You really think you're funny, don't you? I was gonna give you the low-down on the new H.R. Haldeman book, but now...

Do you mean H.R. "Bob" Nazi crew-cut Medusa-eyed s.o.b. Berlin Wall Lord High Executioner Haldeman?

You've read the book already!

No, no, calm down. The only time I ever saw the Senatuh Sam Show, H.R. Bob was testifying. Is his book worth reading?

Well, it won't be after I tell you the five good stories in it. The first one is the headline, the inflatable woman. The second one is Haldeman's explanation of how Mike Wallace came to pay him $25,000 to go on 60 Minutes and stonewall in 1975: It seems that Wallace saw Haldeman leaning out of a hotel window towards Pennsylvania Ave muttering that, "Nixon was the weirdest man ever to live in the White House."

What's so startling about that? C'mon, tell me the other stories.

Well, Haldeman explains that Nixon needed Kissinger because "dealing with the State Department is like watching an elephant become pregnant. Everything's done on a very high level, there's a lot of commotion, and it takes 22 months for anything to happen."

Say, ol' H.R. Bob sure can turn a phrase, huh?

No, no, he was quoting Franklin Roosevelt there, and it's about the best quote in the book. There was the one about the Great Governmental Re-Organization of 1972 in which Nixon laid down only one limitation on the hirings: "No Goddamn Harvard men, you understand! Under no condition!"

So that's why my father was turned down in '72.

No, kiddo, that was because of his war crimes. But let me tell you about the Secretary of Transportation. Remember Claude Brinegar?

That's like asking me to remember the Alamo, where Rusty Calley killed all those Arabs.

It's like this: They had to look for ethnic balance, right? Up to the Transportation post they just went for the best people, right?

Yeah, John Connally, Caspar Weinberger, Robert Bork.

Right, but they needed a Catholic, so Fred Malek, who surfaced here as a fellow at the Institute of Politics in '75, got all enthused about Claude Brinegar, the president of Union Oil of California, young and Catholic and from the West Coast, Malek said. According to Haldeman, Nixon wasn't so sure. "His name doesn't sound Catholic to me." But Malek assured him that "he's Irish too." So after two weeks in office, Brinegar, the Irish Catholic appointee, revealed that he was a German Presbyterian.