The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (57 page)

Worse, Hunt was not the only Watergate defendant rattling his cage. James McCord, the inscrutable master spook who had sabotaged the June 17 break-in and deceived his fellow burglars about it, was dismayed they were now considering a “CIA defense.” Under this strategy, the Cubans would plead not guilty and argue that they always believed they were carrying out an Agency mission. So fierce was McCord’s determination to protect Langley that he began seeing treachery everywhere, including on his own defense team. He quarreled with his lawyers’ plan to subpoena Richard Helms, and wondered why they (rightly) dismissed as hearsay McCord’s attempts to implicate Mitchell. “Mitchell really didn’t talk to you about it, did he?” McCord quoted his lawyers as saying, typical of their “negative-type approach.” “They can go to hell,” he fumed. Soon McCord was firing off threatening notes, including one to Jack Caulfield, Dean’s aide, vowing that if Helms was fired, and the onus for Watergate laid at CIA’s door, “every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert.”
²²

Caulfield dutifully notified Dean. The strain of marshaling hush money was bad enough; but the kind of dissatisfaction McCord was expressing couldn’t be mollified with simple cash. Something else was needed: executive clemency. Up to then, all of Dean’s dealings on the issue of clemency had concerned Howard Hunt and had been limited to discussions with Colson and Ehrlichman. However, in sworn testimony before the Senate, previously unpublished, Dean claimed he was prompted to action in McCord’s case by a telephone call, out of the blue, from John Mitchell.

McCord was off the reservation and they were having all kinds of problems with him, his lawyer was quite upset with him. He was not cooperating and playing ball as the others were. So…Mitchell called me and said he thought I should talk to [McCord] about it, and take his pulse, or make him a similar offer. I think there had been pulse-taking sessions—I’d have to check my notes on that.

Dean’s testimony on this allegation in the ensuing forums followed the familiar pattern: Dates slid, a single call became multiple calls, face-to-face discussion became a phone conversation, and Mitchell’s complicity deepened in each retelling. Asked if he took part in the extension of clemency offers to the Watergate defendants—whether he bore guilty knowledge of what Colson was promising Hunt, and acted, through Dean and Caulfield, to tender similar promises to McCord—Mitchell dismissed Dean’s story as “a complete fabrication.” “I was out of town in Florida when [Dean] started the McCord dialogue,” Mitchell told the Senate, brandishing his office logs and adding “there would be no reason in the world for me to direct Mr. Dean to do anything vis-à-vis Caulfield or McCord or anybody else.” This was true: On the matter Mitchell considered his greatest vulnerability—the three Gemstone meetings—Hunt and McCord could offer only hearsay testimony. Whether they talked or kept silent thus mattered little to Mitchell.

Once again, the WSPF prosecutors appear to have recognized the problems posed by their central witness and his chameleonic testimony; for in listing this charge in the
U.S. v. Mitchell
indictment, the conspiracy’s thirty-third overt act, the best the prosecutors could say was that Mitchell did the evil deed, by phone, sometime “in or about early January 1973.”
²³

“The crux of the
problem that you always had,” Dean was once asked, “was raising the money to support [the defendants], pay their legal fees and, as you testified, to keep them quiet; is that correct?” “Yes,” Dean answered.

The money! The money!
It was the bane of Dean’s existence across the latter half of 1972 and the first quarter of 1973. By the end of January, Nixon had been sworn in for a second term as president; Hunt and the Cubans had, as promised, pleaded guilty; and McCord and Liddy had stood trial and been convicted. When Earl Silbert put Alfred Baldwin on the stand, a lawyer representing Spencer Oliver and other DNC employees had interrupted the proceedings and demanded, successfully, that Baldwin be prohibited from disclosing the racy contents of the conversations that he, as the operation’s wiretap monitor, had overheard. The secrets of the DNC—and the Columbia Plaza—would remain undisclosed, for now.

To further ensure as much, Dean that month also performed what he later called the “concrete and sweaty act” of shredding three notebooks, including an “operational diary” of the Gemstone project, seized from Hunt’s EOB safe. This detail Dean withheld from the Senate and, initially, from the WSPF prosecutors; he disclosed it only after his plea deal was completed. In a recent interview, Hunt termed Dean’s destruction of the notebooks an act of “self-preservation,” aimed at suppressing “notations that were incriminatory to him.” Of Dean’s presence at the creation of Gemstone, there is no better indication than his destruction of this evidence, and the lengths he went to conceal it.
²⁴

Only one overarching problem remained:
the money!
Despite the brush-off he had gotten from Mitchell at the Metropolitan Club in November, Dean still saw the former attorney general as the most likely of the Big Three—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell—to act on the defendants’ demands. Dean also remembered the solid performance of Herb Kalmbach in raising and dispensing hush money the previous summer. Therein Dean apparently saw his, and the cover-up’s, salvation: If he could get Mitchell and Kalmbach in a room together, perhaps Kalmbach could be persuaded to return to the game.

On January 19, Dean encountered Mitchell and Kalmbach at a trustees meeting for the Nixon Foundation at Blair House, the official residence for foreign dignitaries, located across from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Afterward, Dean told the Senate, he repaired with Mitchell, Kalmbach, and Fred LaRue to Mitchell’s law office at 1701. (At
U.S. v. Mitchell
, Dean changed LaRue’s status at this meeting, from attendee to discussion topic.) Within a few minutes, Dean claimed, Mitchell asked Kalmbach to resume his role in the hush-money enterprise. Dean remembered Kalmbach refusing, then demurring in response to a second request, made either by Mitchell or Dean himself, for a list of potential contributors, and leaving shortly thereafter.

Neither LaRue nor Mitchell recalled the meeting at all. Kalmbach recalled it—but not as Dean described it. The
über
-fund-raiser remembered Dean approaching him as the trustees’ meeting broke up, and telling him John Mitchell wanted to see him right away. Through “misty-like rain,” Kalmbach recalled, he and Dean—not Dean and Mitchell, as Dean claimed—ran the half block to 1701 and headed straight into the office of the former attorney general. There they found Mitchell and LaRue. According to Kalmbach, it was Dean who “led the conversation.”

Mr. Dean stated that they were interested in my raising additional funds for these defendants. And the minute that came up, suddenly I knew, of course, what the reason was for this meeting. And I, of course, had made up my mind the prior August that I would not raise additional funds, and so I was just in the position of excusing myself as gracefully as possible from the meeting…. [I] said that I would not do anything further.

Dean was “the one that talked to me most often about this, to continue in this [hush-money] program,” Kalmbach told the Senate Watergate committee; and as he told the House, it was Dean, not Mitchell, who asked him to reenter the game that drizzly day in January 1973. As for Mitchell’s role, Kalmbach made explicitly clear—in the only interview he ever gave after Watergate, to author Len Colodny, in April 1988—that there was none. “Mitchell never asked me to raise money,” Kalmbach said.

For his part, the former attorney general claimed he first learned of the payments to the Watergate defendants in September 1972, and that he neither aided nor impeded the scheme. He told House investigators, according to previously unpublished documents, that he thought the disbursements were solely for legal fees, and that he “knew that the payments were in cash, but he did not know of the covert manner” in which they were being made.

Since Fred LaRue worked so closely with Dean in the hush-money enterprise—deciding sums, arranging drop-offs—prosecutors hoped the Mississippian, after copping his plea, would testify that Mitchell was the driving force behind it. But LaRue’s residual affection for Mitchell, on such vivid display when LaRue broke down and wept before the grand jury, apparently prevented him from further implicating his old friend. LaRue came close, previously unpublished documents show, wavered back and forth—but never pulled the trigger.

Thus after explicitly telling the Senate Watergate committee he never briefed Mitchell on his own machinations with Dean and Kalmbach, LaRue told federal prosecutors he “discussed with Mitchell these money disbursements—discussed where $ would come from.” LaRue told the prosecutors “either Dean or Mitchell caused [him] to contact Kalmbach,” but added Dean “appeared to be directing” the effort. The farthest LaRue went was to claim he presented a “cash disbursement summary sheet” to Mitchell in July 1972. “Mitchell said you ought to get rid of it + he destroyed it,” the prosecutors’ notes read. Yet in recounting to Senate investigators how he entered the hush-money scheme, LaRue spoke only of Dean, not of Mitchell, and made no mention of the incriminating summary sheet Mitchell had supposedly ordered him to destroy. LaRue also told Senate investigators he “[could] not remember whether he was getting his instructions from Mitchell or from Dean,” but that, in any case, he “[did] not recall Dean seeking approval from higher-ups” in the operation. Elsewhere LaRue said that as early as June 28, 1972, he and Mitchell discussed “commitments” to the Watergate defendants; but LaRue also claimed he “did not raise the subject with Mitchell because he had the impression that this fund-raising area was Dean’s responsibility and that there was consequently no need to tell Mitchell.”

With House impeachment investigators in April 1974, LaRue continued his strange Mississippi two-step, claiming Mitchell “was aware of how much money was going out” but that Dean “made the final decisions.” Later that year, at
U.S. v. Mitchell
, LaRue returned Mitchell to an authorial role, claiming the former attorney general “asked me to work with Mr. Dean on…meeting these commitments.” LaRue reaffirmed he “did discuss…the payment of monies with Mr. Mitchell,” then swore his and Mitchell’s talks covered “only the vaguest generalities.” Finally, LaRue told prosecutors that Dean and Mitchell had jointly dispatched him in January 1973 to solicit rich Republican donors, without betraying his true purpose, in an effort to replenish the depleted $350,000 White House fund. This was aborted when the donors, including Cincinnati businessman Carl Lindner, demanded to know the reason for their largesse. Even here, however, LaRue told the House he undertook this mission “after discussions with Dean.”
²⁵

Until now, President Nixon
had mostly been a spectator at the Watergate drama, the recipient, in his White House aerie, of news good and bad, a largely passive actor alternately baffled and intrigued, enraged and delighted as developments warranted. Outside of the “smoking gun” meeting, when Nixon acquiesced in Haldeman’s proposal to get CIA involved on national security grounds—a step taken under the mistaken belief, propagated by Dean, that the proposal had the endorsement of John Mitchell—Nixon had had little role in the daily machinations of the cover-up. He had also indicated his ex post facto approval when Haldeman informed him, thirty-nine days later, that Hunt, “at considerable cost,” had been made “happy”—“They have to be paid,” Nixon had agreed—but even here, the president’s role had been passive, and not irrefutably discernible as a witting obstruction of justice.

In the days surrounding his second inauguration, however, Nixon watched the situation deteriorate rapidly. On January 14 and 15, the
New York Times
ran a pair of articles by Seymour Hersh, far more worrisome than anything Woodward and Bernstein had published, headlined “4 Watergate Defendants Reported Still Being Paid” and “Pressures to Plead Guilty Alleged in Watergate Case.” On February 7, the Senate created a select committee to probe Watergate. Nixon’s thoughts on The Question ran toward the uncharitable. “I mean, let’s face it,” he snapped to Haldeman and Ehrlichman on December 11. “We all know who the hell should have handled this. Goddamnit, it was Mitchell, and he wasn’t handling it.”