Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate.

• Author: Baker, Ross K.

Warren Rudman Random House, $27.50 By Ross K. Baker Just as I was finishing a review of Bill Bradley's autobiography, what should cross my desk but the memoir of retired Senator Warren Rudman. In light of the unprecedented number of senatorial retirements, I get the uneasy feeling that I will be facing an eternity of these reviews. Imagine the mysteries to be solved: What, for example, was going through Howell Heflin's mind when those telltale hairs appeared on Clarence Thomas's can of Coke? And what tales could Sam Nunn tell of avaricious defense contractors and the various presidents who have snubbed him?

Warren Rudman, the New Hampshire Republican who retired in 1992, is not one you'd think to deliver a thoughtful and remarkably candid account of two terms in the Senate. Not because Rudman is not thoughtful and candid--he is surely both, in spades--but because he comes across as a kind of hands-on type, too busy getting things done to reflect in writing.

But Combat, a book whose title is an allusion both to the night patrols that Rudman led as a young infantry officer in Korea as well as the mano-a-mano in the U.S. Senate, is perceptive and revealing. Rudman found himself in the U.S. Senate in 1980, the first Republican-majority Senate in 26 years. Even more significant, it was the year that such liberal heroes as Frank Church of Idaho, Birch Bayh of Indiana, and George McGovern of South Dakota were replaced by three conservatives named Symms, Quayle, and Abdnor. It was in this latter company that Warren Rudman found himself

It didn't take long for Rudman, formerly the attorney general of New Hampshire, to discover that the Republican Party in 1980 was an odd place to be for a pro-choice Jew and supply-side skeptic. On the other hand, he had little in common with his neighbor from the other side of the Merrimac River, Ted Kennedy, and the other lords bountiful of the welfare state. Rudman could not abide deficits, and eagerly supported the Reagan budget cuts. For a time, he even allowed himself to be swept along on the Laffer Curve, but his enthusiasm for that fiscal gimmickry came to an abrupt halt when Reagan married it to a huge defense buildup.

The arch-villain of this weapons binge was Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, whom Rudman saw as an evil enabler who encouraged the armed services to press for everything on their wish list, although Rudman does concede Reagan's defense spending probably did bankrupt the Soviets.

But...