TRUE TALES OF NIXON FROM A BOY IN THE BAND

Author: By Martin F. Nolan, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 2, 1997

Page: N17

Section: Books

While covering Nixon's presidency, I often wondered what he did all day. Reports of his tape-recorded neurotic mutterings suggest that he brooded a lot, but even from the grave Nixon testifies to the power of his odd personality.

Why, then, is Nixon's quiet, dignified arrival in Chapter 3 of ``Crazy Rhythm'' so distracting? Because the pre-Nixon Leonard Garment was such good company, just as the post-Nixon Garment is a pleasure to meet.

In Nixon's White House, I seldom sought out Garment because he was one of the designated good guys, all too conversant with the administration's noble works. I preferred fire-breathing zealots like Pat Buchanan and Chuck Colson. ``Crazy Rhythm'' rectifies my mistake.

Garment knows his man, reporting on ``Nixon at his pious best'' in a tiff with Lyndon Johnson; expletive-laced anger at Elliot Richardson's refusal to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox; and the sight of Nixon coping with scandal in his hideaway office, safe from the imposing majesty of the Oval Office, ``his super-shined black wingtips aloft on the ottoman, scratching away on the inevitable legal pad. That schoolboy intensity. The unwieldy head. The strange pull of his personality.''

The Gershwinesque title for this memoir is apt. Many good people worked for Richard Nixon, but only one of them had played in Woody Herman's band. From his boyhood in a new part of Brooklyn, ``a Jewish Klondike,'' Garment swung into music, proudly noting: ``My brothers were in the balcony at Benny Goodman's historic 1938 Carnegie Hall concert.''

Young Lenny hit the road with clarinet and saxophone, recalling, of his days playing New Orleans gigs, ``smoking a respectable amount of marijuana, sleeping on the beach at Lake Pontchartrain, and breakfasting on chicory coffee and beignets.'' The FBI background checkers must have choked on their bubble gum at this resume.

Garment eventually entered ``a profession that paid large rewards for precision, hard work, and personal agility and did not demand great originality or perfect pitch.'' After Brooklyn Law School, he became a junior partner in the Manhattan firm where Nixon landed after losing to Pat Brown in the 1962 California governor's race. The two got along, and Nixon chose Garment as a traveling companion and sounding board.

After he was elected president, in 1968, Nixon urged Garment to become the Clark Clifford of the Nixon era -- a big-bucks lawyer with a back door to the White House. Instead, Garment became a White House honcho on low-priority issues like the arts and civil rights.

Garment seemed to have a claim on Nixon's conscience and may be responsible for Nixon's status as the last liberal president. It's a title that infuriates his friends and foes, but the record is clear: affirmative action, environmental protection, food stamps, big housing and transit programs.

Garment also helped preserve Nixon's historic role as a friend of Israel. Although Garment does not say so, Nixon probably doubted Henry Kissinger's steadfastness and may have feared that his foreign policy adviser would sell out Israel or anyone else for a professorial notion of Realpolitik.

But soon enough, all Nixon initiatives were consumed by Watergate. Garment was drafted late to the damage-control effort because ``I was the last senior White House staffer who (a) had a license to practice law and (b) was not a potential indictee.'' His insights into the case are are all the more refreshing because, unlike other memoirists of the era, he has no case to plead.

On the crucial mystery of why Nixon did not destroy the tapes that became the fatal evidence against his presidency, Garment first runs through the usual explanations -- the tapes were irreplaceable symbols of Nixon's place in history, unique resources for memoirs, and ``financially priceless.'' But he goes on to theorize that the tapes were ``a kind of personal immortality, an actual piece of Nixon himself.'' Like ``photographs, letters, locks of hair, Citizen Kane's `Rosebud,' '' they were talismans in which ``the past is preserved against a disappearing present and an unknown future. Destruction of the tapes would have been something like an act of self-mutilation.''

One historical note he offers is how he pursued the ``last big piece of advice'' from Abe Fortas, former Supreme Court justice and LBJ adviser. With Fortas confirming his judgment, Garment lobbied the new president, Gerald Ford, to pardon Nixon.

After serving the Ford administration briefly, Garment went back to New York. His memoir does not skimp on the pain in his personal life that followed, including his wife's suicide. He remarried and returned to Washington, which, he notes, is also the capital of forgetting, if not forgiving. He found himself ``advising and representing politicians in trouble.''

His clients included Robert Bork, the Reagan Supreme Court nominee rejected by the Senate, and Robert C. McFarlane, the Reagan national security adviser and former Nixon aide whose attempted suicide brought a discreet hospital visit, showing Richard Nixon at his unpious best.

Nixon still dominates this memoir as he did so many decades of this century. Garment combines literary felicity and political loyalty -- but he wonders about his old boss, too. For example: ``It is always possible that still-to-be-released tapes will provide evidence of truly ugly anti-Semitism in Nixon. But during Nixon's time in the Nixon White House, the stories about his anti-Semitism spread without benefit of such evidence.''

Leonard Garment is also a clear-eyed lawyer who knows that he did not need to know everything: ``Placed on the fringe of Nixon's life, I was exposed mainly to his attractive sides -- his intelligence, idealism, and generosity. Only by `hearsay,' mainly tape-recorded, did I `see' the fulminating stranger I was happy not to know.''