Surrounding the outwardly calm White House Oval Office that is the President's citadel is a symbolic battleground pocked with shell holes and scarred with trenches. The tactical objective of the attackers is the President's attention. The besiegers include great institutions and the meekest citizen. There are the representatives of the Federal Government itself: the Cabinet en bloc and as individuals, Senators and Congressmen, military chiefs, economic advisers, satraps of the independent and quasi-independent agencies.
Those are the front-line supplicants, but many others constantly seek to infiltrate the presidential stronghold. They include state governors and city mayors, and the senior national and state political leaders of the President's party. After them comes a helter-skelter militia of citizens, often sniping at one another, enemies of the President as well as friends: banker, lawyer, merchant, chief, cleric, doctor, scholar, journalist, student, housewife. Some advance to plead a cause, others to extol, still others to criticize and fix blame.
Patrolling the battlefield, defending the fortress against unwanted infiltrators, is the President's personal staff. It is his own creation. Each of the staff members is ultimately answerable to a constituency of only one man: Richard Milhous Nixon. Theirs is a hazardous occupation: often criticism aimed at the President falls short and bursts directly on them.
Throughout his first year in office, Richard Nixon's elaborately organized network of assistants, counselors, advisers and lesser factotums went largely unscathed. Any concern that it might insulate him from reality came only in sporadic muttering from Congressmen and disgruntled favor-seekers. No longer. When Nixon decided to move U.S. forces into Cambodia, evidently without realizing the outcry of protest that this would provoke, he set off angry charges that he is too isolated from many sections of American opinion. Interior Secretary Walter Hickel pleaded that Nixon pay more attention to the young, complained that he got a swift brush-off from the President's staff—and reported that he had been able to see Nixon alone exactly twice since taking office 16 months before.
All the King's Krauts
Suddenly it is fashionable in Washington to fret and fulminate that a palace guard has separated Nixon from realities. In the White House, the key figures around the President are Staff Chief H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, Domestic Affairs Aide John Ehrlichman and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Because of their ancestry—and their closemouthed habits—the Teutonic trio is now known as "the Berlin Wall" in the White House pressroom. One Administration official calls them "all the king's Krauts"; another speaks of "the throne nursers." Kissinger refers to the other two as "the Praetorian Guard," and Haldeman and Ehrlichman are widely called "Von Haldeman" and "Von Ehrlichman"—or simply "the Germans." The nicknames are used by officials inside the White House and out, sometimes in jest, sometimes in bitterness. While Attorney General John Mitchell is not technically part of the White House staff, he comes in for equal criticism because Nixon consults him regularly about the whole panoply of presidential problems; his special intimacy