A Regular Guy

RICHARD NIXON AND HIS AMERICA

by Herbert S. Parmet; Little, Brown

755 pages; $24.95

Making Richard Nixon seem ordinary is no easy task, but Herbert Parmet almost pulls it off. A respected historian, he spent six years burrowing into various archives and interviewing just about every living soul who has encountered the 37th President -- as well as the man himself, a feat few Nixon biographers can match. Unfortunately, it yielded no major scoops.

Parmet's Nixon is not the driven, tortured, fascinating schemer of popular memory or Watergate fame. In fact, that career-ending scandal merits only six pages at the book's close. Instead, Parmet paints Nixon as a regular guy, a mediator between the forces of welfare statism and cold war red bashing. Every rap against the former President -- from his 1952 slush fund to the 1972 Christmas bombing of North Viet Nam -- is thoroughly ventilated and, in most cases, dismissed. Nixon, says Parmet, was merely a child of his times, who "harnessed the unease that lay just below the surface of celebratory blessings of the American existence." Nixon is more interesting than that. He deepened the unease, and in the end paid heavily for it.