The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (75 page)

Uniquely among the Watergate
convicts, Mitchell returned to Washington. He moved back into Mary Dean’s Georgetown town house, but never recovered the life he enjoyed before the great scandal. The Wall Street wizard who once commanded the respect of the Rockefellers was now a disbarred ex-convict, his opportunities limited, the hands extended in partnership few and mostly uninspiring.

“He had lost his confidence,” observed Jack Brennan, a former military aide to Nixon who befriended Mitchell around this time. “He didn’t say it, but I knew. I could tell that he was always afraid people would reject him.” A former Marine Corps colonel who had shepherded Nixon through his last days in the White House, then became the ex-president’s first chief of staff in San Clemente, Brennan one day introduced Mitchell to an old friend and business partner, James M. Tully, at Mary Dean’s town house. A Korean War veteran and former NYPD cop, Tully had refashioned himself into an international businessman, using his military pension to launch a series of companies that mostly went nowhere. On March 29, 1979, he incorporated his latest creation, the consulting firm Global Research International—“We just picked it out of the air,” Tully said of the name—and set up shop five blocks from Mitchell’s Georgetown home at Thirtieth and N Streets. One day Tully invited his new friend to visit Global Research, and Mitchell accepted. “Take a seat,” Tully said. Mitchell began swiveling comfortably in the chair. “How do you like it?” “I like it,” Mitchell said. “Well, it’s your office,” Tully said.

While Brennan’s intent was “never to utilize Nixon for any of his activities,” he knew bringing the Big Enchilada on board would suffice, in the eyes of the world, as the next best thing. As Brennan acknowledged: “The fact that John Mitchell was [Nixon’s] closest ally did not hurt us at all overseas.” “How would you like to be our partner?” Tully asked Mitchell. “I never thought it would be any other way,” he replied. A handshake sealed the deal.

Mitchell began showing up at Global every day, walking the four blocks. He remained with the firm until his death, not merely because he “hit it off” with the two former military men who started it, but more likely for the more depressing reason that, as one intimate put it, he received “no better offers.” The trio compartmentalized its work, each man pursuing his own deals, involving the others only as needed, pooling and dividing proceeds in the few instances when their efforts produced results. “Of all the activities that we undertook, very few of them were successful,” Tully said years later. “There were some big numbers in terms of dollars earned; whether they were collected or not was another matter.”

Global Research’s core activity was the nebulous realm of overseas consulting: representing foreign firms seeking a foothold in America and American firms looking to do business abroad. At other times, Global acted as a middleman, playing matchmaker to different companies and, occasionally, to governments. A bizarre cast of foreigners paraded past Mitchell’s nose and pipe, pitching Byzantine money transfers, oil deals, rice deals. Former Kentucky governor Louie Nunn, a key witness in the ITT scandal a decade earlier, lured Mitchell into a time-consuming, and ultimately fruitless, bid to standardize interstate billing for cellular phone calls. “Oh, we had everything proposed to us,” Tully said. “I mean anything you can think of, we had, short of white slavery and murder.”

Though in time his work would require extensive overseas travel—London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, the Caymans—Mitchell at first acted as a faux senior partner, the heavyweight whose mere presence, it was hoped, would compel reluctant brides to the altar and scare fakers away. Key to success was dispelling the “fear of rejection” Brennan still sensed in the older man. Since one of Global’s most bankable clients was Hess & Eisenhardt, world-renowned maker of armored cars (including the limousine carrying President Kennedy when he was assassinated), Mitchell thought to contact old colleagues at the State Department, thinking they could be persuaded to retain the firm. But he wouldn’t make the call. “I knew all these guys just loved Mitchell,” Brennan said.

And I would, for a long time, try to get Mitchell to call and make an appointment, and he wouldn’t. He would just make excuses. And it occurred to me that he was afraid that they would say no, that they didn’t want to see him…. And of course [we] called the State Department and they couldn’t
wait
to see him! They were just delighted to see him!

Late in 1983, Brennan stumbled on what seemed like a fabulous deal: brokering the sale of $181 million in hospital, prison, and military uniforms to Iraq, which was then engaged, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, in a long-running war against Iran. Since the seizure of the American embassy four years earlier, the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Tehran and was now beginning to tilt toward Iraq in the conflict. Brennan said he received “encouragement” from individuals “very high in our government” to go forward. So did Mitchell. “John spoke directly to [CIA director William] Casey,” recalled Deborah Gore Dean, “and Bill Casey…suggested other areas where John may be helpful to Iraq.”

As Brennan soon found, the manufacture of uniforms is a labor-intensive business, and American companies, with their stringent union requirements, found it difficult to compete with overseas firms. So Brennan outsourced the job to Romania. But he had Mitchell do something Brennan later wished he’d done himself: ask Nixon for a letter of introduction to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. Nixon complied on May 3, 1984, writing Ceauşescu: “I can assure you that Colonel Brennan and former attorney general John Mitchell will be responsible and constructive.” More than two years later, after the Romanians had partnered with a Saudi firm, Pan East International, to produce the uniforms, Nixon again wrote to Ceauşescu: “My good friend John Mitchell told me recently that the contract between the [Romanian] Ministry of Light Industries and Pan East International was completed, and I wanted to let you know how highly Mr. Mitchell spoke of the diligence of the Romanian workers.”

Global’s commerce with the Iraqi regime proceeded on other fronts. On a trip to Baghdad, Brennan had been instructed by Saddam’s men to deal through Sarkis Soghanalian, a three-hundred-pound ethnic Armenian, born in Syria and raised in Lebanon, who now lived in Miami and was renowned as “the Cold War’s largest arms merchant.” Soghanalian, whose clients included Muammar Qaddafi and CIA, helped Global broker the sale of twenty-six helicopters from Hughes Aircraft and the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, a $27.4 million deal from which Mitchell and Brennan stood to reap a $584,000 commission. The only problem, in both the uniform and helicopter deals, was that Soghanalian never sent Global its fees, worth $3.54 million.

“These arms dealers are having a hell of a big impact on us,” Mitchell grumbled to a friend. He wrote Soghanalian in August 1985 complaining about the “long, dry spell in our dealings” and demanding “your remittance at the earliest date.” The collection effort went nowhere. In fact, Global’s partnership with Soghanalian ended in the most rancorous way. “They would sell their mothers if they could,” the arms dealer spat. Global sought recourse in the courts, but saw only Pyrrhic victories. When Mitchell was later found to have died intestate, his survivors quarreling with each other in probate court, it was the set of judgments against Soghanalian, ordering him to pay Brennan and the Mitchell estate $3.54 million in outstanding fees, that pitted Marty Mitchell against her half sister, Jill Mitchell-Reed, and other members of the Mitchell family. The money never materialized.
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“Everybody in this town
loves me,” Mitchell joked a few months before his death. But he had returned to Washington a ghostly figure from another era. Former chief justice Warren Burger—who owed his robes to Mitchell—once espied his old patron being treated like a leper at a National Geographic Society party. “John Mitchell was off in a corner, I think with his daughter,” Burger recalled. “Nobody was going near him and talking to him. And my wife and I said, ‘Let’s go over and talk to him.’ We went over and shook hands with him and engaged him in conversation for a little while, and that broke the ice and a lot of other people did, too.” Other times the pariah was not so fortunate. An Associated Press reporter never forgot the lonely sight of Mitchell walking the streets of Georgetown, “a gray man plodding along in his gray way.”

Mitchell’s financial troubles could have been eased considerably, even eliminated, had he availed himself of the obvious option, so appealing to his fellow Watergate convicts: writing a book. In fact, he had quietly contracted to do just that, with Simon & Schuster, on July 21, 1975. Mitchell’s Untitled Memoir of the Nixon Years, as the publishing agreement hailed it, was to run 100,000 words and be delivered no later than April 1, 1976; in return, Mitchell received an immediate signing bonus of $50,000, with another $100,000 due before publication.

Mitchell reportedly arrived at Maxwell with a satchel full of notes for the project. In his letters from prison, he solicited stories and materials from former associates, and mused about publishing more than one book. Years later, Jill Mitchell-Reed claimed to have found her father’s incomplete handwritten manuscript, but she declined repeated requests to see it.

Others suggested the project never got very far. John Ehrlichman, a full-time author after Watergate, told an interviewer the day after Mitchell died that Simon & Schuster had hired veteran reporter Nick Thimmesch, one of the few reporters Mitchell actually liked, “to write Mitchell’s book for him,” but Thimmesch supposedly grew “totally frustrated” because “Mitchell didn’t cotton to him and wouldn’t talk to him.” Bill Hundley, who represented Mitchell in his book deal, never saw Into the Fire from his client. “[The publishers] were very unhappy because he wouldn’t write about Watergate and he wouldn’t write about Martha,” Hundley said. “I think they always thought they could persuade him, but they couldn’t.” “He thought everybody had already had enough trouble,” said Mary Dean, “and he didn’t want to add on to any of it.”

In the end, executives at Simon & Schuster never saw Into the Fire of Mitchell’s manuscript either, and in February 1981, the publisher filed suit in New York State Supreme Court. Mitchell was forced to cough up an immediate $7,500, and to sign a repayment schedule mandating annual payments of $10,000 for the next six years. Thereafter, he had until 1991 to pay off the accrued interest. Ultimately, he repaid only $40,000, roughly 60 percent of his debt. Simon & Schuster sued his estate and settled, in November 1992, for a $10,000 payout. Thus ended the saga of John Mitchell’s Untitled Memoir of the Nixon Years.
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The toll Watergate took
on Mitchell’s family was his “deepest sorrow,” Jill Mitchell-Reed recalled—and the full extent of the damage may never be known. “John, I think more than anything in the world, was sorry about the way his own family turned out,” recalled another intimate. “He really felt that he was responsible. And although everybody in the world tried to tell him, ‘You know, John, only so much of this can be your fault,’ he just always felt that without him, everybody would have been happy.”

[His children] fell apart. And he blamed himself. Now everything that went wrong from then on [was], “Well, gee, if you hadn’t gone to jail, my marriage wouldn’t have broken up,” and “If you hadn’t gone to jail, I’d be able to get a job.” And it went a little bit too far.

Some have even suggested Mitchell’s disgrace played a hidden role in the decline of his son, Jack, who, having battled alcoholism and left a series of good jobs, finally developed a malignant brain tumor. He battled bravely but died, in 1985, at the age of forty-four. Mitchell was devastated. He adored his son’s wife, Jacqueline, and their three children. “I could have sworn my father would die the day he rode from Riverhead to New York in the ambulance with [Jack],” Jill recalled. “It touched my father deeply, quite deeply. He was white when he went in and shaking when he came out. I thought that I would lose both of them that day.” “The only things that he ever really was unhappy about,” Mary Dean said, “was that if any of this [the Watergate scandals] affected his children.”