Nixon Rising.

The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946-1952, by Irwin F. Gellman (Free Press, 590 pp., $30)

A quarter-century after Richard Nixon was jeered from the presidency, it has become customary to read his whole career as a prelude to that spectacular disgrace. Historians scan every step of Nixon's rise for evidence of the bitterness, paranoia, and dishonesty that would turn his countrymen against him in 1973 and 1974. Chapman University historian Irwin Gellman, having mined the archives of the Richard Nixon Library, thinks that's a mistake. In the opening volume of a projected multi-volume biography, Gellman follows Nixon from his first congressional race in 1946 to his selection as Dwight Eisenhower's vice-presidential candidate at the 1952 Republican convention. The Nixon who emerges is hardly without blemishes-but neither was he discernibly more bitter, paranoid, or dishonest than his contemporaries.

Our post-Watergate understanding of Nixon's entry into politics leans heavily on rumors that were already circulating during the Truman administration. In 1952 the California leftist Ernest Brashear claimed in The New Republic that a shady group of oil and banking interests had bankrolled Nixon's congressional career. That line has since been taken up by-to take just a sampling of the writers and institutions Gellman assails-Roger Morris, Frank Mankiewicz, The Progressive magazine, and the Women in Politics Oral History Project. The assertion of secret money is a myth, Gellman insists-and the proof is that the Nixon campaign's expenditures were modest enough to be accounted for by its meager budget. While Nixon was indeed selected by a committee, ringleader Herman Perry was only a small-town bank manager, hardly the "financier" of recent accounts.

What Perry and others sensed was that the incumbent Democrat in Nixon's home district, just east of Los Angeles, was vulnerable. Jerry Voorhis was an upright Christian socialist who had been named the "hardest working man in Congress." He was also a sanctimonious know-it-all well to the left of his constituents. Nixon campaigned door-to-door for ten months. Voorhis was kept out of the district until the closing days of the campaign by a hectic legislative schedule and an emergency hemorrhoid operation. He denied taking money from CIO-affiliated political-action committees with Communist ties, but soon had to admit he had done so. At a handful of debates, Voorhis was under-prepped and Nixon wiped the floor with him. In 1947, aged 33, Nixon went to Congress with the first Republican majority since the Hoover administration.

It was in his 1950 Senate race against Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas that Nixon gained his reputation as a rough campaigner. Rough he was, Gellman says, but no rougher than his opponent. Douglas launched her campaign with a broadside against the moderate Democratic incumbent Sheridan Downey-who responded in kind. Downey's handpicked successor, the Los Angeles Daily News publisher Ralph Manchester Boddy, attacked her leftist voting record and her dismal attendance, and dubbed her "the Pink Lady." Once Douglas won the nomination, her campaign against Nixon was marked by the constant taunting that brought "Tricky Dick" into the American vernacular. Douglas entered the fray with big credibility problems-one of the hardest-line leftists in Congress herself, she claimed that Nixon's lack of vigilance had led to the Communist invasion of South Korea. Nixon fought back hard. He published a "pink sheet" that linked Douglas's voting record to that of the fellow-traveling American Labor Party congressman Vito Marcantonio. With the backing of dozens of the state's most prominent Democrats, Nixon beat Douglas 59-37 percent-the widest margin in any Senate race that year-and took 311 of 320 precincts.

While anti-Communism became the signature issue of Nixon's four House and two Senate years, that enthusiasm, Gellman shows, was not a venting of inner demons but an accident of his committee assignments. Chosen for the Herter Committee that toured war-wrecked Europe on the eve of the Marshall Plan, he witnessed a Communist coup attempt in Trieste, and grew intent on defending Europe's democracies against violent takeover. Appointed to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where his predecessor Voorhis had served, he kept his distance from the racist Mississippian John Rankin and the corrupt chairman, New Jerseyite J. Parnell Thomas. When other Republicans urged outlawing the Communist party and banning the teaching of Marxism, Nixon sought a balance between fighting subversion and protecting free speech.

Thomas's ill-health-and later incarceration for graft-vaulted Nixon to a lead role on HUAC at just the time Whittaker Chambers leveled his accusations at Alger Hiss. While Nixon has been vindicated by history for backing Chambers, he did not back him in any knee-jerk way. He started off biased in favor of Hiss, even traveling to New York to grill Chambers in an executive session over the inconsistencies in his story. But if Nixon emerged as a hero from the affair, it is because there was a logic to his anti-Communism that eluded most politicians of both parties. Hard-line Republicans wanted vigorous anti-Communist action at home but worried little about a strengthening Soviet position abroad. Most Democrats-and President Truman was typical in this respect-were willing to fight Communism militarily but cavalier about responding to grassroots worries about subversion. (Gellman holds this nonchalance at least partly to blame for McCarthyism.) Nixon, by contrast, sought to "fight Communism in the United States," as he said, "on the same realistic basis that we are already committed to fighting it abroad."

Such balance made Nixon, even at age 39, a logical choice as running mate for the internationalist moderate Dwight Eisenhower. What's more, he had pulled the nifty electoral trick of uniting California's semi-partisan moderates and its hard rightists-exactly the conflict that threatened to split the national GOP between Eisenhower's backers and supporters of Ohio senator Robert Taft. Nixon, at the close of the Truman administration, looked very much like the future of American politics.

Gellman is a clunky and repetitive writer, prone to malapropisms. He thinks minimalist means minimal, that administer means minister, that concise means precise. Disinclined to speculate on motives or psychology, he hews somewhat grimly to his sources, and often appears at the mercy of them. Wherever too much information is available-the square footage of the Queen Mary's dining room, the grades Nixon's congressional successor got at USC-the book bogs down. But this is a fair and thorough work that does far more than replace one oversimplification with another. There is considerable new material about Nixon's early deviousness that is absent from the work of even his most bilious detractors. Gellman thinks Nixon used his friendship with the FBI's congressional liaison Louis Nichols to gather information on the black Communist Benjamin Davis. He also establishes that Nixon gave his young ally Joe Holt the confidential HUAC dossier of Holt's primary opponent, who had flirted with Communism in his youth. This is an indication that Gellman, in coming volumes, will seek to present Nixon not as a power-mad monster but as a fairly representative politician who, somewhere along the line, went bad. But when?

Nixon pooh-poohed Truman's desperate 1948 campaign against the "Do-Nothing" 80th Congress. It hadn't been a Do-Nothing Congress, after all. Republicans had passed the Taft-Hartley Act to bridle unions-the only taming of a New Deal initiative until the Clinton welfare reform. It had cut taxes, passed the Marshall Plan, and-not least-begun to root Communists out of government. Thinking of himself (mistakenly) as a typical American, Nixon knew in his heart that his countrymen would choose the Republican program over Truman's gimmicky collection of race initiatives and socialist housing programs. They didn't. He trusted Americans to see through the stunt of Truman's whistle-stop campaign. They didn't. Truman's victory-bringing with it a Democratic House majority that would endure for 44 of the next 46 years-bowled Nixon over.

And he started down a dangerous road. Two decades later, he would distrust a huge swath of his fellow-countrymen with a paranoia verging on hatred. The standard version of the Nixon story-that Nixon, cunning from the outset, plotted and lied his way to power-is a disturbing one. Since Gellman doesn't buy the line that Nixon was unusually or innately rotten, his version of the story promises to be more disturbing still.