by James Rosen
Joseph and Margaret’s first two children, a boy and girl, they named after themselves—though with typical Mitchell inscrutability in the matter of names, the boy was addressed as Scranton. The couple’s third child, John Newton, died at birth.11 The name was given anew to their fourth child, the future attorney general, in 1913.
John Mitchell’s mother was unusual for her time: a Hunter College graduate12 and an indomitable presence at home. “She was quiet but her force was felt in the family, no question about that,” her last child, Robert, born a little more than a year after John, remembered.13 Countless times, her husband, Joseph, recounted for the family how he had asked Margaret, in 1907, to marry him: “I would call her up on the phone and say, ‘Margaret, will you marry me?’ And she said, ‘Yes—who is this?’” Seventy-five years later, this line still made Robert laugh. “That’s Yankee humor,” he chuckled.14
Humor was in need in the earliest years of the twentieth century, when the Mitchell family was wracked by wild fluctuations in its financial fortunes. “[H]e was successful,” Robert said of his father, “up until World War I came along.” Wartime rationing of consumer goods left little need for trading stamps—goods were valuable enough without stamps as a purchasing incentive—and one day, as Robert remembered sadly, “[M]y father was without a business.”15
By 1918, the family had moved from Detroit back to Blue Point, where Peter McMahon, Mitchell’s restaurant-owning grandfather, had spent summers away from his swank Harlem apartment. Desperate for work, Joseph took a sales job with the Cudahey meatpacking firm, switching shortly thereafter to Cudahey’s main competitor, Wilson. He traversed Long Island’s butcher shops and groceries, peddling Wilson’s meats. Though it was a big step down from owning his own business, Mitchell’s “lovably stern” father had, by 1920, secured the job that would keep his family afloat throughout the Great Depression.16
A resort town, Blue Point came alive in the summertime, but winters were often severe. The water would freeze over and the town became, as Robert recalled, “a dead place.”17 To wring excitement from the deadness, the brothers rode ice floes down the Great South Bay, refusing to return home until wet clothing and freezing temperatures left them no alternative. As the seasons changed, they hunted ducks, rabbit, and geese with shotguns, and caught and ate snapper. An undated photograph, circa 1925, captures two skinny boys seated on a decaying wooden pier, bamboo fishing poles in hand, alone together on a deserted marshy inlet along the bay. Robert smiled rakishly at the camera; his older brother, Jack, the future attorney general, stared into the water below.18
The oldest and handsomest of the children, Scranton led his brothers in their outdoors exploits, and, like many an older brother, occasionally grew domineering in dealing with his siblings. Mitchell’s older sister, Margaret, was a good-looking, athletic woman who inherited her mother’s strong-willed nature. By the time she turned seventeen, a modeling dream led her to abandon high school for Manhattan, touching off a furious row with her father, Joseph. “I guess my father was probably too strict on her hours,” Robert remembered. “And she was a little headstrong, and she just took off on her own.” A persistent illness, later diagnosed as pneumonia, landed her in a Manhattan hospital. Within a few weeks, Margaret was gone, dead at twenty-three.19 In another ten years, Scranton, too, would be gone, victim of a heart attack he suffered when, during World War II, he responded to an air raid alert in his Long Island community.
Like Richard Nixon, then, John Mitchell had, by his early thirties, experienced the agony of seeing two siblings die young. Whether Nixon realized this is unknown, but it is unlikely that Mitchell, as Nixon’s campaign manager, somehow remained ignorant of so potent and widely disseminated an element of his candidate’s personal biography as the deaths of Harold and Arthur Nixon.
As a student at the Blue Point School from 1919 to 1921, Mitchell, “smaller and slighter than most boys his age,” demonstrated both native intelligence and uncommon discipline, amassing, according to one assessment, “a handsome sprinkling of As and Bs.”20 As he went further in school, he developed a winning, if somewhat withheld, personality as well. At Jamaica High School, the future attorney general launched his only campaign for elective office, a successful bid for the presidency of his senior class. A B+ student and popular athlete, Mitchell was the handpicked candidate of a group of students already running the student organization. It was Mitchell’s first involvement with machine politics.21
Mitchell rapidly developed into a formidable athlete, excelling at several different sports. Unlike the young Richard Nixon—who persisted at football, a sport for which his diminutive frame left him ill-suited, and who accordingly absorbed “a vast amount of brutal punishment”—the young John Mitchell played to his strengths. In hockey, for example, he became adept at skating around bigger players and avoiding their brutal body checks. Ken Agnew, who practiced with Mitchell on Long Island’s ponds and played with him on the Jamaica High School team, later remembered Mitchell as intensely competitive. “He had a lot of drive and incentive,” Agnew told the New York Post in 1970. “He wanted to win. He played the game the way it should be played.”22
The Jamaica team won the city hockey championship thirteen years in a row, and the 1927 squad, on which Mitchell played, was rewarded with a visit the following February to the White House—Mitchell’s first—and an audience with President Calvin Coolidge.23 Mitchell was so skilled that he played (for “blade sharpening money,” he said, twenty-five dollars a Saturday) for the Jamaica Hawks in the Metropolitan League. Some league games were played at Madison Square Garden, giving rise to a myth—persisting even into Mitchell’s Associated Press obituary—that he skated for the New York Rangers.
At golf, too, Mitchell excelled, becoming captain of his high school team and tying for New York’s coveted Police School Athletic League title. When Mitchell went on to Fordham University, his captain was Malcolm Wilson—later the governor of New York—who remembered Mitchell giving golf lessons on the side for money.24 During a joint appearance with Mitchell on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970, White House communications director Herb Klein told the host, “John was once a professional golfer.” “Is that so?” Cavett asked. “Yes,” replied Mitchell, “but that was a long time ago. You can’t imagine what happens to your handicap when you’re in the Justice Department. You have other handicaps,” Mitchell said, to the audience’s laughter.25
As a young man, Mitchell showed no interest in two vices that later became his trademarks: alcohol and tobacco. Tales of Mitchell’s love affair with Dewar’s Scotch abound in the literature of the Nixon presidency; and so ever-present in Mitchell’s hands and mouth did tobacco pipes become that the Watergate conspirators, speaking in cryptic terms over the telephone, adopted “The Pipe” as their code name for Mitchell (“What a great cover name,” he snapped sarcastically, six months before his death).26
According to his daughter, Jill Mitchell-Reed, when Mitchell first saw Elizabeth “Bette” Shine, a pretty member of the girl’s basketball team, on a bicycle one day in 1936, he proclaimed to his friend Doug Giorgio: “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.”27 The prophecy became a reality. The pair deferred their wedding until Mitchell earned his law degree. One photograph shows Bette—an entrancing blonde with a trim, athletic figure, sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a glamorous smile, Faye Dunaway before the fact—beaming in a new fur coat; on the reverse, she recorded in pencil that Mitchell bought her the coat after passing his bar exams in 1938.
Bette was “kooky, like I Love Lucy,” recalled Susie Morrison, Mitchell’s secretary from 1963 to 1971 and a close friend of the family. Once, Bette found herself locked out of her house; an hour later, she realized the doorknob was in her pocket. “Little things like that happened on a daily basis with Bette,” laughed Morrison. “She was cute, and I think down to earth…maybe a little flaky, but a lovable kind of flake. Not the kook Martha was…She wasn’t harsh, brassy. She was fun, but in a more subdued w
ay.”28
On stationery bearing the gothic imprint of Fordham’s legal fraternity, Gamma Eta Gamma, Mitchell composed whimsical love letters to his future bride. “Bette darling,” he wrote on May 6, 1937, “your two letters…have broken the spell of inactive distemper caused by the lack of seeing One Miss Shine and lack of work to keep me from thinking about that One Miss Shine, the dream.” Three months later, in response to the girl’s demand for more letters, Mitchell indulged in playful, pun-ridden verse, then roguishly suggested he could more effectively demonstrate his love in person, where he could “make gestures.” “Night my love,” Mitchell signed off, withholding his name. “If you [are] thinking I’m signing this so that you have something on me, another guess.”29
After two years as an undergraduate at Jesuit-run Fordham University in the Bronx, Mitchell entered the school’s nighttime law school program. By day he worked as an “office boy” at the law firm of Caldwell and Raymond, founded in 1887 by “Judge” James H. Caldwell (a title, Mitchell once quipped, recognized only in the court of public opinion). As new railroad lines were branching across America in the second half of the nineteenth century, the firm had developed a legal specialty refereeing disputes between the small western towns that had floated bond issues to pay for new lines and the railroad companies that often reneged on their bond debts.
Mitchell worked hard to make himself indispensable. Just before he graduated from law school, Judge Caldwell handed him a thankless task. “See if you can make anything out of this mess,” he told Mitchell.30 The “mess” was the paperwork supporting the bond program for one of the nation’s earliest federal public housing initiatives. The concept of the federal government supplying grants, low-interest loans, and other incentives for developers to build new housing units for low-income citizens was a product of the Great Depression, part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to combat the intertwined problems of rising unemployment and the spread of slums. A series of bold federal initiatives—including the passage by Congress, in 1933, of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the creation of the Public Works Administration and its Housing Division, and Congress’s enactment, four years later, of the United States Housing Act, with its accompanying Housing Authority—empowered local governmental and banking institutions across the country to construct more than 370 projects, housing some 120,000 families at a cost of $540 million ($7.2 billion in current figures).31
The conservative Caldwell regarded the Roosevelt initiative, whose first test was planned for Syracuse, New York, as a boondoggle. “Take this damn fool New Deal idea and work it out,” he dismissively told Mitchell. Soon after, a delegation from Syracuse arrived, seeking Mitchell’s counsel on how to develop a pilot program to finance low-income housing; although the rest of the conservative municipal bond bar greeted the endeavor “coolly,” the young lawyer from Long Island leapt at the challenge.32
Mitchell’s interest in housing, an ingredient in what one business associate later termed his “passion for cities,” likely stemmed from the fact that he had come of age during the Depression. Mitchell’s father and uncles, like most Americans at the time, struggled to get by. “The brothers were either all the way up or all the way down,” Jill Mitchell-Reed said. “I mean, they amassed fortunes and lost them.” Jack, the older brother of the attorney general’s father, had only recently alighted on Wall Street, trading stocks and bonds and making a killing—until Black Tuesday. “The Depression came along and then he went broke,” Mitchell’s brother Robert said, seventy years later. “[H]e lost everything. He was actually a pauper. And he had three young daughters from his second marriage and a wife to support. I know my father helped support him for several years…. He never really recovered.” Asked if the family history offered any prologue, or analogue, to Mitchell’s own fall in Watergate, Robert thought back to Black Tuesday, and mused: “[M]aybe John remembered the glory days of Uncle Jack…”33
Though susceptible to the allure of Wall Street, with its soaring potential and palpable peril, Mitchell also recognized the investment community was “pretty sour” on low-income-housing subsidies. Few financial analysts imagined the revenues generated, principally through rent payments, could ever match the sums paid out in start-up loans, a calculation that usually saddled low-income-housing bonds with exorbitantly high interest rates; after all, if the projects went south, who would repay the loans? Yet Mitchell was determined to make the concept work. The disarmingly simple idea he took back to Judge Caldwell—the tax-exempt municipal housing bond—later revolutionized public finance, and set Wall Street on fire. What if the federal housing authorities, while not legally bound to make good on loan defaults, pledged their intention to do so? And what if, as a good-faith measure, the agencies maintained verifiable reserves for just such a rainy day? “In other words, this was not a guarantee by the government, but they would promise to make annual contributions,” recalled William A. Madison, a colleague and law partner of Mitchell’s for nearly two decades. “It was a—sort of like a gimmick.”34
After researching constitutions and bylaws in states where bonds were to be issued, Mitchell would draft legislation for the states’ legislatures to enact, and, upon that foundation, issue his firm’s legal opinion on the validity and tax-exempt nature of those bonds. Francis X. Maloney, another longtime law partner, agreed the “requisition agreements” Mitchell designed did not bind the federal government to backstop locally issued bonds, but served nevertheless to secure them, to Wall Street’s satisfaction, with the force of the federal government. “[W]hen the bonds were issued,” Maloney explained, “you knew damn well that they were going to get paid, and of course, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s felt that way because they rated the bonds Triple-A.”35
“They sold like hotcakes,” Mitchell himself recalled, with other municipalities rushing to duplicate Syracuse’s success. Even before graduating from law school, Mitchell was drawing new clients to the firm on the strength of his name. On a straight commission basis, he later remembered, he was “making more money than most partners on Wall Street”—more, in fact, than the astonished partners at Caldwell and Raymond. As Mitchell told a reporter years later, the firm soon recognized, after Judge Caldwell’s death, that it “became cheaper to make me a partner.”36
He had created a money machine—but it was more than that. Jill remembered her father working away at a card table at home on weekends. The little girl learned what municipal bonds were and did through small demonstrations by her bemused, pipe-smoking father. On drives to Manhattan, they would pass a shantytown in Manhasset, where the less fortunate—bums then, the homeless today—took shelter in crates and discarded refrigerator boxes. “No water, no nothing,” Jill recalled. “And I can always remember how sad I felt for those people, particularly with the naïveté and innocence of young children: Someone should give them a home. That was my solution.” One day, they drove past the same spot to find the shantytown replaced by a gleaming public housing project. “And that’s how I understood what municipal bonds did when I was very, very young: They built houses so that people like that could live in houses.”
I can remember him showing them to me, and he was very proud…“You see, now the people have a home and everything. They cleaned it up, brought in the bulldozers, cleaned it up, and put grass on it.” And it’s a beautiful place still today.
On another occasion, Jill remembered asking her father what he was working on, and him peering up from the card table to say he was helping a small town acquire a fire engine. “This is not what we usually do,” he chuckled, returning to his papers. With a child’s naïve indignation, Jill replied that it was terrible for someone to make money if a town needed a fire engine. Her father “took his pipe out of his mouth, and said, ‘We’re not making money off of this one,’ or something like that. And I know he was particularly proud of doing things like that.” A decade later, Mitchell’s stepson witnessed the same passion. “He thought as a lawyer all the time, not ju
st when he was in the office,” said Jay Jennings. “He was in love with what he did…. It wasn’t just writing bonds…. There were beneficial public outcomes that affected people’s lives.”37
These were good years for John Mitchell. He was in his early thirties, married to his high school sweetheart, father of a healthy baby daughter, living in suburban Long Island with his parents close by, a partner in a prestigious Manhattan law firm with money, as he put it, “tumbling in.” Less than a year after his admission to the bar, he was helping to draft the federal Housing Act of 1939. Already a nationally renowned expert in housing finance issues, Mitchell, a Scotch-Irish kid from the South Shore, had catapulted himself in a phenomenally short time into the top tier of the municipal bond bar, a notoriously stodgy bastion of old boys’ school attitude.
On May 4, 1942, the Daily Bond Buyer heralded the young man’s arrival: “Caldwell and Raymond, Esqs., of New York City, announce the change of the firm name to Caldwell Marshall Trimble and Mitchell…. Partners in the firm are Charles C. Marshall, John T. Trimble, and John N. Mitchell.” Not surprisingly, the hotshot lawyer came to exhibit a sense of self-confidence that in some eyes “verged on arrogance.” “He is a very hard-nosed guy,” said one former New York State official who dealt frequently with Mitchell. “And like all bond lawyers he is three steps above the archangels.”38