Word: ehrlichmans
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...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...
Yeah, illegal seafood. Like Ehrlichman was forever fishing for information the CIA wouldn't give him, so he wrote his book about how the CIA was blackmailing the president. He called it a novel, of course, so he wouldn't get sued, but you never know about those things...
Well, you gotta realize he's saving that part for another book, a full memoir of the splendor of the Nixon years, in which Watergate'll be a minor episode. Haldeman says duty called him to straighten out Watergate after the Nixon/Frost interviews, which incidentally cast him and Ehrlichman as the villains Nixon was just trying to protect out of a sense of humanity. Ol' Bob's revisionist history runs like this: "I believed in tough campaigning too, but even from my hardline standpoint, Nixon went too far at times. But political strategy wasn't my province, only the mechanics...
...composing eulogies yet, this book just came out last week. And it's got some folks in a dither, like Ehrlichman, who blasted Haldeman in Time magazine for representing his tennis serve as a "lash," and describing his neck cords as "straining." No such luck, says Ehrlichman, and what really got to him was Haldeman's use of the Woodward/Bernstein method of reconstructing quotes from memory, lines I never quoth, says Ehrlichman...
Yeah, like Haldeman, the second most powerful man in the country, kept out any ideas of a better society from his job. Like he says, all he was there for was "simply to enable the President to function most effectively." Haldeman and Ehrlichman were advance men; their only vision of society came from managing campaigns and advertising accounts. Haldeman's biggie at J. Walter Thompson was Black Flag--he didn't mind anybody eradicating people who were pestering Nixon...