Haldeman, Intensely Loyal, Key to Access to Nixon

Through the four years and four months of the Nixon administration, Harry Robbins (Bob) Haldeman has been the least visible and most powerful of that small band of White House assistants who could claim to be close to President Nixon.

At the White House he was the chief of staff, and from that position he wielded enormous power that flowed directly from his absolute control over both the people and the paper that reached the President's inner office.

He was aided in the exercise of that power by a personal relationship with Mr. Nixon that had been fostered over years of working together, stretching back to the mid-1950s and the Nixon campaign for re-election as vice president. Said to be Mr. Nixon's closest and most trusted aide, Haldeman is intensely loyal to the President and in Washington gathered around himself a group of tight-lipped young men who shared his devotion to the President and, in turn, were absolutely loyal to Haldeman.

Among them were former presidential appointments secretary Dwight L. Chapin, deputy Nixon campaign director Jeb Stuart Magruder and former presidential assistant Gordon Strachan -- names that kept cropping up in the investigations of the Watergate bugging incident and related allegations of political espionage and sabotage during the Nixon re-election campaign in 1972. Chapin, Magruder and Strachan have left the administration.

Slowly, the links between these loyal Haldeman aides and the ever-growing Watergate scandal became public. As late as April 4, Sen. Sam J. Ervin (D-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate select committee investigating the Watergate incident, issued a formal statement saying that "as of this time " there was "no evidence of any nature" to link Haldeman personally with any illegal activities during the 1972 campaign.

Nevertheless, sources familiar with both the Senate committee investigation and a separate federal grand jury probe into the bugging said investigators considered the role of Haldeman as the key to understanding the undercover activities of the 1972 Nixon campaign.

As far back as last October, a Justice Department source, referring to the espionage-sabotage campaign, said, "This is a Haldeman operation."

It was a curious position for Haldeman, who in almost 20 years of association with Mr. Nixon has been a largely invisible technician, a manager of people and paper flow who rarely voiced his own political convictions and who cherished, above all else, efficiency and his own personal anonymity.

Haldeman had stayed in the background through the first Nixon administration and the beginning months of the second as his power in the White House grew steadily. A Christian Scientist who neither smokes nor drinks, he would rarely show up in photographs of White House social functions or informal get-togethers of Nixon aides. He accumulated and held his power through hard, grinding work, arriving early at the White House and staying late. "Work consumes most of my father's time," Haldeman's son, Hank, 19, said in an interview last year.

And, according to most accounts, he exercised his power ruthlessly. Best known for his trademark, the closely cropped, 1950s style crewcut, Haldeman in the White House was portrayed as an unsmiling, curt taskmaster who guarded access to the President so closely he discouraged Republican senators and Cabinet secretaries from even trying to see Mr. Nixon. In one of the most often repeated Haldeman remarks, former White House speechwriter Richard Whalen, in his book "Catch the Falling Flag," quotes Haldeman as saying: "Every President needs an S.O.B. -- and I'm Nixon's."

They first met -- the President and self-described "President's S.O.B." -- in 1951 when Haldeman, on his first trip to Washington, visited Richard Nixon, the senator from California. Haldeman was fascinated by the Alger Hiss case and Sen. Nixon's involvement in it.

Besides an interest in anticommunism, Haldeman and Nixon shared a common area of birth and upbringing -- Southern California. But other than that accident of geography, there was little in common in the backgrounds of Nixon, the son of the poor Whittier, Calif., grocer, and Haldeman, oldest son of an upper-middle-class Los Angeles businessman.