On April 30, 1973, Richard Nixon told a national TV audience that he was reluctantly accepting the resignations of "two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know," White House Chief of Staff H.R. (Bob) Haldeman and Domestic Adviser John Ehrlichman. The two, who were good friends in Washington and had known each other since student days at U.C.L.A., are both now serving prison terms for their part in the Watergate coverup. Since Haldeman's new book, The Ends of Power, blames Nixon for both launching and covering up Watergate, TIME asked Ehrlichman, himself the author of the highly successful roman a clef, The Company, to review Haldeman's effort. Ehrlichman's critique:
"John Ehrlichman threw a tennis ball high in the air, and lashed at it, his neck cords straining. " —The Ends of Power
So help me, that's in there, on page 232. And it isn't supposed to be a joke. But anyone who has seen my tennis serve will tell you that the verb lash is not the one most people use. The last time my neck cords were straining is an event lost in the mists of memory.
Bob Haldeman's book is full of odd little passages like that; dramatic hyperbole, overstatement and stereotype in place of thoughtful description. Some of these excesses are funny. Others are full of poison, and they cause me to wonder about the relationship between Bob Haldeman and the writer, Joseph DiMona. Haldeman has seen my tennis serve, and he knows my character and personality; DiMona does not. Perhaps the wrong fellow picked the verbs.
As in a cowboy movie, it is never hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in this book. Everyone mentioned wears an adjective, and wears it, and wears it, until it is worn out. Subtlety is not the problem with Mr. DiMona's style. Perhaps there was so little time to correct the proofs and get the books into the stores that Bob Haldeman just shrugged at these quirks of the writer's fancy and left them in. It was only after the book was set in type that Haldeman began making the necessary final corrections. By then, no doubt, he was under intense pressure to hurry and to keep the changes to a minimum. Perhaps that accounts for the factual inaccuracies too.
The Ends of Power is a book that should be read, nevertheless, for what it tells of Richard Nixon the man. No one knows Nixon better than Haldeman. He was Nixon's campaign manager as far back as the 1962 California campaign. Even before that, Haldeman had begun to create the extraordinarily successful techniques that would eventually bring Nixon to the White House. Haldeman tailored Nixon's schedule, his staff—even, to some extent, his family—to better market the strange man who was his constant candidate for 20 years. Even in Haldeman's 1962 campaign, dirty tricks were an established part of the Nixon mode.
Four or five times the reader is told that Bob Haldeman is a direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense bastard who always tells it like it is. That is the Haldeman I remember. But time after time, the accounts of Watergate events in his book are couched in the vague terms of the diplomat who is walking on eggs.