The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (19 page)

As initial projections of twenty-five hundred protesters multiplied tenfold, Mitchell became “personally involved in directing the defense of the capital.” He authorized Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to deploy as many federal troops as necessary to keep the federal government open. In a classified memorandum, Mitchell said it was “quite plain” the protesters “may well be successful unless armed forces are…made available.” Laird responded with ten thousand men. Soldiers of all kinds—police battalions, National Guardsmen, Army riot-control units, airborne paratroopers, Marines—flew into nearby bases on high alert. Five thousand District of Columbia cops were also ready. To the task of repelling the May Day protesters, whom they regarded as little better than rodents, the soldiers and Marines came thirsty for action and heavily armed: M-14 automatic rifles with fixed bayonets; heavy-machinery cranes; half a dozen Chinook helicopters; Army Jeeps with wire-mesh fronts; a fleet of V-100s, state-of-the-art armor-plated riot-control juggernauts outfitted with gun turrets and rubber wheels, and capable, the Army noted proudly, of “running over a car.”
⁶⁰

Mitchell also braced for another assault on the Department of Justice. A White House official who visited DOJ in this period saw teams of uniformed infantrymen patrolling the building’s acute-angled hallways with belt-fed light machine guns. “Any of the mob who managed to overwhelm the General Services Administration guards and enter the building to shut it down would be cut to pieces by machinegun fire,” the official wrote. “Nobody fucked with John Mitchell.”
⁶¹

Yet once again, Mitchell was the protesters’ preferred target. On the afternoon of April 30, 1971, more than two thousand demonstrators converged on Justice, an odd site for a rally whose participants identified themselves as “antiwar and anti-poverty.” What really made Justice the epicenter of countercultural conflict in those years was Mitchell’s preeminent power in the Nixon administration and his singular identification with the “repressive” concept of law and order. It was as if the revolutionaries recognized the full depth and range of Mitchell’s influence in Nixon’s America, and accordingly visited upon him the fury that, by virtue of their stated causes, they might have directed elsewhere—the Pentagon, say.

Now the anti-Mitchell mob lay sprawled across the steps of Justice, blocking all entrance. Female DOJ employees in short skirts were forced to climb, amid jeers and harassment, over the prostrate rabble. Finally a hundred cops, marching in formation, swept through the crowd with nightsticks and armored vehicles. “Come down here Mitchell, and get these police,” thundered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Hosea Williams, a leader of the march on Selma. “They are abridging our constitutional rights!” Three hundred and seventy people were arrested.
⁶²

That Monday, May the third, a reporter recalled years later, dawned as “a perfect May morning, scented with spring flowers and tear gas.” Before the sun rose, some 50,000 government employees, urged to commute early, were already on the job. In that sense, May Day’s primary goal—preventing federal workers from reaching their desks—went unmet. The
Evening Star
reported the government’s 318,000 employees showed up in “normal” numbers, with attendance at some agencies, like the Departments of Transportation and Interior—and Mitchell’s DOJ—
above
normal.
⁶³

Scattered and leaderless, hunted by an army of angry cops, the protesters panicked and ran wild, abandoning Gandhianism for one last flash of the Days of Rage. Richard Kleindienst catalogued the lawlessness:

They rolled boulders into streets, laid metal pipes across roadbeds, strung barbed wire and ropes across streets, set fire to trash cans, spread nails on roads, threw rocks at passing motorists, removed manhole covers, slashed at motorists with wooden poles, smashed windows, slashed tires, overturned cars, pushed parked vehicles into traffic lanes, ripped down signs and traffic markers. They stopped a fire truck trying to get to a fire…. They blocked police emergency vehicles, turned on fire hydrants, disabled city buses and commuters’ autos, abandoned old cars on bridge approaches and in tunnels, and dumped all manner of trash into the streets. They stoned and beat policemen.
⁶⁴

“D.C. was a war zone,” said one Yippie. “It was Halloween to the tenth power,” agreed CBS News’ Eric Sevareid. Demonstrators remembered policemen swinging their nightsticks indiscriminately, “clubbing like grotesque wind-up toys” Nixon’s silent majority saw the May Day protesters as “ugly mobs of thugs…murderous…hate-filled.” Disorder spread so widely and quickly that at 6:30 a.m., Chief Wilson suspended the rule requiring his officers to fill out arrest forms. This was May Day’s pivotal event. Over the next four hours, more than seven thousand citizens were dragged off the streets, thrown into police cars, paddywagons, trucks, ambulances, any kind of vehicle the cops could get their hands on, and carted off to city jails and detention centers. When those sites overflowed, the police emptied their human cargo onto a Washington Redskins practice field hemmed in with concertina wire. It was—and remains—the largest number of mass arrests in American history.
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At the White House and Justice, the president’s men quarreled over what to do next. Haldeman’s unpublished notes captured the chaos and Nixon’s hourly responses.

7:30
[a.m.]
—4,000 arrested

traffic open—city under control

running loose—arresting fast

trashing—garbage, logs, etc.

lots of film
[being broadcast]
of arrests, etc.

E
[hrlichman cites]
prob

6,000 in a pen—ugly mood…

surrounded by troops

knows that it’s a bad situation
[but]

AG feels they shld be held ’til tonite

John Ehrlichman later claimed he faulted Mitchell for treating the arrested protesters too harshly. “I was…concerned that the administration might seriously overplay its hand,” Ehrlichman told an interviewer in 1985. “And in fact it did…and I moved in as quickly as I could to try and set it right…. [RFK Stadium] looked like a concentration camp…. I got on the Justice Department to do something about it.” Yet the notes Haldeman took on May Day show that when Mitchell proposed releasing “non-critical” detainees after the evening rush hour, Ehrlichman—and Nixon—opposed him.

AG is running this—

we thk this bass ackwards

[to]
let them out & disrupt traffic

would reverse policy P. & AG worked out

A mid-afternoon meeting in the attorney general’s office between Mitchell and Ehrlichman failed to resolve their dispute. Confronted with the clash of opinions, Nixon backed Mitchell, as Haldeman’s notes confirmed.

His own feeling is that he believes

let them out &
[let them]
raise a little hell today

may temper off tomorrow

doesn’t want
[pictures on the]
evening news of 5,000 in a cage

better to have trashing etc

pic. on evening news is critical

At 10:00 a.m., Mitchell emerged, like Caesar at Gaul, to declare victory. “The city is open,” he announced to newsmen, “the traffic is flowing, the government is functioning.” Rennie Davis conceded defeat at his own news conference, shortly before his arrest on conspiracy charges.
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But the action wasn’t over yet. The following afternoon, May 4, another two thousand die-hards converged on Justice. The issue was no longer the war, clearly, but John Mitchell. “Power to the people!” the youths chanted. “Off the pigs!” The cops moved in once more, this time methodically filling out arrest forms. The protesters, seemingly “broken in strength and spirit,” went quietly, with outbreaks of fighting infrequent. In all, two thousand people were arrested, right under the aquiline nose of the attorney general. For as in the siege of 1969, Mitchell stepped out onto his fifth-floor balcony to survey the scene. It was his last look at the New Left, a kind of “youth culture carnival.” The
Washington Evening Star
published a photograph on its front page showing Mitchell, pipe in mouth, taking it all in calmly, “looking for all the world like Stalin” to the weary protesters beneath him. Mitchell watched intently as FBI agents, squawking into walkie-talkies, closed in on John Froines, the former chemistry professor and acquitted Chicago Seven defendant, haranguing the crowd and wanted on charges similar to Davis’s. “We have him! We have him!” the agents cried, as Mitchell looked on.
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More than 12,000 Americans, “generally young [and] white,” were arrested over May Day’s seventy-two hours. More than 7,000 were detained on Monday alone, and 70 percent of those individuals were released by noon the next day; by Tuesday night, the 500 still in custody were those who refused to be fingerprinted and photographed. Most of the criminal charges stemming from the action were dropped. The nation’s capital stayed open, the war continued. The protesters had been soundly defeated, without a single shot fired. Little wonder the Yippies later declared the movement “lost the revolution at May Day.”
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Mitchell wanted all of America to know who won and who lost. Speaking a week later to the California Peace Officers’ Association, following a warm introduction by Governor Ronald Reagan, the attorney general urged local police to emulate the “decisive opposition to mob rule” that capital authorities had shown. It had been two years since May Day 1969, when Mitchell famously declared an end to patience with student rioters; now the “high tide” of violence as an instrument of social protest had passed. Mitchell said the May Day militants reminded him of “another group of civilians who roamed the streets of Germany in the 1920s, bullying people, shouting down those who disagreed with them, and denying other people their civil rights. They were called Hitler’s Brown Shirts.”

Polls showed 71 percent of Americans disapproved of the May Day action, with 76 percent regarding the mass arrests as justified. The
Washington Evening Star
editorialized that the “willfully lawless mob” had been “dealt with appropriately and effectively.” The symbolism was unmistakable: The attorney general had succeeded in removing the badge of “fascist” from the forces of law and order, where it had resided since the heady days of Berkeley and Columbia, and stuck it on the protesters. The left turned purple; the sixties had been stood on their head.
⁶⁹

For his bloody victories
over the movement—the Days of Rage, the New Mobe, Kent State, May Day—John Mitchell was never forgiven. When the tables turned, and the former attorney general found himself transformed, unthinkably yet unmistakably, into an American outlaw, a target of Justice hunted as vigorously as the most radical Weatherman, no one took greater pleasure than the revolutionaries Mitchell had so thoroughly vanquished.

As late as April 1973, with the “Radical Chic” of the sixties long supplanted by the self-absorption of the “Me Decade,” as Tom Wolfe observed, five hundred die-hard Yippies staged one last march on the Mitchell home, no longer the Watergate but a grand apartment building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. “Free Martha Mitchell!” they chanted. “Fuck John!” When the Mitchells finally appeared at the window to see what all the commotion was about, the stoners cherished their last “eye-to-eyeball confrontation with Mr. Law ’n’ Order.” To commemorate the moment, they placed a giant marijuana joint on the Mitchells’ doorstep.

Mitchell’s ruin in scandal brought joy to the hippies and radicals who once dreaded him. “It took six years, but as we watched the daily Watergate soap opera, watched Mitchell shatter,” wrote Yipsters Dana Beal and Steve Conliff, “the busts and beatings and bummers and burns all started to feel worthwhile…. Mitchell became the first attorney general ever to be sent to prison. The biggest joke of the Seventies was the persecutors turned out to be the criminals.” Timothy Leary, the LSD guru imprisoned on a marijuana conviction in 1970, shared in the elation: “I watched my federal pursuers join me—the attorney general, John Mitchell.”

Other radicals savored not merely the personal irony in Mitchell’s incarceration, but cosmic validation of the movement itself. Rennie Davis, the May Day impresario, felt Mitchell’s going to prison represented “the inevitable outcome” of the sixties. “The attempt to suppress, close down, jail, imprison, vilify, [and] curse had its ultimate salvation in Mitchell having to face what he had to face,” said Davis. “It just seemed like a completion to a long process to take a stand for this country, its democracy, its openness, its stability for democratic institutions.” William Ayers, unrepentant founder of the Weather Underground, struggled to put into words the euphoria he felt upon seeing Mitchell imprisoned. “Such a wonderful—such a wonderful
vindication
,” he said. “It was a feeling of tremendous justice. I mean, what could be more just than John Mitchell, the chief law officer and also the chief lawbreaker, being sent to jail?”