Abstract
In the annals of political promises, few PR advisors have issued hollower pledges than White House communications director Herbert G Klein’s post-election vow that ‘truth will be the hallmark of the Nixon administration’.
Klein should have known better. He met Richard Nixon during his first campaign for Congress in 1946 and then worked as his press secretary in his subsequent races for governor, vice president and president – contests that were indelibly stained by Nixon’s trademark dishonesty.
Klein has long been one of Nixon’s most forgotten advisors, overshadowed by more infamous Watergate criminals HR Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, John Mitchell and dozens of other felons large and small, many of whom ended up in the penitentiary for their illegal abuses of power.
Wafa Unus, an assistant professor at Fitchburg State University, attempts to resurrect Klein’s stint in the Nixon White House, arguing that he ‘played a formidable role in the development of Nixon’s relationship with and response to the press’ (p. viii). Given Nixon’s notoriously toxic relationship with the news media, that is not a compliment.
Unus has mined eight boxes of Klein’s White House papers at the Nixon Library in California to produce an examination of Klein’s various attempts to get positive press for the President, primarily by focusing on local news outlets that were more sympathetic to Nixon than the national news media. Klein used honey rather than the vinegar that was Nixon’s preferred method of dealing with his media ‘enemies’.
Klein’s PR efforts, catalogued by the author, are mostly unremarkable, although some reveal in comical fashion Nixon’s petty and controlling obsession with his news coverage. In one case, he was incensed by an innocuous statement in the Wall Street Journal that his sleep schedule was ‘early to bed and early in the office’. Nixon thought it undercut his hardworking image and handed down orders through his chief-of-staff to the hapless Klein: ‘we need to kill the early to bed idea. As a matter of fact, the President almost never is in bed before 11:30 P.M. or midnight and he very frequently works well past midnight’ – and often wakes up in the middle of the night to work further. ‘All of these points ought to be got across so that we don’t let any early to bed myth set in as a result of [this] article’ (p. 121).
Unus writes that ‘Klein was arguably one of the more significant political figure[s] of the mid- to late twentieth century’ (p. vii). But that seems a stretch and is not supported by the evidence marshalled in her book. If anything, the author’s mind-numbing catalogue of Klein’s routine tasks reinforces the long-held view that he was an amiable but ineffectual aide deliberately given no genuine power, reluctantly kept on the White House payroll only because of his longtime loyalty to the President. Indeed, Klein was frequently the butt of Nixon’s bilious id as he barked out orders to rebuke journalists for slights real and imagined. When Klein proved unable to deliver the laudatory news coverage that Nixon thought his due, the President complained behind his back that Klein ‘just doesn’t have his head screwed on’ and is ‘not our guy at all’. Nixon ignored Klein’s advice to make nice with journalists and a disappointed Klein left the White House. In the end, as Watergate consumed the President and his top advisors, Klein proved lucky to have been eased out, his reputation still intact.
A Newsman in the Nixon White House consists of a preface and six chapters and often reads like a dissertation that has been insufficiently repurposed into book format. A plodding 16-page literature review summarizes and critiques various books, articles, dissertations and oral histories that deal with Nixon; it also explains search terms used by the author in several databases and the number of hits produced. Still, the author seems to have missed some important works by Nixon biographers, aides, scholars and journalists who covered the president, as well as other potentially relevant archives, including Klein’s pre-presidential papers at the University of Southern California. These sources could have added nuance and context, especially about Klein’s various efforts at damage control during the many Nixon scandals that preceded his elevation to the White House.
Unfortunately, Unus’s writing is often awkward and ungrammatical, and the publisher did the author a disservice by failing to correct many errors of spelling, punctuation, redundancy and improper word usage. The bibliography is organized in a bizarrely inconsistent fashion: some works are listed alphabetically based on the last name of the author, some based on the first name of the author and some based on the first word of the title – all rolled into a single, confusing mish-mash that makes it difficult to search for specific works. Hopefully, the publisher will do better in future books published in its ‘Studies in Political Communication’ series.