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Magruder's evocation of the prevailing mentality in the White House is, in its way, nearly as revealing as that of the Nixon transcripts. In the best locker-room and fraternity tradition, all the President's men had their nicknames. John Dean told the Ervin committee last year about H.R. ("The Brush") Haldeman and John ("The Pipe") Mitchell, but Magruder adds to the list. Transportation Secretary John Volpe was "The Bus Driver"; Defense Secretary Melvin Laird was "The Bullet"; Postmaster General Winton Blount was "The Postman"; and Martha Mitchell was known as "The Account," an advertising term for a client. Nixon himself was above nicknames; in memos and meetings he was referred to as "RN," or "the President," or occasionally by his military code name, "Searchlight."
Mere Mortals. Nixon's once much feared palace guard emerges as more petty than sinister. Magruder describes how Haldeman once gave his young aide Larry Higby a brutal dressing-down for failing to provide a golf cart to take him 200 yds. across the presidential compound at San Clemente. Haldeman loved to make his far-flung assistants jump by activating their Pageboy beepers, especially when traveling in Air Force One: "[Nixon] and Haldeman and Chapin and the others in the traveling entourage would get up there, 30,000 ft. above the earth, and something would happen to them. It must have been the close-in atmosphere, or perhaps the plane's well-stocked bar or something about the altitude that made them feel Godlike, but they would invariably begin to rain down calls upon us mere mortals here on earth, and there was no way to talk to them or reason with them." Magruder characterizes Press Secretary Ron Ziegler as "a former Disneyland guide who was scarcely more than a ventriloquist's dummy." Magruder came to the White House from a cosmetics-marketing firm.
The No. 1 villain of Magruder's piece is Colson, whom he calls "an evil genius." Despite his reputation as a grandmother-stomper, Colson comes across as almost pathetically small-time. When not waging interoffice battles against then Communications Director Herbert Klein, Colson seems to have been preoccupied with setting up something called Silent Majority, Inc., a proposed conservative research institute to counter the influence of the liberal Brookings Institution.
The author manages to make even Liddy seem like a logical addition to the Nixon team. After cataloguing examples of Liddy's unstable, potentially homicidal behavior, Magruder concludes blandly: "My personal distaste for him aside, he seemed like the right man for the dual job we envisioned [legal counsel and supersleuth for C.R.P.] . . . He was, in short, a professional, and ours was a campaign that looked to professionals for guidance . . . Perhaps it was just bad luck that he got there, or perhaps there was a certain historical inevitability to Liddy—perhaps if there had been no Liddy we would have created one." Elsewhere he quotes White House Aide Gordon Strachan as saying more succinctly, "Liddy's a Hitler, but at least he's our Hitler."