Haldeman Dies; Nixon’s Top Aide, Key Watergate Figure

H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff under President Richard Nixon who went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, died at his home in Santa Barbara early Friday. He was 67.

His death was attributed to abdominal cancer.

A square-jawed, crew-cut disciplinarian in his Washington heyday, Haldeman was foremost among a group of Californians Nixon brought to the White House. He had lived quietly in retirement since the early 1980s, lecturing occasionally, advising small new business enterprises, gardening and riding horseback with his wife, Joann.

Although he was forced to resign as the Watergate scandal approached its climax and later spent 18 months in federal prison for trying to conceal the scandal that cost Nixon his presidency, Haldeman remained on cordial terms with his old boss.

From his home in New Jersey, Nixon released a statement Friday: “The Nixon family will always remember Bob and Jo Haldeman as cherished members of our official family.

“Ever since he joined my vice presidential staff as a young advance man in the 1956 election, I have known Bob Haldeman to be a man of rare intelligence, strength, integrity and courage,” the former President said. “As my White House chief of staff, he played an indispensable role in turbulent times as our Administration undertook a broad range of initiatives at home and abroad.”

Ten months after his resignation as ramrod of the White House staff, Haldeman was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

On New Year’s Day, 1975, he was convicted, along with John N. Mitchell, former attorney general and Nixon campaign chief, and John D. Ehrlichman, former White House domestic policy chief. Haldeman served his prison time at Lompoc, Calif.

From Nixon’s inauguration in January, 1969, until April 30, 1973, Haldeman was not only head of the White House staff but Nixon’s closest confidant. He was said to have been the first official with whom Nixon spoke in the morning and the last to see him at night.

It was Haldeman who controlled access to the Oval Office, often angering Nixon’s allies as much as the Administration’s critics. Until Watergate, he seemed to relish his role.

“Every President needs a son of a bitch,” he was quoted as saying, “and I’m Nixon’s.”

“I tried to run a tight ship,” he told Senate investigators who grilled him in 1973 about the unfolding Watergate scandal, “and I think I was successful most of the time.”

As the scandal unfolded, it was disclosed that Haldeman was the only ranking White House official who knew that Nixon had secretly tape-recorded conversations in his office.

The tapes, which Nixon was forced to relinquish after a fight that went to the Supreme Court, produced the evidence that forced Nixon from office. It was proof that Nixon had known of his lieutenants’ efforts to conceal Administration involvement in a burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex on June 17, 1972.

In “The Ends of Power,” a memoir published in 1978, Haldeman said that he believed the bungled burglary was triggered by Nixon’s desire to obtain evidence that Democratic Chairman Lawrence F. O’Brien was on the payroll of the late Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire industrialist.

He acknowledged that Nixon had been a part of the cover-up from the beginning and documents released nearly 10 years later seemed to support that widely held theory.

A January, 1971, memo from Nixon to Haldeman said: “It would appear that the time is approaching when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes.”

It went on to suggest that White House aide Charles W. Colson, later implicated in a host of White House “dirty tricks,” pursue the matter.

Haldeman himself took part in the incriminating conversation that proved to be the “smoking gun” sought by investigators. It was a discussion in which Nixon instructed Haldeman to have the CIA intercede with the FBI to get it to call off its effort to trace the financing of the burglary.

With its discovery, Nixon, facing nearly certain impeachment, accepted the advice of staunch congressional supporters and resigned.

Haldeman later accepted blame for the fateful disclosure and for others that destroyed Nixon’s presidency.

In an interview on CBS, he said that he had committed a “failure in judgment in advising Nixon not to destroy the tapes after their existence became known.”

“I never--stupidly--did really think the thing through. . . . Nor did I think through the enormous damage that would be done to me and to Richard Nixon and to all the other participants,” he said. “I thought it was a good idea to keep them for the historical value. And beyond that, because at that time Watergate was developing, I thought they would be valuable to the President in knowing what had actually been said at various meetings in his office.”

The son of an upper class businessman, Haldeman grew up in Los Angeles, attended the University of Redlands and USC before a stint in the Navy and further study at UCLA.

As a young man, he was a staunch anti-communist who was fascinated by the sensational trial of Alger Hiss, the State Department official accused of lying about his association with communists.

During a trip to Washington in 1951, he visited the office of then-Sen. Richard Nixon. Taken with the senator’s anti-communist fervor, he became an ardent supporter, working in Nixon campaigns through the 1950s and 1960s. He managed Nixon’s unsuccessful race for governor of California in 1962, as well as his run for the presidency.

By the time Nixon reached the White House, Haldeman was an executive in the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.

With the encouragement of former California Lt. Gov. Robert Finch, he resigned that job to become White House chief of staff.

Although his role was to coordinate the operation of the President’s staff, he became a personal confidant and a participant in the Administration’s major policy decisions. He remained a Nixon fan, as well, traveling the world with the President and accumulating a massive personal film record of Nixon’s journeys.

Until he began his alliance with Nixon, he later said, he had no interest in politics. And though he made his reputation as the consummate Nixon loyalist, he insisted in his memoir that he was interested in Nixon only as a political leader.

But while they went on their separate ways after the Watergate debacle, Haldeman said that he retained his respect for the former President, once calling Nixon “probably one of the least understood, most complex, most confusing men who has ever sat in the White House.”

Haldeman was himself an enigmatic figure, for he had assiduously avoided the Washington social scene during his years in the capital.

“He was probably one of the more extraordinary public servants of the last 20 years,” said Lawrence M. Higby, his White House aide who is now executive vice president for marketing of The Times.

“Before he ever went to the White House, he had a career in public service exceeding what most people accomplish in a lifetime,” Higby said.

Before he was 40, he had been a director of the state college system, president of the UCLA Alumni Assn. and the first chairman of the California Institute of the Arts.

In the White House, Haldeman helped shape the Nixon Administration from the day he arrived and was largely responsible for bringing in his college friend, Ehrlichman, as domestic policy chief and Ronald Ziegler as press secretary.

Alexander M. Haig Jr., who became chief of staff when Haldeman was forced out, called Haldeman’s service to the President “impeccably selfless.”

“He was a fine man and he will be missed by those who really knew him,” Haig said.

After his release from prison, Haldeman generally avoided politics. While he did not show the bitterness later displayed by Ehrlichman and some of the others involved in Watergate, he would later caution students learning about it for the first time: “Don’t believe what you read in the history books (just) because of the fact that those words are printed.”

Speaking to students at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace last year, he called the work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the most energetic of Watergate journalist-investigators, “grossly inaccurate” and an effort at “self-glorification.”

But once back in California, Haldeman was generally a more mellow figure than he had been in Washington. His appearance changed markedly with the disappearance of his bristling crew cut and the adoption of a fashionably long hairstyle.

After his release from Lompoc, he became associated with Los Angeles developer and businessman David Murdock, gaining an interest in hotels and steakhouses, among other investments.

Haldeman was a Christian Scientist.

The family said that no funeral service is planned.

In addition to his widow, he is survived by four children, Hank and Peter Haldeman of Los Angeles and Susan Haldeman and Ann Coppe of San Francisco.