The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (72 page)

Yet the amenities and pretty scenery were deceptive. Colson felt “a pervasive feeling of despair” hung over the place and an Associated Press reporter who scoped it out found “even a brief visit leaves no doubt that it is a prison where personal freedom is limited.” Warden R. W. Grunska assured reporters Mitchell would feel the sting of confinement: “He can’t go where he wants when he wants. We tell him when to get up, when to eat, when to go to bed. This is no country club.”

Nor was there any doubt how extremely out of place Mitchell would feel among his new neighbors. The average age of the nearly three hundred inmates was twenty-eight; nearly 20 percent of them were drug offenders. Others were doing time for bank robbery, auto theft, grand larceny, illegal gambling, tax evasion, forgery—even bootlegging. Discreetly suggesting that the Central Intelligence Agency be importuned to provide covert bail funds, and lying at nationally televised Senate hearings, were not the kinds of crimes to which the other inmates at Maxwell could easily relate.

With “uncertain anxiety” the men anticipated Mitchell’s arrival. Nobody knew exactly what to expect, either from the mysterious celebrity in question or the authorities charged with his well-being. Rumors flew. One suggested “Big John,” as the cons immediately dubbed him, would remain under constant watch of a two-man guard. Another had undercover marshals infiltrating the camp weeks in advance, ready to neutralize any perceived threat to the former attorney general.

Feeding the rumor mill was the unexpected set of improvements prison officials made around the grounds immediately prior to Mitchell’s appearance: new air-conditioning units, hasty roof repairs, paint jobs. “I’ll bet they treat him like a king,” groused one con. “He is a cop and cops look after their own,” clucked another. A third vowed action.
All I gotta say is they better keep a pretty close eye on that son-of-a-bitch. First chance I get and I’ll stick a shiv in his belly. That mother is the reason I’m here, him and his Goddamn wiretap laws
.

Mitchell spent his last days of freedom the same way millions of other Americans did: wallowing in Watergate. The occasion was David Frost’s televised interview with Richard Nixon, a nationally consuming spectacle for which the ex-president received a widely resented fee of $600,000. Broadcast in three installments in May 1977, the Frost sessions—the closest thing to a sustained cross-examination of Nixon in public—dealt first with Watergate, then with foreign policy, and then finally, in the third episode, with topics ranging from Spiro Agnew to Chile to the pardon Nixon received from President Ford. While there were some moments of candor—Nixon arguing “when the president does it, it is not illegal,” and acknowledging “a reasonable person” could conclude he had taken part in a cover-up—the old fighter for the most part stubbornly resisted any admission of guilt. “I didn’t believe we were covering any criminal activities,” Nixon maintained. “I didn’t believe that John Mitchell was involved.”

This last claim was one Mitchell, having reviewed the tapes of April 1973, was uniquely equipped to rebut. He believed the whole idea of the Frost interviews a “mistake” on Nixon’s part. “In his opinion,” Mardian wrote after talking with Mitchell, “Nixon really had not thought the matter out when he agreed to do the shows; that he could have done it with a better format and a more sympathetic questioner. He thought Nixon was brilliant in the second interview and that the third show was ‘blah.’ He felt that the first show put him in a very bad light.” Publicly, however, Mitchell said nothing.

Mitchell’s primary fear in those days was not incarceration. Running into a reporter from the Nixon days, the former attorney general joked matter-of-factly about his date with “the slammer.” He confidently told a friend:
I can face jail
. Prison was not the problem; the trouble was Marty. “The only thing he worries about is his daughter,” a friend said. The question of who would look after the girl on weekends and holidays, and in summertime, when she returned from boarding school in Connecticut, was uppermost in Mitchell’s mind. He settled on a rotating group that included Ken and Peggy Ebbitt, Mitchell’s friends in Bronxville (“We practically raised the girl,” Ken later remarked); Sandy Hobbs; and Jill Mitchell-Reed.

For Marty, only sixteen, the vilification and incarceration of her father, so soon after the ugly decline and death of her mother, made for one of the seventies’ most traumatic individual experiences. “Her father was the strong person in the family that she went to when her mother was difficult and was drinking,” Hobbs recalled. “So here she was, losing the strong person in her family. It was a horrible situation.” “Her father was the love of her life,” Mary Dean said. “She loved him more than anything in the world. I never saw a daughter and father closer.”

Reporters who went looking for Mitchell at this time found he had “virtually disappeared.” He was spending all his remaining free time with Marty, holed up in his East Fifty-second Street apartment building. Even there he found no refuge from the censuring eyes of the outside world: A neighbor in the building boasted to a reporter about letting the elevator door slam in Mitchell’s face. “If it had been anybody else, I would have held it,” the neighbor said. “It was just my way of saying, ‘Screw you, John Mitchell.’” Upstairs, Mitchell and Marty whiled away the remaining hours cooking, reading, watching TV together. His last Sunday with the girl was June 19, Father’s Day.

A group of old Nixon
loyalistas
, led by Pat Buchanan, tried to throw a farewell party, but the Old Stone Face wouldn’t have it. All expressions of sympathy he rejected.
I don’t want any of that hearts-and-flowers stuff
, he would say.
What does it lead to?
The day before he was due in Montgomery, Mitchell’s most improbable sympathizer, Rabbi Korff, called once more. Was there anything he could do? No, Mitchell said, your prayers, that’s all. “My call is not perfunctory,” Korff insisted. “I know, and I appreciate it more than I can say,” Mitchell said. “You are a great friend, and I value your friendship, but there is nothing anyone can do.”

“They got what they wanted,” Mitchell said of his arch nemeses, the WSPF lawyers. “But I am not down. I’ll live through it. There’s nothing I did that I wouldn’t do again with a clear conscience.” Now the rabbi quoted from Scripture:
They that hate thee will be clothed in shame
. Mitchell merely repeated what he had told the holy man once before:
My mistake was in men, not law
.
⁶

Clad in a dark
green pinstripe suit, briefcase bulging with notes for a planned memoir, surrounded by reporters and camera crews, the former attorney general strode onto Maxwell’s grounds at precisely 11:25 a.m. on Wednesday, June 22, 1977.
Ah, we got you now, we got you now, Big John!
the inmates jeered.
Got you now. You’ll be here for a while. You ain’t nothin’ but another convict with a number now!

The jubilation extended beyond the prison grounds. Outlaws the world over, from radical Mark Rudd to mobster Meyer Lansky, exulted in the spectacular downfall of Mr. Law and Order. Mitchell ignored the commotion, pausing only to offer a steadying hand to a cameraman stampeded by his colleagues. “Watch it son, don’t hurt yourself.” Then, with that slight smile: “Good morning, gentlemen.”
Anything to say today, Mr. Mitchell?
“Yes, indeed. It’s nice to be back in Alabama. It’s a nice day in Alabama.”

Despite the surrealism of the moment and the unprecedented shame it carried for him, the certitude that he now “personified Watergate more than anyone except Nixon himself,” Mitchell was walking tall. “The big man seemed as glacially composed as ever,”
Time
observed. “He never complained,” said Plato Cacheris, who accompanied his client on the walk. “I think he took it better than I did.”

First Mitchell made the acquintance of the warden. “I indicated to him that he’ll be treated like any other inmate here,” Grunska said. Then came the ritual known to all convicts as R&D: receiving and discharge. It was at this point that Mitchell officially traded in his identity for an impersonal assigned number: 24171-157. Four times the former attorney general was fingerprinted. (“In case we make a mistake; they smudge sometimes,” the guard said;
was he being sarcastic?
); then Mitchell was photographed a
dozen
times (“Different copies for different offices; I’m told you know all about it,” the guard said—
unmistakable impertinence!
).

Next, 24171-157’s belongings were confiscated and his measurements taken. The cash he was carrying was credited toward his account at the commissary, where he could purchase his beloved pipe tobacco, snack items, and popular jailhouse reading material like
Playboy
and
Penthouse
. His watch and ring were shipped home; when the same was proposed for his suit, Mitchell raised his first objection. “Just hang it up in the closet. I think I’ll be needing it very soon.” He didn’t say why. He was permitted to keep his shoes. Then he was issued bed linens and the clothes he was expected to wear for the duration of his stay: four pairs of white boxers, four white T-shirts, four pairs of white socks, one pair of dark socks—for weekends and “off” hours—four light brown collared shirts, four pairs of dark brown khaki pants, and one pair of steel-tipped shoes.

For his first meal as an imprisoned felon, Mitchell was taken to lunch by one of the “hacks,” as guards were informally known. Plodding through the cafeteria “chow line,” Mitchell patiently waited his turn like everyone else. The cuisine reflected the Southern surroundings: grits, biscuits, collard greens, cornbread, Southern fried chicken, and other items that, the
New York Times
gleefully noted, “a Wall Street lawyer might find unfamiliar.”

Suddenly Mitchell came face-to-face with a snarling con named Bobby Lawson, a convicted bookmaker doling out vegetables across the counter. Prison authorities had repeatedly assured Mitchell’s lawyers none of Maxwell’s inmates could claim any grudge against the former attorney general. Yet back in May 1974, when the Supreme Court had invalidated 494 wiretap cases, the requisite forms having been improperly signed years earlier by Mitchell’s executive assistant, the case of Bobby Lawson was, remarkably, one of
four
in which Mitchell remembered signing the forms himself; thus while many other convicts had seen their convictions overturned, Lawson had not. “Welcome to Maxwell, Mr. Mitchell,” Lawson now sneered. “You put enough of us here.” Mitchell looked Lawson straight in the eye without budging.
You son-of-a-bitch, I didn’t put anybody here
, he snapped. Mitchell let his eyes linger an extra second before moving down the chow line. He had survived his first test of manhood on the inside.

At 5:00 a.m. the following morning, a loudspeaker woke the inmates with a crisp, irritatingly cheerful “Good morning!” Mitchell rose from the steel-frame bottom bunk to which, in deference to his age and in violation of seniority rules, he had been assigned. He left his six-by-seven-foot cubicle and headed for the bathroom, where he showered, shaved, and brushed his teeth in the company of the forty-five other convicts with whom he now shared Maxwell’s F Barracks. Like all new arrivals, the former attorney general was initially thrown in with a group of “unassigned” workers whose job was to report to the camp’s shuffleboard court every day at noon, be counted, and await further instructions. Their orders usually included such menial tasks as hoeing the rose garden, picking up cigarette butts, and emptying wastebaskets. When, on his third day at Maxwell, he quickened his step but still arrived late for this assembly, the hack in charge relished the moment.
I don’t care if your name is John Mitchell! You ain’t gonna be late for my counts! You
understand
that? If you’re late again, you’ll get an hour’s extra duty for each minute you’re late!

In time, Mitchell was assigned to toil in the prison’s education department, devising new programs for the inmates, doing a little teaching, and clerking in the prison library. It did not take the other inmates long to figure the former Wall Street innovator could prove useful as a source of free legal advice; he became a popular man. Even Bobby Lawson lightened up. Mitchell wound up drafting the bookmaker’s appeal. When a federal judge rejected it, Mitchell took the rebuff personally. “I appointed that man to the bench!” he marveled. “I didn’t realize I’d appointed a bunch of idiots as judges!” But a chow-line friendship was now cemented. “How’s the soup today, Bobby?” Mitchell would ask. “It’s just like your Filipino cook used to make for you at the Justice Department,” Lawson would say, smiling.

After a few weeks, Mitchell began corresponding with old friends, taking pains, as always, to minimize his troubles. To his former secretary, Susie Morrison, whom he regarded almost like a daughter, the former attorney general described his time at Maxwell as “just plain dullsville.” “I do a lot of legal work for the inmates and have had a few successes,” he joked, “but by and large I could accomplish more on the outside.”