The Palace Guard

Days before his death, Lyndon Johnson entertained a group of old political acquaintances by telling them of a recent visit to the White House, now occupied by his successor Richard Nixon. Johnson marveled that while his old phone allowed him to talk to anyone in government he wished to chew out at the moment, Nixon's hotline had only three buttons. "Just three buttons," reads the quote in "The Palace Guard." "And they all go to Germans!" As Dan Rather and Gary Paul Gates go on to explain, Nixon would have benefited from disconnecting two of the lines, the ones that reached chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and domestic affairs advisor John Ehrlichman. Together the two men effectively blocked all access to the President during most of his time in office, with only one exception, that being chief White House diplomat Henry Kissinger (German #3). By insulating Nixon so, they not only shielded him from a broader range of ideas, but instilled an institutional paranoia that abetted the blockheaded Watergate fiasco that brought them all down. It's tempting to read "The Palace Guard" with an eye on co-author Rather, especially as he departs his own place of prominence this week over a scandal given the name "Memogate." Rather's knee-jerk liberalism is on display for sure, as when the book criticizes Nixon's opposition to forced busing as a blatant sop to racists while crediting him only for initiatives that revealed non-conservative thinking, like welfare expansion and reaching out to communist China. But "The Palace Guard" is not written in a mean-spirited way. In fact, it's quite entertaining for the snarky but sensitive way it presents its characters. It's not only Haldeman and Ehrlichman who get the spotlight. Much time is spent on people like Wally Hinkel, the secretary of the interior who goes Green on Nixon and is frozen out after balking over Kent State. Arthur Burns, an early cabinet leader, is dubbed "Super Bore," which the book notes "was no small achievement when you stop and consider the place was something less than a haven for gifted raconteurs." One exception to that rule, the effulgent future Democratic senator and urban affairs advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, mentors Nixon for a time on taking a more liberal policy course, thus earning Rather and Gates' approval, until he is undone by some memos leaked to the public, probably by Haldeman, that gets Moynihan in trouble with blacks and academics and undercuts his authority. That and, suggest the authors, there was less need for Nixon to protect himself by tacking left after his most likely opponent in the 1972 election drove himself off a bridge in Chappaquiddick. The book's drawbacks include a lack of direct quotations (surprising given the fact one of the authors was CBS's White House reporter at the time) and a divided sense of what its supposed to be about, the various cabinet officers Nixon drew around him at various times or the way two of these officers (Haldeman and Ehrlic

This is an interesting examination of the inner workings of Nixon's organization, concentrating in good part upon aides John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman. I bet most White House operations are run as strictly as Nixon's was -- you simply MUST have exemplary efficiency and effectiveness at that level -- though without the stainless steel quality that those two palace guards imbued.My favorite episode was the one wherein the wife of a terminally ill senator petitioned the president's office for Nixon to visit the man on his deathbed. Haldeman evaluated the situation and determined it would be more politically beneficial for Nixon to be seen consoling the bereaved widow... so good old Bob wrote this immortal instruction to the staff member who'd forwarded the request: "Wait until he dies."

"The Palace Guard" is the story of the two most powerful underlings in the Nixon Administration, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Together, they rose to the pinacle of success by shielding their paranoid boss from all those with whom he did not wish to associate. And together they fell, both resigning on the last day of April 1973 as the heat from the Watergate scandal began to scorch the second term President who had been reelected by a landslide only months before. Rather and Gates's account, while lacking historical perspective, is fascinating in how it depicts two power hungry men who moved largely in the shadows. They served their boss well, even to the end when it was hoped that by their sacrifice he would be saved. Political junkies will love their story.