Nation: How Nixon's White House Works

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Nixon a memo. Nixon dislikes "the laying on of tongues," as White House locution has it, and much prefers spending three minutes reading a memo to hearing someone out in person for a quarter of an hour. Papers come down from the President with the scrawled notation: "Any comment? RMN." A neat red square is clipped to any urgent memo, any document seen by a key staffer is duly initialed, and everyone knows the deadlines for getting a note to Nixon. "If I have something ready by 2 p.m.," one aide says, "I know that the President will see it by that night."

That is when things are running smoothly. In a crisis, it is a different matter. When a staffer or Cabinet member has an overwhelming reason to see the President, Haldeman insists, they do. He says: "The Postmaster General got in without any trouble at all during the postal strike. Suppose Wally Hickel calls up at 2 a.m. and says there's been a disaster in oil pollution. He says, 'I've got to talk to the President.' He gets to talk to him." The whole staff system, Haldeman contends, "is set up to get the pertinent information in. It spends all its time on that, and I think it's successful. This myth that there's a little group that manages and isolates the President—it's a myth and nothing else."

The screening is arduous, however. While Lyndon Johnson proudly showed visitors his 60-button telephone console, Nixon has just three direct lines—to Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Kissinger. Only four Cabinet members can count on getting through to Nixon at any time: Mitchell, of course, and Secretary of State William Rogers, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Labor Secretary George Shultz. Every program proposal is "staffed out," since Nixon dislikes to be unprepared when a visitor springs an idea on him. Haldeman supplies him with dossiers on everyone he is to see each day. In the competition for Nixon's attention, many ideas die without getting to his desk. Says Haldeman: "Not many people have discovered electricity."

While Haldeman's traffic-cop role at Nixon's office door has not changed since he assumed it in January 1969, Ehrlichman's responsibilities have continually grown and shifted. "I have a feeling that Ehrlichman is a little astonished that he's where he is," says one associate. He began as White House counsel and troubleshooter—policing conflicts of interest on the staff, helping assemble a package of crime legislation, managing Nixon's financial affairs (including sale of the President's New York apartment).

Idea Generator

At that point, Arthur Burns, a moderate conservative who now heads the Federal Reserve, and Pat Moynihan, a Democrat who served Kennedy and Johnson, were the top two staff men on domestic affairs. Each pushed his own ideas, Cabinet members pressed for theirs, and Nixon found himself in need of a coordinator of domestic programs comparable to Henry Kissinger in foreign affairs. The President put Ehrlichman in the job and will doubtless upgrade him further on July 1, when the Domestic Affairs Council—a counterpart to the National Security Council—comes into being.

Ehrlichman admits that he is no expert on the problems of the U.S., but he does not apologize. "I shouldn't be a generator of