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So familiar is some of the portraiture that the intrigued reader finds himself wondering which physical details Ehrlichman has changed to keep his fictional license legal. Did this leader of the free world, as he writes, often emerge from the lavatory to greet foreign dignitaries with a slightly damp hand shake? Nixon, like Monckton, scorned hat and gloves. Was it really to preserve a macho image or to copy John F. Kennedy? And what of Carl Tessler, guttural-voiced escapee from Vienna and Harvard who serves as Monckton's foreign policy expert and chief of the National Security Council? As NSC chief, Kissinger had an influence over the President that Ehrlichman resented. In The Company Tessler is described as an egotistical coward whose mouth was "small, almost cherubic," with "fat cheeks and three layers of chins," and "yellowing teeth." On his hands "all the fingernails had been torn away again and again by his teeth . . . the middle knuckles of his third fingers were red from constant, nervous chewing."*
Ehrlichman has been widely reported as being nearly $500,000 in debt to his lawyers, a plight with which many Americans can sympathize. The tendency these days is to assume that it does not matter what kind of book you write for money. Yet The Company, for all its diverting tidbits, should not be accepted (or dismissed) as good, dirty fun. In it, using a mask of fiction, the author continues with great tenacity and skill a campaign begun by the White House to vilify past Presidents and, indeed, American political institutions, so that Richard Nixon's behavior would seem less reprehensible by contrast. With that in view Nixon tried to declassify material to blacken Kennedy and Johnson.
With that in view, one recalls, E. Howard Hunt (Lars Haglund) once forged a cable linking Kennedy personally to the political murder of Viet Nam President Ngo Dinh Diem. How much more convenient to revive a similar charge in fiction, transferring it to Rio de Muerte — and to imply that through a tortuous trail of Democratic cover-up and CIA blackmail, the road came back to Watergate. Timothy Foote
* Kissinger chews his nails, but not his knuckles.