The Wars of Watergate (16 page)

The idea that his sinister aides transformed the newly minted Nixon of 1968 back into the old, familiar Nixon apparently has its source in accounts of the campaign. Nixon’s media advisers claimed that he lost his large lead
over Humphrey when Haldeman came more directly into the fray. Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary since 1951, and long regarded as the “fifth Nixon,” later—after the Watergate revelations—complained: “It was all warm and friendly until … Bob Haldeman arrived.”
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Harry Robbins Haldeman had stood outside the Los Angeles television studio where Nixon made his “Checkers” speech in 1952. The twenty-six-year-old advertising account executive sent a note into the studio, offering to help in the campaign, but he was refused. The rebuff showed that Senator Nixon had something to learn about gratitude, for Haldeman’s father had contributed to Nixon’s $18,000 “slush fund.” Haldeman’s grandfather, who had made a fortune in the plumbing-supply business, had co-founded the Better American Federation of California, an early anticommunist organization. Following the 1952 election, Haldeman continued his career in advertising, handling accounts as diverse as Disneyland and Black Flag insecticide. He finally gained a place in the Nixon camp when he signed on to work in the 1956 re-election effort. Robert Finch, then Nixon’s Chief of Staff in all but name, was impressed, and made Haldeman the chief advance man in the 1960 campaign. Haldeman opposed Nixon’s pursuit of the California governorship but loyally coordinated the effort when it was decided upon. While John Mitchell managed Nixon’s presidential bid in 1968, Haldeman maintained proximity to the candidate and quietly assumed the lion’s share of power. After the election, he commanded the transition arrangements and eased into the role he occupied until the end of April 1973.

For several of the Nixon campaigns, Haldeman had enlisted the services of his college friend John D. Ehrlichman, who had been practicing real-estate law in Seattle. Ehrlichman, too, served an apprenticeship as a Nixon advance man, but in 1968 he worked closely with Haldeman. Quite naturally, he followed his friend into the White House, where he first served as Counsel to the President, and later as head of the Domestic Council. Ehrlichman, far more than Haldeman, worked with the President on substantive policy matters.
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Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s detailed notes of their constant meetings with the President faithfully recorded Nixon’s wishes and complaints—not, however, without occasional sarcasm or astonishment at his behavior. At one point during their repeated visits to the Oval Office in the 1972 campaign, Haldeman scratched a note to Ehrlichman: “Why did he buzz me?” Like a schoolchild answering a passed message, Ehrlichman sketched several sarcastic answers in his inimitable style: “He had an itchy finger.” “Also there was a chair unoccupied.” “Also he has been talking about not just reordering the chaos, and he would like you to understand that point.”

In general, however, the two aides dutifully gave their President the loyalty that they demanded of others in his name. “There shouldn’t be a lot of leeway in following the President’s policies,” Ehrlichman said in 1972. “It
should be like a corporation, where the executive vice presidents (the cabinet officers) are tied closely to the chief executive,… [and] when he says jump they only ask how high.” Critics of Haldeman and Ehrlichman regularly complained that they were not men of ideas, that they pursued power as an end in itself. Richard Whalen, who had written speeches for Nixon in 1968, was a conservative with firm ideological and policy convictions. Whalen was appalled at the lack of values and philosophy in the President’s key aides, and he winced when Ehrlichman announced that the President was only interested in what was “feasible and tactically shrewd.” Whalen eventually realized that Ehrlichman was no different from the others; he served as a functionary, carrying out the role and duties designed by Richard Nixon. CIA Director Richard Helms, too, understood the role of the President’s aides; as for Nixon himself, Helms considered him “the original loner.”
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“We had a strong, tight-knit team with a passion for anonymity,” Haldeman said rather disingenuously, nearly fifteen years after he left the White House. But unlike Johnson, Nixon did not demand anonymity from his aides; their visibility served him conveniently and well, especially in diverting heat and attention from himself. Visibility and independent power are quite different things, however. Both primary aides have offered ample testimony that they had executed the President’s wishes, not invented them. Their self-effacement was self-serving, to be sure. But Robert Finch came to the same conclusion. He insisted that the Richard Nixon of 1960 obviously was not the Richard Nixon of 1968 through 1972. Finch, who saw Haldeman in a role he once had, at first thought that “they”—Haldeman and other White House aides—“were constantly changing Nixon.” But Finch reluctantly concluded that “they” were but an extension of Nixon’s own personality. And Harry Dent, another White House aide, who ranked just below Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and who disliked Haldeman intensely, scoffed at the notion that Nixon could not control his subordinates. “I know from whence every order came.… You couldn’t be around without knowing that everything came from one well, one spring.” Egil Krogh, a particular Nixon favorite, concurred.

Nixon had the message, and in Haldeman he had his medium. William Safire, who savaged Haldeman in his account of his White House years, well understood Haldeman’s role:
“Haldeman organized the dissemination of the President’s thinking;…. Haldeman organized the execution of the President’s orders,”
Safire wrote. Haldeman even had a verb for his function—“game planning.” His memos came in a cascade, “game planning” Vietnam, prisoners of war, and Clement Haynsworth’s Supreme Court nomination. By “Game Planning we will attempt to co-ordinate total Administration activities toward producing the maximum possible results from any of the key objectives that the President feels requires special attention and an all-out effort,” the Chief of Staff told his subordinates.

The President’s daughter admitted that “my father wanted Bob Haldeman to be the sole conduit to him.” Hardly an admirer of Haldeman’s, however, she added that he “seemed to want that even more.” Nixon depended “mightily” on his Chief of Staff, and he did not want to hear criticism of Haldeman. According to Julie Nixon Eisenhower, her father “closed his eyes to Haldeman’s occasional overstepping” of his bounds and allowed his aide to isolate him. Her account reads like a historical novel depicting a powerless medieval king manipulated by supposedly inferior feudal barons. Ultimately, however, the President’s daughter conceded that Haldeman’s “occasional overstepping” reflected “what the President wanted.”

A decade earlier, Nixon had acknowledged the difficulty, even the impossibility, of certain administrative functions. For those, he said, “you need a son-of-a-bitch in it.” Such was Haldeman’s position, and both men realized what was required. Haldeman readily acknowledged his role: “I’m his [Nixon’s] buffer and I’m his bastard. I get done what he wants done and I take the heat instead of him.” Haldeman later recalled that early in the Administration, he lost his “passion for anonymity” when he appeared on television to denounce congressmen who had criticized the President’s Vietnam policy, accusing them of “consciously aiding and abetting the enemy.” But he made that statement, he revealed, “at the president’s orders.”
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Haldeman displaced Rose Mary Woods as the President’s most important assistant, an act that Haldeman’s detractors often cited to illustrate his grasping for power. But the directive that elevated Haldeman came from Nixon. Haldeman’s notes for his September 19, 1971 meeting with the President record Nixon as saying: “When Rose gets back—reevaluate her job. 80% of her time making calls.” The next day, Haldeman dictated an action paper as follows: “When Rose Woods gets back we should reevaluate her job. She should shift to a use of her time that is more externally productive. Approximately 80% should be spent making phone calls. She should be checking things like congratulations to the staff people and outside people.…” Given her experience with the President, Woods must have recognized who had demoted her.
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Knowledge was control, and it extended even to what did not happen. Early in the first term, the President conveyed to Haldeman his “uneasy feeling” that many of his directives for action were ignored when the staff thought them unreasonable or unattainable. “I respect this kind of judgment,” Nixon remarked. But, he added, “I want to know when that kind of decision is made.” He instructed Haldeman to keep a checklist indicating what action had been taken, “and particularly I want to know when the action that I have ordered has
not
been taken.” Two years later, the President told Haldeman to let friendly reporters and commentators know that “I am very persistent in checking to see whether my orders are carried out.”
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Alexander Butterfield, a Haldeman aide who monitored the paper and staff
flow to the President and set his schedule each day, saw the President as much, if not more, than Haldeman did. Testifying to the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, Butterfield coolly described Nixon’s conduct of his office.
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Butterfield’s detailed testimony amply corroborated Harry Dent’s general observation that in the last analysis Nixon was the master in his house.

The President’s day began with Patrick Buchanan’s news summaries, running usually from sixty to eighty pages and including a listing of recent happenings and notice of attitudes toward the President and his policies throughout the nation. Nixon made marginal comments, directing Haldeman or Ehrlichman to take note, or even commanding sudden, dramatic (and often unattainable) changes, such as telling Kissinger to cut American forces in the Philippines by 80 percent in six months. Butterfield regularly saw the President’s personal memoranda to his staff, and he described approvingly their attention to detail. Nixon was concerned about whether curtains were open or closed, on which side of the room the staff should place state gifts to visiting dignitaries, the table and entertainment arrangements for social dinners, whether and when salads should be served, whether the Secret Service should salute and sing during the playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” what aides had what photographs of former presidents in their offices, the comments of visitors on White House paintings, and whether or not to move the tennis courts. He very much wanted to know where his people were and what they were doing. He instructed Butterfield to institute a program requiring Cabinet members to clear travel plans through Butterfield’s office. “[A]ll of these things are understandable,” Butterfield remarked at one point. They were, he noted, “typical of a thoughtful and careful and well-disciplined man,… highly interested in detail.” Such a man was unlikely to give
carte blanche
to mere gatekeepers.

Nixon gave lip service to delegating work on details, but he qualified this by asserting personal control over “matters … where I have particular competence and where my decision rather than anybody else’s can make the big difference.” Thus he prescribed the order of seating and serving at dinners and told Haldeman he wanted all musical selections for state dinners cleared with him. He ordered an Army choir to sing for a congressional dinner, later adding that he knew Leonard Garment and others did not approve of such entertainment, preferring instead “some offbeat modern ballet such as that utterly disgusting group we had from New York.” Nixon wanted to know when a baseball player hit his five-hundredth home run so he could properly congratulate him; he dictated a memorandum requesting a waste basket for the washroom off the Oval Office; and he ordered precise word limits on speeches prepared for him. In the spring of 1972, he gave a great deal of attention to “his” gift of a blue Lincoln Continental to Leonid Brezhnev. “For Ford [Motor Company], of course, it would be a pure business deal in any event since they are negotiating with the Russians for putting
in a plant,” Nixon told Haldeman. The Chief of Staff dutifully repeated the language verbatim as he delegated the problem to one of his own aides.
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The Haldeman directives, whether written memos or shouted instructions to awed subordinates, are legendary for their authoritativeness. Even when the staff characterized them as “Mickey Mouse” orders—such as harassing a senator who had said something critical about the President the day before—they knew, as Dent remembered, that the instructions really came from the President. The authority was Nixon’s, that “one well, one spring,” as Dent said. Butterfield vividly recalled how Haldeman regularly emerged from the Oval Office with his yellow legal pad, reading directives to others or going to his “dictating machine [to] spit out instructions to the staff members.” Presidential commands, both important and trivial, were often formulated as the President sat alone at night in his Executive Office Building hideaway or in the Lincoln Room in the White House residential quarters. Nixon “was unquestionably the decision maker,” Butterfield insisted, “and those decisions would normally be brought down in the morning on the yellow pad.” Dent’s former secretary corroborated the technique. Haldeman had taken the woman for his own staff. Her job: to type Nixon’s memos, either handwritten or left on a Dictabelt from the previous evening. Haldeman then turned them into “his” instructions, often repeating the President’s language precisely.
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Butterfield admired Haldeman as a friend and patron, and as his immediate superior, but he had no illusions about the role of the Chief of Staff. Haldeman was only “an implementer,” who did “nothing without the knowledge of the President”; “he was not a decision maker,” Butterfield later told House and Senate investigators. “Haldeman’s preoccupation [was] … to see that things went in accordance with the President’s likes and dislikes.” To that, Haldeman was “dedicated … in a very selfless way.” Inadvertently, Butterfield confirmed the danger that Reedy had sighted four years earlier. The President’s staff, Butterfield thought, sometimes mirrored his personality too readily, and even accentuated his weaknesses rather than compensating for them. Julie Eisenhower was a bit more delicate: “loyalty was demanded of all, not judgment.”