Word: ehrlichmans
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Your review of John Ehrlichman's novel, The Company [May 31], instigated the following speculation. If other historical miscreants had written novels based on their experiences, American literature would have been enriched by the following: a psychological study of treason by Benedict Arnold, detailing how a simple soldier was pressured by society to become a turncoat: a thriller by John Wilkes Booth showing how he was really a misunderstood hero who had been seduced into crime by evil Yankee villainy; a political novel by Jefferson Davis, describing the daily life and irritations of a fictional President...
...wall of John Ehrlichman's home in Santa Fe hangs a framed piece of stationery imprinted "Aboard Air Force One" and signed by Henry Kissinger. Upon this official sheet, dated May 22,1971, are recorded two games of ticktacktoe between Ehrlichman and the Secretary of State. One game is a draw. The other game shows Ehrlichman a winner. In the shade of this trophy−this fun-and-games scalp−Ehrlichman wrote his roman à clef, The Company, in which Kissinger, under the thinnest of disguises, has taken a second clobbering that the old ticktacktoe loser could hardly...
Damp Handshake. He campaigns with an awkward, mechanical passion. "Monckton never thought of handshaking as a personal contact with the electors," Ehrlichman writes. "He was doing all that crap on autopilot." At one point the politically smiling candidate escapes from a crowd at the Waldorf by retreating to an elevator filled with his own staff. Once inside, "his face changed as though he had suddenly broken out of a trance; his smile collapsed, his eyes darkened as if a light had been extinguished...
...familiar is some of the portraiture that the intrigued reader finds himself wondering which physical details Ehrlichman has changed to keep his fictional license legal. Did this leader of the free world, as he writes, often emerge from the lavatory to greet foreign dignitaries with a slightly damp hand shake? Nixon, like Monckton, scorned hat and gloves. Was it really to preserve a macho image or to copy John F. Kennedy? And what of Carl Tessler, guttural-voiced escapee from Vienna and Harvard who serves as Monckton's foreign policy expert and chief of the National Security Council...
...Ehrlichman has been widely reported as being nearly $500,000 in debt to his lawyers, a plight with which many Americans can sympathize. The tendency these days is to assume that it does not matter what kind of book you write for money. Yet The Company, for all its diverting tidbits, should not be accepted (or dismissed) as good, dirty fun. In it, using a mask of fiction, the author continues with great tenacity and skill a campaign begun by the White House to vilify past Presidents and, indeed, American political institutions, so that Richard Nixon's behavior would...