The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (24 page)

Shultz repeated this theater for each panel, each time with Mitchell reprising his showstopping cameo. After the attorney general’s departure, Shultz would tell the groups: “This discussion has been intense and revealing, but you can see that it’s not really relevant. The fact is, desegregation is going to happen, whether you like it or not. You have a great stake in seeing that this effort is managed in a reasonable way.”
²⁷

“We had broken the
back of school desegregation by September of 1970,” Jerris Leonard later boasted—and the numbers bore him out. Prior to 1969, only 186,000 of 3 million African American children attended desegregated Southern schools. In the fall of 1969, after nine months of Nixon-Mitchell leadership, 600,000 Southern blacks sat in desegregated classrooms; in 1970, the number edged closer to 3 million. “In this sense,” concluded civil rights historian Dean Kotlowski, “Richard Nixon was the greatest school desegregator in American history.”
²⁸

The man who really made it happen was John Mitchell. Without an attorney general committed to enforcing them, the Supreme Court’s historic decisions would have been so much wordplay. Mitchell also championed—against resistance inside and outside the Nixon administration—the controversial Philadelphia Plan, a pioneering affirmative-action program that required all Philadelphia-area bidders on federal construction contracts worth more than $500,000 to meet minority-hiring goals. The unprecedented nature—and Republican parentage—of the Philadelphia Plan led civil rights historian Robert R. Detlefsen to conclude, in 1991, that “contrary to conventional wisdom, contemporary federal affirmative action policy owes far more to the likes of John Mitchell, George Shultz and Richard Nixon than to Lyndon Johnson, a fact that stands in sharp contrast to the typical caricatures…one finds in contemporary political folklore.”
²⁹

While Nixon and Mitchell never sought, and as a matter of political expedience could never receive, public acclaim for their historic accomplishments in race relations—
watch what we do, not what we say
—Watergate all but ensured their exemplary record would go unnoted in their time. “The people who were perpetuating the Watergate scandal,” charged the National Urban League’s Vernon Jordan, shortly after Mitchell testified before the Senate Watergate committee, “are the same people who were the architects of the [civil rights] retrenchment, the retreat, of ‘benign neglect,’ and we see here some cause and effect relationship.” What went unmentioned was the huge decrease in the percentage of Southern black children attending segregated schools—from 68 percent in 1968 to 8 percent in 1972—under the leadership of Nixon and Mitchell.
³⁰

What’s more, there were still other areas of substantial progress for blacks—besides affirmative action, voting rights, and school desegregation—in which Attorney General Mitchell cut new ground. It was, for example, Mitchell’s Justice that filed the first federal lawsuits charging cities with manipulation of zoning laws to discriminate on the basis of race. These lawsuits won the applause even of Roy Wilkins, the NAACP official better known for telling the press that Mitchell’s racial policies made him want to vomit.
³¹

Mitchell never minded the diminution of his role, by contemporaries or historians, in the rise of a more color-blind nation. The point was
not
to get credit for it; African Americans, after all, were not going to get Richard Nixon reelected in 1972. It was yet another example of Mitchell colluding in a false public image of himself for Nixon’s benefit. “[Mitchell] wasn’t a guy to get on a white horse and a sword in his hand and charge down the street,” remarked Richard Kleindienst. “I don’t think he had any animus towards blacks. I don’t think he hated anybody. But I think pragmatically, from the standpoint of the Republican Party and electing a Republican president, I don’t think he was very much interested in chasing black votes all over the country.”
³²

ROBBING THE PRESIDENT’S DESK

If I found out that the military was spying on a president of the United States, it would worry the hell out of me.

—W. Donald Stewart, 1974
¹

A FEW MONTHS
after Nixon was sworn in as president, Mitchell and his press secretary, Jack Landau, were traveling in upstate New York, near Vermont, where the attorney general was to give a speech. The two had just checked into their hotel rooms when the telephone rang. On the line was Secretary of State William Rogers, a longtime associate of Nixon’s who had served as attorney general under President Eisenhower. Rogers gave Landau a message: “Please tell the attorney general that I do not know what’s going on in the Paris peace negotiations.” “I said thank you,” Landau recalled, “and went to the next room and said the secretary of state would like you to know that, quote, ‘I do not know what’s going on in the Paris peace negotiations.’ And Mitchell looked up at me with this wonderful grin and said, ‘He’s not
supposed
to know what’s going on.’”
²

That was the way Richard Nixon liked it. His style of governance was highly secretive, and the bold foreign policy thrusts of his presidency—withdrawal from Vietnam, détente with the Soviet Union, the opening to China—hung precariously on constantly shifting lines of wartime “back-channel” communication that the president encouraged, wherein some key players, like Mitchell, Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger’s deputy, Alexander Haig, knew what was going on, but others, like the easily foiled Rogers, the wilier defense secretary Melvin Laird, and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not.

Kissinger, whom Mitchell had recruited into the administration, was often at the center of the subterfuge. Nixon admired Kissinger’s intellect but suffered no delusions about his loyalty. He was, after all, a Jewish intellectual who had flowered in Nixon’s forbidden zone, the Ivy Leagues—Harvard, no less—and spent the ’68 primary season advising Nixon’s rival, Nelson Rockefeller. But Kissinger’s blend of brilliance and unabashed duplicity intrigued Nixon; as the election unfolded, the Harvard professor switched allegiances without blinking an eye, passing classified information about the Paris talks, obtained through his work with the American delegation, to Mitchell.

If Nixon saw in Kissinger a kindred spirit, an equally ruthless realpolitik practitioner who understood the value of deception in the conduct of foreign policy, he also saw through Kissinger’s unctuous attempts at flattery (“You do these office press conferences so damned
vell!
”). “Nixon didn’t entirely trust Henry, and I can vouch for that,” recalled John Ehrlichman. Once, after Kissinger finished a classified cabinet briefing, Nixon snapped: “And there goes Henry, out to call the
Washington Post
.” Roiling with insecurities, Kissinger guarded his proximity to Nixon zealously. But he knew better than to try to interpose himself between the president and the man whose counsel Nixon valued most. “Mitchell, so far as I can tell, had no views on foreign policy,” Kissinger said in 1995, before correcting himself: “He had no
knowledge
of foreign policy. He had good judgment, and he wanted to make sure things got done properly.”
³

Among the broad range of foreign affairs issues on which Nixon consulted his attorney general were monetary policy (Mitchell was “basically in favor” of abandoning the gold standard), nuclear arms control (he urged American negotiators to demand on-site inspections of Soviet stockpiles), German reunification (on which the pivotal strategy sessions were held in Mitchell’s Watergate apartment), and an array of covert operations carried out across the globe.
⁴
Mitchell was privy to CIA’s Project Jennifer, a top-secret plan, with the Hughes Tool Company providing cover, to raise a sunken Soviet submarine.
⁵
When the White House strong-armed CIA director Richard Helms, a holdover appointee long wary of Nixon, into producing the agency’s records on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mitchell was among the few men permitted to review the documents—heavily sanitized—that Helms supplied.
⁶
Mitchell knew, before Kissinger, Rogers, or the Joint Chiefs, about Nixon’s plans for rapprochement with China.
⁷
The attorney general sat in on—and composed the official memorandum recording—the somber Oval Office meeting of April 28, 1970, when Nixon informed Rogers and Laird about the incursion into Cambodia.
⁸
And there Mitchell was again, silently puffing on his pipe, when the president, on September 15, 1970, bluntly ordered CIA to use any means necessary to thwart the inauguration of Chile’s newly elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende.
⁹

Mitchell sat on the National Security Council and the “40 Committee,” an even more elite group that derived its name from the document that created it: National Security Decision Memorandum 40. Chaired by Kissinger, the committee’s function, in theory, was to approve CIA’s covert operations and monitor the intelligence branches of the armed forces. Helms later recalled Mitchell in these meetings as “sort of a shadowy figure, sometimes asking questions, sometimes being absolutely silent.” Mitchell, for his part, eyed the CIA director suspiciously, regarding him as “capable but very devious,” a Johnson appointee who “didn’t like the Nixon administration or anything about it.” The attorney general’s dislike for Helms mirrored Nixon’s own, and anticipated the director’s—and CIA’s—later intrigues in Watergate. “Dick Helms would knock off his grandmother,” Mitchell would later say.
¹⁰

Of all the foreign policy councils on which Mitchell sat, the most time-consuming and least productive was, by far, the “little committee” that was formed to keep Henry Kissinger on an even emotional keel. The national security adviser conducted a daily battle with Bill Rogers, who, excluded from critical decisions, often made ill-timed and ill-informed public pronouncements, gaffes that drove Kissinger mad and generated more than one emotional threat of resignation. At first, Nixon took Kissinger’s side; later he realized Kissinger himself was the problem, and asked the attorney general, El Supremo, to rein him in.
¹¹

Both Kissinger and Rogers were “acting childish and unpleasantly,” H. R. Haldeman recalled. “We brought Mitchell in frequently as a heavyweight to try and deal with the two of them and get them back on the track. I had to do a lot of that, but there were times when I couldn’t cope with it, and Nixon would ask Mitchell to come in on it.” But as Nixon’s esteem for Kissinger waned, and Mitchell gave up trying to mediate the ceaseless feud with Rogers, the president turned increasingly to Kissinger’s deputy, Colonel Alexander Haig, perhaps the era’s shrewdest practitioner of palace politics, for national security advice and help in tempering Kissinger’s emotionalism.
¹²

A former aide to General Douglas MacArthur and Cyrus R. Vance, secretary of the army under President Kennedy, the physically vigorous Haig moved more easily among hawkish Democrats and Pentagon generals than Kissinger’s left-leaning staff, which Haig, with a snicker, dubbed “the Harvard faculty.” But Haig was as effusive and insincere a flatterer of his boss as Kissinger was of Nixon, leading Kissinger to remark once, quite in error, that Haig was the only aide he could fully trust. Mitchell at first took little notice of Haig, but later saw in him a “Machia-fucking-vellian…psychopath.”
¹³

In such an atmosphere
it was natural—inevitable—that leaks and internal spying would flourish. Indeed, under Nixon, unauthorized disclosures of classified material to the news media reached a kind of zenith, with the timeliness, depth, and scope of government secrets splashed across front pages far exceeding anything policymakers had ever before confronted. Since these were violations of law, Attorney General Mitchell played a central role in the Nixon administration’s determined effort to stanch them.

The battle was joined shortly after Nixon’s hundredth day in office, with the publication in the
New York Times
, on May 9, 1969, of William Beecher’s front-page story “Cambodia Raids Go Unprotested.” Beecher accurately reported that B-52 bomber planes had secretly attacked North Vietnamese supply depots in Cambodia, the ostensibly neutral border country the North had long used as a base of operations. Though Beecher’s report generated no public outcry—unlike the firestorm that erupted four years later, when the secret bombing of Cambodia was revealed in greater depth—the story enraged Kissinger.
¹⁴

From Key Biscayne, Florida, where he and Nixon were staying, the national security adviser wasted no time calling FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, demanding the Bureau undertake a “major effort” to identify who was behind this “extraordinarily damaging…very dangerous” leak. Later that day, Hoover called Kissinger back with the prompt assessment that the Beecher story, and others he had recently published, “probably” relied on leaks from a member of Kissinger’s own staff at NSC. According to Hoover, a livid Kissinger vowed to “destroy whoever did this if we can find him, no matter where he is.” Hoover named several suspects, and by 6:00 p.m. that night, the home telephone of one such staff member, Morton Halperin—also staying in Key Biscayne that weekend—was placed under surveillance. Under current laws, no court order was required for the national security wiretap, only the signature of the attorney general, which Hoover sought, and got, three days later.
¹⁵

Thus began a wiretapping program that continued for the next twenty-one months, expanding to include twelve government officials and four prominent newsmen. In May 1973, fourteen months after Mitchell resigned as attorney general, and one year after Hoover’s death, the
Times
, fittingly, exposed the program, which later figured prominently at Nixon’s impeachment hearings. Mitchell was questioned under oath on the subject five times: first by the FBI in May 1973; again, briefly, that July, in his appearances before the Senate Watergate committee; by staff lawyers for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force that December; and twice more in July 1974, first by investigators for the House Judiciary Committee, then by lawmakers in public session. The records of Mitchell’s classified interrogations by the Watergate prosecutors and the House investigators are previously unpublished.