Analysis -- Haldeman's Diaries Reopen `Window On The Old Nixon'

WASHINGTON - If the weeks following Richard Nixon's death amounted to a warm, fuzzy festival of rehabilitation, now comes a bracing reality check: "The Haldeman Diaries."

Just in case anyone forgot.

"It's like the skunk appearing at the wedding," said historian Michael Beschloss of yesterday's release of the posthumous reflections on White House life by the disgraced president's top aide, providing a detailed, unvarnished view of Nixon's famous but lately ignored dark side.

"Every time the reputation of the New Nixon begins to gather momentum, there will always be a new tape transcript or some other document to open a window on the Old Nixon. In a way, it's like the scene in `The Wizard of Oz' where the dog keeps pulling back the curtain and the wizard says, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.' This is going to happen to Nixon for the next 10, 20, 40 years."

Monday's and yesterday's installments of ABC's "Nightline" were devoted to H.R. Haldeman's diary, published by Putnam with an initial press run of 100,000, and have thrown a spotlight on Nixon's crude racism and anti-Semitism, as well as his peculiar penchant for paranoia and getting even.

While all those American flags still fly at half staff, Haldeman, who died last November at 67, revives, in laconic sentences scribbled on note pads or dictated into a tape machine, the Nixon of yore. That Nixon was obsessed with Sen. Edward Kennedy's sex life ("Also Kissinger has reported to him that Teddy Kennedy is now in a position practically of being a total animal"), contemptuous of blacks ("Pointed out that there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true"), fearful of Jews ("There was considerable discussion of the terrible problem arising from the total Jewish domination of the media").

In deadpan prose, the late chief of staff also offers revealing, often embarrassing glimpses of Nixon's friends and associates, such as the Rev. Billy Graham ("Graham has the strong feeling that the Bible says that there are satanic Jews, and that's where our problem arises"), Pat Buchanan ("had his first session with President this afternoon and discovered when he left, after an hour session about press and TV briefings, that his fly was open"), and the mercurial Henry Kissinger ("(President) raised the question of whether Henry's gotten past the point in basic stability to where he is no longer useful and maybe even dangerous").

Yesterday, Graham denied he ever said what is quoted in Haldeman's entry - one of thousands that were generally recorded the same day that the events occurred - while Kennedy had no comment, and Kissinger was out of the country and unreachable. But Haldeman, who spent more than a year in prison for his Watergate conviction on conspiracy and obstruction of justice, was certainly in a position to observe what he wrote about and proved a reliable witness in the past.

"It's incredible stuff," said former Sen. George McGovern, Nixon's Democratic opponent in the 1972 campaign, who later befriended him. "Until he left the White House," McGovern said, "Nixon was an unscrupulous opportunist at almost every point and had, I think, unhealthy if not paranoid ingredients in his personal makeup. . . . But in the years since he left the White House, I'm convinced he became much more humane."

McGovern, who met with Nixon several times in the past decade and attended his funeral, is among the former enemies who have lent their names, in one way or another, to Nixon's attempts to reshape himself for posterity. He credits Nixon's diplomatic approaches to the Soviet Union and China as an important legacy to world peace, despite his dubious distinction of being the only president to resign.

Not so Watergate scholar Stanley Kutler, a professor at the famously liberal University of Wisconsin.

"For the last 20 years, Richard Nixon and his disciples have tried to orchestrate his own revision of history, as part of his campaign for elder statesman, and invariably his own words and deeds dating back to his presidency regularly pop up in new forms to overwhelm his appeal to history for a favorable judgment," Kutler said. "I suppose you could say that Nixon's campaign for history has been aborted" by the Haldeman diaries, Kutler asserted.

"I guess it's time for people to say, let's leave Nixon to contemporary history," said Harvard don and Kennedy family loyalist John Kenneth Galbraith, who giggled when various diary entries were read to him over the phone. "The first rough draft of history wasn't all that wrong," he added. "I have always had a slight memory of the fact that I was on Nixon's enemies list with two check marks by my name."