Haldeman Diaries

It's amazing the amount of time spent on incidental and personality conflicts when the bigger issues were floating around the Nixon administration. However, as a businessman, it is refreshing to know that the office of the CEO of the world's greatest power got (and probably still gets bogged down) in small issues, just like an corporation! A great read. It was hard to put the book down.

I appreciated this book in the same way that I did Lady Bird Johnson's "White House Diary". It is an excellent peek into the daily workings of the Nixon White House. It's amazing to read this very large volume and realize how much time was wasted by Nixon trying to analyze and manage personalities on his staff, particularly the feud between Kissinger and Rogers. Perhaps every White House staff is like this. We won't know because no one since has put out this type of detailed record. In the Watergate era I considered Haldeman, along with Erlichman, to be some of the most repulsive characters in American politics. My opinion of Haldeman hasn't changed; he's still a man I'd rather not meet. His defense that he was Nixon's mouthpiece doesn't hold water any more than military men who insist they were "following orders". My impression upon finishing the book is relief that I've never had to work in such an awful atmosphere. Great historical record, though.

As Chief-of-Staff, Bob Haldeman is to be commended for keeping such a detailed review of his White House years even during his "fall from grace" in 1973...That being said, the reader should be ready to be taken on an exhaustive and sometimes hard to follow review of the Nixon Administration. A previous knowledge of the Nixon Presidency and particularly Watergate is essential to get the most from this book. I found myself skipping pages as discussion after discussion about Grand Jury testimony and policy meetings on Watergate flooded the chapters towards the end of this book. I gave it 4 stars because the beginning of the book dealing with the initiation of the Nixon Presidency and the day-to-day observations (pre-Watergate) of an intelligent and observant White House executive far outweigh the "burned-out" and frustrated entries that close the book. The most surprising conclusion that I came away with was that Haldeman seemed to be a warm/accomodating "real" person, not the "Nixon Nazi" that he's been made out to be in other works on Watergate. Good reading

Nothing in this is going to break Watergate wide open. But if you are interested in the goings-ons in the NIxon White House, this is an excellent book. A little slow at times, but well worth reading.

H.R. Haldeman was Pres. Nixon's chief of staff, and right-hand man. Thus, he was privy to all the secrets and intrigue of Nixon's presidency. Haldeman kept an exhaustive written and oral diary of those years, and now they are available in book form. The book is an abridged edition of the diary (but it's still quite long) and is facinating reading.