Nixon Before the Fall : RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON The Rise of an American Politician <i> by Roger Morris (Henry Holt: $29.95; 944 pp.; 0-8050-1121-8))</i> : NIXON Volume Two: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972 <i> by Stephen B. Ambrose (Simon & Schuster: $24.95; 742 pp.; 0-671-52837-8)</i>

Like the mythological Egyptian bird that consumed itself by fire and rose renewed from its ashes, Richard Nixon is a latter-day phoenix. Defeated by John F. Kennedy for the presidency in 1960 and by Pat Brown for the California governorship in 1962, Nixon told a press conference: “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more.”

As so often in his career, his words masked the reality of his actions. He at once began working toward the comeback that culminated in his two victorious campaigns for the White House in 1968 and 1972. Resigning the presidency in 1974 rather than face impeachment and conviction for Watergate crimes, Nixon began his final battle: the vindication by history. Making the case for himself in his 1978 memoirs, he has worked to convince Americans of his greatness as a foreign-policy leader and to obscure the truth of Watergate and other improprieties by blocking release of documents and tapes that might further blight his reputation.

His current campaign enjoys some success. A November, 1988, Louis Harris poll, asking a cross section of Americans to rank the last nine Presidents from F.D.R. to Reagan in 11 categories, rated Nixon as “best in foreign affairs,” well ahead of all the others, except Reagan, who was a close second.

Although a decisive plurality of the poll said that Nixon had set the lowest moral standards of all these Presidents, he scored better than Johnson, Ford, and Carter in several other categories. Having suffered the worst public humiliation of any President in U.S. history by resigning from office and having continued a spirited fight for vindication, Nixon has partly redeemed himself with some Americans who find considerable appeal in a man who doggedly struggles to overcome self-inflicted defeats.

Two new biographies by Roger Morris and Stephen Ambrose will undercut Nixon’s efforts to create a positive historical image. A former member of the State Department and the National Security Council, who resigned in protest against Nixon’s 1970 invasion of Cambodia, Morris has become a prize-winning journalist. To be published next month, his massively detailed 900-page book, the first of a multi-volume biography, takes the story only through Nixon’s election as vice president in 1952.

The book tells us more about Nixon than most readers would ever care to know, but therein also lies its strength. It is the most detailed and authoritative reconstruction of Nixon’s life and career we have ever had. Building his account on materials in 35 archives and from hundreds of oral-history interviews, Morris dispassionately recounts the story of Nixon’s early life in California, at the Duke University law school, in a Whittier law practice, in the Navy during World War II, and, above all, in postwar politics. Nixon’s 1946 congressional race against Jerry Voorhis, his role in the Alger Hiss case as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, his 1950 race for the U.S. Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, his campaign to become Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate, and his part in the 1952 presidential election never has been told more completely and evenhandedly.

Morris shows a keen understanding of Nixon’s strengths and importance as a representative American. He describes him as a man of extraordinary diligence and determination, with an exceptional feel for public sentiment that propelled his meteoric rise in mid-century American politics. In high school, Morris writes, Nixon’s “grades were nearly perfect. . . . There was a dour fierceness of application and ambition about the record.” But he struggled with geometry, scoring only B’s the first two quarters. “. . . When the teacher once presented a special problem, promising an A for the next quarter for its solution overnight, he worked until 4 a.m., got the grade, and finished the course with an A.”

His first campaign for a House seat was a microcosm of his capacity to succeed in politics. The campaign was “a political balancing act between the warring wings of the Republican Party--a matter of conviction as well as expedience and opportunity--that Richard Nixon was to practice with an almost instinctive brilliance throughout his career.” No detail that could serve the campaign escaped his notice. “So complete was his attention to detail, so insistent the control . . . that the candidate himself even decided the precise telephone poles and other locations ‘where campaign posters should be placed to the best advantage.’ ” He would stand “in the print shop as his political pamphlets came off the press, making certain every word and layout was exact.”

Nixon’s genius for reaching a mass audience was demonstrated in his 1952 “Checkers” speech defending himself against charges of a secret campaign slush fund used for personal ends. Speaking to more than 60 million people, about half the possible TV viewers in the United States, Nixon gave a performance that Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck called “the greatest production I have ever seen.” Moving some people to tears and generating 4 million overwhelmingly favorable telegrams, letters, cards, and calls, Nixon convinced Americans not of his innocence but of his shared identity with them as a hard-working, ordinary fellow who loved his country and dreamed of a better life for himself and his family. In Morris’ words: “For a single dramatic half-hour in the autumn of 1952--as for so many smaller audiences before and after--Richard Nixon had become the quintessential American politician.”

It is not Nixon’s political astuteness that echoes through Morris’ book, however, but his all-consuming ambition, his determination to win at any price. Fellow students and teachers at Whittier High remember his debating tactics and race for student-body president as the actions of someone ready to rationalize bad means for reaching self-serving goals. The same attitude dominated his later political career, especially the Alger Hiss case, which did so much to make Nixon a prominent national figure. His objective never was to weigh the evidence in a search for the truth but to make his reputation by getting Hiss. At a crucial moment in 1948, when it appeared that the case against Hiss for stealing government documents and lying about his actions seemed about to collapse, Nixon threw a private fit. “Oh, my god, this is the end of my political career,” he shrieked. “My whole career is ruined.”

Stephen Ambrose’s biography, the second of a three-volume work, begins in 1962 when, he says, Nixon launched his second drive for the presidential nomination, and ends with his reelection to the White House in 1972. Ambrose, a distinguished professor of history at the University of New Orleans and author of a fine two-volume biography of Eisenhower, has produced a study that is equally damning of Nixon but less convincing than Morris’ book.

Ambrose’s biography rests on a more limited body of sources. Although he makes extensive use of Nixon’s jottings on news summaries compiled during his first term and of some letters and memos in his presidential papers, the book largely rests on printed materials, memoirs and secondary accounts by journalists. Ambrose has also done some interviewing, but much less than Morris.

The result is a book that does not take us much beyond what we already knew about Nixon in the decade after 1962. Ambrose says that “It is not news that he (Nixon) was devious, manipulative . . . passionate in his hatreds, self-centered, untruthful, untrusting, and at times so despicable that one wants to avert one’s eyes in shame and embarrassment. Nor is it news that this same man could be considerate, straightforward, sympathetic and helpful, or that he was blessed with great talent, a superb intellect, an awesome memory, and a remarkable ability to see things whole, especially on a global scale and with regard to the world balance of power. If he was the ultimate cynic, a President without principle in domestic politics, he was also the ultimate realist, a President without peer in foreign affairs.”

The most interesting feature of Ambrose’s book is the extent to which he contradicts his own assertion about Nixon’s matchless leadership in world affairs. Ambrose has warm praise for Nixon as a President with a world view who understood the need for a “new era of negotiations” with the Russians and the Chinese. Indeed, Nixon had the imagination and foresight to do what no other post-1945 President had done--seek detente with the Soviets and normal relations with China that became essential steps in the developing end to the Cold War. Yet Ambrose is sharply critical of Nixon’s slow withdrawal from Vietnam, which cost so many additional lives for no productive end. He also faults Nixon’s policies toward Cambodia, Chile, India and Pakistan, describing them as leaving a legacy of serious unresolved problems.

In time, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, every scoundrel becomes a hero. Richard Nixon is not there yet.