The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  INTO THE FIRE

  MORAL OBLIGATIONS

  THE HEAVYWEIGHT

  LAW AND ORDER

  DAYS OF RAGE

  THE COMEDOWN

  WATCH WHAT WE DO

  ROBBING THE PRESIDENT’S DESK

  CLOUD OF SUSPICION

  PETTY THIEF

  GEMSTONE

  PHOTO INSERT 1

  DNC

  THE NEEDLE

  PHOTO INSERT 2

  OFF THE RESERVATION

  THE BIG ENCHILADA

  A GREAT TRIAL

  BLEED FOR ME

  HANDS OF THE GODS

  MAXWELL

  GHOST

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Notes on Sources

  List of Interviews

  The Moorer-Radford Tapes

  Copyright

  For my beloved mother and father,

  Regina and Mike Rosen,

  who gave me life—

  mine and theirs

  John Mitchell I love.

  —Richard Nixon, 1973

  I think that the current time in the affairs of men are to the point where these stories are now out, they should be fully explored…. I think, however, that great care should be taken to ascertain who was involved and how they were involved, instead of just lumping it into a catchphrase of “Watergate” or “cover-up” or things like that. I think it is time that the individual activities be properly parceled out.

  —John Mitchell, 1973

  PROLOGUE

  History means the endless rethinking—and reviewing and revisiting—of the past. History, in the broad sense of the word, is revisionist. History involves multiple jeopardy that the law eschews: People and events are retried and retried again.

  —John Lukacs, 19981

  ON JUNE 22, 1977, the sixty-seventh attorney general of the United States, John Newton Mitchell, strode onto the grounds of the Federal Prison Camp at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, and began serving his sentence for convictions on conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury charges in the Watergate cover-up. “It’s nice to be back in Alabama,” Mitchell told reporters with defiant jocularity.

  With his next step, he became the highest-ranking U.S. government official ever to serve time: Federal Prisoner No. 24171-157. Inmates lined Maxwell’s walkways for a glimpse of their new neighbor. They got you now, Big John! they jeered. You’re nothing but another convict with a number now! On the winding path to his cell, Mitchell visited offices where his own signature hung on the wall, conferring power on the same individuals who now welcomed him into federal custody.2

  Many lives were ruined in the Watergate maelstrom. However, ex-President Richard Nixon, disbarred but pardoned, and ex–Vice President Spiro Agnew, who pleaded nolo contendere to tax evasion charges, both escaped the public servant’s ultimate shame: incarceration. Not so John Mitchell. Like many of his fellow Watergate defendants, the former attorney general could have traded evidence, real or fabricated, against a more senior official—Nixon himself, in Mitchell’s case—in exchange for leniency, perhaps even avoided prison altogether. But Mitchell did not do that. Instead, he asked Watergate prosecutors to cease their pursuit of the president in exchange for his own guilty plea; the prosecutors refused.3

  Equally unlike his fellow Watergate convicts, Mitchell never published a book about his years in power, never sold his soul to pay lawyers’ fees, never dished dirt on Richard Nixon to delight university audiences on the lecture circuit or viewers of The Mike Douglas Show. He never “found God.” In electing to tough it out, one columnist wrote, Mitchell stood “up to his hips in midgets among the other Watergate characters…divided the men from the boys.” “Among the WASP Westchester country club Mafia,” another columnist observed of Mitchell’s behavior in Watergate, “the code of omertà holds.” Richard Nixon, toasting his former attorney general at a post-prison party he threw for Mitchell in San Clemente, put it simplest: “John Mitchell has friends—and he stands by them.”4

  This stoicism and loyalty exacted enormous costs: personal, professional, financial. Mitchell’s criminal convictions made it fashionable to regard his tenure as attorney general, the capstone to a brilliant legal career on Wall Street, as merely a prelude to scandal; his stewardship of the Department of Justice, from 1969 to 1972, a lawless dress rehearsal in the dark theater of repression. Critiquing the Senate Watergate hearings for The Observer of London, novelist Mary McCarthy saw in Mitchell “shades of the late Senator Joe McCarthy…an old-style, coarse, crony-type law-and-order politician and backroom mouthpiece…a proto-fascist mentality” who “brought evil into the Caucus Room.” Former U.S. Attorney Whitney North Seymour Jr., who unsuccessfully prosecuted Mitchell on influence-peddling charges in New York in 1974, wrote the following year, after his guilty verdict in the Watergate cover-up trial, that Mitchell “acted in a fashion totally inconsistent with the standards of integrity and impartiality required of the chief legal officer of a great nation.” “The idea of Mitchell as the United States’ constitutional guardian staggers the imagination,” agreed historian Stanley Kutler in 1991. “Mitchell apparently never understood the American Revolution, let alone the Constitution.”

  Many on the left had always seen him this way. Mark Rudd, a founder of the radical subversive group the Weathermen, contemptuously dismissed Mitchell as “a Wall Street Nazi.” The New Republic fumed in 1970 that “John Mitchell personifies and encourages some of the worst tendencies of this administration.” The Nation worried that “so great is the current preoccupation with crime and ‘law and order’ that we are in danger of permitting, by default, this grim-lipped attorney general to fashion the legal structure of a new-style police state.” “Liberty under the law is under the most severe attack in America since Joe McCarthy’s hey-day,” fretted the New York Times’ Tom Wicker, a few months after Woodstock. Yale Law School professor Alexander Bickel complained to Newsweek that Mitchell was advancing “the most breath-taking claim for untrammeled executive authority since Lincoln” the New Yorker interpreted his every act as a “signal from the administration that it believes a nation of laws is no longer workable.”5

  Yet many others, from both sides of the political aisle—particularly those who knew Mitchell well, worked with him on Wall Street, in the Department of Justice, and at the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP)—drew a starkly different portrait. “He was a great man,” lamented Brent Harries, Mitchell’s friend of twenty-five years from the municipal bond business. “A tremendous worker, loyal, nice to people, good to [them]—he made probably millionaires out of those lawyers he worked with. He rewarded people well, they worked hard, and they’d bust their ass for him, but he took care of them.”

  Rob Odle, a young aide at the White House and CRP who first met Mitchell prior to the ’68 campaign, encountered a man far different from the image that preceded him. “He was so unpretentious, so plain, so nice, so at ease that he made you feel at ease. That wasn’t quite what I expected; I expected a mean, tough, gruff guy, and he wasn’t that at all.” Michael Raoul-Duval, who worked under John Ehrlichman as associate director of the Domestic Council and later served as special counsel to President Ford, told a symposium audience in the mid-1980s: “John Mitchell is one of the most misunderstood public figures that I’ve ever known. He is one of the most gentle, unassuming, humble men that I’ve met who got to the level of the Cabinet.”

  Eve
n John Dean, who served as an associate deputy attorney general under Mitchell before becoming White House counsel, and who later proffered the most damning testimony against his former boss, told an interviewer in 1977: “The John Mitchell I know is far different from the man the public perceives. I saw him more as a restraining influence on Nixon and some of the people in the White House…. If not for Mitchell, Nixon might have been even more forward in his actions.”

  Finally, and most compelling, was the word of Erwin N. Griswold, the revered dean of the Harvard Law School for twenty-two years who was named solicitor general of the United States by President Johnson and continued in that office for the entirety of President Nixon’s first term. Griswold’s stature in the legal fraternity was unrivaled. “Dean Griswold has, in the world of law and learning, become a legend in his own time,” said Senator Edward Kennedy. “He has earned a position of respect and renown for his ability as an attorney, scholar, teacher and educational leader, as well as a public-spirited citizen and family man.” As solicitor general, it was Griswold’s duty to argue the positions of the federal government in all cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In such cases, with nothing less than the future of American jurisprudence and society at stake, surely an attorney general determined to use the Justice Department as “a partisan instrument for pursuing presidential policies,” as one Oxford-educated historian has charged Mitchell, or who “had no respect for rule of law,” as the leading scholar of American attorneys general has written of him, would have taken extraordinary pains to prejudice Griswold’s work and actions; yet Mitchell did just the opposite.

  “All I can say,” wrote Griswold in 1992, “is that Mr. Mitchell was always fair and square with me. I never saw anything in our association in the Department of Justice which gave me concern about his integrity. Generally speaking, the attorney general left me alone. He understood that I wanted to act professionally, and he did not seek to interfere with that.” Indeed, Griswold recalled that Mitchell “shielded me from several matters…[and] served to protect me from a good deal of direct pressure” exerted by political appointees in the Nixon White House.6

  When Mitchell emerged from Maxwell, on January 19, 1979, the oldest and last of the president’s men to leave prison, a ghost from the era of the Chicago Eight and Kent State disgorged, incongruously, into the age of Star Wars, disco, and designer jeans, he wryly told the assembled news media: “From henceforth, don’t call me, I’ll call you.” But no biographer ever did. Yet by that same year, the world had three books about Mitchell’s late ex-wife, Martha, an emotionally disturbed alcoholic whose late-night crank calls splashed her face across the front pages of every newspaper and magazine in America. Stunningly, no one bothered to chronicle the life of John Mitchell: child of the Great Depression; World War II combat veteran; Wall Street innovator; gray-flannel power broker to governors and mayors in all fifty states; Richard Nixon’s law partner, consigliere, and winning campaign manager in 1968 and 1972; America’s top cop, as attorney general, during the Days of Rage, the May Day riots, and the Pentagon Papers; and Public Enemy Number One when, in the words of a British observer, “the great black cloud of Watergate seemed to settle over America like a kind of grand judgment, not just on Nixon himself, but on the whole of post-war America.”7

  To understand this “grand judgment,” to ensure the facts and lessons of the Watergate scandals are properly recorded, requires a revisiting of John Mitchell, and his extraordinary life and times, that the man himself, with his penchant for privacy, would surely have discouraged. If America truly aspires to be “a nation of laws,” it can ill afford to leave unexamined the conduct, and treatment, of its highest-ranking government official ever to be convicted on criminal charges—especially when that same figure was the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate aims to fill this unacceptable gap in the sprawling literature of the Nixon presidency, and in our understanding of American society in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Mitchell’s life raises questions both simple and profound: Was he centrally a part of, or did he somehow stand fundamentally apart from, the criminality of the Nixon administration? Were his problems, as one of his lawyers later rued, simply Nixon’s problems—or was it vice versa, as one of Nixon’s biographers would claim after both men were dead? Which association contributed more to the attorney general’s demise: his political alliance with Nixon, as Martha Mitchell sobbed in her final years, or his ill-starred marriage to Martha, as Nixon argued from 1973 onward? To all who knew and respected him, however, one question loomed above all others: Was Mitchell guilty in Watergate—and if so, guilty of what?

  The great scandal began, as a matter of public record, in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, when plainclothes Washington police officers, responding to a call placed by a private security company, arrested five men inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex. Unlike most local burglars, these men were found in business suits and rubber gloves, carrying cameras, sophisticated electronics equipment, and crisp hundred-dollar bills. Within days, police and FBI investigators, joined by reporters for the Washington Post, established direct ties between the arrested men, their flimsy aliases notwithstanding, and the Nixon White House and reelection committee. James McCord, a longtime FBI and CIA operative and the covert team’s expert on electronic surveillance, was employed as chief of security for Nixon’s reelection committee; the other burglars, veterans of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, were swiftly linked to E. Howard Hunt, a longtime CIA officer listed on the White House payroll as a consultant to Nixon’s special counsel, Charles Colson. Mitchell, having resigned from Justice to spearhead Nixon’s reelection drive, was then the head of the campaign committee.

  Over the next nine and a half months, during which period President Nixon was reelected by one of the greatest landslides in American history, the arrested men, Hunt, and his chief coconspirator in the break-in, G. Gordon Liddy, the reelection committee’s general counsel, were indicted and began receiving secret, sporadic, and invariably incomplete cash payments. Left in phone booths at National Airport and other ingenious drop spots, the payments were designed—depending on whom one asked—either to buy the defendants’ silence or to honor the first rule of the spy game: When your men get caught, they and their families get taken care of, and they, in turn, keep their mouths shut.

  During this same period, members of the White House and reelection committee staffs, led by Jeb Magruder, Mitchell’s deputy at the campaign, destroyed evidence, perjured themselves before a federal grand jury, and conspired in myriad other ways to obstruct the multiple investigations that were gleefully launched, in a capital controlled by Democrats, to probe the origins and financing of the break-in. The admitted “ringleader” in this multifarious undertaking was John Dean, the ambitious young White House counsel who scrambled to find ways to raise the “hush money” that kept the cover-up together; kept close tabs on the FBI investigation and civil litigation that threatened to unravel it; and coached Magruder in his perjury.

  The cover-up came crashing down in March 1973, when McCord broke ranks with his fellow burglars—all of whom had dutifully pleaded guilty—and wrote a bombshell letter to the judge in the case, John J. Sirica. The proceedings in U.S. v. Liddy, McCord charged, had been grossly tainted by perjury and backstage political pressure. Sirica’s reading of the letter in open court unleashed a frenzy in the news media and a new round of congressional and grand jury investigations. Dean, Magruder, and other midlevel officials scurried to negotiate plea bargains for themselves, exchanging their testimony for lenient sentences. Soon the grand jury handed down perjury and obstruction of justice indictments against the president’s top aides: Mitchell, White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, and domestic adviser John Ehrlichman.

  Watergate had now become a national obsession, at least among the political classes, the overriding issue in a superp
ower engaged in cold war struggles across the globe. Then, in televised Senate hearings that dominated the summer of 1973, came an even more stunning disclosure: Nixon had surreptitiously recorded virtually all his meetings and phone calls, from February 1971 onward, in his White House and EOB offices. This set off a desperate, yearlong legal battle for access to the tapes, which Nixon lost, resulting in disclosure of his early awareness of, and fitful participation in, the cover-up. He resigned in August 1974; a month later he was granted a pardon for all crimes he committed “or may have committed” while in office by his handpicked successor, Gerald R. Ford.

  When it was all over, investigators discovered Hunt and Liddy had stage-managed an earlier break-in, targeting the psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers; and the original crime metastasized into a massive complex of scandals, triggering an inquisition of the Nixon administration as comprehensive as the Nuremberg trials. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force formed five separate task forces, focused on crimes as disparate as political espionage, abuse of the Internal Revenue Service, antitrust collusion, influence-peddling, and campaign finance violations, and ultimately secured convictions against more than fifty men and nineteen corporations.8

  What was Mitchell’s role in all this? History commonly records that he ordered the Watergate break-in, an unofficial verdict that cast on the shoulders of the former attorney general ultimate responsibility for the improbable chain of events that climaxed in the disgraceful end of the Nixon presidency, and the corresponding diminution in American superpower influence. But the former attorney general, who collapsed and died from a heart attack on a Georgetown street in November 1988, always steadfastly denied ordering the break-in; and no court of law ever determined who did give the order.