by James Rosen
MORAL OBLIGATIONS
Through all his years in bonds, no one knew what Mitchell’s politics were or, indeed, whether he had any. One old associate has said that in thousands of conversations with Mitchell he couldn’t recall a single mention of a political position or preference.
—New York Post, 19731
ON NOVEMBER 12, 1988, as the U.S. Navy Band played the Navy Hymn at Arlington National Cemetery, six white horses clip-clopped slowly forward, tugging a caisson that bore a bronze coffin, draped by the American flag, inside of which lay the body of the former attorney general. Four days earlier, he had succumbed to a massive heart attack. When the caisson came to rest, seven sailors fired three volleys. A bugler played taps. Because of his naval service—but more likely in deference to his cabinet rank, his Watergate convictions, here only, set mercifully aside—John Mitchell was interred in storied Section 7-A, hallowed ground just downhill from the Tomb of the Unknowns, the final resting place for the likes of former heavyweight champion Joe Louis; Lee Marvin, the combat veteran and tough-guy actor; and Air Force colonel Stuart Roosa, pilot of the command ship on Apollo 14’s mission to the moon.
Delivering the eulogy was Richard A. Moore, a lifelong friend who first met Mitchell on a high school hockey rink in 1930, later served as his consigliere at Justice, then followed him to the witness chair at the Senate Watergate hearings.2 Moore told the mourners: “You all know, of course, that [Mitchell] served in the Navy in World War II.”
But the only thing that most people know about his war record is that John F. Kennedy served under him. I don’t know whether John was annoyed or pleased about that—probably a little of both; [but it was] because John never talked about it. I knew he had served in combat in the Pacific but I never knew until yesterday that he received the Navy’s treasured award for gallantry in combat—the Silver Star. Nor did I know that he had been twice wounded, receiving two Purple Hearts.
Amazing tales, but—as with the childhood fires—wholly untrue. The JFK story first surfaced in a September 1968 New York Times Magazine article in which Richard Reeves, observing Mitchell’s “intelligent, dignified…and unexciting” demeanor, found it “hard to believe that Mitchell commanded squadrons of PT boats during World War II.” When Reeves asked about Kennedy, the most famous PT boater, Mitchell replied: “I hardly knew him. He was just one of the dozens of junior officers I had to deal with every day.” The New York Daily News recycled these remarks two months later, followed by Milton Viorst in the Times Magazine the following August.3
In fact, there is no evidence Mitchell ever encountered, let alone commanded, Kennedy or his unit. Mitchell’s squadron, “Ron” 37, was not commissioned until March 1944—seven months after the Japanese destroyer Amagiri had already sunk Kennedy’s PT 109. According to Alyce N. Guthrie, executive director of a Memphis-based company that operates a PT boat archives and museum: “The idea that Mitchell served with Kennedy may have come from the fact there was another Mitchell who served under JFK on PT 59. From reading various clippings it looks like an error could have been made in linking the two, an error which Mitchell could have let be perpetuated.”4
And what of the medals—the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts? Asked once by an acquaintance of what he was proudest, Mitchell cited his war injuries. “When you spill blood for America,” he said, “that’s the highest sacrifice you can make.” Pressed on the nature of his wounds, Mitchell replied tersely: “When I go to the beach, I wear long pants.” Jill Mitchell-Reed once asked her father about a scar on his leg; he said it came from a Japanese machine gun. The medals and citations are long gone; according to numerous accounts, Martha Mitchell, suffering a psychotic fit in 1974, set them on fire. Yet available Navy records show no evidence Mitchell was ever decorated at all.5
Ensign “J. N. Mitchell” reported for duty at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on June 14, 1944. Years later, he would tell an interviewer the navy wanted him to do legal work, but he refused, insisting on a combat role. That July, Mitchell and the crew of PT boat 536, commanded by Lieutenant Thomas R. Wardell of Phoenix, began leaving New York for frequent, twelve-hour trips to the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Camp at Melville, Rhode Island. There the men received extensive training in the firing of small arms, antiaircraft guns, mortar rounds, underwater depth charges, and torpedoes. They were also schooled in radar tracking, night navigation, and covert troop deployments.
As the second in command of PT boat 536, Mitchell was required to record and sign, in his own hand, the daily log of the vessel’s operations and movements. These logs show he spent the summer and fall of 1944 navigating the shores of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, overseeing repairs, conducting simulated attacks, and ferrying around superior officers. A monthlong stay at Tulagi Harbor reportedly included pleasantries with a man he never saw again, but who would later cause him considerable grief: E. Howard Hunt, then with the Office of Strategic Services.6
The day after Christmas, Ron 37 launched its first offensive operation. Allied planes bombed and strafed coastal Japanese installations along Bougainville Island for fifteen minutes; then the PT boats, stationed 200 yards offshore, spent the next eight minutes firing 37,000 rounds at the enemy. If Mitchell’s logs offer the best evidence of his military service, his life was never in danger; however, he likely saw many Japanese soldiers shot and killed, and may even have killed some himself. Over ten days in February 1945, Mitchell’s boat took part in several more strikes at “enemy bivouac and supply areas” in the Solomons. His commander later testified to murky theater conditions and significant enemy casualties.
After these operations, Mitchell’s navy tenure was uneventful. On February 7, he was promoted from ensign to lieutenant junior-grade, two weeks before his boat arrived at Espiritu Santo in New Hebrides. There, on April 18, he was named commander of his own boat, PT 541, also part of Ron 37. The next two months saw intensive training for the expected invasion of mainland Japan. But after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, combat in the Pacific was finished. By November, with the war over, Lieutenant Mitchell was relieved, reassigned, and sent home to New York.7
If much of Mitchell’s war record seems exaggerated, even fabricated—as with the Kennedy myth, the unverifiable injuries and decorations, and numerous other tall tales—the personal portrait of Mitchell as a young man of thirty, developed in interviews with half a dozen World War II veterans who served with him, proves equally conflicted.
Some of the men, or their descendants, told admiring tales of a benevolent lawyer-statesman who loaned money to broke sailors on shore leave, freely shared his liquor, and casually continued advising law clients back home. Russell Addeo, a mechanic aboard PT 536, remembered a “hell of a nice fellow” who’d always “rather be with the enlisted people than the officers.” Yet radioman Adam Mancino, with whom Mitchell was said once nearly to have come to blows, recalled an “aloof” elitist who “wouldn’t even stick his head in the crew’s quarters.” The sharpest words came from Lieutenant Wardell, the one man on the boat who outranked Mitchell. “The crew hated his guts…. He was an arrogant son of a bitch…. I got along with him because I had to, but I really didn’t like him…. Everybody thought he was a son of a bitch, that’s about the short of it.”
Other veterans disputed Wardell’s harsh memory. Yet all except Wardell and Mancino, the most hardened in their views, seemed to agree with Addeo, the mechanic, who confessed: “I can’t visualize him doing what they claim when he was attorney general. He wasn’t that kind of person.”8
While Mitchell was away at sea, Caldwell Marshall Trimble and Mitchell hit hard times. The war had largely frozen municipal bond sales, and Trimble was the only partner still working. Then, as staff attorney Bill Madison recalled, “Mitchell came back—and voom! The firm took off.”9 The postwar ad pages of the Daily Bond Buyer show Mitchell picked up right where he had left off. In 1949, the federal housing laws were overhauled, extending low-income initiatives and plunging the federal gov
ernment into a new era of urban renewal. Mitchell recalled spending “a great deal of my time helping to draft those pieces of legislation and also to perfect their financial documents.”10
By the early fifties, Mitchell “had no peer” on Wall Street. It was perhaps inevitable that he attracted the attention of the undersecretary of Housing, Education, and Welfare, a wealthy New Yorker only five years older than Mitchell named Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. The precocious heir to the Rockefeller fortune had already served, thirteen years earlier, as a senior State Department official setting Latin American policy. In late 1952, President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower tapped him to chair an advisory panel on government reorganization—a vehicle Rockefeller seized upon to create HEW, the very agency he now, as undersecretary, effectively ran. The future New York governor shared Mitchell’s passion for cities and took note of the accomplishments of the nation’s leading municipal finance lawyer.11
“Perhaps Nelson’s greatest genius,” said Roswell B. Perkins, assistant secretary at HEW, “was to identify a problem and get the best minds to work on it that he could find. He harnessed good minds probably as well as anyone in political history.” With that charge, Rockefeller’s aide, Frank Moore, a former lieutenant governor and state comptroller, approached the young Wall Street wizard and asked if his alchemy could be brought to bear on an intractable problem: financing school construction nationwide. Mitchell “twirled the problem around in his supple mind,” then devised a plan. Once again, semi-autonomous state agencies would be created to issue bonds, build the needed facilities, lease them to local districts, and pay off the bonds with the revenues. Once the bonds were paid off, the school districts would own the schools. And once again, authorities would maintain a special “reserve fund,” backing up the bonds in the event of a revenue shortage. Half the fund’s money was to be contributed by the states, the other half, an estimated $150 million, by the federal government. The states themselves, though not legally obligated to make good on the bonds’ default, nevertheless acknowledged a “moral obligation” to do so.12
Rockefeller loved it. When Eisenhower unveiled his massive education plan, vowing to bankroll $6 billion in school construction over three years, Mitchell’s concept lay at its core. Yet the reaction was muted: Politicians and educators found the scheme convoluted; the teachers’ unions favored outright grants. The plan never made it out of committee. Still, for Mitchell the experiment proved a boon: His salary in the years 1955 and 1956, when he worked on it, exceeded his 1954 earnings by an average of $51,000 (roughly $352,000 in current figures). He had also made an important new friend.13
As his practice prospered, so did Mitchell’s net worth. In later years, after he became attorney general, published estimates of his private sector earnings varied wildly, some citing an annual salary of $2 million. In fact, a review of Mitchell’s tax returns from 1950 through 1973 shows his best year was 1968, when, as Richard Nixon’s law partner, he listed a gross income of slightly more than $495,000.14
When the navy interrupted Mitchell’s career, he, Bette, and their two kids—Jack and Jill, born in 1941 and 1943, respectively—were living with Mitchell’s parents in a large old house in St. Albans, Queens. By 1950, with Mitchell’s parents deceased, he moved his family northward, to Port Washington in Long Island’s Nassau County. But by all available accounts, Mitchell himself spent little time there. As his stock on Wall Street rose, he traveled more frequently. “[M]y practice took me into, I think, all of the fifty states,” he testified in 1975.
Accomplished, articulate, and often alone, Mitchell appears to have looked outside his marriage for companionship. Tales told by law partners and others who knew him in these years suggested he was prone to affairs; the dangerous combination of physical estrangement and susceptibility to temptation took its toll. In later years, Mitchell’s decision to separate from Bette, when he was in his early forties, would have been called a midlife crisis; at the time, he kept his feelings, characteristically, to himself, and reportedly sprung his decision on his wife with stunning suddenness. In the only published quote ever attributed to her, Bette Mitchell said, in 1973: “John just walked in one morning and asked for a divorce.” However, Jill Mitchell-Reed regarded the quote with suspicion, and others close to Mitchell depicted the dissolution of his first marriage as far more complex. “I think what killed their marriage is what kills a lot of marriages,” said Susie Morrison, Mitchell’s secretary from 1963 to 1971. “It’s the distance. It’s that John was up and coming. He was ambitious. He wasn’t home, and she was lonely.”
Still others, including Mitchell-Reed and longtime friends Ken and Peggy Ebbitt, confirmed Morrison’s assessment. Mitchell’s punishing travel schedule left Bette alone too often; nor did it help that he had gone to sea during the war and grown accustomed to a foot-loose existence incompatible with family life. In those years, American women were less likely to protest inequities in their marriages, and Mitchell lived, enthusiastically and without recrimination, by the norms of his day. “Maybe he watched too many John Wayne movies,” Mitchell-Reed mused decades later.
Bette moved to Reno’s Biltmore Ranch in November 1957. Within six weeks, she established residency in Nevada and filed a complaint charging Mitchell with extreme cruelty, a charge he denied. In granting their divorce, the court ruled for joint custody of Jack and Jill, and for the couple’s house, furniture, and boat to be awarded to Bette. A published report from 1973 described the breakup as “amicable.” “I said I would take care of you forever,” John told Bette when they parted, “and that’s what I am going to do.” The terms of the divorce transformed Mitchell’s moral obligation into a legal one: He agreed to pay Bette 35 percent of his gross annual income regardless of whether she remarried.15
Mitchell was single again—but hardly alone. Eleven days after his divorce from Bette, at an elopement center in Elkton, Maryland, he remarried.
History records multiple versions of how Mitchell first met Martha Elizabeth Beall, the vivacious, buxom blonde from Arkansas, five years his junior, who became his second wife. Newspapers and magazines, friends and strangers all proffered stories of the lovers’ first meeting, said to have occurred at various points between 1953 and August 1957—when Martha’s divorce from her first husband, Clyde J. Jennings Jr., was granted in Dade County, Florida—and cast, alternately, as a chance dinner-party encounter, a blind date in Greenwich Village, and a night of sin in Little Rock. The truth is irretrievable.16
Daughter of a cotton broker and elocution teacher, Martha Mitchell was born in Pine Bluff on September 2, 1918, and raised primarily by her African American “mammy.” Though dyslexic and hamstrung by a stuttering problem, Martha developed a Southern belle’s charm and an aversion to silence, attributes that sometimes complemented one another but more often clashed to her disfavor. Her father, estranged from her mother, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in 1943, when Martha was twenty-five. By then, Martha had graduated from the University of Miami, where, after transfers from two other schools, she earned, in between serial dates and sorority capers, a history degree. She taught grade school in Mobile before returning to Pine Bluff to work at an arsenal. When her commander was transferred to Washington, Martha tagged along, serving as a research analyst in the office that later became the Army Chemical Corps.
In October 1946, she married Clyde J. Jennings Jr., an army captain and businessman from Virginia. A year later the couple’s only child, Jay, was born. Later, during her divorce, Martha hired a private detective to document Jennings’s alleged physical abuse; instead the gumshoe testified it was Martha who was “neurotic…sick and all mixed up.” “I was so happy to get out of that situation,” Jennings recalled decades later, “I just left with nothing.” At the height of Martha’s notoriety in the early seventies, a reporter sought out Jennings’s insights into her personality before she met John Mitchell and attracted nationwide publicity. “She would have a few drinks,” Jennings recalled, “and then talk dow
n to people. She gave a bad time to head-waiters, taxi drivers, doormen, anyone who was menial. It was an insecurity problem.”17
After Watergate, critics of the Nixon administration depicted Martha Mitchell as a brave lady surrounded by evil but determined to tell the truth, an ordinary woman driven insane by her husband’s unholy alliance with Richard Nixon. Yet friends of John Mitchell who got to know Martha in the late 1950s and 1960s, long before her husband formed any association with Nixon, painted a much different portrait. “Everybody said, ‘What in God’s name did he see in her?’” recalled Bill Madison. “They despised her! She could breed instant hate! Oh God, she was awful, an awful woman.”
Brent Harries, a Wall Street publishing executive who worked with Mitchell in the fifties and sixties, first met Martha when Mitchell was dating her and still married to Bette. Harries remembered with undiminished horror the time his pal brought Martha to a cocktail party at the home of Roald Morton, Harries’s boss. “It was a beautifully done party,” Harries remembered thirty years later. “If you wanted a drink there would be a nudge at your arm and there would be a waiter standing there with a tray.”
Martha showed up with John. John was smoking his pipe, Martha—in a bouffant hairdo that went all over the place, this mini-pleated skirt that was very gaily colored, with her high-heels, very stiletto-type heels. And it was a very refined cocktail party, very quiet; I think there was music, maybe a harpist or a violinist. All of a sudden, Martha for some reason either thought she wasn’t getting enough attention, or people weren’t paying enough attention to her…All of a sudden, she jumped up on a couch to sing or do something…. And John just kind of looked at her, had his pipe in his mouth and kind of smiled like, “Isn’t she cute?” type of thing. I assume he was very much in love with her, and he just overlooked this kind of stuff.18