Before the Deluge

By Ed Magnuson

THE PALACE GUARD

by DAN RATHER and GARY PAUL GATES 326 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

Another book about the overanalyzed and all too familiar Nixon Administration? Yes. But this time two CBS television newsmen have sliced through conventional explanations with some offbeat conclusions about what went wrong. The most provocative: the single event that did most to ruin Nixon was, of all things, Chappaquiddick.

Dan Rather, whose acerbic press-conference quizzing of Nixon outraged the former President's defenders, and his lesser-known colleague, Gary Paul Gates, make a brisk and balanced case for their assertion. Nixon, they write, had an obsessive fear of a political threat from the liberal Ted Kennedy. The President attempted to blunt this threat with his own flock of political moderates: Arthur Burns and Pat Moynihan in the White House, former Governors George Romney, Wally Hickel and John Volpe, as well as Robert Finch, in the Cabinet. But Kennedy's accident in July 1969 eliminated Nixon's need to keep moderates around. Chappaquiddick, the authors contend, opened the way for Nixon's harshly conservative advisers and image hucksters to take over.

Officious Clerk. Above all, The Palace Guard tells precisely how H.R. Haldeman, clearly the villain of the book, schemed to silence or neutralize the voices of moderation and close the Oval Office door to all but his own favorites. At first, say Rather and Gates, Haldeman tentatively tested his influence by telling Burns to leave a note, rather than re-enter Nixon's office to deliver an afterthought. The dignified Burns considered it unseemly to argue with this "officious clerk"--and Haldeman was emboldened. When he personally pulled his U.C.L.A. classmate, fellow Eagle Scout and protege, John Ehrlichman, into position as chief domestic-affairs adviser, the die was cast.

At that point, the authors believe, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell were determined to humiliate, rather than pacify, the left. They reinforced Nixon's own suspicions and joined him in trying to destroy Daniel Ellsberg, a symbol of antiwar, anti-Middle America dissent, for leaking the Pentagon papers. The plumbers were installed. Spiro Agnew was unleashed. Enemy lists flourished. Watergate followed.

If the theory seems simplistic, Rather and Gates nevertheless embellish it with fresh details of the intrigue around Nixon and new White House anecdotes. Haldeman, they claim, cemented his relationship with Nixon in 1961 by bolstering the then defeated candidate's shattered ego through weeks of patient listening and encouragement as Nixon labored over Six Crises. It is ironic, then, that the authors finally blame Haldeman for the act that ultimately finished Nixon: the secret taping of White House conversations. It was Haldeman's idea, they suggest, that after Nixon finished his second term, the tapes would be carefully edited and selected conversations would be left to stand as a monument to Richard Nixon and his presidency --"a sort of electronic answer to Mount Rushmore."

Ed Magunson

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