The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (20 page)

Mark Rudd, the SDS leader and Weatherman revolutionary who led the seizure of Columbia in 1968, regarded Mitchell as “a Wall Street Nazi” and savored his incarceration—but only briefly. “I was ecstatic!” Rudd remembered. “I was thrilled. It seemed almost as if the revolution had won—although I knew it hadn’t.”
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THE COMEDOWN

Mrs. Mitchell commented that she might need an agent to accompany her full time to protect her from the press…. She was advised that she could easily avoid the press by simply stating, “No comment” to their inquiries. She indicated she could not do this.

—Assistant FBI Director J. P. Mohr, 1969
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FOR THE MITCHELLS,
Washington had been a mixed blessing. The attorney general had tasted all the benefits that high-level service to the nation can offer: instant access to the president of the United States; substantive, even decisive, influence over federal policy, across the broadest spectrum of issues; ’round-the-clock transportation and protection, for him and his family, by the FBI; nationwide notoriety and its attendant perks; and interaction with highly accomplished people in and out of government.

But as the most talked-about cabinet couple soon discovered, good things in Washington tend to come at a steep price. Instant access to the president, in this case, also meant constant accountability to him, and Nixon was an exceptionally needy client: consumed by politics, disdainful of leisure pursuits, personally insecure, and restless at odd hours. The constant presence of their FBI escorts was, unbeknownst to the Mitchells, a vehicle for J. Edgar Hoover to spy on them, their every word in the agents’ presence transmitted directly to the devious and manipulative director. Fame brought the need for physical protection; and the Mitchells’ hectic schedules cut into the time they could spend, in lieu of nannies and aides doubling as nannies, with young Marty.

November 1969 saw Mitchell’s clout in the capital at its apex. Within the preceding five months, the attorney general had muscled Abe Fortas into resigning from the Supreme Court, by quietly supplying evidence of Fortas’s financial improprieties to Chief Justice Earl Warren, himself soon to retire; had stage-managed the swift Senate confirmation of Warren Burger to replace the chief; and had faced down the Yippies, Mad Dogs, and Weathermen from his balcony at Justice. That fall Mitchell appeared on the cover of
Newsweek
atop the headline: “Mr. Law and Order.”
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But what the media build up, they delight in tearing down. Five days after the New Mobe left town, the Senate rejected Nixon’s next Supreme Court nominee, Clement Haynsworth, an exceptionally fine man and brilliant jurist sacrificed, by Senate Democrats, as payback for what Mitchell had done to Fortas. And in April 1970, the Senate voted down G. Harrold Carswell, the administration’s second choice to fill the Fortas vacancy; a “mediocrity” with a racist past, Carswell, as even Nixon admitted (to David Frost in 1977), never deserved nomination to the nation’s highest court.
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With these defeats, Mitchell’s reputation took a beating. The headlines were grim: “Disenchantment over Mitchell Grows in Ranks of Republicans” “Mitchell Has Not Mastered His Job, Republican Senators Now Believe.” “Mitchell’s days of glory are really ending; the handwriting is becoming visible on the wall,” reported Evans and Novak. The
National Observer
agreed: “Except for a handful—mostly Southerners—who still see Mr. Mitchell as a political asset, congressional Republicans believe Mr. Nixon’s close friend and political confidant has become an unnecessary burden both to the party and the president.”
Life
magazine, in a rare editorial, demanded he resign. “In this capital,” the
Washington Post
observed, “the obvious possession of great power by any man nearly always generates a counter reaction…a drive by other men to bring him down.” Now it was Mitchell’s turn: “Senators are grumbling, pundits are moving to the attack, and some of the critics believe they smell blood for the first time.”
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Dissatisfaction with Mitchell was also acute at the White House. “P concludes principal fault is Mitchell’s,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. “I think probably the rejection of both Haynsworth and Carswell did hurt Mitchell with the president,” agreed William Rehnquist. Most vocal in this view was the attorney general’s prime antagonist in the administration, John Ehrlichman. “[Mitchell’s] influence was much stronger at the beginning than it was toward the end,” Ehrlichman recalled in 1992. “In fact, after the Haynsworth and Carswell debacle, I would say his influence was pretty nearly zero.” Yet Ehrlichman’s dire assessment was not universally shared. “I don’t think that’s true,” responded Henry Kissinger. “I couldn’t tell that.” Similarly, Haldeman, who spent more time with Nixon than any other aide, recognized that the defeats of Haynsworth and Carswell, while ascribed in the president’s mind principally to Mitchell, did not cause a complete loss of confidence. “I would say that Ehrlichman was more dissatisfied with Mitchell’s performance as attorney general than the president was,” Haldeman said.
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Indeed, as Haldeman’s previously unpublished notes show, Nixon responded to the attacks on his embattled attorney general by ordering the White House PR apparatchiks—speechwriter Pat Buchanan, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, and Communications Director Herb Klein—to make sure Mitchell was seen and photographed sitting next to the president in the stands at a football game, a gesture intended as the kickoff in a concerted campaign to restore the old Mitchell mystique.

Major speech for Mitchell…

Buchanan write it

Z
[iegler]
announce as major admin. stmt.

Klein take him on as major project

+ get him a new PR man at Justice

A reporter who interviewed Mitchell in late April 1970, when the criticism was reaching its crescendo, found him absorbing it all “without anger or embarrassment…full of certitude about himself and the world as he knows it.” But the new atmosphere in the capital, vicious and unsparing, was not without its effect. These were the days when the attorney general was most apt to puff on his pipe and remind visitors that he never really wanted the job in the first place. “I’d much rather practice law,” he grumbled.
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Then there was Martha,
who had begun to attract media attention of a kind never before accorded a cabinet wife. The first break in the dam was her interview on
CBS Morning News
shortly after the New Mobe protests. Although Martha had observed little of the sporadically violent demonstrations, she freely volunteered the attorney general’s opinion of them. “My husband made the comment to me,” she told Marya McLaughlin, “looking out the Justice Department it looked like the Russian revolution going on. As my husband has said many times, some of the liberals in this country, he’d like to take them and change them for the Russian Communists.”
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What was this?
the Washington press corps wondered.
A new species! The cabinet wife who blabs her husband’s private thoughts!
Hordes of reporters began flocking to the Watergate East, eager to exploit the new source of snappy comment inside an administration once derided as “twelve gray-haired guys named George.” Others took cheap shots from their desks. “To some of us,” opined the
New York Post
’s “ladies” columnist, Harriet Van Horne, Martha’s “tirade on CBS…sounded like an old strip of film from the white Citizens’ Council of Birmingham.”

Like George Wallace, Mrs. Mitchell has a ready-made constituency in this country. To rally that constituency one needs only to articulate the meanest prejudices of the most confused, embittered people. That such people are out there—anxious, troubled, sick of the war, of protesters, of taxes—is part of our national shame.

Such criticism forced the attorney general, not for the last time, into the delicate contortion of disavowing his wife’s remarks without appearing to disavow his wife. Lamely, Mitchell contended Martha had used the term “so-called liberals”—never mind that her interview was captured on film. “If you will transpose the word ‘liberal’ into ‘violence-prone militant radicals,’ I would be delighted to change them for some of the academically inclined Marxist Communists,” Mitchell continued. “I’d trade for the academic Marxists two-for-one, because they don’t necessarily advocate violence.”
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The stampede on the Mitchells’ apartment only made things worse, for Martha seldom thought before she spoke, and the times were volatile. “Anytime you get somebody marching in the streets,” she told
Time
, “it’s catering to revolution…. My family worked for everything. We even had a deed from the King of England for property in South Carolina. Now these jerks come along and try to give it to the Communists.” She also lamented the “comedown” her husband’s government service had imposed on the Mitchells. “We’re not living on the same means that we had in Rye,” she complained. “I had to sell my stock, and now we are having to dip into the till. I think the government should give us free housing.”

Taxpayers could be forgiven for believing otherwise—especially after
Women’s Wear Daily
reported that Martha needed four closets to house her clothes: one for “afternoon and short cocktail things,” another for handbags and shoes, another for fur coats. America now had its own media-age Marie Antoinette, a
bouffant
blonde in a Southern accent and sling-backed stilettos, perched above the Potomac in her Watergate condo, dispensing disdain on opponents of a deeply divisive war fought mainly by boys from the lower classes.
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Mitchell tried to skate through the commotion by affecting an air of imperturbability. “Anything my wife does is fine with me,” he would say. But official Washington was unimpressed. “Wives, all politically knowledgeable,” wrote one political reporter, “were particularly affronted by the amateurishness of Mrs. Mitchell’s performance.”
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