NEWPORT BEACH

Corona del Mar resident Irwin F. Gellman has spent the last four years buried in the bowels of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, patiently and passionately reading through thousands of Nixon’s private papers.

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.”