In the Shadow of the White House Read online

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  Copyright © 2017 by Joanne H. Haldeman

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  Set in Minion

  epub isbn: 9781945572371

  Book design by starling

  Interior photographs by Joanne H. Haldeman

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Haldeman, Joanne H., author.

  Title: In the Shadow of the White House : a memoir of Washington and Watergate years 1968–1978 / Jo Haldeman.|

  Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Genuine Vireo Book | New York, NY ; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572081

  Subjects: LCSH Haldeman, Jo. | Haldeman, H. R. (Harry R.), 1926-1993. | Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913-1994. | Watergate Affair, 1972-1974—Personal narratives. | United States—Politics and government—1968-1978. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Political

  Classification: LCC E860 .H35 2017 | DDC 364.1/32/0973—dc23

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Preface

  Part One

  Jo, We Need to Talk

  Nixon’s the One

  Let’s Win this One for Harry

  Mr. President-elect

  Alone in the Crowd

  Historically Significant

  Seashells

  Transition

  The Inauguration

  This Place is a Zoo

  Chief of Staff

  The Women Behind the Men

  Air Force One

  Say “Cheese”

  It’s Called the Watergate

  H. R. H. His Royal Highness

  The Presidents’ Men

  Part Two

  Super Non

  Camp David

  Things Are Never Going to Be the Same

  Shades of Gray

  Antisocial and Nonsocial

  Dignity in the White House

  Mr. Haldeman, It’s the President

  Flaps

  Parental Concerns

  Perks

  Weird

  All the King’s Krauts

  May I?

  The Silent Majority

  Newsmakers

  Overboard

  Can You Keep a Secret?

  Bob, We Need to Talk

  Tennis Lessons

  Here Comes the Bride

  Pentagon Papers and Peas

  What Would the President Do Without You?

  Washington Daze

  Housewives and Treason

  China

  A White House Docent Program

  A Third-Rate Burglary

  Georgetown, Here We Come

  Four More Years

  The Post Finally Does It

  White House Hatchet Man

  Ripping the Place Apart

  Flawless

  1,461 Days Left

  Part Three

  What’s Going to Happen, Will Happen

  Chip, Chip, Chip

  It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

  A Super-Major Watergate Day

  We’ll be Eaten Alive

  The Final Journal Entry

  An Outsider

  Wax Begonias

  The Ervin Show

  Under Siege

  Reservations?

  The Elusive Mr. Haldeman

  Nixon Bugged Himself

  Mr. Inside

  Son of Nixonstein

  The Attic and the Puppy

  The Saturday Night Massacre

  The Tapes, the Tapes, the Tapes

  The Long Wait is Over

  Expletive Deleted

  The Smoking Gun

  I Do Not Want to Go to Jail

  Resignation and a Pardon

  Friction Benefits Me

  Part Four

  An Arabian Tent and the Courtroom

  Had by His Boss

  John Wesley Dean, III

  Bedlam

  Intense, Tedious, and Boring

  Jeb Stuart Magruder

  An Island and a Monument

  Don’t Be Absurd, Jo

  Bob’s Day in Court

  Four Days of Cross-Examination

  John Daniel Ehrlichman

  From One Ham to Another

  Artfully Weaving the Web

  A Jar of Jam

  The Jury Deliberates

  We Have a Verdict

  Part Five

  Mike Wallace Interview

  I Find a Purpose

  Appeal Denied

  The David Frost Interviews

  Night Thoughts

  The Camp

  Handelman, You Have a Visit

  Good Days, Bad Days

  The Sewer Plant and Poppies

  A Commutation of Sentence

  Two Birthday Picnics

  The Ends of Power

  Six More Months

  Heat

  Truly Whole

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  By Evan Thomas

  In the summer of 2013, I went to visit Joanne “Jo” Haldeman to talk about her late husband, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. I was writing a biography of Richard Nixon, and I wanted to know more about his famously tough chief of staff. With his piercing eyes and flat-top crewcut, Haldeman was an intriguing mystery to me.

  Haldeman was arguably the most powerful White House chief of staff ever. He virtually created the command structure of the modern White House. Paul O’Neill, who served as a high-ranking official in the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations and then as George W. Bush’s secretary of the treasury, told me that Haldeman ran the tightest ship of any presidential staff. The quality of analysis and thinking was as high as that of any other modern White House, according to O’Neill.

  Haldeman made sure that decisions were reached and carried out, and that the president’s orders were followed up on. He seemed to relish his role as the enforcer. “Every president needs an SOB,” he once told a fellow aide. “And I’m Nixon’s.”

  The press began referring to Haldeman and his colleague John Ehrlichman as “the Berlin Wall,” and it’s true that Haldeman saw it as his job to protect and even wall off the secretive and lonely chief executive. Haldeman wanted to shield Nixon from the world and the world from Nixon. And yet Haldeman had great empathy for his boss. In his daily diary, he wrote with a kind of affectionate bemusement about the yearnings and quirks of the president he once described as the “strangest man I ever met.”

  I hoped that Jo Haldeman would help me better understand Nixon’s fall—and the failure of his otherwise brilliant top aide. She was in her mid-eighties when I visited her, but still very alert and alive with memories of her years in Washington. I had heard that she was writing her own memoir.

  Jo graciously received me at the Newpor
t Beach house where she was staying with her kids, as she has every summer for many years. My wife, Oscie (who went to high school with one of Jo’s daughters), and I found a handsome, elegant woman who has borne a great deal of suffering with dignity, strength, and good humor. Jo was open and warm with us, but she did not disguise a degree of sadness. She gave me a copy of her draft memoir, which I agreed not to quote from for my own book, but which helped inform my judgments, not just about H. R. Haldeman, but about his tortured boss.

  Jo was, throughout her marriage, devoted to her husband. She loved him and cared for him, stood by him, and tried to comfort him. But, for a time, her husband took her for granted and neglected her. So great was his duty to the president, so all-consumed was he by Nixon’s demanding and difficult personality, that Haldeman submerged his own humanity—and with it, his good judgment. Jo could only watch and suffer as her family was engulfed by tragedy.

  Jo’s memoir is a moving, gripping—indeed, at times, harrowing—story of the climb to power and the swift and terrible fall that awaits men who overreach and fail to heed their more human, softer sides (or their wiser and gentler wives). There are some comic moments—Nixon’s awkwardness is not to be believed. Like a Greek tragedy, the story is one of hubris, of overweening pride. But it is equally a story of love and redemption, a fascinating morality tale of a great marriage that almost dies, and then is reborn. It absorbed me, and it will keep you turning the pages as the Haldemans rise and fall—before finding truer meaning and even a measure of peace and forgiveness.

  This book is a personal account of my experience as the wife of H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, assistant to the president and chief of staff for President Richard Nixon. Spanning ten years, from 1968 through 1978, my memoir progresses from our early Washington days through Watergate and its aftermath.

  Jo Haldeman at #11 Bay Island, August 2013.

  Prologue

  “Grandmother, we’re studying Watergate in school.” This offhand comment, made by my oldest grandchild over Memorial Day weekend, 1995, was the seed that eventually grew into this book.

  My grandson’s remark and the casualness of it affected me deeply. It made me sad to think that a new generation of Haldemans was growing up with only a textbook explanation of Watergate, which would be portrayed as the defining event of the Nixon administration. As difficult and public as that time had been for us, our life in Washington had included so much more.

  I realized that it was important to me that our six grandchildren have a greater perspective on Bob’s and my extraordinary experience. Bob would have loved to talk to them about his role in the White House and the accomplishments and ideals of the Nixon presidency. He also would have openly shared his thoughts on the evolution of Watergate. But he had passed away eighteen months earlier, and that opportunity was gone. If our story was going to be told, I would have to be the one to do it. I made a commitment to myself to provide that legacy.

  My first attempt to reconstruct those years was to make a scrapbook for each grandchild, but I soon discovered that photographs and articles could not convey the whole story. I then took a memoir writing class. Although writing was new to me and did not come naturally, my commitment far outweighed my self-doubts.

  I always knew exactly where my story would begin—the sail with Bob in Newport, when I first became aware of what the future might hold for us after the 1968 Republican Convention. I worked to select the appropriate vignettes to carry the narrative along. Some were humorous, others were informative. I did my best to ensure that the content was factually correct and that the dialogue captured the essence of the individuals and the conversations. Eventually, I felt at ease expressing myself, and a book began to emerge.

  Most of my information came from weekly letters that I wrote to our families in California. I transferred the pertinent material onto index cards, which I categorized by subject and date. Two other invaluable resources were the many photographs I took and the scrapbooks I made to document our life in Washington. I referred to personal calendars, memorabilia, notes that I made on special occasions, and the journal I kept during the trial. To confirm dates and current events, I consulted Bob’s monthly White House calendar, magazine articles, newspaper stories, and the Internet. In addition, my reference materials included several books written about both the presidency in general and the Nixon administration specifically.

  When I experienced periods of doubt over my ability or authority to proceed, I was bolstered by a conversation I had with Bob in 1987. As he was preparing his keynote address on “Surviving Challenge and Trauma” for the Young Presidents’ Organization University in Venice, Italy, Bob raised that I, too, should participate in the program. I was stunned. What did I have to contribute?

  “Jo, you have a story to tell,” Bob insisted.

  Bob stressed how difficult it must have been to live with him as chief of staff, a driven man under great pressure, single-mindedly serving the president. He talked about how I dealt with the trauma of the Watergate trial and the ordeal of his imprisonment. He said that it was important for me to be forthright and honest, including my frustrations and our differences of opinion. Bob was steadfast in his conviction that I had a story to tell.

  Writing solely from my own perspective, I have tried to be as truthful and accurate as possible. I recognize that the recollections of others, including my own children, may differ from mine. In no way does this book cover everything our family experienced during this time period. This is not a story of our family. Neither is it Bob’s story, nor an explanation of Watergate.

  What follows is my story.

  Preface

  Bob and I had been married twenty years when we moved to Washington in 1969. It was a turbulent time in our country’s history. The generation gap was widening, and counterculture values were replacing past social and moral codes. Growing frustrations over the Vietnam War and racial and gender inequalities divided our nation.

  Technology was in its infancy and had not yet evolved from analog to digital. We lived in a world without personal computers or the Internet. We listened to music on vinyl records. We recorded events on film without sound. We watched twelve VHF channels on television sets with antennas and no recording devices. We went to a theater to see a movie. There were no CDs, DVDs, DVRs, iPods, iPads, Kindles, digital cameras, or videos.

  Telephones had rotary dials and had to be connected to the wall by a cord. We did not have answering machines, caller-ID, or cordless phones—let alone smartphones with voice mail and texting. It was expensive to call long-distance to another area code, and the most common way of communicating from afar was through letters.

  Terrorism was not an issue. There were no security checks at the airport, and friends and family members could accompany passengers to the boarding gate. A luxury Lincoln Continental sold for $6,046, and a gallon of gas was thirty-five cents. A domestic postage stamp cost six cents, and a double cheeseburger, forty-nine cents.

  The Haldeman family in Los Angeles, 1965.

  Part One

  California

  Jo, We Need to Talk

  July 1968

  “Jo, we need to talk.”

  Bob’s five words send out a red flag. Something’s up, but I know him too well to ask what it is. He’ll tell me when he’s ready.

  The two of us are about to go for a sail on his twelve-foot Sunfish, and we’re standing in water up to our waists. With beads of sweat glistening on his forehead, Bob tries to get the tiller connected. He forces a stubborn cotter key into place, while I steady the boat.

  We are at my parents’ summer home with our four children. For years, we have spent Bob’s month-long vacations here on Bay Island in Newport Beach, California. Ordinarily, Bob would be out sailing every afternoon, but not this year. He has been on the campaign trail with Richard Nixon, who is expected to become the Republicans’ presidential candidate at their convention next m
onth. This is nothing new for Bob. Over the past twelve years, he has taken periodic leaves of absence from his job in advertising to work on five Nixon campaigns.

  Mother and Dad, Adele and Joe Horton, wave from under a blue umbrella on the porch, as a gust of wind carries our little boat out into the bay. Our four children, Susan, Hank, Peter, and Ann, are swimming off the dock with other children from the island. For a while, I can hear their shouts, but soon, it’s just the rhythmic sound of the water slapping against the hull. Bob and I are alone, and it’s a good time to talk. I wait for him to begin.

  At last, he breaks the silence. “I need your input, Jo. But you have to promise not to repeat anything I tell you.”

  I nod.

  “As everyone knows, Nixon’s got the nomination in the bag,” Bob says. “And this time, I think he’s going the whole nine yards.”

  My grip on the side of the boat tightens. President Nixon. Is this possible? Two years after John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in 1960, Bob managed his unsuccessful campaign for governor of California. Will he really win this time?

  The wind is brisk in the turning basin as we tack back and forth. A gull screeches above us and dives for a fish.

  Bob continues, “If Nixon does get elected, I think there’s a good chance he’d offer me a job.” A pleased smile spreads across his face. “If I get the opportunity to work in the White House, I don’t see how I could pass it up.”

  I can’t believe it. What an incredible opportunity for him, as well as for the children and me. Up until this minute, the two of us have never talked about how a Nixon presidency might affect our lives. Suddenly, I see my husband in a different light. I swing around to get a good look at the tan, six-foot man bent over the tiller. With a closely cropped crew cut and piercing gray-green eyes, he looks confident and in control.

  Sailing on a reach, Bob heads for the leeward side of Harbor Island. It’s less windy, and we will be able to talk better. Being a pragmatist, he immediately begins discussing the logistics of a move to Washington. Through the years, he has been transferred several times as he climbed the corporate ladder. We have lived in New York, San Francisco, Connecticut, and Los Angeles. I tell him that I can handle another move and that the thought of living in our nation’s capital is thrilling.