A newsman in the Nixon White House: Herbert Klein and the creation of the Office of Communications, 1969 to 1973

Herbert G. Klein was one of the important political figures of the mid to late 20th Century. Born in 1918, Klein’s career spanned 63 years. He retired as Editor-in-Chief of Copley Press, a company he worked for from the start of his career as a young journalist covering an up-and-coming Richard Nixon and was active in public affairs up to his death in 2009. Klein is best known as longtime advisor to Richard Nixon, and was with Nixon at peak moments in his career, including the Checkers Speech, as well as Nixon’s 1960 and 1962 campaigns. Upon Nixon’s election as President, Klein became the White House Director of Communications, a new position Klein was tasked with designing. For four years, Klein is known as one of Nixon’s chief advisors. But then, for reasons historians never have fully explored, he disappears from Nixon’s political landscape as well as from scholarly and public prominence.

The purpose of this dissertation is to establish Herbert G. Klein as a formative figure in the Richard Nixon White House, whose contributions to Nixon’s television strategies, their subsequent impact on the President’s actions and attitudes and eventual fall, have been largely overshadowed in the scholarly literature. The work draws from previously unexplored materials on Klein in the Nixon Library. The account is notable for the first examination of Klein’s only known oral history, lessening a gap in the existing literature on Nixon’s aides and his relationship with the media.