The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (10 page)

By Wednesday night,
the balloting was finally at hand. Mitchell sat in his Hilton Plaza suite overlooking the Atlantic, fielding phone calls from across the country. He was eager for the action to begin. “I was with Mitchell before the convention opened,”
Newsweek
’s Hal Bruno recalled, “and somebody called in to say, ‘Governor Rhodes of Ohio is now coming out for Nixon.’ And Mitchell said, ‘Tell him the train left the station,’ because they had been working on Rhodes for a long time, and he kept horsing around with them. And one thing you didn’t do was horse around with John Mitchell—because he remembered.” Nixon approached the moment with less equanimity. Minutes before roll call, he dialed Mitchell’s deputy and spewed into the phone: “All right, Kleindienst, it’s your ass now.” Kleindienst was in no mood for it. “Fuck you, Nixon,” he spat back—perhaps the only man ever to speak those words. Nixon hung up—then redialed. “You’re right,” he said, by way of apology.

As the balloting progressed, Nixon’s anxiety melted away. His years of toiling in the Republican vineyard and Mitchell’s months of meticulous preparation had finally paid off. Mitchell perched himself in a command trailer near the convention floor and coolly puffed his pipe. “John showed no emotion,” an aide recalled. “[T]he delegate counting and hunting,” said Hal Bruno, “they had it wired, and Mitchell was superb at this.” In the end, despite defections from Ohio and Pennsylvania, Nixon secured 692 delegates, 25 more than necessary for the nomination. Among the fickle Southern delegations, Mitchell’s courting of Thurmond yielded handsome dividends. Of the thirteen Southern caucus states, Reagan captured a majority in only one—ironically, Thurmond’s own South Carolina. It was Wisconsin—where Mitchell first showed his managerial prowess—that put Nixon over the top.
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When Nixon mounted the stage to accept the nomination that he and Mitchell had worked so hard to secure, the candidate trumpeted the themes that drove him through that turbulent, bloody year. Among Nixon’s promises, perhaps the most compelling rationale for his counterrevolutionary candidacy, was his vow to restore law and order. Throughout the campaign, he had promised to replace Ramsey Clark, whom Nixon cast as soft on crime and national security. “If we are to restore order and respect for law in this country,” Nixon told the delegates, “there is one place we are going to begin. We are going to have a new attorney general of the United States of America!” Mitchell, like the rest of the conventioneers, applauded.
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After months of Democratic
Party turmoil—manifest most vividly in the skull-cracking riot outside the party’s Chicago convention hall—Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey emerged as the Democratic nominee for president. A former mayor of Minneapolis and senator from Minnesota, he had long promoted civil rights and other progressive causes. As LBJ’s vice president, however, Humphrey found himself outside the loop, belittled by the bully Texan who regarded him with wariness and contempt. For his ’68 campaign, Humphrey adopted “The Politics of Joy” as his slogan; but the balding, ruddy-faced vice president exuded precious little of it. Struggling to exploit the advantages of incumbency while dodging responsibility for the war waged by the administration he embodied, Humphrey evoked indifference on the center-right, hatred from the Democratic left. Humphrey, in turn, viewed Nixon’s rise, contemporaneous with his own, with fear and loathing. “Nixon’s belief in corporations and corporate managers bordered on religion,” he sneered.
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There was also, as befit the volatile year, a wild-card candidate: Alabama governor George Wallace. Four years earlier, the snarling segregationist had campaigned against LBJ in the Democratic primaries and captured between 30 and 43 percent of the vote in states like Indiana, Wisconsin, and Maryland. Now Wallace was running on the American Independent Party label, his overtly racist appeals (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” he had thundered in 1963) swathed in the rhetoric of states’ rights and anti-intellectualism. With Nixon’s and Humphrey’s core constituencies in place—racially tolerant conservatives and GOP moderates for Nixon, blacks and mainstream liberals for Humphrey—the great battle between the two camps was to siphon a majority of those angry white voters who identified with Wallace, but who were not such bigots as to vote for him. Mitchell and Nixon did not initially agree on how best to counter the Wallace threat. Nixon wrote in 1978 that Wallace’s candidacy was “depriving me of a substantial number of votes….[I]f George Wallace had not run for president, I might have received the same overwhelming mandate then that Eisenhower had received in 1952.”
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To Mitchell, the breakdown was not so simple. Painting the governor as an unelectable bigot would surely bring some Wallace voters Nixon’s way; but Mitchell also thought his candidate’s lead in northeastern states derived not from intrinsic strength, but from Wallace’s usurpation of blue-collar workers who would ordinarily vote Democratic. “I always thought,” Mitchell told an interviewer in 1969, “that when the Wallace vote in the North woke up, it would go back to its labor-oriented base in the Democratic party.” Humphrey sensed this as well, warning a Detroit crowd: “George Wallace has been engaged in union-busting whenever he’s had the chance…and any union man who votes for him is not a good union man.” Luring voters to Nixon without awakening traditional union Democrats from their angry Wallace idyll became the task at hand; Strom Thurmond, who told Dixie that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Humphrey, was once again the chosen instrument.
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Between August and November, Thurmond’s associate Harry Dent flew to New York once a week to meet with Mitchell, who personally approved the banners, ads, and country music jingles deployed in this “bootleg” operation. Dent’s partner in the effort was Fred LaRue, the rangy, tight-lipped Mississippi oil and gas man who later became Mitchell’s neighbor, close friend, special assistant—and Watergate accuser. “This was a very low-key, very subtle advertising campaign,” LaRue recalled of the effort to undermine Wallace. “We used a lot of radio, used a lot of country and western music stars: Minnie Pearl, Roy Acuff, Connie Francis.”

Thus Nixon’s was a two-front war—three, if one counted the news media. Despite much talk of a “new Nixon” that year, reporters were mostly skeptical. Relman Morin of the Associated Press, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was among the believers. “[Nixon’s] manner had changed so greatly,” Morin wrote. “He was more mature, more stable. He wore an air of easy assurance, the air of a man who could see everything proceeding exactly according to plan. This was not the harried, insecure young man in a hurry who had scowled more often than he smiled in 1960…. What had changed and created the ‘new Nixon’ came from the inside.”
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But for many reporters, old suspicions about “Tricky Dick” lingered. Part of their problem was with the highly corporate nature of the Mitchell operation. There was, for one thing, the money: Nixon’s ’68 campaign was by far the most expensive in American history to that point, costing roughly $34 million (or more than $176 million in current figures). Then there was what
Newsweek
called Mitchell’s “authoritarian, all-business austerity” and embrace of modern technology. “It is hard to imagine that a political campaign was ever run with such crisp, mechanical efficiency as Nixon’s drive on the presidency in 1968,” observed the
Times
of London. “[I]t drew liberally upon almost every usable device produced by the communications and data-processing industries, and not infrequently a certain institutional enthusiasm about all this hardware slopped right over into self-parody, as when campaign manager John Mitchell declared that it was his job to ‘program the candidate.’”
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Mitchell’s shrewdness extended beyond managerial competence, into the heart of politics itself. Having watched—undoubtedly with a mixture of horror and elation—the bloody clashes roiling Chicago, and the only slightly less chaotic scenes unfolding inside the Democratic convention hall, Mitchell “saw a chance to emphasize the differences between Nixon and Humphrey.” He proposed the Republican nominee make his first general election appearance in Chicago. It was a risky move. If radicals descended on Nixon’s rally, he would lose the calming, counterrevolutionary mantle he had seized in Miami, and forfeit whatever profit he derived from the turmoil in Chicago. But Mitchell’s gamble paid off. On September 4, one week after Democratic demonstrators drowned out Humphrey’s paean to the politics of joy, Nixon returned to the city’s downtown Loop, drawing a massive crowd of 400,000 cheering, well-behaved supporters. The turnout exceeded even Mitchell’s expectations.
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The first Gallup poll after the conventions showed Nixon leading Humphrey by a whopping sixteen percentage points. Both Mitchell and Nixon knew the race would tighten, though both probably underestimated by how much. “Anyone who’s honest,” Mitchell recalled in 1969, “will admit you never know what you did right or wrong in a campaign. But this one was relatively easy. The factors were clear. We just set a course and stuck by it.” Some Republicans pressed Mitchell to concentrate solely on major industrial states, but he rebuffed them.
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Sure enough, as autumn unfolded, Nixon’s lead steadily dwindled. The Harris poll showed that over September and October, George Wallace lost eight points and Humphrey picked up twelve; by October 21, Gallup showed, Humphrey had cut Nixon’s early lead fully in half. On election eve, Gallup showed Nixon ahead, 42 percent to 40, with 14 for Wallace; Harris actually had Humphrey
leading
Nixon, 43 to 40 percent, with 13 percent for Wallace. To reporters, Mitchell dismissed the Harris poll as “a gratuitous concoction” that would not “con the voters.”

What Mitchell really regarded as gratuitous—if not surprising—was Lyndon Johnson’s announcement of a bombing halt in Vietnam, an act from which, over the campaign’s final weekend, Humphrey derived a five-point bounce. “[T]his was anticipated,” Mitchell remembered two decades later. “The way he did it, in conjunction with Hubert Humphrey, wasn’t anticipated. That was quite distressful.”
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In anticipation of LBJ’s
“October Surprise,” Mitchell and Nixon had steeled themselves for months. Their secret strategy was to establish back-channel contact with South Vietnamese leaders—and with foreigners thought to hold sway over them—and privately urge Saigon not to agree to any last-minute deal at the Paris Peace Talks that could swing the election to Humphrey. Opponents of Ho Chi Minh, the Republicans argued, would fare better with Nixon in power. In fact, the South Vietnamese needed little convincing to frown on the Paris talks: They resented the inclusion of parties at the table that the South did not formally recognize, and President Johnson’s attempt to “bully” the South into attending.
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But Nixon and his campaign manager were taking no chances. In July 1968, Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, appeared at Nixon’s Fifth Avenue apartment for a closed-door strategy session, the first of many discreet contacts. Also present were Mitchell and the curious figure who would serve as the campaign’s primary interlocutor with Saigon: Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born widow of a famous American aviator in World War II and a force in her own right, both as a GOP hostess and member of the China lobby. This was the influential group of expatriates who advocated the return to power of the Nationalist Chinese over Mao’s ruling Communists. With her painted eyebrows, slender hips, and extravagant parties, “the Dragon Lady”—as Chennault was dubbed, after a character in the
Terry and the Pirates
comic strip—cut a unique figure in Washington, and Mitchell apparently accepted her claims to influence.