Businessman, historian -- and now he’s famous
Jessica Garrison
CORONA DEL MAR -- Overnight, Irwin F. Gellman has become the historian’s
answer to Ricky Martin.
The Corona del Mar resident and former full-time real estate developer
has gotten there by living his own version of “La Vida Loca.”
He spent the last four years buried in the bowels of the Nixon Library &
Birthplace in Yorba Linda, patiently and passionately reading through
thousands of Nixon’s private papers. Along the way, he became the
Allergan Professor of Modern American History at Chapman University, his
first scholarly job since he quit academia to go into shopping-mall
development two decades ago.
When Gellman emerged from the archives, he sat down at his desk and
wrote, “The Contender: Richard Nixon, The Congress Years, 1946-1952,”
which the Free Press published Aug. 8.
The book argues that Nixon’s early career was marked not by Red-baiting,
crooked fund-raising and the general smarminess for which the disgraced
president was excoriated, but by a “sensible anti-Communist course
against the excesses of McCarthy and other extreme right-wingers.”
Whether this book, and the many more volumes on Nixon which The Free
Press has contracted Gellman to write, will change the way America views
its most controversial leader is an open question.
There is no doubt, however, that it has changed Gellman’s life. Since the
book’s publication, Gellman’s days have been filled with radio
interviews. Newspapers are filled with reviews of his book, most of which
praise its careful research.
This would be heady stuff for most history professors at small regional
universities such as Chapman, but Gellman, seated on a sunny,
cat-hair-coated couch in his mammoth Harbor View home, said that while he
is shocked and pleased by all the attention, he’s taking it in stride.
“To me, it’s just what I do,” said Gellman, the author of three previous
books on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. His words, however,
are belied by a wild chuckle and a booming enthusiasm when he lists all
the radio shows that have contacted him for interviews.
Kevin Starr, the California State Librarian, said Gellman is right to
laugh proudly at his accomplishments.
“Mr. Gellman is a very interesting man,” Starr said. “A businessman with
a PhD, and a pit bull of a researcher.”
Starr added that, in his book, Gellman has made Nixon “a more sympathetic
figure”
The book’s major strengths, said Starr, are the rounded portrait it gives
of Nixon’s early years in Congress and the way that it explains how
Nixon, with only six years in Congress under his belt, was chosen as
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice presidential nominee in 1952.
“I think this book is the beginning of a hard-headed reassessment of
Nixon, to take him out from under the shadow of Watergate and show him in
the context of post-World War II America,” Starr said.
Many Nixon-haters don’t quite see it that way, however, and Gellman, a
Republican who says he keeps his work as objective as possible, has been
on the receiving end of quite a few diatribes from talk-radio land,
something which he also takes in stride.
“We knew it would happen,” said Gloria Gae Gellman, Irwin’s wife.
The idea for the book was actually Gloria’s. She, and not her husband,
once met Nixon, back in 1968 in Indiana. She found him “charming.”
And it was Gloria who dragged her husband away from work on a book on the
Holocaust for a lunch and a tour of the Nixon library in Yorba Linda.
He got hooked and wrote the book, but Gloria edited every word.
It is he, however, who has been appearing on all the radio shows.
Gellman had three alone on Thursday. Around noon, he came up the stairs
chuckling at the reaction of callers in Dallas to his book.
“The first thing they try to do is define me is a Nixonophile or a
Nixonophobe,” he said, adding: “I am neither. I am a historian.”
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