[3] He grew up in the Bronx with his parents, and his younger brother Robert,[4] the latter of which has taught history at CUNY's York College since it opened in 1967.

[5] Herbert went to DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City, where he met his wife, Joan Kronish.

[10] While working as a teacher, he co-authored his first book, Aaron Burr; Portrait of an Ambitious Man[11] with colleague Marie Hecht.

Herbert Parmet thought very highly of former president Richard Nixon, saying in an interview with the Great Falls Tribune, "I think it is very important to see him as the very sensitive, intelligent human being that he is.

", explaining further that in his interviews, they didn't focus on the policy and other political aspects of Kennedy, in comparison to the time they spent talking about the personality of the former president himself.

On his debut book on Aaron Burr, the Bridgeport Post very highly reviewed and recommended the work of Parmet and Hecht remarking, "This is scholars' work, no doubt of that... anyone with a casual interest in biography or American history will find much to interest in him in this exhaustive, though never exhausting, well-written biography.

"[24] Lessenberry and Miller's praise of Herbert's work on Nixon is heavily contrasted to that of Judith Johnson from the Wichita Eagle who says "Besides a favorable bias, "But in his praise for the former president, Parmet tends to diminish the influence of other plays such as Dwight David Eisenhower and John F Kennedy... Richard Nixon and His America" suffers from an imbalance in events and issues.

Mel Small of the Detroit Free Press makes claims that parrot the praise and criticism of Nixon's work, discouraged by his narrow inclusion of the Watergate scandal, but also agrees that "Along the way, [Parmet] makes a reasonable case for the consideration of Nixon as a reasonable politician"[26] In a review to his writings on former president Dwight Eisenhower, Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times commended the book by Parmet, appending "This is not only a narrative of the administration, and a portrait of the man, it is told against the background of America, and the world, and told brilliantly.

[30] Marquardt's opinion was not unpopular among reviewers, with fellow journalist Thomas Lask of the New York Times describing the biographical work as "a clumsy, ill-proportioned book in which the material gets in the way of the subject".