Herbert G. Klein was a significant figure in both journalism and political history during the mid- to late Twentieth Century. Klein is best known as longtime advisor to Richard Nixon, and was with Nixon at peak moments in his career, including the Checkers Speech and 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 was known as one of Nixon’s chief advisors. But then, for reasons historians have never fully explored, he disappears from Nixon’s political landscape as well as from scholarly and public prominence.


This book establishes Herbert G. Klein as a formative figure in the Richard Nixon White House, whose contributions to Nixon’s press strategies, their subsequent impact on the president’s actions, attitudes, and eventual fall, have been largely overshadowed in scholarly literature. It explores the then-emerging, and now enduring, conflict between journalistic truth and presidential image. The work draws from previously unexplored materials on Klein in the Richard Nixon Presidential 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.