Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy was three years into his incendiary search for Communists when Dwight Eisenhower assumed the presidency in 1953. Ike privately loathed McCarthy but never directly confronted him or so much as mentioned his name.

Rather, he worked in typically understated fashion to bring the demagogue down. In a discussion of his new book Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower's Secret Campaign Against Joseph McCarthy, Eisenhower scholar David A. Nichols explores the tensions between the two men and Eisenhower’s covert effort to discredit the senator—abetted by McCarthy’s own, off-putting performance during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.

Nichols, who lives in Winfield, Kansas, is the author of A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution and Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis. The event is co-presented by Rainy Day Books.