GARMENT’S DISTRICT

Among the stranger intimacies recounted” by Leonard Garment in his autobiography Crazy Rhythm are the deadof-the-night telephone calls he regularly received from Richard Nixon in the closing weeks of the 1968 presidential campaign. These monologues were “a procession of sad and lonely thoughts, mingling past and present, that needed to be expressed, not necessarily heard.” Nixon’s voice would “gradually grow less clear, slower, indistinct, and finally end, often in midsentence. There would be silence. And then a dial tone.”

Was Nixon drinking? Was he cracking up? Twenty-five years later, over dinner with former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, Garment solved the mystery: At the end of a wired day on the trail, Ehrlichman said, Nixon would be plagued by both exhaustion and insomnia. The antidote “was a Seconal, a stiff drink, and a phone call to me.” In other words, Garment put the man to sleep.

Crazy Rhythm will not have the same narcotic effect on readers. Although Garment has no sullied reputation to redeem, no political scores to settle, no bombshells to drop, and no ideological point to drive home, there is a quirky charm to this nebbishy and neurotic narrative. Garment modestly describes himself as “slightly out of touch,” and “always a peripheral character in the whirling dramas of the Nixon years” — a pleasing contrast to such recent exercises in self-promotion as Dick Morris’s memoirs, or Ed Rollins’s.

Garment has three stories to tell in Crazy Rhythm. The first is of his career: Raised in Brooklyn, he studied at Brooklyn Law School and entered politics as a “birthright Democrat,” but ended up advising Nixon in the darkest hour of his presidency. He persuaded Gerald Ford to pardon his predecessor, defended Israel in the U.N. with Pat Moynihan, defended embattled national security adviser Robert McFarlane during the Iran-Contra hearings, and nearly “went crazy” defending Robert Bork against “the dirtiest opposition campaign in Supreme Court history” in 1987.

The second story is that of Richard Nixon. Garment was his law partner in the early 1960s, played a role in resurrecting him as the “New Nixon,” and served as Nixon’s counsel after April 1973. Although Garment’s involvement in Watergate was fairly noncontroversial, Crazy Rhythm does revisit Garment’s impassioned arguments against destroying the tapes — advice Nixon followed to his everlasting regret. Twenty years later, Garment regrets it, too. Had he had it to do over, he says, he would have said, “Just do it.”

But it is the third, more confessional, story — of Garment’s struggle with depression, of his wrestling with questions of assimilation and Jewish identity, and of his tragic first marriage-that makes Crazy Rhythm so captivating.

In most Great Men books, the wives are disposed of in a line or two in the acknowledgments. Garment does not have this option. The story of his first wife, Grace, is clearly painful to tell. After years of paralyzing depression, endless therapy, and amphetamine overdoses, Grace Garment took a train to Boston, checked into a hotel under an assumed name, and slit her wrists in a bathtub. Another author might have collapsed this experience into a few isolated cameos. Garment is unwilling to let himself off that easily. “And where was I during the years of Grace’s downward spiral?” he asks. Twenty years later, he courageously writes that he is still groping for the answer.

Garment’s introspective honesty is the mixed reward of his immersion in psychoanalysis. He recounts various therapeutic attempts to bid his mother back from a “long psychotic holiday,” his own phobic disorders and treatment after the brutality of boot camp, Grace’s diagnosis as “anhedonistic,” as well as the chore of “ferrying [his children] to their own psychiatrists.”

And although the inner contours of Nixoh’s soul are hardly uncharted territory, Garment’s psychiatric lens provides a singular perspective. He traces Nixon’s trauma over firing Haldeman and Ehrlichman to his earlier loss of his two brothers, Arthur and Harold. And he thinks Nixon ultimately chose to preserve the Watergate tapes not for the reasons pressed by his advisers, but because destroying them “would have been something like an act of self- mutilation.” Likening the tapes to the “Rosebud” sled in Citizen Kane, Garment ventures that the tapes represented “a kind of personal immortality” for Nixon. Elsewhere, he sums up his affinity for Nixon as due to their both being “social immigrants, on the margins of polite society,” alienated, uneasy, “adapting inner need to outer circumstance.”

It is from this vantage point that Garment probes one of the more disturbing questions of the Nixon legend: the charges of anti-Semitism. Those looking for a clear verdict will be disappointed. Garment writes:

Show me a Christian or for that matter a Jew who does not have some traces of anti-Semitism in his or her soul, [and] I will show you a human being whose body contains no germs. If you build from these considerations an anti- Semitism continuum running from 1 to 100, my personal experience would put Nixon somewhere between 15 and 20 — better than most, worse than some, much like the rest of the world.

While one can appreciate the attempted nuance, the formula is unsatisfying. A stronger defense comes with Garment’s account of Nixon’s decisiveness during the Yom Kippur War. With Watergate raging, Nixon angrily told his hand- wringing advisers to “send [Israel] everything that can fly.” Golda Meir would later say that “Israel never had a better friend” in the White House. And Garment informs us that a reference to “Jew boys” attributed to Nixon by the New York Times in 1973 was actually the misattribution of a John Dean remark about “Jewish boys.” (The Times never corrected the record.)

For all his revelations, there is one area where Garment remains disappointingly oblique, and that is on the question of what he believes. Throughout, we catch only the most fleeting glimpses of his ideology, which never takes more shape than “a general sympathy for the underdog.”

Despite his Democratic roots, Garment says he “couldn’t have cared less that Richard Nixon was the political Antichrist of eastern liberalism.” For him, Nixon was “an opening to a different life and the possibility of salvation.” As well as being perhaps the biggest underdog of all.

Jennifer Grossman is a columnist and a contributor with MSNBC.