The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (2 page)

Mitchell’s life raises questions both simple and profound: Was he centrally a part of, or did he somehow stand fundamentally apart from, the criminality of the Nixon administration? Were his problems, as one of his lawyers later rued, simply Nixon’s problems—or was it vice versa, as one of Nixon’s biographers would claim after both men were dead? Which association contributed more to the attorney general’s demise: his political alliance with Nixon, as Martha Mitchell sobbed in her final years, or his ill-starred marriage to Martha, as Nixon argued from 1973 onward? To all who knew and respected him, however, one question loomed above all others: Was Mitchell guilty in Watergate—and if so, guilty of what?

The great scandal began, as a matter of public record, in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, when plainclothes Washington police officers, responding to a call placed by a private security company, arrested five men inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex. Unlike most local burglars, these men were found in business suits and rubber gloves, carrying cameras, sophisticated electronics equipment, and crisp hundred-dollar bills. Within days, police and FBI investigators, joined by reporters for the
Washington Post
, established direct ties between the arrested men, their flimsy aliases notwithstanding, and the Nixon White House and reelection committee. James McCord, a longtime FBI and CIA operative and the covert team’s expert on electronic surveillance, was employed as chief of security for Nixon’s reelection committee; the other burglars, veterans of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, were swiftly linked to E. Howard Hunt, a longtime CIA officer listed on the White House payroll as a consultant to Nixon’s special counsel, Charles Colson. Mitchell, having resigned from Justice to spearhead Nixon’s reelection drive, was then the head of the campaign committee.

Over the next nine and a half months, during which period President Nixon was reelected by one of the greatest landslides in American history, the arrested men, Hunt, and his chief coconspirator in the break-in, G. Gordon Liddy, the reelection committee’s general counsel, were indicted and began receiving secret, sporadic, and invariably incomplete cash payments. Left in phone booths at National Airport and other ingenious drop spots, the payments were designed—depending on whom one asked—either to buy the defendants’ silence or to honor the first rule of the spy game:
When your men get caught, they and their families get taken care of, and they, in turn, keep their mouths shut
.

During this same period, members of the White House and reelection committee staffs, led by Jeb Magruder, Mitchell’s deputy at the campaign, destroyed evidence, perjured themselves before a federal grand jury, and conspired in myriad other ways to obstruct the multiple investigations that were gleefully launched, in a capital controlled by Democrats, to probe the origins and financing of the break-in. The admitted “ringleader” in this multifarious undertaking was John Dean, the ambitious young White House counsel who scrambled to find ways to raise the “hush money” that kept the cover-up together; kept close tabs on the FBI investigation and civil litigation that threatened to unravel it; and coached Magruder in his perjury.

The cover-up came crashing down in March 1973, when McCord broke ranks with his fellow burglars—all of whom had dutifully pleaded guilty—and wrote a bombshell letter to the judge in the case, John J. Sirica. The proceedings in
U.S. v. Liddy
, McCord charged, had been grossly tainted by perjury and backstage political pressure. Sirica’s reading of the letter in open court unleashed a frenzy in the news media and a new round of congressional and grand jury investigations. Dean, Magruder, and other midlevel officials scurried to negotiate plea bargains for themselves, exchanging their testimony for lenient sentences. Soon the grand jury handed down perjury and obstruction of justice indictments against the president’s top aides: Mitchell, White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, and domestic adviser John Ehrlichman.

Watergate had now become a national obsession, at least among the political classes, the overriding issue in a superpower engaged in cold war struggles across the globe. Then, in televised Senate hearings that dominated the summer of 1973, came an even more stunning disclosure: Nixon had surreptitiously recorded virtually all his meetings and phone calls, from February 1971 onward, in his White House and EOB offices. This set off a desperate, yearlong legal battle for access to the tapes, which Nixon lost, resulting in disclosure of his early awareness of, and fitful participation in, the cover-up. He resigned in August 1974; a month later he was granted a pardon for all crimes he committed “or may have committed” while in office by his handpicked successor, Gerald R. Ford.

When it was all over, investigators discovered Hunt and Liddy had stage-managed an earlier break-in, targeting the psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers; and the original crime metastasized into a massive complex of scandals, triggering an inquisition of the Nixon administration as comprehensive as the Nuremberg trials. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force formed five separate task forces, focused on crimes as disparate as political espionage, abuse of the Internal Revenue Service, antitrust collusion, influence-peddling, and campaign finance violations, and ultimately secured convictions against more than fifty men and nineteen corporations.
⁸

What was Mitchell’s role
in all this? History commonly records that he ordered the Watergate break-in, an unofficial verdict that cast on the shoulders of the former attorney general ultimate responsibility for the improbable chain of events that climaxed in the disgraceful end of the Nixon presidency, and the corresponding diminution in American superpower influence. But the former attorney general, who collapsed and died from a heart attack on a Georgetown street in November 1988, always steadfastly denied ordering the break-in; and no court of law ever determined who did give the order.

Instead, Mitchell was convicted on five criminal counts for his role in the cover-up: A jury of eight women and four men from the District of Columbia found that Mitchell lied under oath to the grand jury and Senate Watergate committee; ordered Magruder to destroy evidence; instructed Dean to obtain FBI case reports; directed a third aide, Robert Mardian, to engineer McCord’s premature release from jail; personally authorized, and tried to rope CIA into subsidizing, the payment of “hush money” to the arrested men; and extended promises of executive clemency to them.

Mitchell’s Watergate conviction, announced on New Year’s Day 1975, came eight months after another federal jury, seated in New York, acquitted him and another Nixon cabinet member, former commerce secretary Maurice Stans, on influence-peddling charges. Mitchell and Stans stood accused of illegally soliciting a $200,000 campaign contribution from Robert Vesco—the “fugitive financier” who fled the country rather than face charges he looted a mutual fund of $224 million—in exchange for their quiet help in derailing a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into Vesco’s activities. After a two-month trial, the jury found, correctly, that $200,000 was not a lot of money compared to the sums the ’72 Nixon campaign routinely took in; that the SEC case against Vesco hummed right along, absent any sign of tampering by the defendants; and that Mitchell was guilty only of arranging, with a phone call here and there, a few meetings between willing government officials and polite Vesco associates.

That Mitchell should have won acquittal in the Vesco trial at the height of the Watergate frenzy, in April 1974, only to be convicted in similar proceedings in Washington less than a year later marked a curious turn of events that should have attracted the attention—but never did—of the nation’s burgeoning new corps of investigative reporters. After all, a number of the same elements were present in both trials: To cite but two examples, the “Vesco trial,” as
U.S. v. Mitchell-Stans
came to be called, saw the first playing of the Nixon tapes in public and the courtroom debut of John Dean, the witness whose testimony in the Watergate cover-up trial would prove critical to the convictions of Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. Did Mitchell’s luck just run out—or were other, more sinister forces at work?

Dozens of questions clamor
for answers: If John Mitchell didn’t order the Watergate break-in, who did—and why? What role did CIA, and the intelligence community at large, play in Watergate? If the great scandal represented, as
Harper’s
observed in November 1973, “a major modern metamorphosis…the poisonous afterbirth of Vietnam,” then questions from the cold war period leading up to Watergate also command attention today. In the conception and execution of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, Mitchell played a substantial, and purposefully unheralded, role. Was there some connection between that policy and the administration’s ignominious end? Were Nixon and his men forced to pay a price for their embrace of détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with Red China? Why were the nation’s top military commanders discovered committing espionage against Nixon and Kissinger, for thirteen months in wartime, and what did the president—and Mitchell—do about it?

No less significant are the issues raised by the administration’s domestic policies. Indeed, as the very symbol of “law and order” in Nixon’s America—and then again as a symbol of a different kind in Watergate—John Mitchell bore witness to the most searing political turmoil in America since the Civil War. After all, it was Mitchell who ran the Department of Justice, and the administration of justice in those years occupies the central role in all lingering controversies from that era: Was justice done in the enforcement of school desegregation and antitrust laws? In the battles against antiwar protesters and radical groups? At Kent State and Jackson State? In the cases of Daniel Ellsberg and Lt. William Calley, Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Vesco, Abe Fortas and Clement Haynsworth, John Lennon and the Berrigan Brothers, the Black Panthers and ITT?

These and other mysteries continue to haunt Americans not merely because they involve colorful figures of intrinsic interest or because their answers remain so elusive, but because the times that produced them—the “decade of shocks” that spanned the Kennedy assassination to Nixon’s resignation—marked a frightening watershed in American history, an age when wars raged on earth while men walked on the moon, when media began transmitting social upheavals in real time, and when the continued existence of the republic seemed, for the first time since Reconstruction, imperiled.

For the crimes of Watergate, no one paid a higher price than John Mitchell; but it would be a mistake to believe Mitchell’s incarceration, and denial of parole, were meant to punish him
solely
for the crimes of Watergate. The times—and the
Times
—demanded his ritual sacrifice. As Mitchell’s brother remarked wistfully in later years: “The climate was right for putting someone like John in jail.”
⁹

If answering such questions
definitively is a central aim of
The Strong Man
, so, too, is the resolution of a number of disputes over Mitchell’s personal biography. There is, for example, no agreement on when he first met the two individuals who had the greatest impact on his life—Richard Nixon and Martha Mitchell—nor on what medals he was awarded in World War II; whether he married twice or thrice; earned $200,000 a year on Wall Street, or $2 million; or, as family lore held and the Associated Press reported in his obituary, he played professional hockey for the New York Rangers. Salvaging the truth from the ceaseless clash of claims and counterclaims surrounding Mitchell, and evoking his true personality—his mordant wit, wry fatalism, and desperate attempts to raise a daughter against staggering legal and financial odds—were no less important than corralling the elusive, though not irretrievable, facts of Watergate.