The Rediscovery of Richard Nixon : NIXON: Ruin and Recovery, <i> By Stephen Ambrose (Simon and Schuster: $27.50; 638 pp.)</i>

In both tenacity and perspicacity, Richard Nixon’s political re-emergence over the last 14 years has proven as extraordinary as his earlier success at hauling himself back from defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race and going on to win the presidency (on his second try) in 1968. Historians and journalists are only just beginning to deal with the forces and circumstances involved.

In “Why Americans Hate Politics,” political writer E. J. Dionne calls Nixon the man who could have made a more moderate Republicanism work. In “One of Us,” New York Times columnist Tom Wicker writes that Nixon’s strength emerged from a political communion with middle-class values and Middle America, a communion that inspired many voters to support him as “one of us.”

The other Republican President who began a watershed, Abraham Lincoln, shared this appeal. But the Republicans lost it in the Gilded Age and again in the late 1920s--and may be doing so again under George Bush--by getting caught up in an elite politics of Wall Street and tax breaks for the richest small minority of Americans. Some key Democrats recognize that these old “cloth coat” Republican loyalties have begun to move Nixon beyond his old partisanship. When Mario Cuomo told a Washington Post reporter that Nixon’s common-man origins, loyalties and persistence were somewhat like Lincoln’s--for which Nixon sent him a thank-you note--the New York governor was acting on a sage realization that cloth-coat Republican hearts are not necessarily with George Bush in 1992.

Indeed, in Nixon’s own most recent book, he noted that his father Frank had voted for third-party Progressive presidential candidate Robert LaFollette in 1924, during the Roaring Twenties boom, because the GOP incumbent in the White House, Calvin Coolidge, was too much for the rich. This is another aspect of the rediscovery of Richard Nixon by liberals and centrists: the realization that maybe he meant what he said two decades ago about being for all those Middle Americans, Joe Sixpacks and Peoria residents.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Nixon, back in 1968, was the founding father of the Republican era that went on to claim the White House for five of six terms, interrupted only by Jimmy Carter in the reaction against Watergate. Presidents who fill this era-launching role stand out historically, which is already forcing renewed attention to Nixon in the supra-Watergate sense.

Thus it is somewhat disappointing that while Stephen Ambrose’s subtitle is evenly split between ruin and recovery, his book’s contents aren’t. Nixon’s ruination in Watergate takes up at least two-thirds of these pages, with only a fifth or so devoted to his recovery over the last 15 years. That allocation could be a mistake. The book itself has more than a few hints that historians may find themselves shifting emphasis.

Take the accompanying blurb from the publisher, Simon & Schuster. It remarks of Nixon that “Within a decade and a half of his resignation, not only had he become America’s elder statesman, but he was threatening to become America’s beloved elder statesman.” Ambrose’s own television appearances discussing the book have conveyed an impressed-with-Nixon quality that presumably would have surprised him when he began his three-volume project a decade ago. This may be telling us something the author’s actual words don’t.

Most of the book is his usual, well-done arrangement of history. Unluckily for Ambrose, however, the Watergate chapters are already partially dated by the new analyses and revelations in “Silent Coup: The Removal of a President,” the best-seller by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, which appeared this spring. That was too late for Ambrose to note its powerful arguments that Nixon knew less about Watergate than was previously thought, and while hardly innocent, was significantly misled by his White House counsel, John Dean, who was deeply involved. Future historians will not be able to discuss Watergate without taking “Silent Coup” into account.

Interestingly, Ambrose himself notes that in 1977, when broadcaster Diane Sawyer, then a Nixon aide, prepared a Watergate “flow chart” tracing day by day the events of June, 1972, to August, 1974, Nixon told her, “You know, this is the first time I’ve really understood everything that happened.” The Colodny-Gettlin revelations, however, suggest he was premature. Facts and relationships are still emerging. Indeed, “Silent Coup” should be amplified by other new reexaminations from ex-Nixon aides, principally from former Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman.

Fortunately, partly obsolescent approaches to the scandal’s origins don’t matter to the bulk of the volume, which ranges from the unraveling of Watergate in the Spring of 1973 to the painful days of 1974-75, after Nixon had left office. Besides being readable, Ambrose is thorough and even-handed.

His principal weakness is politics. In fact, the first paragraph of his first chapter begins with two errors: that in the 1972 election, Nixon beat Democrat George McGovern by 60%-40% (it was 61% to 38%) and that the Democrats made gains in both houses of Congress (they actually lost a dozen seats in the House). After beginning so inauspiciously, the limitations of Ambrose’s political knowledge don’t matter so much for the rest of the book--1972, after all, was Richard Nixon’s last election--until the author comes to the Nixon “recovery” years of the 1980s.

Even so, the hundred or so pages Ambrose devotes to Nixon’s political and historical comeback between 1977 and the summer of 1990 represent a trailblazer of sorts. This is the first major Nixon chronicle to award the “recovery” label, and others are sure to follow .

In 1992 or 1996, Nixon, as the first GOP President of the post-1968 Republicans era, may face another interesting “first”--in contrast to the other Presidents who presided over the beginning of electoral watersheds. Jefferson, Lincoln, Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt died before well before their parties’ cycles in office came to an end. As a result, they did not have to face the ungluing of their old voting coalitions in favor of something new, along with the strain in loyalties that might involve.

Richard Nixon, despite his ongoing Republican fidelities, may be the first President to have presided over one watershed and then lived to confront the shifts and questions of the next one. Cloth-coat Nixon Republicans may be a pivotal swing group in the 1990s, like Jacksonian Democrats were in the pre-Civil War North.

Nixon’s re-emergence in U.S. political history has been additionally greased by the increasing disrepute and scandals overtaking other Presidents. John F. Kennedy’s reputation was sinking even before the autumn, 1991, revelations by his girlfriend, Judith Exner, that she had to carry money to mobster Sam Giancana, some of which apparently paid for mob help in making Illinois go narrowly Democratic in 1960. That was the election Nixon lost by a very small margin, but declined to contest for fraud because of the divisiveness of such an action.

Lyndon Johnson’s integrity also has been tarnished in new biographies; Oliver North, in turn, suggests that Ronald Reagan must have known all about Iran-Contra and thereby participated in a major cover-up of his own. George Bush remains to be seen. Small wonder that the Watergate-era attempt to portray Nixon as a uniquely immoral President has all but imploded as the evidence about other recent Presidents unfolds.

Stephen Ambrose did not deal with any of these points, but I think future biographers will have to. It is unrealistic to call Richard Nixon “America’s beloved elder statesman,” as the book blurb does. Beloved, Nixon will never be. However, with a record 60 appearances on the cover of Time magazine to his credit, and with the 50th anniversary of his election to Congress approaching in 1996, Nixon is well on his way to being the most important U.S. politician of the second half of the 20th Century. And with Ambrose’s book as one launching pad, new generations of historians will find themselves trying to explain why.

BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “Nixon: Ruin and Recovery,” see the Opinion section, Page 3.