The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (73 page)

One inmate thought Mitchell in the early going appeared “pale, apprehensive, and perhaps a little afraid,” but most prisoners treated the “celebrity criminal” with an uncharacteristic deference that bordered on reverence. Some maintained a studied aloofness, but others rushed to solicit Mitchell’s friendship; few wanted to reenter civilian life unable to boast of having known Big John in the joint.

Even the prison administrators seemed in awe of him. It was not lost on the inmates that while they were invariably summoned over the PA system with a curt barking of their surname and a command to report to a given place, the first time Mitchell’s presence was required, the overhead speakers emitted words never before heard at Maxwell: “Attention on the compound!
Mister
Mitchell,
please
come up to the control room.”

Before long, the former Nixon consigliere acquired his own crew, a group dubbed “Mitchell’s Boys.” They included a recidivist criminal serving time for transporting stolen merchandise across state lines, named Gene Franklin—he and Mitchell became inseparable—and Maurice “Blackie” Malaway, a con roughly the same age as Mitchell. In the evenings, work assignments completed, the trio would haul lawn chairs out onto the Green, a meadow on the banks of the Alabama, to hold court. Some nights, pipe in hand, Mitchell would regale his boys with tales of the high and mighty characters he had known on the outside.

Gazing on the state capitol one night, Mitchell recalled Governor Wallace’s fondness for booze, and mused: “I’ll bet old ‘Bourbon George’ is up on the seventh floor and drunk as a skunk by this time.”
The tapes?
They should have been destroyed.
Haldeman and Ehrlichman?
Only grunts and pipe smoke. But for the two men he considered the most despicable in the Nixon White House—Colson and Dean—Mitchell had a few choice words, all right. “The classic stool pigeon,” he said of Dean. “All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. He knew what it was all about.” And Colson? “If it weren’t for him, Watergate would never have happened,” Mitchell said. “A born-again Christian? Ha! I’d take my chances with the lions!”

That Nixon frequently telephoned Mitchell while he was in prison—three times a week, according to one report—was attested to by several sources. “I would go to see him in jail…in connection with parole,” Hundley recalled years later, “and the camp superintendent would say to me, ‘Don’t go in now. He’s talking to Nixon and he wouldn’t want you to hear him.’ Of course, I’d go in and say: ‘That’s great. Here you are in the slammer and he’s out there in San Clemente!’” “Ah, Bill,” Mitchell would shrug, “don’t be like that.”
⁷

Three months into his
sentence, Mitchell made his first bid for mercy. In court papers filed in September 1977, William Hundley disclosed his client was suffering from heart problems brought on by hypertension and from a rare and severe case of degenerative arthritis in his right hip. The condition had grown “extremely painful,” Hundley wrote, with Mitchell’s “mobility…severely impaired.” Though he sought no specific sentence reduction, Hundley said Watergate had had a “traumatic and devastating” effect on Mitchell’s family—particularly for Marty, who was “of sensitive years.” Mitchell’s finances also lay in ruins. He owed nearly $500,000 in legal fees and personal loans, Hundley said, and would remain in debt the rest of his life. “The result produced by these circumstances constitutes the severest fine,” Hundley wrote.

The petition also explicitly refuted remarks Nixon had made to David Frost, in which the ex-president alleged that had it not been for Martha’s “mental and emotional problem that nobody knew about…there’d have been no Watergate.” Nixon had it backward, Hundley argued: “[Watergate] was the apparent proximate cause of the increasing mental conflicts of defendant’s wife.” The only other reference to Watergate was—for the first time—an expression of remorse. “Counsel is authorized by Mr. Mitchell to advise the court that he is truly sorry for and regrets those actions of his that resulted in his conviction,” Hundley wrote.

After reviewing Mitchell’s motion—and one filed by Haldeman, who responded to the Frost interview by angrily accusing Nixon of admitting his “guilt” only after ensuring “his pockets are lined with $600,000”—Judge Sirica was unmoved. The record, he said, was insufficient for the granting of mercy. Instead he scheduled a hearing and took the unusual step of dispatching Herbert Vogt, deputy chief of probation for the District of Columbia, to visit the Big Three—Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman—in their respective cells, armed with a piece of equipment sure to stir fear and loathing in all Watergate convicts: a tape recorder. If the men wanted Sirica’s mercy, they would have to make their own statements of contrition, and the judge was determined they should be captured on tape, a fitting—or perhaps mocking—counterpoint to the incriminating recordings that had figured so prominently at
U.S. v. Mitchell
.

Ehrlichman took the exercise most seriously. Imprisoned at the Swift Trail Camp in Arizona, he spoke to Vogt for twenty minutes in a highly confessional, quasi-psychoanalytical tone, ruing how he had “abdicated my moral judgments and turned them over to someone else. And if I had any advice for my kids, it would be to never, ever defer your moral judgments to anybody—your parents, your wife, anybody. That’s something that’s very personal. And it’s what a man has to hang on to.” Haldeman, working as a chemist in the sewage treatment facility at Lompoc Federal Prison and reported by his lawyer to be suffering “indignity, horror, fear, shame, disgust and all the other overwhelming emotions that assail a thinking man who is required to enter prison,” also spoke at length into Vogt’s portable cassette recorder. Uniquely, the former chief of staff, struggling to convey how “very real” his remorse was, invoked religion. “I am sorry for what I’ve done, for what I’ve been responsible for, for what’s been the result of the damage to many, many people, and, I think, to the whole governmental system,” Haldeman said. “I recognize my responsibility to atone.”

Mitchell, as ever, proved the most laconic. He was the only defendant to acknowledge the presence of the man operating the tape recorder—slyly calling attention to the coercive element in the proceedings—and his statement of contrition was, by far, the most lawyerlike. “Mr. Vogt,” Mitchell began, “in the moving papers that my counsel filed with the courts, in support of the motion for reduction of sentence that you referred to, my counsel stated that he was authorized by me to advise the court that I was truly sorry for and regretted those actions of mine that resulted in my conviction before the court, and I wish to confirm to you and to the court my authorization to my counsel to include that statement in the motion papers.”

Keeping safe distance from remorse, Mitchell merely confirmed he had authorized Hundley to express regret on his behalf; moreover, the sorrow extended only to those actions that
resulted in conviction
—not to his actions, period. Now he fairly drowned in legalisms. “My reflections have convinced me that the convictions resulting from my actions—which I have reviewed and which I now, of course, find that they have been reviewed and affirmed by the appropriate lower courts, and I know that our judicial process has run its course and I, of course, accept that outcome.”

The question now was: Would Sirica buy it? The answer came on October 4, 1977, in a two-and-a-half-hour hearing held in the same courtroom where the judge had presided over
U.S. v. Mitchell
. Now semiretired and recently recovered from a heart attack, Sirica ordered the new Watergate tapes played in full. For the better part of an hour, the air was thick with the eerie voices of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell; Nixon, once again, was absent. Afterward, Hundley pleaded that Mitchell was “severely crippled” by the arthritis in his hip. Haldeman’s lawyer, John Wilson, reprised old arguments about the “legal unfairness” of Nixon’s pardon. “There does seem to be an element of unfairness,” Sirica allowed. “But Mr. Nixon paid a great penalty as the first president to be forced to resign in disgrace.”

After recess, the judge returned to the bench, ready at last to show some compassion to Nixon’s top aides—but only of a modified, limited kind. Having given “careful consideration of all the facts and circumstances,” Sirica said, he was reducing the sentences of the Big Three to one to four years each, making Mitchell and Haldeman eligible for parole in July 1978—still a full eight months away. Ehrlichman, who had reported to prison earlier, would regain his freedom sooner.

Nine days later, Mitchell, unreceptive to Sirica’s brand of mercy, appealed to President Carter for immediate release. “I am in pain and am taking drugs,” Mitchell said in a signed petition. X-rays had shown advanced deterioration of bone and cartilage in his right hip; the only solution was an operation to replace the diseased bones with aluminum or plastic substitutes. “I want the operation as soon as possible,” Mitchell wrote. “Without in any way reflecting on the Federal Bureau of Prisons, I do not want this delicate surgery performed within the prison system.” In a separate letter to Attorney General Griffin Bell, Hundley said his client was taking excessive amounts of Valium. “I am concerned,” Hundley wrote, “that the constant pain, the need for surgery and the continued incarceration, coupled with all his other problems, could be too much even for a strong man like John Mitchell.”

Carter rejected the petition. But Bell liked Mitchell and was aghast his predecessor had gotten “more than a bank robber” for his sentence. A former judge, Bell granted Mitchell an “unusually long” medical furlough of two weeks, twice the normal length, so that the former attorney general could have tests on his hip conducted in a private hospital in the nation’s capital. In January 1978, Dr. Joseph Palumbo, a former Washington Redskins team physician, announced that while evaluating Mitchell’s hip, he discovered the patient was also suffering from a “large abdominal aortic aneurysm”—a ballooned blood vessel in his stomach—requiring immediate surgery at Georgetown University Hospital. Bell extended Mitchell’s furlough through the end of the month.

The surgery took three hours, after which hospital officials emerged to say the patient was “doing well.” “I was outside in the waiting room with Mary Dean,” Jill Mitchell-Reed recalled with a shudder. “[The procedure] was much longer than they expected. They went in and they found another little thing…and they took a lot of blood.”

In an extraordinary act of grace, Bell granted Mitchell five consecutive monthlong furloughs, unprecedented in the history of the Bureau of Prisons. This allowed Mitchell to recuperate from his aneurysm operation and to undergo another surgery, on his hip, on April 10, outside the prison system, to which he would return that May.
⁸

On July 5, 1978, three
parole examiners visited Maxwell to interview the former attorney general and determine whether, if granted early release, he would pose any further danger to the community. When the results of the interview were typed up, the regional commissioner, based in Atlanta, recommended the prisoner’s release on August 16; but the U.S. Parole Commission, based in Washington, overruled him and ordered Mitchell held another six months, until January 19, 1979. By way of explanation, the commission noted Mitchell’s role in Watergate had been one “of high severity.”

That summer Jerris Leonard, Mitchell’s former DOJ aide, flew to Maxwell to help his old boss appeal the commission’s decision. “The jail time he spent never bothered him a bit,” Leonard said, “except for the fact that, number one, he knew he wasn’t guilty. And when Carter did to him what he did; that’s the only time.”
How the hell can these guys do this to me?
Leonard remembered Mitchell exclaiming.

Mitchell’s appeal assailed the commission’s “bias and vindictiveness” and attacked its ruling as “arbitrary, capricious, and unfair.” The former attorney general had “paid dearly for his errors,” his lawyers argued, and he deserved immediate release. Joining Mitchell’s legal team for the effort was Charles Morgan Jr., a former executive of the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the prime early movers in the drive to impeach Nixon. (Morgan, ironically, had also successfully intervened in the original Watergate break-in trial to suppress the racy contents of the DNC wiretaps.) But unfortunately for Mitchell, his appeal was heard by U.S. District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. Back in 1971, Mitchell had squelched Johnson’s Supreme Court candidacy. Years later, Johnson had not forgotten the episode. He quickly rejected Mitchell’s appeal, calling his sentence consistent with Ehrlichman’s.