When H.R. Haldeman essentially predicted the world of today

One of my bedtime browsing books these days is 1980's The Book of Lists #2. It's amazing how much of it I remember from the early 1980s afternoons when I read page after page in the attic of the house on Willow Street in Montoursville. I'm also coming across things that meant little to me then, but are pretty cool now, such as Grace Kelly listing Marie Dressler as the greatest actress of all time, or Susan Kelz Sperling advocating for words such as bedswerver, bellytimber, merry-go-sorry, mubblefubbles and smellsmock to return to our daily lexicon.

Anyway, I was a bit gobsmacked when I read the passage pictured above in the David Wallechinsky-penned list "6 Outrageous Plans That Didn't Happen."

Citing the 1979 book The Shadow Presidents: The Secret History of the Chief Executives and Their Top Aides, by Michael Medved, the passage discusses an early 1970s idea by H.R. Haldeman (President Richard Nixon's chief of staff) to create something remarkably similar to the internet as we know it today by linking up all the homes in the United States. "There would be two-way communication. Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted. The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events," Haldeman is quoted as stating.

Wallechinsky adds speculatively: "One can almost see the dreamy eyes of Nixon and Haldeman as they sat around discussing a plan that would eliminate the need for newspapers."

Of course it was newspapers, most notably The Washington Post, that brought them down.

It wasn’t until a quarter-century after Haldeman’s early 1970s notion of an interconnected digital world that those ideas began to come to fruition. Haldeman died of cancer in 1993 and, near the end, he may well have been aware of the early 1990s rise of dial-up internet and web browsers and those soon-to-be-ubiquitous AOL CDs. The transformation was underway. A decade later, newspapers began to feel the deeply unfortunate pain of the internet's rise ...