Nixon Off the Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics.

It was Richard Nixon's final comeback, and, like so many of his others, it went surprisingly well. In the '80s and early '90s, there were the carefully scripted private dinners with younger journalists and politicians (the cuisine was almost invariably Chinese, a none-too-subtle reminder of who went there first); The New York Times op-eds on Russia or other weighty international matters; the densely written, and largely unread, foreign-policy books. "The Old Man," as his political proteges called him, would have had us all believe that his resurgence from Watergate to respectability was unplanned, a natural course of events. But Nixon's private world, first in exile in San Clemente in the '70s, then in Manhattan, where he moved in the winter of 1980, and finally in Saddle River, N.J., where he lived until his death in April 1994, was really a staging area for a shrewdly manipulated campaign for redemption.

Monica Crowley, a young woman who served on Nixon's small retirement staff from 1990 to 1994, takes us inside this narrow universe with an accounting of the late president's running political asides, commentary, and anxieties about his status. He war-gamed each phone call, memorized details about his dinner guests, fretted about whether Bush or Clinton would adequately defer to him. It's an intriguing book, if only for the fresh evidence it provides of what people familiar with the Nixon of the White House tapes and the Haldeman diaries would expect from the Old Man. This is, as The New Yorker smartly noted, "Nixon Unplugged"--the casual and occasionally intemperate remarks of a man who spent much of the second half of the century revising his own history and nursing old grudges. Consider Eisenhower. "`He was very charming and warm socially,' Nixon allowed one day in 1991, `but he was a hard-ass ... He was a tough son-of-a-bitch. As you know, he didn't endorse me in 1960 until he absolutely had to. That was pretty devastating to my campaign..."'

Nixon unvarnished is not a pretty sight, so it's not surprising that the late president's daughters are said to be upset with the book, and with Crowley. Crowley came into Nixon's orbit when she was an undergraduate at Colgate and wrote him a long letter about his 1999: Victory Without War. Nixon answered, and invited her for a talk; it led to a job as an editorial assistant. Crowley would write contemporaneous memos recounting his comments; these notes form the basis for Nixon Off the Record.

It is curious that Crowley, a devoted Nixon acolyte, seems not to realize that her reporting has pulled back the curtain on a man who cherished controlling his own image, and history's view of him. If Nixon wanted his post-Watergate years to be remembered as those in which he had at last put his old jealousies and machinations behind him--and by most accounts he very much wanted to be seen as a donnish elder statesman, not a bitter, muttering old pol--Crowley has significantly undercut her mentor's wishes.

The book is full of familiar Nixon obsessions. "On February 18, 1991," Crowley writes, "[Nixon] handed me The New York Times editorial about Presidents' Day, in which he was not mentioned as one of the 20th century's great presidents. `Well, they had fun with that editorial,' he said dryly." Then there were the Kennedys. "`They simply were not nice. The legend is that Jack was always gracious, charming, dashing,' he said, putting his nose in the air. `Bull. He spit on waiters and ignored or screamed at the help."' And there was LBJ, who Nixon allegedly claimed was fixated on bugging. "`Johnson was tough, tough, tough,"' Nixon told Crowley. "`You know, not many realize that he used the kind of tactics that they always criticize me for using.... Johnson had Agnew's plane bugged. Hoover told me later that [Johnson] had my plane bugged. Would you believe it?"'

There are touchingly pathetic moments. Once, during the 1992 campaign, Nixon, traveling in California, called in to his office. "`Today I drove up to Santa Monica, where I campaigned in 1950. Everywhere I went, people said that I should be running for president and no one is as smart and politically savvy as I am--and whatnot. It was something!' He brimmed with satisfaction." And there are anecdotes that, while innocuous scenes of retired life, depict Nixon just the way he would have hated: as a phony. One day, Crowley recounts, she came upon an unsuspecting Nixon in his study. "The man who never admitted to watching television was watching `The Dick Van Dyke Show,' shoeless feet propped up and remote control in hand. Unseen, I watched him smile at the classic comedy." She made her presence known, and "Nixon was mortified. Fumbling to simultaneously turn the television off and put his shoes on, he dropped the remote control and struggled to get his feet into his shoes ... `Well, you caught me,' he said."

Reading along, you begin to wonder about the nature of Crowley's relationship with Nixon. She tends to imply that she was a kind of heir to the line of Nixon hands exemplified by Haldeman and Haig, loyal courtiers who would listen to hours of presidential ramblings while "Victory at Sea" played in the background. As in countless Washington memoirs, there are passages where she favorably quotes herself saying something insightful, and makes sure to report the late president's appreciation of her remark. One example: Nixon is preparing for a meeting with Clinton on foreign policy and asks Crowley if there's anything she thinks he should mention to the president. "`You may want to tell him that one of the most surprising things we found on the trip [overseas] was that the Eastern European leaders were less fearful of the Russian democracy collapsing and of having an authoritarian regime installed than they were of an American withdrawal from Europe leaving them vulnerable to a resurgent Germany,' I said. `Ah, that's right,' Nixon replied. `That is something he should hear."'

But some Nixon intimates from the last years have questions about Crowley, who was a fairly low-level staffer. Although she worked on foreign-policy books and articles for Nixon, his chief advisor on those matters late in life was Dimitri Simes, who oddly merits only a single mention in Crowley's account. In the end, it's most likely that Crowley benefitted from Nixon's increasing loneliness as he aged. His two top aides had gone West to run his library; Mrs. Nixon died in 1993. His was a shrinking circle, and in the young Crowley he probably found a comfortably attentive ear.

And an unquestioning one. One of the often unacknowledged things about Nixon's campaign to be a Wise Man is how banal a lot of what he said really was. With Crowley, playing the grandfatherly guide to history, he could be painfully obvious: "`Decisions, Monica, decisions. Every great leader needs to be able to make the hard decisions and come down on one side or the other."' Nixon's political handicapping in the '80s, the source of much of his renewed editorial respect, was usually wrong. As historian Michael Beschloss has pointed out, Nixon predicted, for instance, that the 1984 ticket would be Mondale and Hart, and that it would run Reagan and Bush "a close race."

Crowley is most interesting on the dynamic between Clinton and Nixon. Nixon disliked candidate Clinton, but was easily seduced by the young president, who reached out to him for advice. Yet even that relationship soured after Mrs. Nixon died and neither of the Clintons bothered to attend the funeral. "`Hillary should have been there,' Nixon grumbled. `That was inexcusable. He comes to me for advice to save his ass and he can't even send a Cabinet member to Mrs. Nixon's funeral...."' An understandable grievance, expressed the way any of us, similarly upset by a slight, might. The Nixon that emerges from these pages is an empathetic figure, prone to the tantrums, ill-considered opinions, and small conceits we indulge in at one time or another. That's not the way Nixon wanted to be remembered, of course, but as always, even in winter, he turned out to be one of us.