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The Book of the Week is “In the Shadow of the White House, A Memoir of the Washington and Watergate Years 1968-1978” by Jo Haldeman, published in 2017.
As is well known, at the time this book was written, America was entering the Trump Era, some of whose aspects smacked of the Nixon Era. In addition, the author also could not escape writing with 20/20 hindsight, as almost fifty years had passed since her husband was implicated in the major historical event known as “Watergate.”
In October 1970, while backing his Republican party’s candidates at rallies during the midterm races amid expletive-shouting hecklers, Nixon said,
“The four-letter word that is the most powerful of any in the world is ‘vote.’ “
Strangely enough, in 1972, Nixon was reelected in a landslide due to low voter turnout– possibly due to influential propaganda and dirty tricks that discouraged or kept Americans from voting.
Bob Haldeman was the president’s advisor and lapdog, at his beck and call 24/7. He got the most face-time with Nixon as chief of staff, giving orders to underlings from wherever he was; it was not uncommon in the course of two weeks for the two to travel from Camp David to a foreign country to Key Biscayne in Florida (where Nixon had a residence) to another foreign country to New York City to San Clemente in California (where Nixon had another residence). Haldeman’s wife Jo and their four children sometimes accompanied them.
Nixon vacillated between: deep insecurities that required frequent consulting with his gatekeepers Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Henry Kissinger; and megalomania that led him to install a taping system in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room in February 1971. This, in an effort to record his administration’s every word and move, for posterity. He wanted to give his name undying fame. The listening devices of the two previous presidencies had been removed years before.
The author commented in her notes that in May 1974 (three months before Nixon resigned), “Although [Nixon] proposes national health insurance in a radio address, it goes nowhere and his public support continues to erode.”
The author’s husband was one of five defendants (there were many more) who were all tried together in a court of law for their roles in the Watergate scandal. Their cases dragged on through 1974.
The tenor of the times was such that alpha males with hubris syndrome populated the White House, Haldeman included. On August 6, 1974, he beseeched Nixon to pardon him and all his alleged Watergate co-conspirators (twenty-one of whom went to jail), and also to salve the leaders’ consciences– grant amnesty to all men who violated the Selective Service Act during the Vietnam War.
Read the book to learn Haldeman’s fate, and much more about the experiences of the author’s family during a particularly turbulent time in American history.