The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  In a 1971 interview, Mitchell sized up the president’s personality for columnist Frank van der Linden: “Nixon is a tough cookie. The thing that has impressed me most about him is how he handles the crises. He does not get into an uproar, but calmly goes on to the next problem, not chewing the rug or climbing the wall.” Certainly, Mitchell shared Nixon’s contempt for the news media. He told van der Linden: “I’m impressed, too, because [Nixon] is not side-tracked by minutiae but keeps his eye on the big target, not the TV bulletin. One thing that makes the editorial writers so damned mad is that he ignores them. They needle him, but he won’t jump.”7

  Of course, White House documents and tapes later revealed almost the complete opposite of everything Mitchell said: that Nixon never put the resentments of the early sixties behind him; that he frequently flew into uproars, during and between crises; that he seldom moved breezily on to the next problem but chewed the same ones over and over again, often to no discernible resolution; that he got sidetracked by minutiae, such as the placement of end tables in the East Wing and wine selection for state dinners, every day of his presidency; and that, most acutely, far from ignoring the needles of the press, Nixon literally obsessed over them, spent hours dictating punitive memoranda in response to them, was driven quite near insane by them.8

  Beyond putting the best public face on his boss, Mitchell was likely having a bit of sport with van der Linden, as he’d had with the Newsday reporter who inquired about his childhood, baldly propounding things he knew to be untrue purely for the perverse pleasure of making fools of reporters. A series of private remarks later reported publicly, some heretofore unpublished, reveal Mitchell harbored a far different view of Richard Nixon than his comments to van der Linden implied. Out of earshot, Mitchell derisively referred to Nixon as “Milhous”—the middle name Nixon loathed so much he banished even the letter M from his press releases and gravestone. Senator Howard Baker never forgot what Mitchell said when Baker introduced him to his wife at the 1968 Republican National Convention. “Oh, I’ve heard of you,” Mrs. Baker said cheerfully. “You are in Mr. Nixon’s law firm.” “No, madam,” Mitchell replied pointedly. “Mr. Nixon has joined my law firm.”9

  Mitchell’s remarks were even more pointed shortly after he assumed control over Nixon’s ’68 campaign, when a group of Republican congressmen summoned Mitchell for a luncheon on Capitol Hill. What business, the lawmakers wanted to know, did a bond lawyer have running Richard Nixon’s campaign? “I’m the only man,” replied Mitchell, “who can say ‘no’ to Richard Nixon. I’ve made more money in the practice of law than Nixon, brought more clients into the firm, can hold my own in argument with him and, as far as I’m concerned, I can deal with him as an equal.”10

  Indeed, over the years, Mitchell occasionally voiced contempt for Nixon. Mitchell’s press secretary at Justice, Jack Landau, remembered his boss “didn’t think Nixon was very smart. He didn’t think he had any resolve.” “Nixon couldn’t piss straight in the shower if I wasn’t there to hold him!” Mitchell once told Landau. This feeling persisted until Mitchell’s death. “I have ceased to be mystified by Nixon’s actions,” he told an interviewer in 1988. “Everybody always says what a complicated individual [Nixon] is. He’s about as complicated as my grandson.”

  What, then—if not awe of intellect or will—explained Mitchell’s boundless loyalty to Richard Nixon? Certainly it was not any expectation of reciprocity. Asked once if Nixon failed to return Mitchell’s loyalty, Henry Kissinger paused. “I think that’s a fair statement,” he finally answered.

  Nixon had no really close relationship with anybody. So I thought Nixon had high regard for Mitchell. And since Mitchell never asked for anything for himself, at least as far as I could ever tell, [Nixon] had less of a hold over Mitchell than over some others. And I think he respected him. Which didn’t keep him from sending him over the wall at the end.

  Why did Mitchell, even after the White House tapes revealed Nixon’s betrayal, persist in undiminished loyalty, never turning on the disgraced ex-president to improve his own prospects before courts of appeal, the bar of history, or the publishing industry? Ultimately, the answer resides not in Mitchell’s view of Nixon but in his conception of self. He had always aspired to be—and became—the lawyer’s lawyer, the consummate professional. To testify against Nixon, to trade evidence, real or fabricated, in exchange for a lighter criminal sentence and a fat book deal, like many of the other Watergate conspirators, was abhorrent to Mitchell as a lawyer. “Why John never told it all,” an intimate remarked after his death, “can only be attributed to the fact that Richard Nixon was his client. And good lawyer that he was, he protected the president to his grave.”11

  For all Nixon’s talk of the New York “fast track,” the practice of law bored him, just as it had two decades earlier in Whittier. The former vice president found that while ambition, doggedness, and resilience had taken him far in politics—a heartbeat away from the presidency by age thirty-nine—those attributes had done little to prepare him for the prospect of life outside the realm of campaigns and elections. In 1964, and in the midterm elections two years later, he campaigned tirelessly for Barry Goldwater and GOP congressional candidates, piling up political debts to be repaid when his own time came again. If he kept practicing law, Nixon would half jest, he’d be mentally dead in two years, physically dead in four.

  Nixon knew earlier than anyone else, of course, that he would return to the game—but remained circumspect. In his memoirs, he admitted he began to “think seriously” about the White House as early as New Year’s Day 1965. “I had finally come to the realization that there was no other life for me but politics and public service,” Nixon wrote. “I did not reveal to my family or anyone else that this was what I had in mind. I knew that Pat and the girls would again be disappointed.” Asked years later how early he learned Nixon would seek the 1968 Republican nomination, H. R. Haldeman, who was as close to Nixon as any political operative, replied “not til ’67. Late ’67, actually, for sure.” It is thus doubtful that Mitchell, at the time of the merger, knew his partner would again seek public office. Surely it was clear to all that if Nixon chose to run again, he could do worse for a base of operations than a major New York law firm.12

  Mitchell’s nationwide network of political contacts had attracted Nixon’s eye. Asked in December 1968 how he wound up managing the campaign, Mitchell suggested, with a smile, that he had been a reluctant bride: “It was an evolution. I got sucked in gradually. I guess somebody had to do it. I was blithely practicing law, and calling up friends around the states to get some Nixon organizations formed.”13 It was in the summer of 1967 that Nixon began to realize his imperturbable law partner could, in addition to salving psychic wounds, also fill a political void. Mitchell accompanied California GOP chairman Gaylord Parkinson on a trip to Wisconsin. Mitchell’s legal contacts in the Badger State were unmatched; but from a Wall Street lawyer with no campaign experience Parkinson was unwilling to take direction. He rejected Mitchell’s idea to organize the state for Nixon by delegating responsibility to a private sector group: “Parky said no and stuck with it.”14 Ignoring Parkinson’s objections, by July Mitchell had organized a team of forty-two campaign professionals—including a chairman for each of Wisconsin’s seventy-two counties, its ten congressional districts, and its fifteen to twenty largest cities. Nixon reconvened his own group. Given a choice between Mitchell and Parkinson, the group chose Mitchell to run the campaign, with Nixon’s acquiescence.15

  The pros were impressed. “Mitchell in his first outing,” reported the Los Angeles Times’ Jules Witcover, “managed to tie up the key Republicans in Wisconsin. In the succeeding months, he was to launch similar operations in most other states, drawing in almost always the influential and effective members of the local Republican establishment.”16

  Mitchell ran the same playbook in California. Jeb Magruder, then an obscure businessman and young Republican, recalled with admiration how Mitchell and his
campaign deputy, investment banker Peter Flanigan, bypassed California’s “top-heavy, fouled-up” GOP organization to set up their own precinct operation—obtaining registration rolls, renting office space, installing phone banks—then repeated the process, with similar success, in other states.17

  To organize Western states, Mitchell reached out to someone he knew only “by reputation”: Richard Gordon Kleindienst of Phoenix, then forty-four, a fiercely combative, brilliant lawyer—magna cum laude from Harvard and Harvard Law—and director of field operations in the 1964 Goldwater campaign. Kleindienst swiftly fielded a national slate of Nixon precinct captains.

  Len Garment, then chief of the litigation department at Mudge Rose, suggested Nixon take the next obvious step and name Mitchell campaign manager. A Jew who played swing jazz clarinet to pay his way through Brooklyn Law School, Garment cut an odd figure among the pinstriped Wasps at 20 Broad Street, and remained an outsider in the Nixon White House, where he first worked on “liberal” issues like the arts and Native American outreach, subjects of little moment to Nixon, and again later, when, following the dismissal of John Dean, Garment took over as counsel to the president. “I remember the Mitchell moment,” Garment later wrote. “It was the end of 1967, and we were in Nixon’s office. Suddenly, the light bulb clicked on over my head…”

  I announced, “The answer to our problem is sitting twenty feet away from us, in the next office, a guy who looks, walks and sounds like a campaign manager, knows more about politics than all the other guys you’ve been talking about, and his name is John Mitchell.” Nixon reacted by doing something he did…very rarely. He abruptly stood up—shot up, actually—and started pacing the room. Mitchell. But of course.18

  Nixon told Garment to sound Mitchell out: “But do it gently.” A few weeks later, Garment ran into Mitchell in the restroom at a black-tie firm dinner at the University Club. “Say, John,” Garment said, “how would you feel about managing a presidential campaign?” Pipe clenched, Mitchell replied with a question of his own. “Are you out of your fucking mind, Garment?”19 “John Mitchell turned out to be just what Nixon needed,” Garment recalled in 1992. “Mitchell had status. He had national standing as a major lawyer…He knew all the politicians in America…. And he had his own money. I mean, he wasn’t, this wasn’t—he wasn’t dependent upon this. He had all those qualities of being a smart man, kept guy, loyal man, intelligent, humorous, interested, animated by the single mission, which was to try to get Nixon elected.”20

  As Nixon and his men soon learned, Mitchell’s political contacts were only one factor that made him an ideal campaign manager. A second, surely, was Nixon’s deep trust in Mitchell, from which arose the candidate’s unprecedented deference to someone else’s political judgment. The third, a surprise, was Mitchell’s managerial excellence. The same agile mind that revolutionized municipal finance now focused on getting Richard Nixon elected president.

  Central to Mitchell’s effectiveness was his indifference to public criticism. As campaign manager he gave not a single news conference. Working from “a bare desk in a shabby office” at 445 Park Avenue, Mitchell was dubbed by the Washington Evening Star the campaign’s “hidden figure,” a status he happily accepted. “It was a very simple precept,” Mitchell said. “The candidate is the one who ought to get the publicity.”21

  With taxonomic precision, Mitchell eyed the deviants malingering about the campaign. He loathed “party hacks” and “prima donnas,” freeloaders and hangers-on, publicity seekers and “damn fool advance men.” “About a third of the people are in politics for the joy-popping,” Mitchell said in a 1988 interview. “It’s a great time to have free whiskey and women…[but] you have to be very careful. You don’t want some guy…more interested in the joy-popping than he is in the hard business.” Such characters he banished to “the Upper Volta entertainment committee.” Last but not least came the donors he saw “coming around later looking for a quid pro quo.”22

  A group of pro-Nixon congressmen learned not to question Mitchell’s authority. At a luncheon in a private dining room in the Capitol building, in the spring of 1968, one lawmaker challenged Mitchell’s qualifications to run Nixon’s campaign. “You people know Dick Nixon perhaps better than I do,” Mitchell’s reply began, “and you think he can’t have a campaign manager. I’ve got news for you,” he continued.

  I’m his campaign manager, and I’m running the show…. When I tell Dick Nixon what to do, he listens. I’m in charge. So, if you have questions about the campaign, call me. But you won’t be able to reach me because I’ll be busy electing a president of the United States. I’ll get your message. But call me, don’t call him [Nixon], because I’m running this campaign.

  Mitchell calmly resumed eating his lunch. The congressmen sat in silence.23

  Devising their strategy, Nixon and Mitchell recognized a paramount obstacle: the pervasive idea that Nixon, who had not won an election on his own since 1950, was a loser. The word haunted Nixon like no other, and to dispel its dark aura, he and Mitchell decided early on that the candidate simply had to run—and win—the GOP primaries. Strong victories would reestablish Nixon as a proven vote winner and defuse claims he was hiding behind a smokescreen of carefully crafted TV ads.

  At first, the plan went off perfectly. By May 7, Nixon had scored victories in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Indiana, soundly thrashing his undeclared opponent, Nelson Rockefeller. In Nebraska, Nixon fended off a challenger from his right flank—California governor Ronald Reagan—holding him to 22 percent of the vote. After winning in Oregon, where both Rockefeller and Reagan campaigned hard, Nixon and Mitchell knew they had the nomination sewn up. “The staff did it,” Nixon told the Associated Press. “Best campaign staff any candidate ever had.”24

  On April 29, Mitchell had called a staff meeting in New York to announce the addition to the campaign of two men whose services he said would ensure “the best and most effective use of Richard Nixon’s time and energy.”25 These two men were to play a decisive role in the history of the nation—and in unraveling the good life Mitchell enjoyed that day.

  Harry Robbins (Bob) Haldeman was new to the ’68 campaign, but not to the candidate. In the vast literature chronicling the Nixon presidency, most commonly noted of Haldeman’s background was his long service—twenty years—as an executive in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York offices of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Mistaking this management career in advertising for a creative one later enabled hostile reporters to cast Haldeman, inventor of the term “news cycle,”26 as a leading villain in the creation of a corrupt Information Age presidency. By contrast, few have noted Haldeman’s intelligence, described as “near-genius” level, his World War II service record, his directorship of California’s Better Business Bureau, or his membership on the University of California board of regents and the Salvation Army board of directors. With his tanned, lantern-jawed good looks and trademark crew cut, Haldeman was the kind of hopelessly square, community-minded uber-citizen who made America what it was, or is popularly remembered as having been, in the fifties.27

  Somewhere along the line, though, Haldeman’s commitment to Nixon, developed as the former studied business at UCLA and the latter pursued Alger Hiss, became all-consuming. Starting as an advance man, Haldeman worked his way up to campaign tour manager in 1960, and overall manager of Nixon’s ill-fated California gubernatorial bid. In ’68, Haldeman returned with a clear role. He would run the candidate—Nixon’s schedule, staff, travel—while Mitchell ran the campaign: relations with party and political organizations, volunteers and fund-raisers, “everything other than the candidate himself.” The two generally got along fine. “I have always found Bob Haldeman to be an honest, straight-forward individual,” Mitchell recalled in 1988.28

  Of the second man he introduced that day, however, Mitchell could scarcely say the same; indeed, he soon came to view John Ehrlichman as “a conniving little S.O.B.” A native of Tacoma, Washington, John Ehrlich
man enlisted in the Army Air Corps and flew twenty-six missions over Europe as a B-24 navigator in World War II. Portly and balding, a UCLA classmate of Haldeman’s and fellow Christian Scientist, Ehrlichman was recruited by Haldeman to serve as an advance man for Nixon in 1960. He continued helping Nixon, both in the ’62 debacle and again two years later, at the Goldwater convention. But Ehrlichman frowned on Nixon’s drinking, which had fueled the self-destructive “last press conference” and an equally ugly occasion at the ’64 convention, during which Nixon, according to Ehrlichman, “made some clumsy passes” at a young woman. Asked four years later to manage scheduling and credentials at the GOP convention, Ehrlichman insisted on a tête-à-tête with Nixon, in which he audaciously bartered his support for a promise that the candidate would forswear alcohol; Nixon agreed.29

  In his 1982 memoir, Witness to Power, Ehrlichman recalled his first meeting with Mitchell. “His picture was all over the papers and magazines then,” Ehrlichman wrote, “smoking his pipe, taciturn, aloof, a sort of Wall Street Gary Cooper.”

  In his pictures he looked better than he did in person, however; the day I first met him, at the headquarters…he said a few cordial words to me about the convention, named some Seattle bond lawyer we both knew and in a minute sent me on my way…. [Later] I began to see that he wasn’t as gruff and remote as he appeared…. [H]e was withdrawn and quiet, but hardly forbidding.