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Businessman, historian -- and now he’s famous

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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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