Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate.

Warren Rudman Random House, $27.50 By Ross K. Baker Just as I was finishing a review of Bill Bradley's autobiography, what should cross my desk but the memoir of retired Senator Warren Rudman. In light of the unprecedented number of senatorial retirements, I get the uneasy feeling that I will be facing an eternity of these reviews. Imagine the mysteries to be solved: What, for example, was going through Howell Heflin's mind when those telltale hairs appeared on Clarence Thomas's can of Coke? And what tales could Sam Nunn tell of avaricious defense contractors and the various presidents who have snubbed him?

Warren Rudman, the New Hampshire Republican who retired in 1992, is not one you'd think to deliver a thoughtful and remarkably candid account of two terms in the Senate. Not because Rudman is not thoughtful and candid--he is surely both, in spades--but because he comes across as a kind of hands-on type, too busy getting things done to reflect in writing.

But Combat, a book whose title is an allusion both to the night patrols that Rudman led as a young infantry officer in Korea as well as the mano-a-mano in the U.S. Senate, is perceptive and revealing. Rudman found himself in the U.S. Senate in 1980, the first Republican-majority Senate in 26 years. Even more significant, it was the year that such liberal heroes as Frank Church of Idaho, Birch Bayh of Indiana, and George McGovern of South Dakota were replaced by three conservatives named Symms, Quayle, and Abdnor. It was in this latter company that Warren Rudman found himself

It didn't take long for Rudman, formerly the attorney general of New Hampshire, to discover that the Republican Party in 1980 was an odd place to be for a pro-choice Jew and supply-side skeptic. On the other hand, he had little in common with his neighbor from the other side of the Merrimac River, Ted Kennedy, and the other lords bountiful of the welfare state. Rudman could not abide deficits, and eagerly supported the Reagan budget cuts. For a time, he even allowed himself to be swept along on the Laffer Curve, but his enthusiasm for that fiscal gimmickry came to an abrupt halt when Reagan married it to a huge defense buildup.

The arch-villain of this weapons binge was Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, whom Rudman saw as an evil enabler who encouraged the armed services to press for everything on their wish list, although Rudman does concede Reagan's defense spending probably did bankrupt the Soviets.

But Weinberger's wind was not so ill as the one blown by OMB Director David Stockman. Rudman sees him as a kind of Professor Harold Hill, a combelt thimblerigger with the power to bamboozle the president. Reagan comes across as a credulous old man whose disbelief was in a permanent state of suspension. Rudman speaks kindly and admiringly of him, but there is a distinct undercurrent of pity in his adoring words. For Stockman, Rudman has nothing but contempt, and he disguises it poorly.

Rudman organizes this book by touching on the high points of his Senate career. Three episodes stand out. Of the Keating Five, an investigation which Rudman helped oversee as vice-chairman of the Ethics Committee, he finds Alan Cranston to be "far and away the one acting most improperly." He virtually exonerates John Glenn and John McCain, and admits ruefully that the committee sacrificed them to public bloodlust. I quite agree. Of Dennis DeConcini he has nothing good to say, portraying him as vain, slippery, manipulative, and ultimately treacherous.

Rudman also co-chaired the Iran-Contra Committee, and he details the episode in spare and lucid prose that would convince even the most inattentive citizen that Oliver North was an ass in lion's skin, a world-class bungler with nothing but contempt for the Constitution. Here again, Rudman offers a vivid portrait of Reagan, insinuating that the president was already well along his tragic path to senile dementia.

The third major episode in Rudman's career was the confirmation of his old friend David H. Souter to the Supreme Court. More than his other accomplishments, this will most likely have enduring consequences. Souter comes across as one member of the Court with whom you'd really like to spend an evening, and as a card-carrying mensch. Likewise is his mentor, Warren Rudman. I don't hold with the pessimistic argument that the loss of Rudman and his like will wreck the Senate. I have more faith in the fussy old place than that and believe that it will end up socializing the Rick Santorums and Bill Frists and get them to act like statesmen. It usually does. But it is always comforting to have a Warren Rudman there to kick ass and take names. The book he has written on the Senate has the stamp of his genuineness on it. Like him, it is crisp, tough, and usually on target. Ross K. Baker is a professor of political science at Rutgers University.