Word: haldemans
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...more reminiscent of Allen Drury than John Dos Passes, it does present a complex narrative with surprising clarity. The Washington settings, from the Oval Office to the Georgetown salons, lend a nice air of authenticity. So do the script's lavish accounts of such Watergate minutiae as H.R. Haldeman's feud with Rose Mary Woods and Gordon Liddy's call-girl schemes. The heaps of dirt stuffed into the show amply convey the moral squalor...
...actual meeting with "the old malefactor" doesn't come until the end of A Visit To Haldeman and Other States of Mind. But the anticipation of the meeting carries the reader through an otherwise rambling book that includes tales from Mee's boyhood, the story of his fight with polio, his theories on the recent death and inevitable rebirth of the republic, and imagined conversations with Nixon and "Exxon"--an archetypal business executive who informs Mee that present governments are outmoded and that multinational corporations will inevitably rule the world. They will, Exxon says, be responsive only to "the reality...
...writing seems to be as much of a catharsis as the impeachment he writes about--"I impeached myself and exiled myself, removing myself from friends, family, and all the world, committing multiple ax murders and suicide all at the same time." And in the next paragraph Mee finally meets Haldeman, who of course turns out to be a nice guy--in fact "one of the great flat-out bores of our times...
...HALDEMAN has become obsessed with all that has been written about him and the Nixon administration. When Mee meets him, Haldeman is suddenly no longer a man to be despised, a man to rage against; Haldeman is now grotesque, a man whose activity has become locked around one period in his life, when he was on hand to help twist American history. When Mee finally meets the enemy, the duplicitous villain he had expected turns out instead to be an object of pity. Watergate is an obsession for Haldeman, but Mee does not need to linger over those unpleasant details...
After his meeting with Haldeman, his mind cleared, Mee closes the book by pulling two appropriate tales from his past. One involves a happy day of love-making sometime in the late '60s--plucked out of the past to provide a relief from the tension that had been building in the book. And the last few pages relate an encounter Mee had with Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, in the early '70s. At the meeting, Mee put forth his elaborate theories about the course of Western civilization, but Toynbee apparently dozed through the tirade and didn't catch a word...