Nixon Tries It Again : IN THE ARENA A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal <i> by Richard Nixon (Simon & Schuster: $21.95; 384 pp.)</i>

Once the most scorned politician in America, former President Richard M. Nixon is now lionized by both liberals and conservatives and is regularly consulted on foreign policy and political strategy by the Bush Administration and Congressional leaders. Yet, Nixon’s latest book, “In the Arena,” is an eloquent reminder of his profound limitations as a politician and political thinker. Its callow attempts at self-justification and its neo-Cold War policy prescriptions reflect a man who is still bedeviled by his past.

Nixon devotes a good deal of “In the Arena” to lame excuses for Watergate. Perhaps assuming that Americans’ memories have dimmed, Nixon reduces the entire Watergate scandal to campaign peccadilloes. “At the core of the scandal was the fact that individuals associated with my reelection campaign were caught breaking into and installing telephone wiretaps at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel,” he writes. He either denies or minimizes his role in the sundry assaults on Constitutional liberties that the Watergate investigation uncovered.

Nixon insists that the numerous wiretaps he ordered were “carefully limited and totally legal for reasons of national security. . . . We were concerned that leaks might abort our secret China initiatives and our Vietnam peace negotiations.” But the wiretaps were first installed in spring, 1969, on Nixon’s National Security Council and two of his closest aides after the New York Times revealed that Nixon had begun secretly bombing Cambodia. The wiretaps had nothing to do with Nixon’s China initiative or peace negotiations. The Supreme Court later ruled that they were illegal.

Nixon dismisses as “bizarre” and “false” charges that he “ordered massive illegal wiretapping and surveillance of political opponents,” but in July, 1970, Nixon approved a massive plan for political repression concocted by aide Tom Huston that included intensified electronic surveillance of “domestic security threats” and increased “mail coverage.” These activities were to be coordinated by a new “Interagency Group.” Fortunately, J. Edgar Hoover balked at creating a rival to his own agency.

Nixon acknowledges that the Watergate cover-up was illegal, but blames it on his subordinates. “I made the inexcusable error of following the recommendation from some members of my staff--some of whom, I later learned, had a personal stake in covering up the facts--and requesting that the CIA intervene,” Nixon says in trying to excuse his request that the CIA throttle the FBI investigation of Watergate. Nixon limits his own role to not setting “a higher standard for the conduct of the people who participated in my campaign and administration.”

Nixon frequently uses the debating technique of denying what has never been charged in order to evade what has already been shown. Denying any hint of political corruption, he writes, “No one who donated over a million dollars was ever appointed to any ambassadorship.” What he fails to mention is that quite a few people who contributed somewhat less were given appointments. According to J. Anthony Lukas’ “Nightmare,” Nixon appointed 13 non-career ambassadors after his 1972 election who, together, contributed $706,000 to his campaign.

Nixon uses a similar debating technique in discussing the use of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to harass political opponents. He cavalierly defends using the IRS against Democratic chairman Lawrence O’Brien. “I see nothing wrong with getting wealthy people to pay their taxes,” Nixon says. But Nixon doesn’t mention using the IRS against virtually anyone who crossed his path, from a Newsday editor to basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Nixon’s rendition of his Vietnam policy is about as credible as his version of Watergate. He blames the prolongation of the war on the North Vietnamese “filibustering” the negotiations. Nixon omits his own role in sabotaging the Johnson Administration’s October, 1968, peace overtures; his adamant refusal for four years to accept a North Vietnamese presence in the South, even though it was obvious they could not be dislodged; the South Vietnamese government’s veto of the agreement finally worked out in summer, 1972, between National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese.

Nixon not only defends but recommends as models of decision-making the 1970 invasion of Cambodia and the brutal and unnecessary 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi. He writes that the Cambodian invasion “saved lives and reduced the Communists’ ability to continue their attacks on our forces,” not mentioning that the invasion failed utterly in its main objective of unearthing and destroying the North Vietnamese headquarters (the infamous COSVN) supposedly located in Cambodia, nor that by inflaming domestic opposition, the invasion restricted Nixon’s future options far more than it restricted North Vietnam’s.

As President, Nixon’s greatest achievement was to break with the Cold War model of a monolithic world Communist movement. Nixon recognized that the United States could use the growing divisions within the Communist world to its own advantage by playing China off against the Soviet Union. The problem is that two decades later, with Communism in ruins and the Soviet Union turning inward, Nixon clings to the same geopolitical strategy. Nixon still believes that the Soviet Union remains a dangerous threat that must be parried through alliance with China.

In this book, Nixon avers that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is not a reformer but a wily Brezhnev, seeking the same ends through more devious means. His musings on Gorbachev sound as though they were excerpted from a John Birch Society newsletter: Gorbachev’s reforms “represent little more than crumbs which have fallen from the banquet table.” Gorbachev’s goal is not “to replace the Communist system, but to strengthen it.” The Soviet army is “stronger than when Gorbachev came to power five years ago. . . . Gorbachev’s principal political reform has been to concentrate more power in his own hands than any Soviet leader since Stalin. . . . He has not given up his support for those regimes besieged by anti-Communist freedom fighters.”

By the same token, Nixon insists that the Chinese are worthy and valuable allies against the Soviet Union. After the Tian An Men Square massacre, Nixon called for the Bush Administration to retain its “cooperative relationship” with Deng Xiaoping and China’s other leaders to prevent the Soviet Union from creating an alliance with China against the United States. In this book, Nixon wildly exaggerates China’s importance to American foreign policy. China, he writes, is “the number three political player on the world scene.”

Nixon also glosses over China’s retrogression after Tian An Men Square. He predicts that “after some necessary retrenchment Deng’s economic reforms will continue and . . . with them will inevitably come renewed pressure for political reforms.” He portrays Deng and disciple Li Peng, the architects of the massacre, as being “reformers” and warns that an American attempt at “isolating China will only be grist for the mill of the reactionaries.”

In typical Nixon fashion, he refutes his critics by attributing to them untenable positions they do not hold. After the massacre, Nixon writes, “some observers called for the United States to punish China’s leaders by breaking off all relations.” China’s critics, however, did not call for breaking off all relations but rather for suspending high-level contacts above ambassadorial level--a far different and more reasonable response and one that Nixon might have found more difficult to dismiss.

Like Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson, Nixon was a lot smarter in office than out. Out of office, he has seemed determined to prove his conservative credentials--even positioning himself in 1987 on Ronald Reagan’s right by opposing the manifestly benign INF treaty. He also seems driven by a need to justify his continuing close relations with China’s leaders and his questionable role in persuading the Bush Administration to take a conciliatory posture after Tian An Men Square.

Nixon is so obsessed with Cold War geopolitics that he barely mentions the global issues that will dominate American foreign policy in the next two decades. Nixon has only the foggiest notion of international economics. He devotes a single sentence to economic conflicts with Japan. Many of our trade disputes, Nixon declares, have been “politically potent” but “economically petty.” If anything, the exact reverse has been the case: The disputes have had little effect politically, but have had enormous repercussions on key American industries like semiconductors and automobiles.

There are sensible and interesting sections in this book. In chapters on temperance, recreation, public speaking or privacy, Nixon offers Dale Carnegie-like advice to the young about how to succeed in politics. Nixon also can display a commendable realism in rejecting proposals for total disarmament or world government. But just as Nixon’s greatest achievements as President were overshadowed by his darker side, the virtues of this book are dwarfed by its vices.