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Mitchell finds Nixon using him as a sounding board in making key decisions of politics and program; Kissinger virtually monopolizes the President's ear on foreign policy. Mitchell and Kissinger are envied and resented for their unrivaled influence. The appointed palace guards, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, screen nearly every person admitted to the President's lair and practically every piece of paper that reaches his desk or briefcase. They stir enmity because, their antagonists argue, the pair shuts him off from access to uncongenial views and even from members of his Cabinet.
Criticism and anger directed at the men who guard the President's doors and carry out his orders are no novelty. "This is a problem that must have started with George Washington," says one Nixon man. "If everybody went in immediately whenever he needed something, the White House wouldn't work." Harry Truman kept on his desk a sign that read THE BUCK STOPS HERE. It was a nice, punchy slogan, but the buck got to him only after it had filtered through his personal staff. Nor is it a new idea that the men who do the winnowing can exercise extraordinary power. Clark Clifford, a perennial adviser to postwar Democratic administrations, remembers an Eisenhower aide telling him that Ike was spared night work because his staff boiled 150-page memoranda down to two pages. Clifford replied: "There is only one trouble. If I could be the fellow who prepares the two-page memo, I'd be President instead of Ike."
Zooming 'Em Past
In Richard Nixon's guard, Haldeman and Ehrlichman are each a chief. They perfected the precise logistical machine that was Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign organization. For that reason, they are sometimes erroneously dismissed as mere "advance men"—schedulers and arrangers who precede a touring politician. Though they lack serious background in Government, they have become far more than that. Haldeman was a Los Angeles advertising executive, Ehrlichman a real estate lawyer, before going to work for Nixon (see boxes).
The two men differ in style and function. Haldeman, says Herb Klein, Nixon's communications director, is "the city manager of the White House," the man who sees that things get done. He is in Nixon's office so often, says an associate, that "he's usually trying to get out at the same time everyone else is trying to get in." Haldeman runs his staff meetings tightly—"I bang 'em through hard and fast, I zoom 'em past" —and he is the only Nixon man who has no schedule of his own. His is shaped entirely by Nixon's.
At night, when Nixon is working in the Lincoln sitting room and wants something, it is Haldeman who jumps. Says Haldeman: "He reads a memo item that some project is under way, and he'll call me and say, 'Stop that, I don't want it done that way.' " One leading Republican, asked what would happen if he wanted a man to see the President over Haldeman's objections, snapped the answer: "He wouldn't see the President." There is a route of appeal —but it leads back to Haldeman. One long acquaintance says: "It would be difficult to