Nation: Ehrlichman Reviews Haldeman

On April 30, 1973, Richard Nixon told a national TV audience that he was reluctantly accepting the resignations of “two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know,” White House Chief of Staff H.R. (Bob) Haldeman and Domestic Adviser John Ehrlichman. The two, who were good friends in Washington and had known each other since student days at U.C.L.A., are both now serving prison terms for their part in the Watergate coverup. Since Haldeman’s new book, The Ends of Power, blames Nixon for both launching and covering up Watergate, TIME asked Ehrlichman, himself the author of the highly successful roman a clef, The Company, to review Haldeman’s effort. Ehrlichman’s critique:

“John Ehrlichman threw a tennis ball high in the air, and lashed at it, his neck cords straining. ” —The Ends of Power

So help me, that’s in there, on page 232. And it isn’t supposed to be a joke. But anyone who has seen my tennis serve will tell you that the verb lash is not the one most people use. The last time my neck cords were straining is an event lost in the mists of memory.

Bob Haldeman’s book is full of odd little passages like that; dramatic hyperbole, overstatement and stereotype in place of thoughtful description. Some of these excesses are funny. Others are full of poison, and they cause me to wonder about the relationship between Bob Haldeman and the writer, Joseph DiMona. Haldeman has seen my tennis serve, and he knows my character and personality; DiMona does not. Perhaps the wrong fellow picked the verbs.

As in a cowboy movie, it is never hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in this book. Everyone mentioned wears an adjective, and wears it, and wears it, until it is worn out. Subtlety is not the problem with Mr. DiMona’s style. Perhaps there was so little time to correct the proofs and get the books into the stores that Bob Haldeman just shrugged at these quirks of the writer’s fancy and left them in. It was only after the book was set in type that Haldeman began making the necessary final corrections. By then, no doubt, he was under intense pressure to hurry and to keep the changes to a minimum. Perhaps that accounts for the factual inaccuracies too.

The Ends of Power is a book that should be read, nevertheless, for what it tells of Richard Nixon the man. No one knows Nixon better than Haldeman. He was Nixon’s campaign manager as far back as the 1962 California campaign. Even before that, Haldeman had begun to create the extraordinarily successful techniques that would eventually bring Nixon to the White House. Haldeman tailored Nixon’s schedule, his staff—even, to some extent, his family—to better market the strange man who was his constant candidate for 20 years. Even in Haldeman’s 1962 campaign, dirty tricks were an established part of the Nixon mode.

Four or five times the reader is told that Bob Haldeman is a direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense bastard who always tells it like it is. That is the Haldeman I remember. But time after time, the accounts of Watergate events in his book are couched in the vague terms of the diplomat who is walking on eggs.

Like the Watergate story, Nixon is still mysteries within mysteries to everyone. No one man, not even Haldeman, completely understands him. Although a parade of biographers has begun to place tiles in the mosaic, there are still huge blanks. A less imperfect portrait eventually will be seen, but it will always be less than a whole description, because, as Haldeman says, Nixon is the Man of a Thousand Facets. Each of us was presented with the aspect Nixon instinctively deemed most advantageous at a given time. None of us can be free of Watergate’s surprises until the last White House tape is played and we learn what Nixon was saying to others in our absence.

For example, I was surprised to read in this book that Nixon probably ordered the Fielding-Ellsberg break-in in 1971. Haldeman relates that about two weeks after I walked into jail in 1976, he and Nixon were out at San Clemente, talking about Nixon’s memoirs. Nixon was worried about what to write about his part in the Fielding breakin. “Maybe I did order that break-in,” Haldeman quotes him as saying. Since Nixon represented to the court during my trial that he had had nothing to do with the genesis of that breakin, his statements to Haldeman are startling.

Based on what Nixon has said to me in the past and what Haldeman now implies, I expect to hear a 1971 tape some day in which Richard Nixon tells Charles Colson that Howard Hunt’s plan to break into Dr. Fielding’s office is approved.

When I told Nixon in 1972 what I knew of that breakin, he instantly voiced his approval of it. I heard him instruct an Assistant Attorney General not to investigate it. After I was fired in 1973, I had a talk with Nixon about the fate of Egil Krogh, who was then being prosecuted for his part in the Fielding breakin. I urged Nixon to pardon Krogh, on the ground that the young man had been involved in an effort which I had heard Nixon expressly ratify. Nixon readily agreed that Krogh should be pardoned. Somewhere on a tape is that promise to me that Krogh would not be penalized. (That is, I believe, the one default I will never be able to forgive Richard Nixon.)

In the preface to The Ends of Power, Bob Haldeman warns us that he and his collaborator are disciples of the School of the Imagined Quotation, after Woodward and Bernstein. At first, the irony of that amused me; but as I got into the book, I found myself saying—within their quotation marks —things I know I never said. That did not amuse me.

In this same preface, Joe DiMona is given thanks for his extensive research work supplementing Haldeman’s personal recollections. In my view, the hypothetical Watergate charges and the research are the book’s major weaknesses. There are material, factual errors which impeach its substance.

I have a hunch how some of the mistakes occurred. If I may resort to the reconstructed quotation technique everyone seems to be using with such financial success these days, it “probably” went something like this:

Joe DiMona: Look, Bob, we can’t write a book about Watergate without telling the readers why those fellows burgled Larry O’Brien’s office.

Bob Haldeman: But Joe, I don’t know what their motive was. And I can’t be saying I do because I’ve often sworn that I don’t.

Joe: Well, how about if I just put in your supposition?

Bob: I don’t even have a good supposition, Joe.

Joe: Look, don’t worry; I’ll write it up in a way that is real hypothetical. But remember, this book has to make headlines. Bob, you’re an old advertising man—you know how these things work.

Bob: Why don’t you rough it out and let me look at it?

Joe: Sure, Bob. Sure.

So the headline-making blockbuster is in there, just as Joe wrote it:

“… here was Larry O’Brien, a secret Hughes lobbyist—and no one cared enough to dig out the proof about O’Brien’s connection with Hughes. I believe it is almost certain that Nixon asked Colson to help him ‘nail’ O’Brien. Colson naturally turned to Hunt. And Hunt tried to do it by tapping O’Brien’s telephone at Watergate.”

The authors may be right in their guess about what happened. But I think they are dead wrong about why. Nixon didn’t need someone to bug O’Brien to establish a Hughes connection; Nixon knew positively that O’Brien was on Hughes’ payroll. He knew it well before the Watergate burglary; so did the IRS, the Secretary of the Treasury (George Schultz), Colson and I. An IRS audit of Hughes’ tax returns had disclosed the Hughes-to-O’Brien payments. A routine IRS Sensitive Case Report informed the President of O’Brien’s appearance in the Hughes investigation (along with the President’s brother Don and other celebrities). All that is a matter of public record. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue described his report to the President in public testimony some three years ago. The Haldeman-DiMona hypothesis needs a little more work as far as the burglars’ motive is concerned.

There are other factual lapses in the book, some attributable to a lack of research, and others which point about 20 degrees off true, as if the anecdotes had been whispered down a long line of people to someone at a typewriter who was unfamiliar with the subject matter.

The book appears to give two conflicting versions of the genesis of Nixon’s late-night trip to the Lincoln Memorial, where he unsuccessfully attempted to rap with young demonstrators. On page 66, we read that he did not go there for the purpose of talking with them. He was merely restless, and went out for air. But 39 pages later, Haldeman says: “A troubled Nixon, unable to sleep, went out for a post-midnight talk with the students.”

In fact, the latter version is correct. Egil Krogh was with him, called me to report what Nixon was going to do, then wrote a long account of it upon returning to the White House. The President’s intended p.r. effort failed. He had talked to young demonstrators there, but instead of addressing their passionate concerns about Viet Nam, he had discussed football teams and surfing. He left them convinced that he was callously indifferent to their desires for peace.

A prank we played on Henry Kissinger is given an odd and nasty twist for no apparent reason. Ordinary, glossy movie promotion pictures of Jill St. John, one of Henry’s beautiful dates, were put into file folders, then given captions by several of the staff as we rode together on Air Force One. and periodically sent to Henry by messenger. Miss St. John was, in fact, fully clothed in all the photos. Haldeman has written that the pictures were nudes and that I forged “presidential memos to Henry complete with Nixon’s ‘bizarre demands’ for certain types of action.” That’s a spicy little newsworthy story, but it just isn’t true.

Other subjects suffer from a factual parallax. And there is a recollection gap in Haldeman’s account of my suggestion to Nixon that he listen to his tape of his March 21, 1973, meeting with John Dean to determine the dimension of his problem with Dean. Haldeman writes: “At that point I thought Ehrlichman didn’t even know about the tapes.” In fact, I did not know of the taping system then. But I had been told that Nixon had taped that one meeting with Dean. Haldeman had told me.

Because I saw the play and knew the cast so well, it’s hard for me to judge how useful or interesting The Ends of Power will be to the casual reader. I confess that parts of it were hard for me to follow, in spite of my familiarity with the subject. With all its factual inaccuracies, the book does give valid and important insights to anyone interested in the Nixon mystery. Unfortunately, these revelations are unduly restrained and limited in scope.

Bob Haldeman was in a unique position to write a truly valuable book about Richard Nixon. I hope that The Ends of Power is not his last word.