The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (26 page)

The son of Midwestern Jews who converted to Christian Science, Daniel Ellsberg, then forty, was a former Marine who had earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees and returned to teach at Harvard. There he became a leading exponent of the theory of “madness” as an instrument of national security policymakers—cutting-edge stuff in the mid-fifties—and received an invitation to lecture on “the conscious political use of irrational military threats” from his more distinguished colleague, Henry Kissinger. Ellsberg completed two tours of Vietnam, as a Pentagon consultant for the RAND Corporation think tank and later as a member of the counterinsurgency team led by Major General Edward G. Lansdale in Saigon. Once a proponent of the war, Ellsberg returned to the States in 1967 harboring grave doubts about the efficacy, and morality, of continued American involvement in it. In 1969, through contacts at RAND, Ellsberg obtained a set of the Pentagon Papers and began reading the study in its entirety. He spent the next two years hardening in his opposition to the war, and in his antipathy for Kissinger. Early efforts to make the Papers public through members of Congress failed, and not until he contacted the
Times
’ Sheehan, to whom he had previously leaked information, did Ellsberg find a willing partner in the largest unauthorized disclosure of classified material in American history.

Now, on the second day of Sheehan’s series, the Nixon administration had zeroed in on Ellsberg as the likely culprit. Attorney General Mitchell, undisturbed by Sunday’s report, heard again from Laird on Monday morning, and this time, according to Mitchell, the defense secretary advised that continued publication of the Papers would harm the national defense.
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Mitchell decided to act. In a telephone call Monday evening, Ehrlichman told the president that Mitchell wanted approval for DOJ to send a cease-and-desist telegram to the
Times
before Tuesday’s editions came out. “Hell, I wouldn’t prosecute the
Times
,” Nixon replied. “My view is to prosecute the Goddamn pricks that gave [the Papers] to them.” Seconds later, Nixon had Mitchell on the line. “What is your advice on this
Times
thing, John?” the president asked. “You would like to do it?” Nixon assumed he and Mitchell both knew what he was talking about. “I would believe so, Mr. President,” Mitchell replied. “Otherwise, we will look a little foolish in not following through on our legal obligations.”

Nixon then announced that Kissinger had joined them on a separate line. Kissinger promptly conveyed to Nixon and Mitchell the view—which he attributed to former president Johnson and Walt Rostow, Kissinger’s predecessor as national security adviser—that the
Times
series represented “an attack on the whole integrity of government…. If whole file cabinets can be stolen and then made available to the press, you can’t have orderly government anymore.” Mitchell agreed to initiate an “undercover investigation,” but couldn’t resist a dig at Kissinger. “We’ve got some information we’ve developed as to where these copies are and who…leaked them,” Mitchell said. “And the prime suspect, according to your friend Rostow you’re quoting, is a gentleman by the name of Ellsberg.”

Mitchell crafted the telegram to the
Times
, and sent it off shortly after Nixon approved the gesture; final authority over its language, however, belonged to Mitchell. Addressed to
Times
publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the telegram read:

I have been advised by the Secretary of Defense that the material published in the
New York Times
on June 13, 14 1971 captioned “key texts from Pentagon’s Vietnam Study” contains information relating to the national defense of the United States and bears a top secret classification.

As such, publication of this information is directly prohibited by the provisions of the Espionage Law, Title 18, United States Code, Section 793.

Moreover, further publication of information of this character will cause irreparable injury to the defense interests of the United States.

Accordingly, I respectfully request that you publish no further information of this character and advise me that you have made arrangements for the return of these documents to the Department of Defense.

Mitchell’s communiqué left unspoken what consequences would befall the
Times
if it continued publishing the Papers, but the attorney general’s invocation of the espionage statute left little doubt what he had in mind. The
Times
’ senior management split on whether to continue with further installments. When publisher Sulzberger weighed in from London with permission to publish a third installment, the
Times
responded to Mitchell’s telegram with a terse public statement:

We have received the telegram from the attorney general asking the
Times
to cease further publication of the Pentagon’s Vietnam study. The
Times
must respectfully decline the request of the attorney general, believing it is in the interest of the people of this country to be informed of the material contained in this series.

That night, the
Times’
Tuesday edition rolled off the presses, its front page featuring Sheehan’s third installment, headlined: “Vietnam Archive: Study Tells How Johnson Secretly Opened Way to Ground Combat.” But that was not the paper’s lead story; that holy real estate, four columns across, was reserved for the headline topping Max Frankel’s piece: “Mitchell Seeks to Halt Series on Vietnam but
Times
Refuses.” A newspaper series documenting the duplicitous conduct of the Vietnam War by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had now been transformed into what Mitchell would later call a “monumental lawsuit” over the scope of press freedom, pitting the Nixon administration against the world’s most influential newspaper. Mitchell’s central role in the legal battle over the Pentagon Papers cemented his image as the supreme authoritarian of modern times, the keeper of evil secrets and enforcer of unjust laws. Yet in the ensuing blur of motions, injunctions, and rulings—amidst which selections from the Papers were published by seventeen other newspapers, only three of them enjoined by the government, and in which the U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately rule in favor of continued publication—Mitchell played virtually no day-to-day role. Where the attorney general
did
remain deeply immersed was in the investigation to determine responsibility for the leak—and in the daily assuagement of his high-strung client.

The Pentagon Papers excited
Richard Nixon’s passions and prejudices like no other event of his presidency. That Daniel Ellsberg, the culprit, was a creature of Harvard University and the liberal think tanks; that he had been a Kissinger protégé and a confidant of those
disloyalistas
purged from Kissinger’s office, like Mort Halperin, on whose residential wiretap FBI agents had overheard Ellsberg’s voice no less than fifteen times; and that Ellsberg was, by his own description, a Jew, like Halperin and Leslie Gelb, who had actually overseen the preparation of the Pentagon Papers; all this proved too much for Nixon to bear. Finally, when DOJ reported that a set of the Papers had reached the Soviet embassy, the affair served to crystallize a quarter century of Nixon’s deepest beliefs and fears: namely, that there existed a vast left-wing conspiracy, in and out of government, led by Jewish intellectuals and their handmaidens in academia, the news media, and hostile think tanks, that was bent on destroying postwar America and Nixon himself.

Throughout the affair, the president alternated between strategizing how best to exploit the leak for partisan advantage, demanding Ellsberg’s head, and decrying the deviousness and disloyalty of the Jews. “Can you haul in that son-of-a-bitch Ellsberg right away?” Nixon asked Mitchell three days into the
Times
series. Nailing the antiwar intellectual, who spent ten days underground before surrendering to authorities in Boston, consumed Nixon as wholly as the pursuit of Alger Hiss, the Soviet spy, had a generation earlier. “What we’re up against here is an enemy worse than the Communists,” Nixon told Haldeman and Kissinger on July 1. And in Nixon’s mind, both cold war menaces, the communists and the antiwar left, shared a common, defining element: the Jews. Day after day, the president of the United States sat in the White House and stewed in the basest anti-Semitism: There was Frankel, “that damn Jew,” and the culprit, derisively tagged “Ell
stein
,” elsewhere referred to simply as “the Jew.”
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With Mitchell, however, the president was careful to express his anti-Semitism in guarded terms, even apologetically. “You can never put, John, any [judge] who is a Jew on a civil rights case, or freedom-of-the-press kind of case, and get even a 10 percent chance [of a favorable ruling],” he told Mitchell on June 22, after an adverse ruling by a Jewish judge. “Basically, who the hell are these people that stole the papers? It’s too bad.
I’m sorry
. I was hoping one of them would be a Gentile. [Laughter]…The three Jews—Gelb—the three suspects. All Jews.” Nixon’s apology for his anti-Semitism here was unique; no other example of such an expression can be heard on the Nixon tapes. And Mitchell, so far as can be ascertained from the thousands of pages of White House tape transcripts that have entered the public domain, never responded in kind—as other advisers, like Haldeman, Charles Colson, and Ron Ziegler, often did.

Indeed, it was during the Pentagon Papers crisis that Mitchell’s aquiline demeanor began, for the first time, to
bother
the president. On the evening of June 19, after a federal judge granted an initial injunction against the
Times
—a historic order, the first time in American history a court had stopped a newspaper from publishing an article—Nixon called Mitchell to emphasize that while litigation was fine enough, paramount importance lay in pressing the administration’s case in the court of public opinion. “Get some strong language, like ‘a massive breach of security,’ things of that sort…in the public mind,” the president said. “We’re not just interested in making the technical case for the lawyers…. Use some really high-flown adjectives.” Mitchell agreed, assuring the president—with open sarcasm—that all court filings would be cleared through the White House, “so your phrase-coiners and word-makers can get a crack at it.” It was Mitchell’s way of saying: The attorney general would mind the law; Nixon and his junior ad men could tinker with adjectives.

But the president thought Mitchell missed the point, failed to grasp the lessons of the Hiss case. “Don’t worry about [Ellsberg’s] trial,” Nixon ordered the attorney general on June 30. “Just get everything out. Try him in the press. Try him in the press. Everything, John, that there is on the investigation—get it out, leak it out. We want to destroy him in the press. Press. Is that clear?” The following morning, Nixon complained to Haldeman and Kissinger that Mitchell lacked the necessary ruthlessness to handle the case. “We won the Hiss case in the papers,” the president explained.

I had to leak stuff all over the place. John Mitchell doesn’t understand that sort of thing. He’s a good lawyer. It’s hard to him…. But what I mean is we have to develop a new program, a program for leaking out information. We’re destroying these people in the papers…. I know how to play this game and we’re going to start playing it.
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The following day, Nixon’s dissatisfaction reached its apex, as the president ordered Mitchell excluded from a strategy session on the Pentagon Papers—“he doesn’t see it clearly”—and spoke longingly of a glorious future unburdened by his upright former law partner, campaign manager, and cabinet heavyweight. “Actually, when Mitchell leaves as attorney general,” Nixon told Haldeman, “we’re going to be better off in my view…. John is just too damn good a lawyer, you know. He’s a good, strong lawyer. It just repels him to do these horrible things, but they’ve got to be done.”
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Horrible things—including the burglary and ransacking of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—were not far off. The burglary was the work of the White House Special Investigations Unit, better known as “the Plumbers,” a team of leak-plugging covert operatives assembled, on Nixon’s order, following the sluggish performance in the investigation of the Pentagon Papers by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. As Nixon later confirmed, Mitchell opposed the Plumbers’ creation; nor did he learn of their break-in at the Los Angeles office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist, until June 1972, some nine months after the fact.
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Just two weeks after the break-in, Mitchell displayed his ignorance of the Plumbers’ ongoing operations, but also his tolerance for “a little bit of dirty tricks,” in an Oval Office strategy session with Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson. The group was discussing Nixon’s demand to “hang FDR and Truman” via swift declassification of incriminating old documents.

EHRLICHMAN:
God, there’s a ton of paper in this crazy thing…. It’s a life’s work….[T]o go through this stuff is nearly impossible…

NIXON:
I don’t understand it. And we just don’t have anybody worth a damn fighting our side of it. I have to go up to bat all the time myself.