White House returned to normal, I started planning another of the foreign junkets I took frequently now that I had decided to leave the Administration. Fielding and I abandoned our crisis regimen of sandwiches at our desks and resumed leisurely lunches at the mess.
“Well, Johnny,” Fred said as we walked slowly back from lunch one day in mid-May, “I read back in January where Jeane Dixon predicted Nixon would have a serious scandal this year but would survive it. It’s amazing, she was right. We’ve had it, and the President was untouched.” I agreed.
We were all wrong, of course. The machinery had long been cranking through the White House toward a scandal that would grind down the President himself. And I was part of the machinery.
Chapter Three: The Tickler
THE WHITE HOUSE APPARATUS went into motion each morning at about seven. Bud Krogh had indeed been late when I encountered him on my first day. The daily staff meeting, chaired jointly by John Ehrlichman and George Shultz, began at 7:30. Usually by seven a sleepy-eyed handful of those who attended this meeting would be in the mess munching cereal and silently reading their news summaries to prepare for the day. Ehrlichman was a regular breakfast-clubber. He sat at a small table near the wall with the newspaper in his face, sometimes lifting one eye to see who else was there, and departing at about 7:25 for the Roosevelt Room to preside.
At 8:15 Ehrlichman and Shultz adjourned their meeting and walked down the hall to the more important session in Haldeman’s office, where they were joined by Henry Kissinger, Chuck Colson, Bryce Harlow (later it was MacGregor, then Timmons), Peter M. Flanigan, an assistant to the President, and Ron Ziegler. “The 8:15” flushed up matters the President’s top-level aides thought he should be thinking about that day, for Haldeman would go from the 8:15 to the President’s office.
After a few months at my job, I suggested to Higby that it seemed appropriate for the counsel to attend the 8:15. Haldeman did not agree but said I could, if I wished, attend the 7:30. For several weeks I dragged my body out of bed at 5:45 to make it to the mess by seven, and then on to the Roosevelt Room. I listened to the discussion of proposed supplemental foreign-assistance appropriations; Shultz’s professorial analysis of the need for a forty-five-day extension of the no-strike period in a railway labor-management dispute; a speechwriter’s report on what the President might say upon signing legislation giving the Blue Lake lands back to the Taos Pueblo Indians. All routine business not involving the counsel’s office. Quietly I stopped attending, and no one missed me. The meetings were simply a mechanical technique to make sure that what the President wanted was being done. However, they were not as strict or severe a method as the tickler.
The discipline of Haldeman’s tickler was unrelenting. I had felt it with my first assignment, the action memorandum on Scanlan’s Monthly, with its due date “Wednesday, August 5, 1970, at 2:00 P.M.” That one I had answered on time, but subsequently I spent too much time preparing my answers to a few action memoranda, let the due dates slide by, and discovered the consequences. First a secretary in the staff secretary’s office called my secretary, asking where the answer was, and when the explanation was found unsatisfactory a very bitchy Larry Higby called to say, “What’s the matter, Dean, can’t you meet a deadline? Do you think you’re someone special?” When I explained I was working on the response, Higby snapped, “Work a little harder.” Higby was chewed out by Haldeman when the paper did not flow as the chief of staff wanted, so he leaned on others.
The tickler was an extension of Haldeman, and was probably more responsible for the chief of staff’s awesome reputation than was his own aluminum personality. It was a self-perpetuating paper monster, with a computer’s
“Well, Johnny,” Fred said as we walked slowly back from lunch one day in mid-May, “I read back in January where Jeane Dixon predicted Nixon would have a serious scandal this year but would survive it. It’s amazing, she was right. We’ve had it, and the President was untouched.” I agreed.
We were all wrong, of course. The machinery had long been cranking through the White House toward a scandal that would grind down the President himself. And I was part of the machinery.
Chapter Three: The Tickler
THE WHITE HOUSE APPARATUS went into motion each morning at about seven. Bud Krogh had indeed been late when I encountered him on my first day. The daily staff meeting, chaired jointly by John Ehrlichman and George Shultz, began at 7:30. Usually by seven a sleepy-eyed handful of those who attended this meeting would be in the mess munching cereal and silently reading their news summaries to prepare for the day. Ehrlichman was a regular breakfast-clubber. He sat at a small table near the wall with the newspaper in his face, sometimes lifting one eye to see who else was there, and departing at about 7:25 for the Roosevelt Room to preside.
At 8:15 Ehrlichman and Shultz adjourned their meeting and walked down the hall to the more important session in Haldeman’s office, where they were joined by Henry Kissinger, Chuck Colson, Bryce Harlow (later it was MacGregor, then Timmons), Peter M. Flanigan, an assistant to the President, and Ron Ziegler. “The 8:15” flushed up matters the President’s top-level aides thought he should be thinking about that day, for Haldeman would go from the 8:15 to the President’s office.
After a few months at my job, I suggested to Higby that it seemed appropriate for the counsel to attend the 8:15. Haldeman did not agree but said I could, if I wished, attend the 7:30. For several weeks I dragged my body out of bed at 5:45 to make it to the mess by seven, and then on to the Roosevelt Room. I listened to the discussion of proposed supplemental foreign-assistance appropriations; Shultz’s professorial analysis of the need for a forty-five-day extension of the no-strike period in a railway labor-management dispute; a speechwriter’s report on what the President might say upon signing legislation giving the Blue Lake lands back to the Taos Pueblo Indians. All routine business not involving the counsel’s office. Quietly I stopped attending, and no one missed me. The meetings were simply a mechanical technique to make sure that what the President wanted was being done. However, they were not as strict or severe a method as the tickler.
The discipline of Haldeman’s tickler was unrelenting. I had felt it with my first assignment, the action memorandum on Scanlan’s Monthly, with its due date “Wednesday, August 5, 1970, at 2:00 P.M.” That one I had answered on time, but subsequently I spent too much time preparing my answers to a few action memoranda, let the due dates slide by, and discovered the consequences. First a secretary in the staff secretary’s office called my secretary, asking where the answer was, and when the explanation was found unsatisfactory a very bitchy Larry Higby called to say, “What’s the matter, Dean, can’t you meet a deadline? Do you think you’re someone special?” When I explained I was working on the response, Higby snapped, “Work a little harder.” Higby was chewed out by Haldeman when the paper did not flow as the chief of staff wanted, so he leaned on others.
The tickler was an extension of Haldeman, and was probably more responsible for the chief of staff’s awesome reputation than was his own aluminum personality. It was a self-perpetuating paper monster, with a computer’s
Similar Books
