That doesn't exactly sound like ol' Bob was leaping to the defense of the Nixon administration.
Well, you gotta realize he's saving that part for another book, a full memoir of the splendor of the Nixon years, in which Watergate'll be a minor episode. Haldeman says duty called him to straighten out Watergate after the Nixon/Frost interviews, which incidentally cast him and Ehrlichman as the villains Nixon was just trying to protect out of a sense of humanity. Ol' Bob's revisionist history runs like this: "I believed in tough campaigning too, but even from my hardline standpoint, Nixon went too far at times. But political strategy wasn't my province, only the mechanics."
Right.
We can thank ol' Bob for keeping Nixon's aberrant behavior from destroying the nation: "Nixon said, 'There are ways to do it. Goddamnit, sneak in in the middle of the night...' (A perfect example of classic Nixonian rhetorical overkill.) I said, 'We sure shouldn't take the risk of getting us blown out of the water before the election.' (A perfect example of classic Haldeman effort to defuse another potential bomb)," Haldeman writes. Some other time, maybe, huh, Bob?
Gee thanks, Bob. We'll look for you in ol' Roustaboula, San Francisco, Honolulu/You gonna have to leave us now, we know/But we'll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass and in the ones we love/You gonna make us lonesome when you go.
Don't go composing eulogies yet, this book just came out last week. And it's got some folks in a dither, like Ehrlichman, who blasted Haldeman in Time magazine for representing his tennis serve as a "lash," and describing his neck cords as "straining." No such luck, says Ehrlichman, and what really got to him was Haldeman's use of the Woodward/Bernstein method of reconstructing quotes from memory, lines I never quoth, says Ehrlichman.
He should be happy they spelled his name right.
He should be happy he's not in prison any more, unlike the South Africans and Chileans Nixon/Kissinger helped put away, not to mention the Vietnamese and Cambodians they put away for keeps.
Watch out now--keep your Crimson radichic out of this piece.
Yeah, like Haldeman, the second most powerful man in the country, kept out any ideas of a better society from his job. Like he says, all he was there for was "simply to enable the President to function most effectively." Haldeman and Ehrlichman were advance men; their only vision of society came from managing campaigns and advertising accounts. Haldeman's biggie at J. Walter Thompson was Black Flag--he didn't mind anybody eradicating people who were pestering Nixon.
You're still here.
Hey, I just started, and I'm getting my kicks in while they're down.