The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  Instead, Mitchell was convicted on five criminal counts for his role in the cover-up: A jury of eight women and four men from the District of Columbia found that Mitchell lied under oath to the grand jury and Senate Watergate committee; ordered Magruder to destroy evidence; instructed Dean to obtain FBI case reports; directed a third aide, Robert Mardian, to engineer McCord’s premature release from jail; personally authorized, and tried to rope CIA into subsidizing, the payment of “hush money” to the arrested men; and extended promises of executive clemency to them.

  Mitchell’s Watergate conviction, announced on New Year’s Day 1975, came eight months after another federal jury, seated in New York, acquitted him and another Nixon cabinet member, former commerce secretary Maurice Stans, on influence-peddling charges. Mitchell and Stans stood accused of illegally soliciting a $200,000 campaign contribution from Robert Vesco—the “fugitive financier” who fled the country rather than face charges he looted a mutual fund of $224 million—in exchange for their quiet help in derailing a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into Vesco’s activities. After a two-month trial, the jury found, correctly, that $200,000 was not a lot of money compared to the sums the ’72 Nixon campaign routinely took in; that the SEC case against Vesco hummed right along, absent any sign of tampering by the defendants; and that Mitchell was guilty only of arranging, with a phone call here and there, a few meetings between willing government officials and polite Vesco associates.

  That Mitchell should have won acquittal in the Vesco trial at the height of the Watergate frenzy, in April 1974, only to be convicted in similar proceedings in Washington less than a year later marked a curious turn of events that should have attracted the attention—but never did—of the nation’s burgeoning new corps of investigative reporters. After all, a number of the same elements were present in both trials: To cite but two examples, the “Vesco trial,” as U.S. v. Mitchell-Stans came to be called, saw the first playing of the Nixon tapes in public and the courtroom debut of John Dean, the witness whose testimony in the Watergate cover-up trial would prove critical to the convictions of Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. Did Mitchell’s luck just run out—or were other, more sinister forces at work?

  Dozens of questions clamor for answers: If John Mitchell didn’t order the Watergate break-in, who did—and why? What role did CIA, and the intelligence community at large, play in Watergate? If the great scandal represented, as Harper’s observed in November 1973, “a major modern metamorphosis…the poisonous afterbirth of Vietnam,” then questions from the cold war period leading up to Watergate also command attention today. In the conception and execution of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, Mitchell played a substantial, and purposefully unheralded, role. Was there some connection between that policy and the administration’s ignominious end? Were Nixon and his men forced to pay a price for their embrace of détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with Red China? Why were the nation’s top military commanders discovered committing espionage against Nixon and Kissinger, for thirteen months in wartime, and what did the president—and Mitchell—do about it?

  No less significant are the issues raised by the administration’s domestic policies. Indeed, as the very symbol of “law and order” in Nixon’s America—and then again as a symbol of a different kind in Watergate—John Mitchell bore witness to the most searing political turmoil in America since the Civil War. After all, it was Mitchell who ran the Department of Justice, and the administration of justice in those years occupies the central role in all lingering controversies from that era: Was justice done in the enforcement of school desegregation and antitrust laws? In the battles against antiwar protesters and radical groups? At Kent State and Jackson State? In the cases of Daniel Ellsberg and Lt. William Calley, Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Vesco, Abe Fortas and Clement Haynsworth, John Lennon and the Berrigan Brothers, the Black Panthers and ITT?

  These and other mysteries continue to haunt Americans not merely because they involve colorful figures of intrinsic interest or because their answers remain so elusive, but because the times that produced them—the “decade of shocks” that spanned the Kennedy assassination to Nixon’s resignation—marked a frightening watershed in American history, an age when wars raged on earth while men walked on the moon, when media began transmitting social upheavals in real time, and when the continued existence of the republic seemed, for the first time since Reconstruction, imperiled.

  For the crimes of Watergate, no one paid a higher price than John Mitchell; but it would be a mistake to believe Mitchell’s incarceration, and denial of parole, were meant to punish him solely for the crimes of Watergate. The times—and the Times—demanded his ritual sacrifice. As Mitchell’s brother remarked wistfully in later years: “The climate was right for putting someone like John in jail.”9

  If answering such questions definitively is a central aim of The Strong Man, so, too, is the resolution of a number of disputes over Mitchell’s personal biography. There is, for example, no agreement on when he first met the two individuals who had the greatest impact on his life—Richard Nixon and Martha Mitchell—nor on what medals he was awarded in World War II; whether he married twice or thrice; earned $200,000 a year on Wall Street, or $2 million; or, as family lore held and the Associated Press reported in his obituary, he played professional hockey for the New York Rangers. Salvaging the truth from the ceaseless clash of claims and counterclaims surrounding Mitchell, and evoking his true personality—his mordant wit, wry fatalism, and desperate attempts to raise a daughter against staggering legal and financial odds—were no less important than corralling the elusive, though not irretrievable, facts of Watergate.

  Indeed, none of those crucial questions about recent American history can be answered in isolation; all, in varying degrees, require each other’s answers for their own to come into view. No one can reckon whether Mitchell “politicized” Justice, served the greater good or acted as a conscious malefactor in a criminal regime, deserved his fate in Watergate or fell prey to cruel and cynical antagonists, without understanding the man’s personality, the way his mind worked. This, in turn, can only be attained through a look at his background and rise to prominence, and a thorough examination of his exercise of power and unparalleled fall from it. At the end of this process lies: truth and judgment.

  Arriving there involved a personal journey that endured through two decades of research, synthesis, and writing. It began with the relevant secondary sources: the five hundred books published on Watergate, the Nixon presidency, and the convulsions of the sixties, as well as the voluminous, if necessarily imperfect, record established by the era’s many fine daily-deadline journalists. Fresh interviews were conducted with 250 people, including two presidents, a vice president, two chief justices, three secretaries of state, three secretaries of defense, four attorneys general, two CIA directors, and a great many staff members of the Nixon White House and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President: individuals alternately central, peripheral, and wholly unrelated to Watergate. Also questioned were party officials and secretaries employed at Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972. These sessions included the only extensive interviews ever conducted with the woman whose telephone was wiretapped in the Watergate break-in and surveillance operation, and more than eight hours of interviews with the only man who monitored that wiretap.

  Aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act, pursued over several years’ time, pried loose hundreds of thousands of previously undisclosed documents and tape recordings. Most of these were located at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, the branch of the National Archives that houses the ex-president’s papers and tapes and those of his staff aides. Of especial value was the long march, on microfiche, through every sheet of Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s 200,000 pages of yellow-pad notes from their meetings with President Nixon; since there was no taping system for the president’s first two years in office, these notes constitute the best evidence of Nixon’s
thoughts and statements, on a whole range of issues, during that critical period. In Haldeman’s case, the notes formed the raw material for The Haldeman Diaries, which proved, in several instances, less candid than the underlying scribbles.

  Surprisingly, some invaluable sources of Watergate evidence—whole archives of contemporaneous documents—had never before been mined, or even requested for inspection, by the armies of earlier scholars. These included the internal files of the staff lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) and the sworn testimony taken by the Senate Watergate committee in closed-door executive session. The former archive revealed what the WSPF lawyers knew about Watergate and when they knew it: their reliance on, and active role in reshaping, the deeply flawed testimony of their star witnesses, Dean and Magruder. The latter collection contained more than five thousand pages of testimony from the major witnesses before the Senate Watergate committee: Dean, Magruder, McCord, Hunt. Like the WSPF records, the executive session interrogations had never been examined by any researcher and revealed witnesses consciously changing their stories, both to implicate Mitchell more deeply and to conceal their own culpability. These were major factors in the outcome of Watergate and have never been exposed; taking account of them enabled The Strong Man to resolve the questions that bedeviled Mitchell to his grave, including the central mystery of who authorized the break-in.

  Rounding out the picture were intimate letters written by Mitchell in his own hand, from prison; his federal tax returns from the years 1950 to 1973; the complete transcripts of his two criminal trials; documents compiled during his bitter divorce from Martha Mitchell; court filings and fresh depositions generated by recent Watergate-related civil suits; and many other relevant documents. In sum, no previous study has encompassed so comprehensive a research effort, mounted over two decades’ time, nor benefited from the wealth of newly declassified evidence now available.

  Americans may fairly wonder after all these years, after all the hearings, articles, trials, books, documentaries, films, and plays, after the seemingly endless releases of new Nixon tapes and the “revelations” in 2005 about the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s shadowy (and highly suspect) source, whether there is, at this late date, anything new to say about Watergate. The answer extracted from these mountains of new evidence, and discernible as much from the source notes as from the narrative text, is both unmistakable and unassailable: Assuredly, the scandal presented in The Strong Man is not your father’s Watergate.

  At all points, the research task was made incalculably more complicated by a subject notorious for his inscrutability, one who left behind no large cache of personal or official papers and whose most memorable remark advised listeners to observe what he did rather than what he said. If taciturnity and sleights of hand served some perceived interest during Mitchell’s lifetime—and the stay at Maxwell suggests the opposite—they certainly serve none now that he, and Nixon, are long gone. For only through the establishment of an accurate record of those tumultuous times, their passions cooled by the passage of almost four decades, can America hope to avoid destructive repetitions of what President Ford called “our long national nightmare,” an experience no one lived more personally and fully than John N. Mitchell.

  INTO THE FIRE

  I don’t think anyone ever really knew him. He lived within himself very much.

  —Robert Mitchell to the author, 19981

  “DO YOU REALLY want to hear about this?”

  John Mitchell was, in his lawyerly way, questioning his questioner, gently needling a young reporter who came to the Department of Justice in the spring of 1970 to interview the attorney general about, of all things, his childhood. On that sunny day in May, the reporter found Mitchell—currently embroiled in searing controversies over the killings at Kent State, two failed Supreme Court nominees, and the potentially explosive desegregation of Southern school systems—utterly at ease in his dark, thickly carpeted office, absently tilting his large frame back and forth in his swivel chair, lighting and relighting his pipe, tossing the still-burning matches into his wastebasket.

  Yes, replied the reporter from Long Island’s Newsday, he did indeed want to know about Mitchell’s childhood; the subject would interest readers in Mitchell’s hometown of Blue Point, New York, and there was, for all the attorney general’s fame in those days, little known or written about Mitchell’s formative years.

  Reluctantly, his pale blue eyes becoming distant as his mind conjured the sights and sounds of coastal Long Island in the 1920s, the attorney general remembered a “normal” childhood spent, he said, “like Huck Finn,” immersed in the twin pastimes of sports—“I played them all,” he boasted, including baseball, hockey, golf, hunting, fishing, and sailing—and mischief. At one particular memory, Mitchell began to chuckle, softly at first, then uncontrollably, until he was “half-bent” in laughter and brought back into the moment only by a coughing fit.

  “I’ll tell you, there was one thing, there was one incident,” Mitchell began. He described his old wooden school by the railroad tracks, at the intersection of Blue Point’s Main Street and River Road, on which his family lived for a time. One night, he said, a fire burned the school clear down to the ground. “Whole damned school went,” he said. Again now, Mitchell was laughing hard, and took a few moments to collect himself. “My brother and I were there,” the attorney general continued. “We watched it. We were so damned glad to see that thing burn down. We watched it! We threw our books into the fire. We were so glad. We just threw our books in. My father gave us a good whack. I’ll always remember that. Whew!”

  The memory prompted Mitchell to tell the Newsday reporter another, similar anecdote from his youth, about an equally destructive fire. “You know, I burned down the house in Blue Point,” Mitchell said. “It was one Fourth of July. We had sparklers and it was daylight and, you know, we were supposed to wait until dark. Well, I was a kid who didn’t want to wait, so I took some of those sparklers down under the porch and—well, it burned down the house.” You didn’t have anything to do with the school fire? the reporter asked. “No,” Mitchell assured him. “That was in the middle of the night. This was during the day. Of course not.”2

  With these beguiling stories, in which the stern-faced monument to law and order allowed a glimpse into a younger, more reckless self, one never permitted to emerge in his public appearances as attorney general, there was only one thing wrong: They weren’t true. Mitchell’s younger brother, Robert, who supposedly heaved his books into the schoolhouse fire along with Mitchell, told the first reporter ever to interview him, in 1998, that the story was complete fiction.

  “Nothing happened!” Robert proclaimed. One night, he explained, he and young John Mitchell, or Jack, as his family called him, were awakened by whistles and sirens screaming past their house. “[W]e knew there was a fire somewhere, but didn’t know anything about it. Next morning we went to school, and we got up there, and the school was an old frame school. They had just bought fire escapes for it, metal fire escapes. And they were laying in the yard. And we went up there, and the school—it was burnt to the ground, and the nice, new fire escapes were laying all around the edges of it, unused…But that’s all…We never heard how the fire started or anything else.”

  It was much the same with the attorney general’s sparkler story, which Robert laughingly dismissed as “another slight exaggeration.” Yes, there was an Independence Day celebration at the Mitchells’ home in Blue Point, where the boys, looking to escape a stiff wind, lit some sparklers under their back porch. “We went under that [porch] to try and light [the sparklers],” Robert remembered. “And I guess we—a couple of the leaves caught fire there, and we went scrambling out. And one of the adults there, I don’t know who it was, took a pail of water and threw it on the leaves, and that was the end of it. The house never burned down. The porch didn’t even burn down.”

  The falsity of the attorney general’s childhood tall tales might be easily wri
tten off as inconsequential, an Irishman’s love of lore, were it not for his multiple perjury convictions in Watergate, and for the recurring theme of factual dispute that accompanies all accounts, and every phase, of his life. That John Newton Mitchell was born in Detroit on September 5, 1913, the fourth of five children, the first three of whom died young, are incontestable facts.3 Yet little else in Mitchell’s early biography is so invulnerable to challenge.

  Mitchell’s paternal lineage is usually traced to Scotland, but exactly when his forefathers came to America varies in the telling. The attorney general’s daughter, Jill Mitchell-Reed, believed her family got its start in the States with a stonecutter from Edinburgh who settled in Rutland, Vermont, before moving to Chicago and ending up in Rockport, Maine.4 Perhaps the most reliable authority—Robert, sole surviving member of the attorney general’s boyhood family—said their grandfather, James A. Mitchell, a stonecutter seeking proximity to New Hampshire’s granite quarries, emigrated from Aberdeen, Scotland, in the mid-1800s to Rockland, Maine.5

  After meeting and marrying Margaret Porter, an immigrant from Newfoundland “of English extraction,” James A. Mitchell fathered three sons. The youngest of them, Joseph Charles, born around 1882 in Rockland, Maine, was to become the attorney general’s father.6 Skillfully exploiting his family’s limited connections, Joseph, when still a young man, joined the trading stamp business owned by an uncle, Esden Porter. Itching to start his own firm, but unwilling to compete directly against his uncle, Joseph left New York for the Midwest, initially eyeing Columbus, Ohio, before settling on Detroit. There he began the People’s Legal Stamp Company.7

  But before that, on an evening in 1906 or 1907, at the East Flatbush home of an older brother, Joseph met his future wife, Margaret Agnes McMahon.8 Margaret’s family was “very well off,” her granddaughter Jill Mitchell-Reed recalled.9 Peter McMahon, Margaret’s father, died in his early fifties, but left behind a considerable fortune from his stake in Peter’s Chop House, a Greenwich Village steakhouse he owned.10