NIXON SPEAKS : NIXON OFF THE RECORD: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics.<i> By Monica Crowley (Random House: $23, 231 pp.)</i>

Toward the end of his life, in his last public appearance before the House of Representatives, Richard Nixon remembered Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s famous farewell speech to Congress and declared that “old politicians sometimes die, but they never fade away.”

Nixon had it right. Two-and-a-half years after his death, the most irrepressible American politician of this century is back, courtesy of Monica Crowley, described as a 26-year-old “foreign policy assistant” who worked for him from 1990 to 1994. A “member of his small circle of advisors” in whom he put full trust, Crowley worked with the former president on his last two books and listened attentively as he confided “his views on international affairs and world leaders, American politics and policy, Watergate, his own political career, and human nature.”

Now, in “Nixon Off the Record,” a book featuring “Nixon’s views on American leadership and the political process,” the author recounts his words “verbatim”--giving him yet another chance to put his “message and vision” before the country.

Nixon never knew she was keeping a daily diary of their conversations, or so Crowley claims. But how in the world did she compile so exact a record of his comments without his knowledge? Her book is full of lengthy quotes--long, sprawling paragraphs with intricate recall of people and places that could not possibly have been scribbled down or recorded after their conversations, at least not verbatim quotes.

Even if Crowley took “some notes” during the conversations, as she mentions in a New Yorker excerpt from the book (something she neglects to tell us in the book), it would be astounding if she had been able to reconstruct Nixon’s words exactly from “some notes” and memory. It seems more likely that the author taped their conversations and that Nixon encouraged her to publish his words after he was gone. Are we in the presence, then, of Nixon’s last tapes--and last cover-up?

No matter--there is no criminal trespass here. But if my supposition is correct, it forcefully reminds us of one side of Nixon--the devious manipulator of facts for self-serving purposes. Why would he try to hide his participation in this collaboration? He probably believed that a book by a bright young political novice would give his views more resonance than if they appeared as another expression of special pleading on his part.

Though Crowley strikes some worshipful chords about her mentor--she sees herself as reconstructing the president’s “final journey toward personal and political resurrection”--she is no cipher. To be sure, she celebrates Nixon’s shrewdness as a political analyst: “Campaigning and governing are, of course, two different things,” he told her. “In campaigning, you play to win; in governing, you act to move the nation and, in some cases, the world. A great campaigner doesn’t necessarily make a great leader; look at [President] Clinton. And a great leader can be a terrible campaigner. . . . Governing is so much more complex and difficult.”

In a revealing passage, she gives us Nixon’s take on George Bush’s reelection dilemma:

“There were three sides to the Reagan revolution. . . . [First] the economic side, with voodoo economics. Cutting taxes would have been OK if he [Reagan] had also cut expenditures. He didn’t and left Bush with one hell of a deficit. Second, he strengthened the military; Carter started it, but Reagan did it. And third--which won him the undying support of the far right--was to espouse those social policies against abortion, for school prayer, etc.

“So look at what Bush inherited. The economy is in the pits. The Cold War is over, so the military has lost much of its significance. And he [Bush] was left with the third leg--the weakest of all--the social issues, and he wasn’t credible supporting it. He had to face the bad economy and blame Reagan. The ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ pledge was wrong economically, politically and personally because after that he couldn’t be trusted.”

Crowley also describes Nixon’s prediction in February 1993 that Bob Dole would be the Republican nominee in 1996, and that he would be able to use the character issue effectively against Bill Clinton. As for Clinton, Nixon saw him as “good with people, which makes him a good politician, but not a good statesman.” Nixon astutely observed that Clinton needed to take on an issue and lose, noting that “losing sometimes means a win.”

The author leaves no doubt that Nixon’s survival and comebacks during a 50-year political career largely resulted from the man’s intellectual and intuitive feel for shifting national moods and fixed traditions. Yet her portrait is no hagiography. The brilliant tactician and thoughtful statesman is coupled with the hypersensitive egotist whose judgments on people and events were colored by enthusiasm for those who sought him out and resentment toward those who ignored him.

Nixon’s animus toward Bush and James Baker, who held the ex-president at arm’s length, for example, was palpable. “Goddamn it!” he complained to Crowley. “Why the hell isn’t he [Bush] showing some leadership? I’ll tell you something. When the shit hits the fan and his gang comes to me for advice, I am not going to provide it unless they are willing to thank me publicly.” On another occasion he told Crowley: “I’m tired of being taken for granted. They all come to me on the sly when they are in big trouble--well, no more. No more going in the back door of the White House--middle of the night--under the cloak-of-darkness crap. Either they want me or they don’t. If they think that I am a liability, then so be it. But they won’t get a shred from me.”

When Barbara Bush thanked Nixon for “ ‘all I was doing for George’ ” Nixon snarled: “That’s a laugh. This was the first time in a long time that he’s really called for me, and it took [Billy] Graham to put him up to it.”

As for Secretary of State Baker, who gave Nixon a wide berth, the ex-president pilloried him as “a deal-cutting opportunist” and the architect of a Russian policy that was “pathetically inadequate.” When Baker left the State Department to run Bush’s 1992 campaign, Nixon described him as a “very overrated” campaign director, but was delighted that this would keep “him the hell out of foreign policy.” In February 1992, when Nixon published a recommendation on how to deal with post-Cold War Russia, Crowley describes him as beginning “to take his revenge on the inattentive Bush administration.”

Though Nixon thought Ross Perot didn’t “know a lot about most things,” he was exhilarated by Perot’s request for a private meeting during the 1992 campaign. “We’ll leak it, of course,” he told Crowley, referring to the meeting. “It’s a hot story. The press will hate it. . . . But they’ll have to admit that Perot is seeking my advice. I really got a kick out of all of this. . . . This will antagonize the hell out of the Bushies. To hell with them. If they want my advice, they can ask and stand in line these days!”

As for Clinton, Nixon believed that the Arkansas Democrat might have the potential for great statesmanship after he began consulting Nixon on foreign affairs in general and Russia in particular. Crowley describes Nixon as relishing Clinton’s deference to him on international relations. Indeed, after his first talk with Clinton, Nixon declared, “It was the best conversation I’ve had with a president since I was president. . . . This guy does a lot of thinking.” Nixon declared that if Clinton pursued the right Russian policy, he could “secure his place in history as a great president.”

No one who has followed Nixon’s career will find surprises in Crowley’s book. The Nixon of 1990-1994 is a familiar man--shrewd, intelligent, clever, devious, petty and self-serving. Nevertheless, her book adds fuel to the long debate that biographers and historians of the future will surely have about one of America’s major 20th century political figures.

It’s worthwhile reading, if only for the author’s observation on the policy similarities between Nixon and the nation’s current chief executive. Although Nixon’s relations with Clinton had their ups and downs, the ex-president would have taken great satisfaction from Crowley’s depiction of Clinton’s presidency as “Nixon’s third term.”