Conrad Black, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 1,152 pp., $40.00.

Elizabeth Drew, Richard M. Nixon (New York: Times Books, 2007), 192 pp., $22.00.

Timothy Naftali, George H. W. Bush (New York: Times Books, 2007), 224 pp., $22.00.

James Reston, Jr., The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews (New York: Harmony Books, 2007), 208 pp., $22.00.

James Rosen, The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 640 pp., $35.00.

Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 368 pp., $27.95.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON, one of the fathers of American realism, observed in 1787 that the United States should seek "to incline the balance of European competitions in this part of the world as our interests may dictate." Hamilton concluded, "Our situation invites and our interests prompt us to aim at an ascendant in the system of American affairs." His admonition did not go unheeded. In the nineteenth century, as Fareed Zakaria, David Calleo, Walter A. McDougall and a host of other historians have observed, the United States, in its conduct of foreign affairs, adhered to realist principles to expand its influence and power.

This was especially so for the Republican Party, which went on to frame the views of Woodrow Wilson and his successors in the Democratic Party as utopian dreams. Thus Theodore Roosevelt-along with his own vigorous assertions of America's interests on the global stage-inveighed in 1918 against the "sorry crew" of "professional internationalists" who wished to substitute peace organizations for robust American attempts at military self-defense. Then, in the 1930s, realism curdled into isolationism. And after World War II, the GOP, led by Robert Taft (widely known as "Mr. Republican"), recoiled at membership in the United Nations and NATO.

But the "loss" of China, the explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb and the revelations of Red traitors inside the American government prompted the Republican Right to go on the offensive and call for the rollback of Communism. The Right, you might say, embraced unilateralist internationalism. America had to define and defend its interests wherever and whenever they might be threatened. One of the chief proponents of ramping up the fight against the Reds, at home and abroad, was a young congressman and senator named Richard M. Nixon. But as vice president of the United States and later president, Nixon endorsed a far more cautious course based in realpolitik. So did Dwight D. Eisenhower. Whatever rhetorical excesses the Far Right might indulge in, the GOP's national leaders pursued a far more flexible course that dismissed utopian notions of rolling back Soviet gains during and after World War II. Cooler heads, in sum, prevailed.

No longer. Were either Eisenhower or Nixon to survey the current state of the GOP, they would most likely be astonished at the vehemence with which a crusading foreign policy, marrying Wilsonian idealism with military force, has become de rigeur for any serious presidential candidate.

And thus Republican candidates are attempting to claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, as the argument goes, single-handedly won the cold war by spending the Soviet Union into the ground and proclaiming a crusade against Communism. That Reagan was extremely cautious about actually deploying military force, however, goes unsaid-as well as Reagan's focus on changing Soviet policies rather than the regime itself. The idea of retrenchment or prudence in foreign affairs seems no more appealing to many politicians in the GOP than it did in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, when George H. W. Bush was chastised by an array of conservative outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, for failing to go to Baghdad. Indeed, while some foreign-policy thinkers associated with the Democrats have begun to make the case for prudence and realism in foreign affairs, the term remains, by contrast, a synonym for immorality and pusillanimity among Republicans.

What explains this state of affairs? How could the GOP go from espousing realist principles to yielding to the crusading instincts it once looked upon with suspicion? Is a return to realism in the cards for the Republicans, or is this a hopeless ambition?

PERHAPS NO career and legacy may offer more illuminating answers than Richard M. Nixon's. Like no other Republican, Nixon straddled the divide inside the GOP between liberal and conservative Republicans. Nixon exploited the Red Scare, but he was also a staunch internationalist who traveled widely. As president, he jettisoned much of his harsh rhetoric, with his final years devoted to improving U.S.-Soviet relations. In retrospect, Nixon stood for three vital foreign-policy principles that have been willfully flouted in recent years. The first is the recognition that there are limits to American power. The second is a refusal to demonize America's adversaries as evil incarnate. The third is a keen interest in diplomacy and strong alliances abroad.

Despite his numerous accomplishments, Nixon commands scant interest in today's GOP. Instead, it's liberals who are taking a fresh look at Nixon. A telling moment came in November 2007 when Sam Tanenhaus, an editor at the New York Times, delivered a Bradley Lecture at the citadel of neoconservatism, the American Enterprise Institute. After Tanenhaus extolled Nixon, the audience seemed to flinch. Tanenhaus's slightly subversive message, at least in the context of his immediate surroundings, was that Nixon, in contrast to George W. Bush, pursued a cautious conservatism that tried to conserve (and, in some notable cases, extend) liberal accomplishments, and that Hillary Clinton, of all people, resembled Nixon in her doggedness and constant maneuvering. And in a June 2007 column, the Times' Frank Rich confessed that while watching Frank Langella play the former president in the excellent Broadway production Frost/Nixon, "I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a tear for Richard Milhous Nixon."

Indeed, with Bush's presidency stirring up such unexpected passions about Nixon, a spate of books provides a welcome opportunity to reassess him. Elizabeth Drew's and Conrad Black's accounts could hardly be more different in tone or bulk. James Reston, Jr.'s recounting of the 1977 Frost/Nixon interviews contains many fascinating detailsF, while James Rosen and Jeremi Suri supply a wealth of new information about the Nixon presidency.

If sheer weight is the measure, then Black's is the most substantial of the lot. It provides a marvelous tour of Nixon's life. Far from being a reverential apologia, it is a critical and fair appraisal. It suggests that Nixon's record on foreign affairs has been misunderstood. A convinced internationalist, he exploited the Red Scare to win election to Congress. Decades later, however, the very forces that he had exploited on the Far Right would help undo his foreign policy, as the neoconservatives and the Republican Right, led by Ronald Reagan, turned on him, not for being too firm with the Soviet Union, but not firm enough. The result was that Nixon's downfall not only spelled the end of his presidency, but, ultimately, the demise of a realist foreign policy in the GOP itself.

Nixon's realism was hard won. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or George H. W. Bush, Nixon was not born to wealth and privilege. On the contrary, he had to work his way up. Richard inherited his belief in the Republican Party from his father, Frank, who ran a gas station and grocery in Whittier, California. His mother, Hannah, a staunch Quaker, may have left the firmest impression upon him. She inculcated in him the precepts of hard work and unceasing effort-two qualities that he would pride himself on all his life. Nixon recognized that while he was not always the most talented or popular person in his class, he could always outwork his peers. Sometimes even that wasn't enough, though. Black makes much of the fact that in 1929, when Nixon ran for student body president of Whittier Union High School, he was defeated by a grassroots renegade named Robert Logue, who "was all that Nixon was not: tall, attractive to women, a fine athlete, and a good student to whom everything appeared to come easily." In Black's view, Nixon was "always wary of a type of person who seemed naturally graceful and lucky, and he thought the world was frequently unjust, as such felicitous people kept popping up to overturn what he had worked with great self-discipline to achieve." Black diagnoses this as the central conundrum of Nixon's political life: while he could project the ordinary fears and ambitions of the average person, his lack of natural magnetism left him vulnerable to more suave opponents such as John F. Kennedy, a kind of Robert Logue writ large.

Resentment of the Ivy League was part and parcel of Nixon's mental makeup. Though the Harvard Club of California rated Nixon "best all-round student" at Whittier, he had to forego attending the university because his family would have been unable to foot the transportation bill between Whittier and Cambridge. (Black speculates that attending Harvard might have lent Nixon more polish and erased some of his phobias about the Harvard set, allowing him to lead a life "less charged with fears and resentments of the Eastern Establishment.")

Upon graduation, Nixon entered Duke University Law School. At Duke, he excelled and ran for and won the presidency of the law school bar association in 1936. He was finally free of provincial Whittier and headed for the big time. Or so he thought. Despite his successes, he landed a job neither at a New York law firm nor the FBI in Washington, DC. At that time, Duke was not well known, and the Great Depression lingered on. Nixon was disconsolate. He headed back to Whittier and procrastinated for a summer before he finally accepted a position with a local law firm. In Whittier, however, he met and wooed the woman who would become a pillar of strength for him during his many trials, Patricia Ryan.

World War II rescued Nixon. He began working for the Office of Price Administration in 1941-which instilled in him a lifelong hatred of bureaucracy-before entering the navy in 1942 (where he proved a master poker player). His service toughened him up, preparing him for the rough-and-tumble of political combat. The animosities and status anxiety that Nixon harbored toward the better set as a youth soon emerged in full flower. His hatred of the liberal, eastern establishment became one of his animating passions and a ticket to political success. And Nixon, in turn, would earn the enmity of the establishment, which viewed him, in Herblock's famous cartoon, as a blackguard, emerging covered in slime from a manhole, intent on smearing his opponents.

Black is at his most sure-footed in dealing with the Red-baiting period in Nixon's career. Nixon was seen as one of the "primitives," as Dean Acheson called them, who saw Reds anywhere and everywhere (but decades later Acheson would meet with Nixon in the White House to advise him on the Vietnam War). According to Black himself, "Nixon was not slow to grasp the potential for this line of attack, though he was always careful to stay well clear of the most rabid imputations of treason to distinguished Democrats." When first running for Congress in 1946, Nixon sensed that after four consecutive defeats at the hands of Roosevelt and eight straight defeats in congressional elections, the Republican ship was about to come in.

Nixon headed back to California where he challenged and defeated the incumbent congressman, Jerry Voorhis. Aided by Murray Chotiner, one of the most devious political consultants in American political history, Nixon painted Voorhis as something of a Communist dupe. For example, the Nixon campaign depicted Voorhis's votes for lend-lease shipments to the USSR as nothing less than "six pro-Soviet votes." Black indicates that Nixon was never taken in by his own rhetoric about Communist perfidy in America, but used it in an opportunistic fashion, which would explain how he was able to shift so smoothly to espousing détente, along realist lines, once he became president.

In Congress, Nixon played an important role as part of the more farsighted World War II generation of Republicans. He traveled to Europe as a member of the Herter Committee and persuaded his frugal constituents back home to support the Marshall Plan as a vital part of confronting Communism. He also made a beeline for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Black's verdict on the committee could hardly be more censorious: "It is fantastic, sixty years later, to imagine that the United States had such a preposterous congressional committee. . . . The HUAC staff was a rag-tag of ex-communists and former FBI agents . . . still recovering from shell shock." Nixon, Black argues, kept aloof from the troglodytes on the committee and was more careful than they were in handling evidence.

Nixon's moment of vindication came in 1948 when he exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. The importance of this episode can scarcely be exaggerated. The Hiss affair transfixed the nation. It catapulted Nixon to national fame and helped ensure that he won election to the Senate in 1950. And Nixon's dogged pursuit of Hiss earned him credibility with conservatives that he never completely lost.

Almost single-handedly Nixon defied the prevailing, liberal sentiment in favor of Hiss, the gilded lawyer who was a charter member of the eastern establishment, by championing the brooding Whittaker Chambers, who had been part of a Communist spy ring with Hiss, only to renounce his belief in world revolution and, eventually, turn on him. (Black, incidentally, goes astray in claiming that Chambers had "privately thrown in his lot with McCarthy." In fact, Chambers despised him, warning William F. Buckley, Jr. that McCarthy was a "raven of disaster.") In 1950, Hiss, who had sued Chambers for libel, was found guilty of two counts of perjury. For a two-term congressman who was only thirty-seven years old, it was a big victory. But according to Black,

Nixon felt ever afterward that he had had a Pyrrhic victory, that while he had gained great renown and prominence from the Hiss affair, he had also earned the implacable and relentless animosity of the most powerful media and political and social elements of the liberal establishment.

If Nixon had tempestuous relations with liberals, his dealings with Dwight D. Eisenhower were not much smoother. As Black copiously shows, they were, in fact, quite strained. Eisenhower viewed Nixon as overly ambitious and came close to dumping him during the famous "Checkers" affair, revolving around a private slush fund for Nixon. (As Black points out, both Adlai Stevenson and Eisenhower had their own questionable sources of income, vastly surpassing Nixon's.) The tensions between the two never entirely dissipated, even when Nixon became president. Black acutely observes,

Eisenhower would admire Nixon's intelligence, courage, and determination but disapprove his Cassius-like appetite for power. He would affect the avuncular grandeur of the spontaneously elevated hero, but was made uneasy by Nixon's knowledge that with Eisenhower, all was not what it seemed.

But these two realists largely saw eye to eye on political issues. There were no wild military adventures on Eisenhower's watch. Instead, Eisenhower extricated the United States from the Korean War and avoided becoming entangled in Vietnam. He acted prudently, and Nixon loyally supported him. Nor was this all. As vice president, Nixon demonstrated a markedly liberal side on domestic issues. Black tells us that Nixon sent his children to integrated private schools and refused to sign a race-restrictive covenant on the resale of a house he bought in Washington, DC's Wesley Heights. Nixon, Black also tells us, "was well recognized as, in civil rights terms, the most liberal and activist senior federal political leader in the country." Nixon's move to the center was also apparent in his campaign for the presidency in 1960. Nixon refused to play up the Soviet threat and took the high ground in avoiding even a hint of dirty politics toward Kennedy-he was a man, wrote Theodore White, "almost pathetic in his eagerness to be liked." Though Nixon went on to suffer a painful loss to Pat Brown in the 1964 California race for governor, he had been shrewd enough to refuse to run for president that year. The Far Right imploded during Barry Goldwater's tumultuous and abortive run, leaving the field open for Nixon four years later.

The 1968 election was tailor-made for Nixon. The liberal establishment-McGeorge Bundy, William P. Bundy and Robert McNamara, among others-had helped drag first Kennedy then Johnson into the jungles of Vietnam. Liberalism cracked up under the pressure of the war, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the rise of the counterculture. Nixon called for "law and order" to stem moral licentiousness. He created what might be called the Nixon Democrats-the ethnic, blue-collar Catholic northerners who were dismayed by the Democratic Party's move to the left.

As Jeremi Suri bluntly puts it in Henry Kissinger and the American Century, "Nixon and Kissinger inherited a mess in Vietnam." Slightly over a half-million American soldiers were battling in South Vietnam. Protests were rampant in both the United States and western Europe as America became "Amerika." The image of the United States had suffered greatly, much as it would decades later under George W. Bush.

NIXON ALMOST immediately attempted to reshape American foreign policy along realist lines. Perhaps his boldest move was to appoint Harvard professor Henry Kissinger national security advisor. Kissinger's Ph.D. dissertation was on the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich and the Concert of Vienna, which helped secure European peace for much of the nineteenth century. Kissinger, a long-time exponent of realism as opposed to simplistic moralism in foreign affairs, espoused a foreign policy defined by pragmatism to promote stability and order abroad. The Nixon Doctrine, which the president announced in 1969, was a natural outgrowth of such thinking. The doctrine made it plain that the United States intended to revise its traditional approach to containment. While the United States would provide military assistance to American allies, "we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense."

A belief in diplomacy and a recognition of the limits of America's ability to confront its opponents were also behind the 1972 opening to China and the advent of détente with the Soviet Union. The former policy had been hinted at by Nixon in a Foreign Affairs article during the 1968 presidential campaign. His visit to China was very much a personal triumph for the former cold warrior, and Mao himself viewed Nixon with great affection. In a sense, Nixon's journey was the precursor to Reagan's embrace of Mikhail Gorbachev-the two Republican presidents who ended the confrontation with Communism.

If anything, Nixon and Kissinger's promotion of détente with the Soviet Union was even more courageous, given that they faced constant and vituperative attacks from within their own ranks for daring to negotiate nuclear-arms-control agreements with the Kremlin, including the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Treaty. Kissinger, to his amazement, found himself being attacked from the Right. But the neoconservative attacks on Nixon and Kissinger as appeasers carrying out a new "Munich" were excessive. Such hypertrophied language was also employed by Ronald Reagan, as he went on the attack against Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination and, later, against Jimmy Carter in 1980. (In 1976, the neoconservative-led Committee on the Present Danger declared, "The Soviet military buildup of all its armed forces over the past quarter century is, in part, reminiscent of Nazi Germany's rearmament in the 1930s.") Ironically, Reagan, who had his own utopian streak, went much further than either Nixon or Kissinger ever contemplated. Where they had endeavored to create a stable global structure based on balance, Reagan wanted to tear it up, at the end even proposing to eliminate the entire U.S. land-based nuclear force (in 1987).

As part of their grand design for reshaping foreign policy-bringing an end to the Vietnam War-Nixon and Kissinger mistakenly assumed that Soviet pressure would prompt the North Vietnamese to sue for peace. Not so. The North Vietnamese were not the playthings of the Kremlin.

Nixon has come in for a drubbing for failing to end the war sooner. But the temptation to seek more than simply a pullout-and instead what Nixon and Kissinger called "peace with honor"-was obviously immense. Had the war ended sooner, Nixon's administration would most likely not have spun out of control, engaging in surveillance of war protesters and ending up with a bunker mentality, in which it saw enemies everywhere.

So, despite his foreign-policy successes, Nixon could not stave off the inevitable. Once the White House taping system became public knowledge during Watergate, his tenure as president was effectively over. James Rosen's superb The Strong Man, which is scheduled to appear in May, delves into the interstices of Watergate, arguing persuasively that Attorney General John Mitchell was essentially ambivalent about, if not opposed to, the machinations of Nixon's subordinates. Rosen, a reporter for Fox News, has performed Herculean labors in unraveling Mitchell's career, and his meticulous account underscores the complexity of getting a true grasp on what actually occurred. Rosen reports that Mitchell spent his final weeks of freedom in May 1977, before he was sentenced to prison, reflecting upon Watergate. The occasion was David Frost's televised interview with Nixon, which was broadcast in three installments.

This was the first campaign in Nixon's newest battle. Nixon had run out of offices to campaign for after beginning at age twelve in grade school. Now he had a new struggle-rehabilitating his reputation. It was one that he would never stop waging and that has faced some considerable road bumps, not least because of the hostility that his name continues to evoke. Indeed, James Reston's The Conviction of Richard Nixon provides a flavor of the animosity that Nixon provoked, and continues to provoke, among the liberal Vietnam generation. Reston makes no secret of his loathing for Nixon. The problem with this approach is that it does little to elucidate why Nixon behaved as he did. The Frost/Nixon play, by contrast, presents a very human Nixon, in some ways, as he himself says, his own worst enemy. Nixon, after all, stated, "I have impeached myself."

Since then, a number of historians and journalists have reexamined his actual record as president. In her compact biography, Richard M. Nixon, Elizabeth Drew notes that under him a host of new environmental laws were enacted, including a bill strengthening the Clean Air Act of 1967. Nixon also signed into law in 1972 the Clean Water Act. According to Drew, "Whatever his motives and his positioning, Nixon presided over a historical expansion of environmental protection in the United States." Other Nixon initiatives included establishing the first Office of Consumer Affairs in the White House, ending the draft and greatly increasing support of the arts. In essence, Nixon was a big-government conservative, who, Drew writes, accepted the premise that "the federal government can do good things for the people. He was the last Republican president to do so."

Nevertheless, Nixon helped mold the modern Republican Party. He ended the reign of the isolationists and country-club plutocrats who railed against Roosevelt and Truman. But now the party he once headed faces its most dire crisis since 1974, when the Democrats captured Congress and went on to take the presidency. That victory proved a mere interregnum as the country moved right during the Carter presidency. Reagan repudiated much of the Nixon program, at least rhetorically. As Timothy Naftali reminds us in his elegant biography, George H. W. Bush, who had headed the Republican National Committee during the Nixon years, was the last legatee of Nixon, pursuing a cautious foreign policy, acutely conscious of the great power of the United States as well as its limits. "Besides his own father," writes Naftali, "Bush viewed Nixon as his most significant political mentor."

IT IS THUS no small irony that Bush's own son, George W., repudiated his and Nixon's embrace of realist principles. From the outset, he has scorned the advice of Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, viewing them as relics of an earlier era (when, in fact, their apprehensions about Bush's recklessness have been amply realized). The time had come, Bush and his neocon advisors agreed, to overturn the previous policy of maintaining stability in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran needed to be put on notice. What was required was the obverse of realpolitik-an ideological crusade that would upend the old order and usher in a new age of democracy and liberation.

With the rise of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the administration has begun to reassess its belligerent approach abroad. The modest steps it has taken, including dealing with North Korea, are overdue. But there has been no real reckoning inside the GOP with the Bush era. This is remarkable. For small-government conservatives, the expansion of the military that has taken place under Bush and the profligate expansion of American commitments are surely reasons enough to embrace realist principles. But conservatives will have to turn as much to history as to contemporary events to make their case for the GOP to come home to its older traditions of prudence and caution. It would be a pity if, in reexamining the origins and course of recent Republican foreign policy, they failed to ponder Nixon's record.

Jacob Heilbrunn, the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Doubleday, 2008), is a senior editor at The National Interest.