The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s arrival on the scene dramatically changed the campaign’s internal dynamics; one key player felt its “happy, carefree environment came to a screeching halt.” Where the inner circle was previously divided between California and New York men—Nixon’s past and present—the fault lines were now drawn along personal, not geographic, lines. “There was a lot of talk about the Haldeman crowd and the Mitchell crowd,” Robert Mardian recalled. “Kleindienst and I, we were all the Mitchell crowd.” These fault lines would persist through the Watergate cover-up trial.30

  The electoral waters of 1968 were unusually rough. Within four months, the nation witnessed the Democratic primary insurgency of antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota; LBJ’s stunning abdication; the entrance into the race of Robert F. Kennedy (who, as late as October 1966, had sworn against running); the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and RFK; and fiery, bloody riots in dozens of American cities. It all played out against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam, and, too, the great social upheavals occurring at home: the civil rights movement; the sexual revolution; the emergence of a “generation gap” and middle-class drug culture; mind-boggling advances in science, medicine, space exploration, communications and data retrieval systems, mass-marketing. America and the world around it were changing rapidly, hurtling toward the twenty-first century through enormous leaps and scarring convulsions.

  Nowhere in the United States did this change come more slowly, and exact greater human cost, than in the South, where Reconstruction-era electoral constellations had begun shifting amid the new realities of integration and two-party politics. Once solidly Democratic, the Deep South had seen Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi depart from one hundred years’ tradition by awarding their electoral votes, in 1964, to Goldwater. Mitchell and Nixon saw the South as integral to the construction of a new GOP electoral majority—a theme soon to be enshrined by a twenty-seven-year-old political analyst working for Mitchell that year, Kevin Phillips, in his political science classic, The Emerging Republican Majority. To capture the nomination, Nixon needed 667 convention delegates; his primary victories had locked up 112, while the Mitchell-Kleindienst delegate operation had garnered another 108 from the Rocky Mountains region. Next came the pivotal South, which required special handling.31

  On May 31, Mitchell and Nixon flew to Georgia to meet with thirteen Southern Republican state chairmen at Atlanta’s Marriott Motor Hotel. The chairmen demanded a promise: If Nixon won the White House, he had to steer patronage jobs to Southern party workers. They had long memories of Eisenhower’s failure to deliver on this score. Nixon’s inclination was to refuse—he knew a Democratic Congress could frustrate any patronage plan—but Mitchell nudged him to mollify the chairmen, and Nixon followed this counsel. In exchange, Nixon asked the Southerners not to commit their convention delegates to anyone else—especially Reagan—until Nixon had exhausted his prospects for victory. The Southerners agreed.

  From Atlanta, Nixon headed to Key Biscayne to take stock. Ten aides accompanied him, including Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. “It was here finally,” a reporter later observed, “that Mitchell emerged, in the phrase of one of the participants, as ‘El Supremo.’” The following night, Mitchell sat out a torrential downpour in his Key Biscayne villa, puffing on his pipe. His companions included Haldeman, who quietly sipped a beer, and campaign press secretary Herb Klein, a veteran of Nixon’s California days just joining the campaign. Mitchell and Haldeman dissected the Atlanta summit while Klein took Mitchell’s measure. “I suspected initially,” Klein wrote later, “that the real manager would be Haldeman…. I soon found that Mitchell was stronger and understood more of the realities of national politics than I had anticipated.”32

  On the eve of the Miami convention, rattled by Ronald Reagan’s attempts to poach Southern delegates, Nixon dialed Mitchell from Montauk, Long Island, where the candidate was resting. “Is there anything I need to know before I come down there?” “No,” Mitchell replied tersely, and hung up. The next day, as the convention gaveled to order, Reagan, with a showman’s timing, officially declared his candidacy just as Nixon arrived. From his Hilton Plaza suite, Nixon again nervously called Mitchell, looking to assess Reagan’s impact. “John, what’s the count?” he asked. “I told you that you didn’t need to worry, Dick,” replied Mitchell. “We’ve got everything under control.”33

  Mitchell’s confidence bespoke the breadth and depth of the delegate tracking mechanism he and Kleindienst had devised, an elaborate system of files and charts laying out delegates’ names, contact information, philosophies, hobbies, friends, enemies. A ten-year veteran of GOP campaigns called Mitchell’s system “the most thorough I had seen…aimed at taking a constant political pulse on the feelings of each delegate.” Nothing less would have sufficed, for delegate preferences, especially in the South, proved more fluid than anyone anticipated. Alabama’s Nixon captain, Jim Martin, worried aloud he would “get lynched when we get home” if his delegation did not cast some votes for Reagan; Congressman James Gardner, of North Carolina’s delegation, declared flatly: “I’m for Ronnie.” A CBS News count, conducted at 9:30 p.m. that night, found Reagan still 434 delegates shy of Nixon, but rapidly gaining steam.34

  Something had to be done. Mitchell turned immediately to South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. A Democrat until 1964, the sixty-six-year-old Thurmond was emerging as a pivotal figure in the transformation of Southern politics, and in these desperate hours of the ’68 convention, he anointed himself chief arbiter of the greater Southern interest. Under that guise, he demanded Nixon and Mitchell reassure him, and Dixie, on two central points: school desegregation and the vice presidential nominee. On the former, Nixon reaffirmed his support of state autonomy, and his opposition to forced busing—but not his opposition to desegregation per se. This was code the South well understood. Thurmond agreed to tend his flock, shepherding delegates into Nixon’s welcoming arms—if Nixon agreed to repeat the same reassurances to the delegates themselves the following morning. “Okay, I’ll do it,” Nixon said.

  The next day, two Southern delegations trekked to Nixon’s hotel for private meetings, at which they would judge his sincerity for themselves. The first session, which included delegates from Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, was secretly recorded by a delegate whom the Miami Herald had outfitted with a tape recorder. After breaking the ice with a few quips, Nixon emphasized he would neither “forget the South” nor treat it “as a whipping boy.” Forced busing of a child, he said, will “destroy that child.” He could be counted on to appoint judges who would interpret the law, not make it. On open housing—which Nixon had already supported on record—he cast the issue as settled, something he embraced to “get it out of the way.” Finally, on the matter of his running mate, he dismissed “cockeyed stories that Nixon has made a deal with this one or that one.” While reserving the right to decide for himself, Nixon assured the delegates he would not “divide this party.”35

  Those who later claimed Mitchell and Nixon pursued a “Southern strategy” to capture the presidency, selling their souls to Strom Thurmond for Southern delegates, often cited the Miami Herald transcript as the receipt for the transaction; in fact, a close reading reveals Nixon gave the South nothing substantial. Even the New York Times acknowledged most of what Nixon said was consistent with previous public pledges. As a Georgia historian has noted, Nixon emphasized themes appealing to conservatives, but always remained “cautious enough not to make any kind of blatant regional, much less racist, appeals…no unreasonable commitments.”36

  While Nixon emerged from the affair unscathed, it gave him and Mitchell a foretaste of what it would be like to see their private remarks surreptitiously recorded and splashed, in transcript form, across the nation’s front pages.

  By Wednesday night, the balloting was finally at hand. Mitchell sat in his Hilton Plaza suite overlooking the Atlantic, fielding pho
ne calls from across the country. He was eager for the action to begin. “I was with Mitchell before the convention opened,” Newsweek’s Hal Bruno recalled, “and somebody called in to say, ‘Governor Rhodes of Ohio is now coming out for Nixon.’ And Mitchell said, ‘Tell him the train left the station,’ because they had been working on Rhodes for a long time, and he kept horsing around with them. And one thing you didn’t do was horse around with John Mitchell—because he remembered.” Nixon approached the moment with less equanimity. Minutes before roll call, he dialed Mitchell’s deputy and spewed into the phone: “All right, Kleindienst, it’s your ass now.” Kleindienst was in no mood for it. “Fuck you, Nixon,” he spat back—perhaps the only man ever to speak those words. Nixon hung up—then redialed. “You’re right,” he said, by way of apology.

  As the balloting progressed, Nixon’s anxiety melted away. His years of toiling in the Republican vineyard and Mitchell’s months of meticulous preparation had finally paid off. Mitchell perched himself in a command trailer near the convention floor and coolly puffed his pipe. “John showed no emotion,” an aide recalled. “[T]he delegate counting and hunting,” said Hal Bruno, “they had it wired, and Mitchell was superb at this.” In the end, despite defections from Ohio and Pennsylvania, Nixon secured 692 delegates, 25 more than necessary for the nomination. Among the fickle Southern delegations, Mitchell’s courting of Thurmond yielded handsome dividends. Of the thirteen Southern caucus states, Reagan captured a majority in only one—ironically, Thurmond’s own South Carolina. It was Wisconsin—where Mitchell first showed his managerial prowess—that put Nixon over the top.37

  When Nixon mounted the stage to accept the nomination that he and Mitchell had worked so hard to secure, the candidate trumpeted the themes that drove him through that turbulent, bloody year. Among Nixon’s promises, perhaps the most compelling rationale for his counterrevolutionary candidacy, was his vow to restore law and order. Throughout the campaign, he had promised to replace Ramsey Clark, whom Nixon cast as soft on crime and national security. “If we are to restore order and respect for law in this country,” Nixon told the delegates, “there is one place we are going to begin. We are going to have a new attorney general of the United States of America!” Mitchell, like the rest of the conventioneers, applauded.38

  After months of Democratic Party turmoil—manifest most vividly in the skull-cracking riot outside the party’s Chicago convention hall—Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey emerged as the Democratic nominee for president. A former mayor of Minneapolis and senator from Minnesota, he had long promoted civil rights and other progressive causes. As LBJ’s vice president, however, Humphrey found himself outside the loop, belittled by the bully Texan who regarded him with wariness and contempt. For his ’68 campaign, Humphrey adopted “The Politics of Joy” as his slogan; but the balding, ruddy-faced vice president exuded precious little of it. Struggling to exploit the advantages of incumbency while dodging responsibility for the war waged by the administration he embodied, Humphrey evoked indifference on the center-right, hatred from the Democratic left. Humphrey, in turn, viewed Nixon’s rise, contemporaneous with his own, with fear and loathing. “Nixon’s belief in corporations and corporate managers bordered on religion,” he sneered.39

  There was also, as befit the volatile year, a wild-card candidate: Alabama governor George Wallace. Four years earlier, the snarling segregationist had campaigned against LBJ in the Democratic primaries and captured between 30 and 43 percent of the vote in states like Indiana, Wisconsin, and Maryland. Now Wallace was running on the American Independent Party label, his overtly racist appeals (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” he had thundered in 1963) swathed in the rhetoric of states’ rights and anti-intellectualism. With Nixon’s and Humphrey’s core constituencies in place—racially tolerant conservatives and GOP moderates for Nixon, blacks and mainstream liberals for Humphrey—the great battle between the two camps was to siphon a majority of those angry white voters who identified with Wallace, but who were not such bigots as to vote for him. Mitchell and Nixon did not initially agree on how best to counter the Wallace threat. Nixon wrote in 1978 that Wallace’s candidacy was “depriving me of a substantial number of votes….[I]f George Wallace had not run for president, I might have received the same overwhelming mandate then that Eisenhower had received in 1952.”40

  To Mitchell, the breakdown was not so simple. Painting the governor as an unelectable bigot would surely bring some Wallace voters Nixon’s way; but Mitchell also thought his candidate’s lead in northeastern states derived not from intrinsic strength, but from Wallace’s usurpation of blue-collar workers who would ordinarily vote Democratic. “I always thought,” Mitchell told an interviewer in 1969, “that when the Wallace vote in the North woke up, it would go back to its labor-oriented base in the Democratic party.” Humphrey sensed this as well, warning a Detroit crowd: “George Wallace has been engaged in union-busting whenever he’s had the chance…and any union man who votes for him is not a good union man.” Luring voters to Nixon without awakening traditional union Democrats from their angry Wallace idyll became the task at hand; Strom Thurmond, who told Dixie that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Humphrey, was once again the chosen instrument.41

  Between August and November, Thurmond’s associate Harry Dent flew to New York once a week to meet with Mitchell, who personally approved the banners, ads, and country music jingles deployed in this “bootleg” operation. Dent’s partner in the effort was Fred LaRue, the rangy, tight-lipped Mississippi oil and gas man who later became Mitchell’s neighbor, close friend, special assistant—and Watergate accuser. “This was a very low-key, very subtle advertising campaign,” LaRue recalled of the effort to undermine Wallace. “We used a lot of radio, used a lot of country and western music stars: Minnie Pearl, Roy Acuff, Connie Francis.”

  Thus Nixon’s was a two-front war—three, if one counted the news media. Despite much talk of a “new Nixon” that year, reporters were mostly skeptical. Relman Morin of the Associated Press, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was among the believers. “[Nixon’s] manner had changed so greatly,” Morin wrote. “He was more mature, more stable. He wore an air of easy assurance, the air of a man who could see everything proceeding exactly according to plan. This was not the harried, insecure young man in a hurry who had scowled more often than he smiled in 1960…. What had changed and created the ‘new Nixon’ came from the inside.”42

  But for many reporters, old suspicions about “Tricky Dick” lingered. Part of their problem was with the highly corporate nature of the Mitchell operation. There was, for one thing, the money: Nixon’s ’68 campaign was by far the most expensive in American history to that point, costing roughly $34 million (or more than $176 million in current figures). Then there was what Newsweek called Mitchell’s “authoritarian, all-business austerity” and embrace of modern technology. “It is hard to imagine that a political campaign was ever run with such crisp, mechanical efficiency as Nixon’s drive on the presidency in 1968,” observed the Times of London. “[I]t drew liberally upon almost every usable device produced by the communications and data-processing industries, and not infrequently a certain institutional enthusiasm about all this hardware slopped right over into self-parody, as when campaign manager John Mitchell declared that it was his job to ‘program the candidate.’”43

  Mitchell’s shrewdness extended beyond managerial competence, into the heart of politics itself. Having watched—undoubtedly with a mixture of horror and elation—the bloody clashes roiling Chicago, and the only slightly less chaotic scenes unfolding inside the Democratic convention hall, Mitchell “saw a chance to emphasize the differences between Nixon and Humphrey.” He proposed the Republican nominee make his first general election appearance in Chicago. It was a risky move. If radicals descended on Nixon’s rally, he would lose the calming, counterrevolutionary mantle he had seized in Miami, and forfeit whatever profit he derived from the turmoil in Chicago. But Mitchell’
s gamble paid off. On September 4, one week after Democratic demonstrators drowned out Humphrey’s paean to the politics of joy, Nixon returned to the city’s downtown Loop, drawing a massive crowd of 400,000 cheering, well-behaved supporters. The turnout exceeded even Mitchell’s expectations.44

  The first Gallup poll after the conventions showed Nixon leading Humphrey by a whopping sixteen percentage points. Both Mitchell and Nixon knew the race would tighten, though both probably underestimated by how much. “Anyone who’s honest,” Mitchell recalled in 1969, “will admit you never know what you did right or wrong in a campaign. But this one was relatively easy. The factors were clear. We just set a course and stuck by it.” Some Republicans pressed Mitchell to concentrate solely on major industrial states, but he rebuffed them.45

  Sure enough, as autumn unfolded, Nixon’s lead steadily dwindled. The Harris poll showed that over September and October, George Wallace lost eight points and Humphrey picked up twelve; by October 21, Gallup showed, Humphrey had cut Nixon’s early lead fully in half. On election eve, Gallup showed Nixon ahead, 42 percent to 40, with 14 for Wallace; Harris actually had Humphrey leading Nixon, 43 to 40 percent, with 13 percent for Wallace. To reporters, Mitchell dismissed the Harris poll as “a gratuitous concoction” that would not “con the voters.”

  What Mitchell really regarded as gratuitous—if not surprising—was Lyndon Johnson’s announcement of a bombing halt in Vietnam, an act from which, over the campaign’s final weekend, Humphrey derived a five-point bounce. “[T]his was anticipated,” Mitchell remembered two decades later. “The way he did it, in conjunction with Hubert Humphrey, wasn’t anticipated. That was quite distressful.”46