Vicious Trivia

...Also, Ehrlichman denies knowledge of the Watergate cover-up, which "could be explained by John Dean, if he'd tell the truth...

...But, then, why remind us...

...What made the plot titillating was the "smoking pistol" White House tape of June 23,1972, which suggested Ehrlichman knew what Nixon was referring to when he said, "We protected Helms from One helluva lot of things...

...This year brings us the tenth anniversary of Watergate, if one takes the first exposed symptom—a snafued break-in—as the symbol for the greater malady...

...Daniel Schorr (Daniel Schorr, who won three Emmy awards for his Watergate coverage for CBS News, is now senior correspondent of Ted Turner's Cable News Network...

...The non-fiction cheap shot follows Ehrlichman's fictional cheap shot...

...That is only the start of the grand anticlimax...

...I'd bet," snarls Ehrlichman without offering any evidence, "that Jerry Ford promised to pardon Richard Nixon and that the promise was made before Nixon's resignation...

...Ehrlichman remains an angry, bitter man, feeling betrayed by Nixon, who resigned and was pardoned, but would not first issue pardons to save his associates from prison terms...

...Among the indicted and unindicted, the conspirators and the coconspirators, a decade should have engendered a broader perspective on how they came to fail America and tarnish confidence in government...

...Readers will know from earlier leaks of Ehrlichman's more "newsworthy" assertions that President Nixon conferred with Chief Justice Warren Burger about a pending desegregation case, and that Nixon considered blacks to be "genetically inferior to whites...

...After ten years we are still faced with the "modified, limited hangout," a phrase that, incidentally, Ehrlichman says was not his, but Haldeman's...

...The twilight recollections make up a bleak collection, from the Memoirs of Richard M. Nixon, who concluded that "the Presidency is not a finishing school," down through John Dean, maudlin about his Blind Ambition...

...In his non-fiction account, Ehrlichman confesses he had no idea what Nixon was talking about...

...Indeed, to read Ehrlichman, you would believe he was a victim of Watergate...

...The enemies' list syndrome has simply turned inward...

...After this litany of unrelieved hateful gossip by a onetime Nixon aide who deemed himself the intellectual superior of the others, one comes away from Witness to Power with the impression that life in the Nixon White House must have been even more sickening than we thought...

...Nor, says Ehrlichman, did he give orders for Howard Hunt to leave the country after the break-in, or to "deep six" the contents of Hunt's safe...

...Ehrlichman professes also not to know the reason for the Watergate break-in...

...It's like old times on the Watergate beat...

...FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who displayed "girlie" pinups in the basement den of his home, reported to Nixon in 1969 "disturbing information" that Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Dwight Chapin were lovers in a White House homosexual coterie...

...Charles W. Colson, the self-styled White House hatchet-man, who managed to be Born Again...

...Get it...

...His novel, The Company, which was adapted for televison as Washington Behind Closed Doors, insinuated mutual blackmail between Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms, the President agreeing to hide evidence of the spy chief's involvement in an assassination in return for a similar favor about the Watergate conspiracy...

...But do readers know—or wish to know—that Nixon treated his wife as "a respected but limited partner," that President Eisenhower was so "bitter towards Nixon" that he shunned the candidate's 1960 campaign rallies, that Nixon chose Annenberg as ambassador to Britain because "the son of a racketeer and a Jew" would shake up "the Ivy League bluebloods who thought they owned that embassy...

...Thus, Nixon, in 1964, after addressing the San Francisco Republican convention, drank too much in his suite and made "clumsy passes at a young woman in the group," convincing Ehrlichman that "Nixon's drinking would cost him any chance of a return to public life...

...Fittingly, I am reviewing this cheap-shot anthology from a photocopy of advance proofs that Ehrlichman sent to a score of close friends and associates, with admonitions of strict confidentiality...

...James McCord knows more than he's said, I'd guess," as well as Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy, John Dean, John Mitchell, and "maybe some CIA people...

...Maurice Stans, who found himself unjustly enmeshed in The Terrors of Justice...

...The anger shows in his venom against others, and Ehrlichman emerges not only as a self-exonerating apologist, but a prudish teetotaler, mingling his moral judgments with his political ones...

...The proofs were widely leaked by those who wanted to help him, hurt him, or just enjoy a nostalgic taste of Deep Throatdom...

...Ehrlichman says he convinced FBI associate Director Mark Felt, in an interrogation, of his association with "a satisfactory number of women...

...Thus, Ambassador Walter Annenberg, "apparently intoxicated" as host of a party for Tricia Nixon in London, "put his arm around her shoulder in a most objectionable and familiar fashion...

...I'd been conned, I felt used and stupid and very angry...

...Haldeman, who vacuously philosophized on The Ends of Power, and, now, John Ehrlichman, merely a Witness to Power...

...Ehrlichman may consider this sweet revenge for his wounds ("some of the scars still hurt"), but he has only stabbed himself again with his vicious trivia...

...Alas, what we continue to get from the Watergate bunch are mainly apologia and mutual recriminations...

...He can muster up no deeper judgment of his Nixon tenure, after ten years, than: "We had a professional relationship that went as sour as a relationship can, and no one likes to be reminded of bad times...