The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (56 page)

Mitchell’s scrape with Bernstein underscored the disturbing reality that, notwithstanding the limited scope of the indictments, the Watergate story was beginning to spiral out of control. A Harris poll released October 19 found more than 60 percent of voters dismissing Watergate as “mostly politics” and disbelieving charges Nixon was involved. But as Election Day drew nearer, the three television networks began joining the
Post
and the
Times
in heavy coverage of the story, specifically of the charges swirling around Mitchell. Despite the mounting turmoil, Nixon swept to reelection by one of the largest landslides in American history, capturing over 60 percent of 78 million votes cast and the electoral votes of every state save Massachusetts.
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Shortly after election night,
E. Howard Hunt placed an angry call to his old patron at the White House, Chuck Colson. “The reason I called you,” Hunt said, was because “commitments that were made to all of us at the onset have not been kept, and there’s a great deal of unease and concern on the part of the seven defendants…. What we’ve been getting has been coming in very minor dribs and drabs…. This is a long haul and the stakes are very, very high…. This thing must not break apart for foolish reasons.”

In anticipation of their trial on burglary, wiretapping, and other charges in January 1973, the indicted men had set November 25 as a deadline for the “liquidation” of all outstanding debts. They understood the hesitancy to pay up before the election, but that was over, and the men now expected the customs of the spy game to be observed: In the event of capture, the operatives, their families, and their lawyers would stay silent—provided they were all taken care of. “We think that now is the time when a move should be made,” Hunt said, “and surely the cheapest commodity available is money.”
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Colson took the cue. He brought a DictaBelt recording of his talk with Hunt to the office of John Dean, who made his own tape of the conversation and arranged for a transcription. On the morning of November 15, Dean rode in a government limousine to Camp David, where he found Haldeman and Ehrlichman inside the president’s empty office at Laurel Lodge. After playing the Colson-Hunt tape, Dean mentioned he was flying to New York that day to meet with Mitchell. “My instructions from this meeting,” Dean later testified, “were to tell Mitchell to take care of all these problems.”

In that afternoon’s meeting at the Metropolitan Club, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Mitchell came face-to-face with the enormity of the problems confronting him. Joining Dean was Maury Stans, there to discuss legal and financial issues stemming from the closure of CRP, and, too, the burgeoning scandal arising from the committee’s unhappy dalliance with Robert Vesco. Only after Stans finished his unpleasant business and left did Dean begin recounting the latest Watergate troubles. Surely, Mitchell at this moment saw the future: indictment in both the Vesco
and
Watergate cases.

Dean bade the older man into a private room inside the Metropolitan Club. From a bulky Sony recorder came the scratchy sounds of Hunt, whom Mitchell did not know, and Colson, whom Mitchell knew and loathed, talking in circumlocutory fashion about the indicted men’s money problems. At one point, when Hunt asserted that Mitchell had already committed perjury, Mitchell interjected: “I wonder what in the hell Hunt is talking about.” Minutes later, he disgustedly told Dean to hit the stop button and stalked out. Dean told the Senate he received “no instruction or really any indication at all at that time from Mitchell” about what to do next.

This was not the first time Mitchell had been asked to resolve the burglars’ financial problems; that had come back in June, shortly after the arrests, when Mitchell, still campaign manager, had “turned down and turned down cold” a request that CRP pay their bail. The Metropolitan Club meeting marked the first time the problem had reappeared at Mitchell’s doorstep, in the person of John Dean, following the indictments and Nixon’s reelection. Henceforth the scandal would consist of these periodic demands for cash, and accompanying pleas for executive clemency, pressed most forcefully at critical junctures in the legal process: the eve of the burglars’ trial, their sentencing. And it would invariably be to Mitchell, widely and mistakenly regarded as the final authority behind the whole project, that these demands, sooner or later, were delivered.
¹⁷

From the beginning, immediately
after the Watergate arrests, the effort to funnel hush money to the burglars and their attorneys had been led by John Dean. It was Dean who practically begged General Walters to assume the burden at CIA; Dean who summoned Herb Kalmbach from the West Coast and set the fund-raising genius in motion; Dean who supervised the payments that were actually made, through Kalmbach, LaRue, and Ulasewicz. It was in Dean’s EOB office, in September 1972, that Kalmbach announced his withdrawal from the money business and set fire to his written ledger of receipts and expenditures. It was Dean who pushed Kalmbach the hardest to reconsider, “the one that talked to me most often about this, to continue in this program,” as Kalmbach testified. “I had the feeling that Mr. Dean was the primary person directing it.” And it was Dean who, after the election, worked hardest to find a way to meet the defendants’ fresh demands, playing the tape of Hunt’s hair-raising talk with Colson for Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell, hoping one of these big men would handle the task that Dean, just thirty-four years old, could not: rounding up the money.
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But to Dean’s surprise and dismay, no one lifted a finger to help. Smart and resourceful, the fresh-faced White House counsel—whose “ringmaster” role in the cover-up appears, in retrospect, to have owed far more to his complicity in the break-in than to any sense of “blind ambition”—worked overtime in the fall of 1972 to ensure that the burglars, Liddy, and Hunt would remain, in the parlance of the day, on the reservation. Since at least the beginning of 1971, Dean had known there were “large sums of cash” floating around the White House, leftover monies from the last two election cycles. As with the Kalmbach and CIA gambits, Dean later disclaimed authorship of the idea to use this White House fund, estimated at $350,000, to meet the burglars’ demands; instead, he attributed it to—
who else?
—John Mitchell.

In his executive-session testimony before the Senate, previously unpublished, Dean was decidedly vague in describing how and when Mitchell first instructed him to access the fund. “Well, the long and short of it,” Dean testified, “was that Mitchell finally called me and said, could I speak with Haldeman about getting some of that money, the $350,000 that was there, and we’ll pay you back.” In public session, Dean claimed Mitchell, just two weeks after rebuffing Dean at the Metropolitan Club, suddenly saw the wisdom of buying the defendants’ silence and contacted him spontaneously. “To the best of my recollection,” Dean testified, “it was the first week of December that Mitchell called me and said that we would have to use some of the $350,000 fund to take care of the demands being made by Hunt and the others for money.”

At the House impeachment hearings, Dean slid the date of this call back to some unspecified time prior to November 28. Then, at
U.S. v. Mitchell
, the witness remembered for the first time that Mitchell’s call had actually come on Thanksgiving Day, which Dean spent at his parents’ home in Greenville, Pennsylvania. “The call caused some excitement in the house,” Dean testified, “and I took it in the back bedroom.” Presumably these small but vivid details—the holiday setting, the Dean family’s excitement, the back bedroom—imbued the story, in the eyes of the jury and as Dean plainly hoped, with the aura of truth; no one ever posed the obverse question, which was why, if these details made the event so memorable, Dean had theretofore failed, in several forums, to mention them. Dean then claimed he raced back to Washington, reluctantly and at Mitchell’s urging, to see Haldeman and Ehrlichman, time and date again unspecified; but when asked, during friendly direct examination, what the duo said, Dean testified lamely: “I frankly don’t recall what they told me.”

In
Blind Ambition
, published in 1976, Dean finally perfected his story, fusing into the single call to Greenville both Mitchell’s plea for the use of the White House fund and his suggestion that Dean return to Washington, events previously held separately. Also for the first time, Dean cast Mitchell’s call as a specific response to another event: the receipt, earlier that week, of a fresh list of money demands that Hunt’s lawyer had sent to CRP attorney Kenneth Parkinson. In no previous account had Dean linked Parkinson’s name, or this list of demands, to Mitchell’s call(s); now, in his memoir, Dean had Mitchell inquiring what action had been taken on Parkinson’s “little list.” Here Dean made a telling mistake, the most glaring of many discrepancies in his multiple accounts of the episode.
Blind Ambition
recounted Mitchell’s call coming on Thanksgiving Day, which fell that year on November 23; but Parkinson did not transmit the list of new demands until December 1. Thus it would have been impossible for Mitchell to contact Dean about a list unknown to both men for another eight days.

Mitchell, of course, flatly denied these allegations about the White House fund. “I had no control over the money and there would be no reason why I should call Dean or anybody else,” Mitchell told the Senate, “and I did not so call Dean.” Apparently, the WSPF prosecutors recognized the problems in Dean’s story, for they chose to list in the
U.S. v. Mitchell
indictment, as overt acts in the cover-up conspiracy, Dean’s playing of the Colson-Hunt tape for Mitchell at the Metropolitan Club (uncontested by Mitchell); Parkinson’s transmittal of the list of demands to Dean on December 1; and Haldeman’s authorization, in “early December,” for the use of the $350,000. Yet in chronicling the origins of this last, and most historically significant, hush-money scheme—one that ultimately ensnared the president himself, and led to impeachment charges against him—the indictment in
U.S. v. Mitchell
made no mention whatsoever of John Mitchell.
¹⁹

On the foggy afternoon
of December 8, 1972, United Airlines Flight 553, bound from Washington, D.C., to Midway Airport, was cruising for landing at 4,000 feet when suddenly the plane’s nose shifted skyward; seconds later, it plowed into a neighborhood in southwest Chicago, slicing off roofs as she careened forward, obliterating four homes before bursting into flames. Forty-five passengers died, among them Mrs. Dorothy Hunt, wife of Howard Hunt and—unknown at the time—the recipient of several deliveries of Watergate hush money. Chicago police discovered Mrs. Hunt’s intact purse, which contained more than $10,000 in cash, almost all in hundred-dollar bills.
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A father of four, Hunt was devastated. “I was very seriously considering doing away with myself,” he later confided to investigators, in previously unpublished testimony. Soon Hunt informed his Watergate codefendants he could not withstand the strain of their trial, set to begin January 8, and that he intended to plead guilty. Urging the Cubans to follow suit, Hunt warned Bernard Barker, according to previously unpublished WSPF files, that “accusations about prostitutes would come out at trial.” To his old White House chums, by whom he felt abandoned—
Colson hadn’t even attended Dorothy’s funeral
—Hunt was now adamant that his financial needs had to be met, and fast; and that he was owed not just money but the promise of rehabilitation, to be achieved through a timely conferral of executive clemency. By March, the ex-spy was in a venomous state: “John Dean is a son of a bitch, and I want somebody to know about that before it is too late and I am in prison!…I am very bitter towards John Dean.”
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