The media tended to portray H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman as Prussian drillmasters implementing with their own sadistic frills malevolent orders from the Oval Office. I was generally contrasted favorably with them. I was awarded the white hat, they the black. This was an oversimplification of all our roles.
In some respects, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were rivals. On the whole, Ehrlichman sponsored or supported domestic policies that were humane and progressive. He favored reducing defense expenditures beyond a point I considered prudent so as to free resources for social programs; several times I appealed his interventions to Nixon. Ehrlichman was shaken by student protest following the Cambodian incursions. He had three teen-age children, and their travail touched him deeply. But Nixon's favor depended on one's readiness to fall in with the paranoid cult of the tough guy. The conspiracy of the press, the hostility of the Establishment, the flatulence of the Georgetown set were permanent features of Nixon's conversation, which one challenged at the cost of exclusion from the inner circle.
Rough talk and confrontational tactics did not come naturally to Ehrlichman. But every presidential assistant is tempted to purchase greater influence by humoring a President's moods. Ehrlichman overcompensated. To the mounting protest demonstrations, the leaks and the drift of the dissenters into extralegal activity, Ehrlichman responded with a zeal that was sometimes excessive.
Toward me, Ehrlichman showed a mixture of comradely good will and testy jealousy. Inevitably he resented the contrast drawn between us by the media. He had been associated with Nixon for too long for the President to tolerate on his part social contacts and attitudes that in my case were treated as a congenital defect. Torn between his prohibited predilections to conciliate and his political survival, Ehrlichman adopted a supercilious manner. Outsiders considered it a mark of arrogance; its real fount was ambivalence.
Haldeman, though by instinct conservative, was at bottom uninterested in policy. Convinced that image defined reality, Haldeman went along with, and frequently encouraged, Nixon's nearly obsessive belief that all his difficulties were caused by inadequate public relations. Nixon never could rid himself of the delusion that only the failings of his media staff kept him from receiving the acclaim he associated with John F. Kennedy. President and chief of staff devoted much time to discussing how to manipulate the press—a doomed quest so long as both rejected a serious dialogue with the hated, feared and secretly envied representatives of the media.
Later, Haldeman was accused of isolating Nixon. This was unjust. Nixon's isolation was self-imposed. He dreaded meeting strangers. He was unable to give direct orders to those who disagreed with him. The vaunted Haldeman procedures were an effort to compensate for these weaknesses. If Haldeman was eventually destroyed because he carried out the President's wishes too literally, it is also my impression that many instructions given in the heat of emotion never went further than the yellow pads where Haldeman dutifully noted them.