The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (60 page)

Ehrlichman, long contemptuous of Mitchell and desperate to preserve his power in this season of upheaval, warmed to his task. Fancying himself not only a detective but a dramatist, he precociously acted out the lines he alone could deliver to the fearsome former attorney general. “The jig is up,” he would say, “and the president strongly feels that the only way that this thing can wind up being even a little net plus for the administration and for the presidency…is for you to go in and voluntarily make a statement, a statement that basically says, ‘I am both morally and legally responsible.’”

Only Haldeman, whom Mitchell always regarded as “a different kettle of fish from Ehrlichman,” interrupted the rehearsals, equal parts spite and delusion, with a kind word for the former attorney general. “I don’t think Mitchell did order the Watergate bugging and I don’t think he was specifically aware of the Watergate bugging at the time it was instituted,” Haldeman declared. “I honestly don’t.” The others blithely ignored this and continued fine-tuning the script. Nixon feared Mitchell, if confronted, would “take the offensive,” lay the whole thing off on the White House. For this contingency Ehrlichman prepared fresh dialogue. “Look, John, we’re past the point where we can be concerned about whether people in the White House are involved,” he would say. “The thing is not going to go away, John, and by your sitting up there in New York pretending that it is, is just making it worse.”

Nixon had some final rewrites in mind, playing up the agony the affair was visiting on the president and explaining why Nixon himself wasn’t confronting his old law partner. “I think you’ve got to say that this is the toughest decision he’s made”—Nixon here was indulging his fondness for third-person references to himself—“tougher than Cambodia and May 8 and December 18 put together.” These were the dates of Nixon’s most momentous war decisions: the mining of Haiphong Harbor and the launching of the Christmas Bombing of 1972, respectively. “He just can’t bring himself to talk to you about it,” Nixon wanted Ehrlichman to say. “Just can’t do it. And he directed that I talk to you.” The script was approved.

A final matter remained. Ehrlichman thought he should create a “record” of his talk with Mitchell. “Maybe I ought to get my office geared up so that I can do that,” he said. Like Nixon, Ehrlichman was an inveterate surreptitious taper of his office conversations; previous victims included everyone from Richard Helms and Pat Gray to John
and
Martha Mitchell. Though his first impulse was to endorse Ehrlichman’s suggestion (“Do you have a way to gear it up? Well, go gear it!”), Nixon suddenly remembered who the intended victim was and had second thoughts. Finally, he gave his blessing to the electronic entrapment of his strong man—on one condition: The president didn’t want his nose rubbed in the dirty business. “I don’t want to hear the record,” he ordered. “Don’t have me hear the record.”

After nearly three hours, the group adjourned with Ehrlichman primed, in cloak-and-dagger vernacular, to smoke Mitchell out. Haldeman placed the call; the former attorney general began making his way to Washington. A “damn painful” business it was, Nixon thought. “Mitchell’s case is a killer,” he rasped.
⁹

A GREAT TRIAL

They didn’t want their little witness [Dean] tarnished…. Why the hell that committee didn’t drag the CIA people up there and put ’em over the coals to find out [their role], I’ll never know…. They all got their picture on television and then they forgot about these things.

—John Mitchell, 1988
¹

BY EARLY APRIL 1973
the Watergate grand jury was back in business, summoning James McCord for a repeat performance of the hearsay account he had given the Ervin committee. The Senate panel was set to begin televised hearings the following month. These twin probes, by the prosecutors and Congress, finally made the cover-up impracticable and spelled the effective end of the Nixon presidency. For those at the center, the scandal was a media-age maelstrom from which there was no hope of escape. “They dragged hundreds of people—contributors, workers in the campaign, members of the administration, friends of Nixon—into a great big Roman amphitheater,” Maurice Stans recalled, “and they each had to individually fight their way out to prove they were entitled to get out.”

Soon the men who regarded Mitchell as a “father figure” queued up to inform him, each in turn, of their cooperation with the prosecutors—in effect, to pay their last respects. First in line, as usual, was Dean, who met Mitchell for the last time on April 10 at Mitchell’s law office. Twenty days away from being fired by Nixon on national television, Dean was already bargaining for immunity with the grand jury and Senate. Before seeing Mitchell, Dean contacted his lawyer, Charles N. Shaffer, who conferred with the prosecutors. Shaffer’s advice was to feel Mitchell out—but not, under any circumstances, to discuss any planned testimony with him. Then Shaffer relayed an indecent proposal from the boys at Justice: How did Dean feel about wearing a hidden microphone and surreptitiously recording his meeting with Mitchell? Dean exploded in anger. “You can tell those guys to go fuck themselves! Jesus Christ, Charlie. It’s hard enough for me to turn on Mitchell. I’ll be damned if I’m going to set him up like some Mafia informant.”

The ensuing meeting Dean recounted twice: in a memorandum to the file two days later and, in lengthier form, in his 1976 memoir. As usual, Dean’s two accounts contained significant discrepancies; but on balance he claimed Mitchell gently exhorted him not to testify, to consider the implications for Nixon’s presidency and invoke one, or all, of the applicable privileges: executive, attorney-client, Fifth Amendment. Dean politely demurred. Those courses could bring contempt charges, and Dean said he preferred eating bean soup in the Senate basement to a cell in the D.C. jail. When Dean mused aloud about fleeing the country, Mitchell said he might join him; when Dean said he would take his wife, Mo, Mitchell expressed uncertainty about bringing Martha.

But the circumstances were too pressing for small talk. Mitchell abruptly asked if it was true that Dean had promised Gordon Liddy a million-dollar budget for his intelligence plans. Dean sloughed off the question and recalled—in his memo of the meeting, but not in his book—that he responded by turning the tables and accusing Mitchell of having issued the illegal orders to enlist Herb Kalmbach and use the White House fund to pay the Watergate defendants’ hush money.

Within an hour the conversation had run its course. Dean urged Mitchell to retain counsel—the first person to so advise the former attorney general, who supposedly replied that if charges came, he would just “stonewall it.” As a final plea, Mitchell asked Dean to keep him informed of what happened in the grand jury room; Dean demurred, citing Rule 6-E, the grand jury secrecy rule. They wished each other luck; Mitchell said he’d need it. The next time they saw each other, Dean was taking the oath at
U.S. v. Mitchell.
²

Four days later, a
black government limousine pulled up the White House driveway and disgorged Mitchell and his ever-loyal secretary, Susie Morrison. Nervously eyeing their arrival from his office window was H. R. Haldeman, who at that precise moment happened to be on the phone with Jeb Magruder. The CRP deputy was announcing, in a “broken voice,” his decision to begin cooperating, that very day, with the Watergate prosecutors. “I’m going to plead guilty and go to jail,” Magruder sighed. “I’ve got no defense now. They’ve got witnesses on top of witnesses on top of witnesses…and I can’t do it for John anymore”—a reference to Mitchell. Haldeman, having caught the bug, was secretly taping the call.

HALDEMAN:
Does [Mitchell] know this?

MAGRUDER:
I, I want to talk to him but I wanted to wait till I had made the firm decision rather than—

HALDEMAN:
Yeah.

MAGRUDER:
—hassling with him about whether I should or I shouldn’t. As you know, up until yesterday, he’s asked me to hold—

HALDEMAN:
Huh.

MAGRUDER:
—and I can’t hold…. I mean, I’ve held long enough…. I really think, Bob, you should realize that, you know, the whole thing is going to go…. They’re
all
going to go. I mean there isn’t anybody now that is going to hold. Except Mitchell, I think.

Nimbly working the phones, Haldeman arranged for Mitchell, who had been summoned for a meeting with the president, to be diverted to Ehrlichman’s office. Here was Mitchell’s first clue something sinister was afoot. The second came when Ehrlichman opened his door. After bare pleasantries, Mitchell later testified, his host made an unusual request. “Most of the times when I met with John Ehrlichman, we sat on a sofa or chairs around the coffee table in one corner of the office and sort of relaxed,” Mitchell said. “This particular time I was invited to sit in front of Mr. Ehrlichman’s desk. After the meeting was over and I was reflecting upon it, it occurred to me that was an unusual procedure, and it might very well have been for the purpose of recording it.” Indeed: While Mitchell and Morrison waited outside, Ehrlichman hid the recorder in his wastepaper basket.

The House Judiciary Committee transcript of the two men’s tête-à-tête, in which Ehrlichman had vowed to tell Mitchell “you are as guilty as hell” and “the jig is up,” later showed that for all his Oval Office bravado, the White House aide completely wilted, like many before him, in the presence of the Big Enchilada. Ehrlichman began by saying the president was “troubled” that some individuals might think they were best serving him by keeping silent. “Now, obviously, you’re in a situation of jeopardy, and other people are, too,” Ehrlichman said. “Jeb Magruder has decided to make a clean breast of things and to take a guilty plea, so that pretty well starts to work from the middle in all directions…. In addition, it’s coming unstuck in a number of other areas—”

“I’d like to know about it,” Mitchell interrupted. Ehrlichman explained that the prosecutors were now focused on post–June 17 activities, “the obstruction of justice aspect.” Howard Hunt’s recent cooperation with the grand jury had begun creating difficulties for Paul O’Brien, the CRP lawyer who had served as a conduit for some of Hunt’s money demands. Mere mention of Hunt and O’Brien was intended to scare Mitchell, whom Ehrlichman believed culpable in the hush-money payments. “They will make a very wide-ranging case of the aftermath business.” On what basis? Mitchell asked. Obstruction of justice and conspiracy, Ehrlichman replied.

MITCHELL:
In what way did they obstruct justice?

EHRLICHMAN:
In inducing the defendants to withhold testimony, is their theory for corrupt [inaudible]—

MITCHELL:
Is, is that factually true?

EHRLICHMAN:
I don’t—I, I can’t say that it is, from anything that I’ve been able to find. I have, I have not been able to find any direct, efficient actor who made that assertion.

Here Ehrlichman retreated, stammering in demurral after Mitchell effectively dared him to make a direct charge of complicity in the payment of hush money. Since Ehrlichman had bullied Mitchell with mentions of Magruder, O’Brien, and Hunt, Mitchell returned the favor with a thrust at Ehrlichman’s own soft spot. The reason hush money was paid at all, the former attorney general suggested, was “to keep the lid on all the other things that were going on over here that would have been worse, I think, than the Watergate business.” Here Mitchell made two incisions with one thrust: He obliquely raised the Ellsberg break-in and other Plumbers activities Ehrlichman had overseen (“all the other things that were going on”), while emphasizing they were White House, not CRP, operations (“going on over here”). Ehrlichman dialed back to the prosecutors and their focus on the hush money; Mitchell again steered the talk back to the liabilities of Ehrlichman and Haldeman, mentioning the White House fund of $350,000.

So far, the most accurate forecast of the conversation had come from Nixon, who rightly feared Mitchell would “take the offensive.” Ehrlichman gamely returned to the question of what Mitchell should do next, suggesting along the way that Mitchell’s guilt in the affair was paramount. “You’re the captain of your own boat on this,” Ehrlichman said. “But the president wanted you to [know] that he is extraordinarily troubled by the situation in which you find yourself, and, and therefore, everybody finds themselves.” What did Brother Dick have in mind? Mitchell asked. The president had few options, Ehrlichman replied darkly.

Mitchell responded with two suggestions of his own. First, Nixon should “take care of his house in an appropriate way” (translation: fire you, Haldeman, Dean, and everyone else who’s in this thing up to his eyeballs) and also take care “not to impinge on anybody’s rights”—a warning that Mitchell had no intention of taking the rap. Mitchell also brought up Dean’s meetings with Nixon in February and March, which he said had “unfortunately” created “a scenario…around the president” as to “when this knowledge was available.” Here Mitchell raised the ugliest specter of all: criminal prosecution of the president himself.

Unaware he was being taped, Mitchell then offered his frankest and fullest explanation of the origins of Watergate, worth quoting at length.

MITCHELL:
There is no way that I’m going to do anything except staying where I am, because I’m too far, uh, far out. The fact of the matter is that I got euchred into this thing, when I say, by not paying attention to what these bastards were doing. And well, you know how far back this goes—this, the whole genesis of this thing was over here, as you’re perfectly well aware.