Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...quoting Franklin Roosevelt there, and it's about the best quote in the book. There was the one about the Great Governmental Re-Organization of 1972 in which Nixon laid down only one limitation on the hirings: "No Goddamn Harvard men, you understand! Under no condition...
Right, but they needed a Catholic, so Fred Malek, who surfaced here as a fellow at the Institute of Politics in '75, got all enthused about Claude Brinegar, the president of Union Oil of California, young and Catholic and from the West Coast, Malek said. According to Haldeman, Nixon wasn't so sure. "His name doesn't sound Catholic to me." But Malek assured him that "he's Irish too." So after two weeks in office, Brinegar, the Irish Catholic appointee, revealed that he was a German Presbyterian...
That doesn't exactly sound like ol' Bob was leaping to the defense of the Nixon administration...
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...
...thank ol' Bob for keeping Nixon's aberrant behavior from destroying the nation: "Nixon said, 'There are ways to do it. Goddamnit, sneak in in the middle of the night...' (A perfect example of classic Nixonian rhetorical overkill.) I said, 'We sure shouldn't take the risk of getting us blown out of the water before the election.' (A perfect example of classic Haldeman effort to defuse another potential bomb)," Haldeman writes. Some other time, maybe...