The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House

This is unbelievable stuff for a historian. On the scene notes, taken immediately (Haldeman wrote this daily).

For a layman, it is revealing how little press this book has received, given the amazing information inside. Bretton Woods is covered to an extent I have not seen elsewhere, even though Haldeman himself doesn't seem to appreciate what was happening.

Watergate is of course covered in excruciating detail.

But what I found most interesting was the mundane day to day activities of Nixon, most of which appeared to be concerned with handling Kissinger. I strongly suspect the book could be extrapolated to most (all?) of his successors.

In summary: an invaluable peek into the Twentieth Century Executive branch.

After visiting the Nixon Presidential Library in Loma Linda, CA and reading the 1,000 page plus Nixon memoir, I was interested in getting another point of view on the Nixon years. What better way then to read the daily diary entries of his Chief of Staff?

Mistake.

I stuck it out for the first 350 pages of this 680 page before giving up.

This might be a valuable document for historians but why G. P. Putnam's agreed to publish this for general consumption remains a mystery to me. If you were to remove all references of 'I met X', 'I met X for Y hours', 'I went to Camp David/the White House/Key Biscayne/ your choice' then I would guess that you could remove 2/3rds of the book. After suffering through the first 50% of this tome I just leafed through remaining diary entries and paused when I thought the entries might be more interesting. Thus I read the visit to China attentively. Once again, the observations were painfully superficial (this is the first time in decades that a U.S. president visited China!) and the excerpts did not delve deeper than how to manage the hurt feelings of Kissinger, how to manage then-Secretary of State Bill Rogers, how the press was portraying the event and was this to the President's liking.

I came away with three main impressions: neither the first VP (Agnew) nor the first Secretary of State (Rogers) seemed to be welcome members of the President's inner circle; Nixon was always very concerned with how the press portrayed his actions; and by the time Watergate spiraled out of control the White House no longer was able to keep its focus on important issues.

Not a book for general consumption.

If you think he was boring in real life, just wait until you read his diaries. There are little interesting snippets here and there, but oh, my, the trivia that he recorded! (And this was at the end of long, intense, frustrating days at work. The guy was nuts.)

fantastic book...of course its HIS side of the story but some great insight into Nixon. A must read for anyone interested in 70's history.

I didn't purchase this through Amazon, but feel the need to post due to the timely nature of it. 2017, Trump, All the Presidents Men series. This book is an insiders look at a train wreck. The path of the current administration are eerily similar to that of Nixon. I literally can read sections of the book and they sound exactly like Trump. Haldeman had no idea the contributions he was making by keeping a diary like this. (I wonder if James Comey's looks something like this book.) The short hand in the book is a little bit hard to follow at times with only letters defining a person. It's great that some of the entries even have a blip about what happened in the future pertaining to that entry. It definitely is something I would urge political junkies to read, along with anyone thinking that this current presidency is doomed.

I'm looking forward to reading this. Book stated "new" and it arrived in very good condition, I don't believe this book is in print any longer, but clearly this item was well taken care of and I would agree that it appears new. Great buy for the money if the events of this time in history are of interest to you. For all you Nixon fans out there, "Our Nixon" is a documentary available through iTunes that is well worth the time and money. Based on what I'm anticipating to read in this book and the reviews of it, it should make for a nice companion to the documentary that was incredibly interesting and was entirely created from home movie footage taken by Nixon White House insiders including HR Haldeman. Enjoy!

I think it is a very interesting book with an insider feel to it. It is literally a large edited (due to size) diary. A shorthand style of writing was used by Haldeman, and after he started using a dictation recorder the daily entries became larger and more detailed. I purchased this book used for just a few dollars since it has been out of print for more than a decade, I think it is a good buy though the it stated in the acknowledgements or foreword that a CD came with the original book that contained an unedited version.

Very heavy contents.But that was a tiny thing. Worth to try reading through.

Only Haldeman could so convincingly demonstrate what horrible, corrupt, and thoroughly despicable people he, Nixon, and the rest of Nixon's inner circle were.

excellent service/descritpion