The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (74 page)

Mitchell spent his sixty-fifth birthday, September 5, working in the Maxwell library. The final months of his sentence ticked by, a day at a time. He received “thousands” of letters from people wishing him well, and, from the government, a sixth and final furlough, this one standard, to visit family after Christmas.

Two longtime Wall Street pals, Roald Morton and Brent Harries, started the John Mitchell Defense Fund to defray their friend’s exorbitant legal expenses. A solicitation letter went out to 150 people; Harries later estimated he raised about $200,000. Contributors came from Mitchell’s Old Guard: friends from “the Street” and the legal fraternity. “I’d tell John that so-and-so sent in a check and here’s his address, and I assume he’d put together a nice note,” Harries recalled. One of Mitchell’s nice notes went to Francis X. “Joe” Maloney, a partner at Mudge Rose, the law firm that once, but no longer, bore the names Nixon and Mitchell. “Brent has told me of the very large contribution you have made to the ‘Save Mitchell Foundation,’” Mitchell wrote to Maloney. “I only hope that things are so good at the firm that it did not hurt to [
sic
] much. Needless to say, I am most appreciative.”

Jimmy and Griffen [
sic
] have finally decided to cancel my reservation at this country club and my membership expires next Friday. I can’t wait to turn in my suit. My training here has put me in great shape and I’m looking forward to tackling that cold, cruel world.

At dawn on the morning of January 19, 1979, as Mitchell emerged from Maxwell, the last of the Watergate convicts to regain his freedom, the same convicts who had greeted him with jeers when he first arrived now cheered him.
Give ’em hell, Mitchell!
In recognition of his “free legal advice and good friendship,” the inmates had even thrown Big John a going-away party. CBS News’ Fred Graham found the ex-convict “caustic as ever” in his final turn on the national stage. First, he thanked his well-wishers: “It’s just wonderful to have the feeling that you get from those letters.” Then the former attorney general extended his congratulations to the news media, swarming him for the last time, and offered them a word of advice, one of his sharpest one-liners ever: “From henceforth, don’t call me. I’ll call you.”
⁹

GHOST

My father would not be an easy person to understand, to reach his guts and soul.

—Jill Mitchell-Reed, 2003
¹

CLOUDS FILLED THE
nighttime sky over San Clemente. It was Labor Day weekend, 1979, and Richard Nixon, slowly emerging from his exile at Casa Pacifica, had decided to throw a party. The ostensible occasion was the sixty-sixth birthday of his former law partner, campaign manager, attorney general, and consigliere—“the last loyalist,” as he privately referred to Mitchell—but the real occasion, of course, was Mitchell’s release from prison.

The Nixons had encouraged Mitchell to invite his own special guests. “Have you ever gone three thousand miles for a cocktail party?” he asked Brent Harries. No, Harries said. “Well you’re going to…. The president’s going to have a cocktail party for me in San Clemente.” To Mitchell, that’s what Nixon forever remained:
the president
.

Some 250 people, including many old White House faces, savored the outdoor Mexican buffet. Nixon, in unusually high spirits, stood in a receiving line for more than an hour, shaking hands and bantering with the arriving guests, bounded by Pat Nixon on his left and by Mitchell on his right. When Harries and his wife appeared, Mitchell introduced them for the first time to Mary Dean, who threw her arms around Harries and exclaimed: “I want to thank you so much for what you’ve done for John.”

Finally, the whole group was summoned poolside: Nixon wanted to say a few words. He spoke of the history they had made, and thanked everyone for all they had done for him. No one, of course, with the exception of Pat Nixon, had done more for the ex-president than the guest of honor, and so, with a rare gaze directly into Mitchell’s eyes, the ex-president raised his glass and offered a toast. “John Mitchell has friends,” Nixon said. “And he stands by them.”

The poignancy of the moment was not lost on the crowd. They had all read the transcripts of Nixon’s tapes, which captured in stark detail the president’s yearlong vacillation on The Question—
Did Mitchell do it?
—and the dark conclusion Nixon had reached. All the guests knew that Nixon’s heartless betrayal of Mitchell was preserved for posterity on thousands of magnetic spools, tucked away in temperature-controlled vaults at the National Archieves. The fact was that when push came to shove, Nixon had
not
stood by his most doggedly loyal friend, and the toast that evening was Nixon’s tacit way of acknowledging as much—of pleading guilty—before their assembled intimates.

After that, Nixon never again spoke publicly of Mitchell in any depth: not in any of the foreign policy books he published to rehabilitate his image, nor in the “intensely personal” set of reflections he published in 1990, two years after Mitchell’s death, entitled
In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal
. The book’s first mention of Mitchell—one of three, all fleeting—noted only that news of Mitchell’s conviction on New Year’s Day 1975 had interrupted the Rose Bowl. “I could no longer even take refuge in my favorite avocation,” Nixon wrote, “watching sports on television.”
²

“I think I have
to stay away from the Mitchell subject at this point,” Nixon told an aide on March 21, 1973—and, for the most part, in public, he did. The most notable exception was on the evening of September 8, 1977—Mitchell, if he was watching, would have been seated in the inmates’ recreation room at Maxwell—when David Frost returned to the airwaves, after a three-month hiatus, with more of Nixon’s thoughts: on China, the Supreme Court, the daily
Götterdämmerung
with Kissinger.

“Well,” the host announced near the end, “we’ve covered a lot of ground in this program, and there’s time now only for a postscript—which is not inappropriate, because Richard Nixon himself volunteered what follows, almost as a postscript to our discussions. It’s a remarkable story he obviously wanted to tell about John and Martha Mitchell. But we found it personally revealing about Richard Nixon himself. Perhaps you will, too.”

“Let me tell you about John Mitchell,” he began. “You mind one—just a second? It’s never been told before. And I haven’t
asked
John whether I can tell it. But…he is too—I suppose
decent
a man to ever tell it. You see, John’s problem was not Watergate. It was Martha. And it’s one of the personal tragedies of our time.”

Over the next several minutes, Nixon disclosed on nationwide television how Mitchell, in the closing weeks of the ’68 campaign, had had to have Martha institutionalized; how he himself had pleaded with Mitchell to become attorney general, suggesting life in Washington might somehow make Martha “better” how she had initially thrived, making her celebrated calls to Helen Thomas, becoming “a good thing to yuk-yuk-yuk about” and how Martha had come totally unglued during Watergate, as in Newport Beach, when, as Nixon put it, she “busted her hand through a window.”

“This sets the stage for why I feel [the way I do] about John,” Nixon went on.

I asked Bebe about it, Bebe Rebozo. John and Martha used to go down and stay with him on their vacations. And Bebe said, “You know, I talked to John about Martha.” This was, incidentally, during the campaign, shortly before the election. She was acting up a bit then. This was after he left the committee. And he said, “John”—and they’d had a couple of drinks, and John was talking a little freely to him. And he said, “John, why don’t you put her away, like you did in ’68?” Bebe said tears came into John’s eyes and he says, “Well, because I love her.” Well, you can’t fault a guy like that. Sure, great stone face—but he loved her. He knew she was emotionally disturbed. He knew it wasn’t just the booze. Sometimes she could be this way with no drinks, and sometimes be perfect with a lot of drinks.

And so I’ll never forget…it was toward the end of the campaign, September, October. Hadn’t heard from John. Called to say, “John, how’s the campaign going?” He sounded very depressed. He said, “Oh, the campaign’s going great.” And I thought, God, maybe he’s depressed about Watergate or something. No. Then I could hear, from the phone, somebody come into the room. He said, “Mr. President, would you mind saying hello to my girl?” I said, “Sure.” I thought he meant Marty. That’s his daughter, a sweet, lovely girl. He adores her. I said, “Sure.” Martha came on the phone. Her voice—you know, she could be just as charming—wonderful when she talked. She says, “Mr. President, I just want you to know that there are only three men in the world that I love. I love John, I love Bebe, and I love you.” And the next night, she was on the phone at midnight, raisin’ hell about
every-
thing.

Okay. We come to the Watergate period…to the period when the axe is gonna fall on John.
And I must say, I made some statements then
. Dean came in and said, “Draw the wagons up around the White House, Mitchell is the guy,” and Haldeman and Ehrlichman wanted to put it on Mitchell, and all the rest. And I said, “Well, it must look that way to me. Indict him, and it’ll be a hell of a tough couple of weeks,” and all that sort of thing, but, “That’s the way we have to go.” This was in April.

Here Frost posed his only interjection, to remind Nixon of the term he had used to characterize Mitchell at the time:
hors d’oeuvres
. “I knew they’d want more,” Nixon protested. “Somebody said it was an
hors d’oeuvre,
I said, ‘Oh, no. They won’t stop at Mitchell. They’ll want more.’ Just as I told Ray Price when Haldeman and Ehrlichman went. He says, ‘You know, when Haldeman and Ehrlichman leave’—this is April 29th [1973]—he said, ‘that’ll be enough for them.’ I said, ‘No, Ray. You know writing, but you don’t know politics. They’re just gonna raise the ante.’ But I understood. I didn’t like it.

“I knew that [Mitchell] was strong,” Nixon continued.

He never lets his emotions show. Except he does have a quiver in his hand at times; it’s better now, I understand. But I just didn’t know what was going to
break
the man! Or her! I didn’t know how bad the situation was.
I’ve talked too long about it
. But just let me just summarize it by saying: I am convinced that if it hadn’t been for Martha—and God rest her soul, because she in her heart was, was a good person. She just had a mental and emotional problem nobody knew about. If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate. Because John wasn’t mindin’ that store. He was practically
out of his mind
about Martha in the spring of 1972! He was letting Magruder and all these boys, these
kids
, these
nuts
run this thing! The point of the matter is that if John had been watchin’ that store, Watergate would never have happened.

Here Nixon paused to regroup. “Now am I saying here, at this late juncture, that Watergate is—should be blamed on Martha Mitchell? Of course not. It might have happened anyway. Other things might have brought it on. Who knows? I do say this:
I’m trying to explain my feeling of compassion for my friend John Mitchell
. John Mitchell is a smart man. He’s too smart to ever get involved in a stupid, jackass thing like Watergate! And John Mitchell also knew, he was smart enough to know, of the dangers of cover-ups and that sort of thing. But on the other hand, John Mitchell could only think of that poor Martha, and that lovely child Marty.

“And so,” Nixon concluded, “that’s the human side of this story, which I don’t—I know that you, in the press, you can’t be interested in that. You can only be interested in ‘Who shot John?’ Well, go ahead.”
³