The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (13 page)

America in 1969 was
a nation of TV-watchers: More than 90 percent of U.S. households boasted a television set, with 78 million in usage. A veteran of the Checkers speech, the 1960 debates, and the media-savvy campaign just concluded—derided in a bestselling book as “the selling of the president”—Nixon knew his war on crime had to be waged in the streets
and
on the small screen. In this he saw John Mitchell as his most potent weapon. With his stern features and no-nonsense speaking style, Mitchell could project exactly the crime-fighting image the president sought for his administration as a whole. “In the ’68 campaign, ‘law and order’ became one word,” recalled Mitchell aide Jack Hushen. “And there was no question that President Nixon was going to try to have a tough-appearing lawman running the Justice Department.”
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Loyal soldier that he was, Mitchell gamely went along with his scripted role, willingly colluding in the creation of the false, authoritarian public image that President Nixon demanded of him. Few at the time recognized that as attorney general, Mitchell
was
playing a role, one he saw as distasteful but necessary, and that, like most actors, he occasionally bristled at his lines. Partly this reflected recognition of the role’s incongruity; Mitchell was warm and genial in private, his eyes more likely to twinkle than glare. Yet his unease with Nixon’s PR plan also reflected the times: Liberalism in the late 1960s dominated American culture, popular and political, and Mitchell knew he would pay a high price for challenging it. In his legal career, he had cultivated a nonpartisan image; now Mitchell was to become America’s preeminent symbol of counterrevolution in the age of amnesty, acid, and abortion. Mitchell’s discomfort showed when he sought to “dispel the notion that I’m a tough cop and an arch-conservative.”

But the president, according to Haldeman’s previously unpublished notes, held an almost romantic vision of Mitchell’s “toughness” and its PR value to the administration:

problem is not what we do—but appearance

not getting the points we

shld on crime…shld have Mitchell do like J. Edgar
[Hoover]
used to—

no one else in Admin. can put this on

play tough SOB role—as crime fighter

time to go on real crusade—not just do good

put all PR effort we can into this area

need to make asset of Mitchell’s toughness

He should do more on TV, speeches etc.

VP + others shld build up Mitchell…

as helluva crime-fighter—fair…

don’t make John likable—

make him a tough crime-fighter
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Mitchell stepped into character immediately. Shortly after being sworn in, his “balding forehead perspiring profusely,” Mitchell held his first news conference. Here he introduced his top aides. As deputy attorney general, Dick Kleindienst would run day-to-day business at DOJ. Then came the assistant attorneys general, most of them politicians: Jerris Leonard, head of the civil rights division, was a former GOP state legislator in Wisconsin whom Mitchell had known since 1963. William Ruckelshaus, chosen to lead the civil division, had failed in his bid to unseat Indiana senator Birch Bayh. Will Wilson, a former Texas state attorney general and state Supreme Court justice, would oversee the criminal division. For antitrust, Mitchell selected Richard McLaren, a corporate lawyer from Chicago with no political background. Finally, as assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel—a job known as “the president’s lawyer’s lawyer”—Mitchell, relying on Kleindienst’s recommendation, selected a forty-four-year-old former Supreme Court clerk and Goldwater campaign worker named William H. Rehnquist.
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“We will always have
crime, and you’re always going to have a hell of a lot of it,” Nixon conceded privately. But he also understood that the president and the attorney general needed to stand up for the uniformed cops manning the front lines—and so did Mitchell. “[O]n more than one occasion,” Rehnquist recalled in 1993, Mitchell “took the side of ‘law and order’ against the advice not only of the usual critics outside the administration, but of other critics within it.”
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Watergate later made it unfashionable to mention, but as attorney general, John Mitchell played an invaluable role in modernizing, strengthening, and relegitimizing American law enforcement. He was the most visible federal official in the early 1970s to look beyond the hostility to cops then in vogue and see that, with proper training and equipment, police could turn the tide against crime—and serve with honor. Picking the right battles on Capitol Hill; backing career prosecutors; donning the tough-guy mask to preach law and order in an era of radical chic: These were Mitchell’s weapons.

Only in the District of Columbia did the federal government exercise jurisdiction over law enforcement; so Nixon decided to make the capital a showcase for his war on crime. Three days after taking office, he ordered Haldeman to “move…fast” on an anticrime initiative. “[Push] hard on law and order,” the president demanded. “Announce a tripling of police.” Four days later, in his first news conference, Nixon said he’d ordered Mitchell to develop an “urgent” plan to vanquish D.C. crime.
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Over the next two years, Mitchell responded with a broad range of reforms aimed at both the District of Columbia and federal criminal statutes. “This model anti-crime program will point the way for the entire nation,” he would declare, “at a time when crime and fear of crime are forcing us, a free people, to alter the pattern of our lives.”
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Mitchell’s proposals included “no-knock” drug laws, preventive detention of criminal suspects, expanded wiretapping powers, interagency strike forces against organized crime, steep budget increases for police groups. The news media painted Nixon and Mitchell in
A Clockwork Orange
tones, sinister futuristic jailers armed with nightsticks, computers, and syringes. But by latter-day standards, most of the attorney general’s proposals were fairly tame and included notable civil liberties precautions; preventive detainees, for example, were only locked up on a judge’s order, after a hearing. Critics on the left were apocalyptic. “There will be no storm troopers, swastikas or brown shirts,” warned an alliance of the nation’s largest student and radical groups. “The slogan for fascism in the United States will be ‘law and order,’ and that is what preventive detention laws are all about.” The
New York Times
lamented the “hard line…straight-to-the-right dourness in criminal matters that perfectly reflects the campaign promises of the president and the public personality of the attorney general, John N. Mitchell.”
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Mitchell defended the constitutionality of preventive detention in his first major television interview, on CBS News’
60 Minutes.
“It’s long been an article of faith in the United States that a man is innocent until he’s proven guilty,” correspondent Mike Wallace argued. “The fellow we’re talking about has not been proven guilty yet, has he?” “In the instance, no,” Mitchell replied, “but the greater and better needs of society I think require the judge…to protect society. And if the track record is such…I think the judge has every conceivable right to keep that fellow in preventive detention.” Elsewhere, Mitchell complained of seeing the recidivist criminal “turned loose just because his mother lives in the same city.”
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In the end, Congress consolidated the Nixon-Mitchell proposals into several pieces of legislation: the District of Columbia Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act, the Organized Crime Control Act, the Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Act. President Nixon signed them into law. “[T]hose who are fighting against crime will have the tools that they need to do the job,” Nixon declared at one signing ceremony, held at the Justice Department in October 1970 as Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover looked on, adding, “they will do the job.”
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In pure statistical terms, Mitchell’s performance as a crime fighter was undeniably impressive. In 1970, for the first time in fourteen years, fewer crimes were committed in the District of Columbia than in the year before. By the following year, Mitchell had steered twenty-seven pieces of anticrime legislation to passage by Congress; doubled the number of organized crime strike forces; and secured indictments or convictions against half the top bosses in the nation’s two dozen largest organized crime syndicates.
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Baltimore, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and St. Louis all saw reductions in street crime;
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in the first three months of 1971, sixty major cities reported the same. The amount of heroin and cocaine removed from U.S. markets more than doubled, tripling in the case of marijuana.
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And by March 1973, the FBI reported that in the previous year—Mitchell’s last as attorney general—the national crime rate decreased for the first time in seventeen years.
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Forbes
hailed him “the most effective gang-buster…and menacer to the drug menace who ever held the attorney general’s office.”
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“In city after city,” trumpeted
U.S. News & World Report
, “the grip of organized crime is being weakened.” Asked once if the war on Cosa Nostra was not “an endless process in which you catch one group of operators but others move in immediately to take their places,” Mitchell replied: “It used to be that way…. Now, with the use of electronic surveillance, we pretty well get the whole criminal organization.”
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Refusing to wiretap mobsters, as Ramsey Clark had, Mitchell likened to “fighting with one hand tied behind your back.” Over time, Mitchell’s views on combating organized crime gained wide acceptance; among the believers was his former Mudge Rose intern, a future U.S. attorney and New York City mayor named Rudolph Giuliani.

Indeed, it was Mitchell who proposed a new racketeering law authorizing action against legitimate businesses infiltrated by organized crime, a measure later known as the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) act, and employed, with devastating effect, against the New York Mafia. And it was Mitchell who narrowed the circumstances under which immunized witnesses could escape criminal prosecution—a provision later used, during Watergate, to compel testimony against the former attorney general himself.
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The severest charge against
Attorney General Mitchell was that he systematically subordinated the mission of his department to the political fortunes of the president he served. The truth, as Nixon’s secret tapes later showed, was quite different. Far from “politicizing” the Department of Justice to serve Richard Nixon’s interests, Mitchell actually protected it from political interference, to a degree never popularly understood in his lifetime. “The most important feature of [Mitchell’s] tenure,” Richard Kleindienst wrote in 1985, “was the shield he erected between Justice and the White House staff.” “Nobody ever interfered with me at the Department of Justice, and again, it goes back to Mitchell,” Kleindienst reaffirmed in a 1992 interview. “Because of his stature and relationship with the president, he had insulated us from that.”
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Those quick to discount the opinion of Kleindienst because he was Mitchell’s deputy and friend must conversely honor that of the late Erwin N. Griswold. A lifelong Democrat, the silver-haired Griswold served as dean of Harvard Law School, president of the American Bar Association, and, from 1967 to 1973, as solicitor general of the United States, the official charged with arguing the federal government’s cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. There are few more respected figures in the history of American jurisprudence, and his appraisal of Mitchell’s stewardship at Justice reflected the feelings of many nonpartisan officials. “[Mitchell] ran a pretty good department,” Griswold recalled in 1994. “And it was always square shooting as far as I was concerned…. I wasn’t loyal to the president because I never conceived of my responsibility to be to represent the president. I conceived of my responsibility as representing the people of the United States. And I think that Mitchell rather welcomed that point of view, because on the whole it was somewhat rare in the government.”
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