on the stump. He took on critics during the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

At a time when political machinations are all too overt, it is entertaining to learn about the wheeling and dealing during a more discreet age. Yet readers may wish less space was devoted to how Dick felt about Ike, and then how Ike felt about Dick. All this gossip seems to take up valuable space: the Suez crisis, for example, covers no more than two pages. The Iran coup and important details about America’s economy are missed out altogether. Mr Frank tells an absorbing story in a breezy, lucid way. But as a work of history, the book leaves something to be desired.