He was loyal to a fault, and paid for it. According to congressional investigators, Haldeman was Nixon’s righthand man and alter ego–the gatekeeper, go-between and implementer-in-chief for the president’s 1972 re-election campaign and the administration’s covert war against Vietnam dissenters. These activities merged disastrously on June 17, 1972, when five men working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President were arrested in what Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, dismissively described as a “third-rate burglary attempt” at the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex. Over the next 10 months, Haldeman helped Nixon in his doomed attempt to “contain” the scandal and resist Sen. Sam Ervin’s special Watergate committee. Like others in Nixon’s palace guard, Haldeman himself became a target of the investigation and was cast aside. He and Ehrlichman were forced to resign on April 30, 1973, and were indicted for their roles in the cover-up. Haldeman was convicted of perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice and served 18 months in a federal prison at Lompoc. Calif.
In interviews and in a 1978 memoir, “The Ends of Power,” Haldeman conceded “errors in judgment” and expressed remorse at his role in the debacle that consumed the Nixon presidency. But his admissions of fault seemed grudging and legalistic, and it is probable he never told all he knew about Nixon’s role, the Watergate cover-up or the administration’s abusive tactics against its political enemies. Haldeman, who joined Nixon’s staff in 1956 after a successful career in advertising, seemed to see politics largely as a matter of public relations and image manipulation–and by his own statement, he broadly failed to understand the public’s outrage as Senate investigators slowly unearthed the evidence of the administration’s campaign to persecute and smear its political enemies. He “was not an interesting villain,” the journalist Elizabeth Drew wrote. “He comes across as the dogged mechanic–a shallow, unself-examining man, malleable in the service of power.” But, Drew added, Haldeman and the others on Nixon’s staff “almost took apart our system.”
Released from prison in 1978, Haldeman went back to the private sector as a real-estate developer and consultant. His contacts with Nixon were infrequent and, he said, “stilted,” since “we disagree on some of the elements and interpretations of what happened at Watergate and why.” (Whatever their differences, Nixon last week remembered Haldeman as “a man of rare intelligence, strength, integrity and courage.”) In 1990, Haldeman surfaced in Moscow on a postperestroika real-estate project, and in 1992 he made a rare public appearance at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda to discuss Watergate with a group of California high-school students. “Don’t believe what you read in history, books,” Haldeman told them, insisting that he had been “improperly convicted” because of “the mood of the country” in 1975. He referred to the late John J. Sirica–the jurist who forced the Watergate burglars to reveal their White House connection–as a “so-called judge.” He also implied that White House Counsel John W. Dean, whose dramatic testimony before the Senate investigating committee was one of the first real cracks in the wall of lies and silence, had somehow been behind the break-in himself.
All this suggests Haldeman never quite made peace with his unenviable niche in history–and it is somehow ironic that his death last week, on Nov. 12, came ust two days short of the 20th anniversary of the discovery of the infamous “18-and-a-half-minute gap.” That was the mysterious electronic hum, allegedly created by Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods, that blotted out a crucial conversation in the Oval Office on June 20,1972, three days after the breakin. Haldeman had ordered the installation of the secret taping system, which played so large a role in Nixon’s undoing, and it was he who was talking to Nixon on the June 20 tape. He takes its secrets–and whatever else he knew–to final judgment.
