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Reviewing his undergraduate days at Williams College, Magruder recalls that it was a dilemma over his sex life that led him to initiate his famous friendship with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr. Magruder was dating a Vassar girl named Judy: "We felt a great physical attraction for one another, one that caused us both to be uncertain as to how far we should carry our relationship. Finally I went to Bill Coffin for advice." The reader is left wondering what counsel Coffin offered.
Hack Away. Magruder's book suggests that he was, and still is, oblivious of the moral ramifications of many acts he confesses so candidly. He recounts working on an automobile assembly line the summer after his freshman year. The foreman taught him how to cheat systematically on the job: "I did as the foreman suggested, and even then it was hard to keep up." Period. On to the next anecdote.
Twenty years later, he tried to talk White House Counsel Charles Colson out of sending a phony supporter of Senator George McGovern to a homosexual rally "because it was likely that the trick would be found out." When he discovered that Political Prankster Donald Segretti was busily sabotaging the Democrats during the Wisconsin and New Hampshire primaries, he sent John Mitchell a memo headed "Potentially Embarrassing Situation," urging that Segretti be supervised "lest he harm the [Republican] campaign." (The job of overseeing Segretti went to E. Howard Hunt.)
Magruder is matter of fact to the point of Boy Scout insouciance in reporting how he dutifully carried out an order from Nixon to spread the word that an unfriendly journalist was a Communist agent, or how he produced, on H.R. Haldeman's demand, an eight-point plan to discredit NBC's David Brinkley. Haldeman was pleased. "Jeb, damn good! Hack away. H.," he wrote on Magruder's memo.
Looking back on the Watergate break-in itself, Magruder has mostly tactical regret: "[G. Gordon] Liddy should have had a middleman between himself and the burglars so they could have no idea they were working for us, and even if arrested wouldn't implicate us." Liddy & Co. reflected "an exaggerated view of American political reality" shared by the White House.
The term "public relations" is ubiquitous in the book, just as the concept has been obsessional in the Nixon Administration. Magruder says that the very words public relations were capitalized in presidential memos. The day after the C.R.P. wiretappers were arrested, a solicitous bodyguard in Los Angeles asked Magruder why he seemed worried, and Magruder tried to appear carefree by replying, "It's just a little PR problem back in Washington."