NIXON'S "GERMANS"

By Henry Kissinger

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.

Haldeman was free of personal ambition, or at least his ambition was fulfilled in the position he occupied. And yet there resided in this almost inhuman detachment the seeds of the eventual destruction of the Nixon Administration. Haldeman had no deep experience in national politics, no feel for the propriety, scope and limits of presidential prerogative. He sought unquestioning obedience from his staff. He selected miniature editions of himself--people with no political past, whose loyalty was determined by a chain of command and whose devotion was vouchsafed by the opportunity to play a part in great events. The White House staffs attitude to the President resembled that of an advertising agency--whence most came--to an exclusive, temperamental client. They were expediters, not balance wheels. And once the machine started skidding, they accelerated its descent rather than braking it in time.

Haldeman's relations with me had ingredients for friction. A conservative middle-class Californian, with all the sentiments and suspicions of that breed, he had rarely met a man of my background (though he overestimated how close I really was to the despised Establishment). He had stuck with Nixon after the gubernatorial defeat of 1962 and genuinely believed in Nixon's mission. It was bound to be irritating to him to see a member of the Rockefeller team, one who had consistently opposed Nixon, garner so much publicity. But he rarely showed jealousy.

Haldeman's attitude to me was fundamentally a reflection of Nixon's. When Haldeman harassed me, I could be sure that it was to carry out some design of the President's. Nixon was convinced that my special talents would flourish best under conditions of personal insecurity; he periodically saw to it that I developed some doubts about my standing with him.

But any tensions caused by these practices had largely evaporated in early 1973, once I had decided to resign. In the second half of April 1973, therefore, my feelings toward both Haldeman and Ehrlichman were tinged with sadness. We had been colleagues during turbulent years. I knew and liked their wives and children. They ruminated on their chances of survival but not on the circumstances that had produced their dilemma. And I am not sure that they really fully understood.

They had not seen their conduct as a "coverup" but as a means to protect the Administration from opponents working against the national interest as they conceived it. Or they were more skillful actors than I think possible.

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