The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  In anticipation of LBJ’s “October Surprise,” Mitchell and Nixon had steeled themselves for months. Their secret strategy was to establish back-channel contact with South Vietnamese leaders—and with foreigners thought to hold sway over them—and privately urge Saigon not to agree to any last-minute deal at the Paris Peace Talks that could swing the election to Humphrey. Opponents of Ho Chi Minh, the Republicans argued, would fare better with Nixon in power. In fact, the South Vietnamese needed little convincing to frown on the Paris talks: They resented the inclusion of parties at the table that the South did not formally recognize, and President Johnson’s attempt to “bully” the South into attending.47

  But Nixon and his campaign manager were taking no chances. In July 1968, Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, appeared at Nixon’s Fifth Avenue apartment for a closed-door strategy session, the first of many discreet contacts. Also present were Mitchell and the curious figure who would serve as the campaign’s primary interlocutor with Saigon: Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born widow of a famous American aviator in World War II and a force in her own right, both as a GOP hostess and member of the China lobby. This was the influential group of expatriates who advocated the return to power of the Nationalist Chinese over Mao’s ruling Communists. With her painted eyebrows, slender hips, and extravagant parties, “the Dragon Lady”—as Chennault was dubbed, after a character in the Terry and the Pirates comic strip—cut a unique figure in Washington, and Mitchell apparently accepted her claims to influence.

  In her 1980 memoir, The Education of Anna, Chennault asserted a uniquely familiar relationship with Mitchell, both as a colleague who collaborated “closely” with him on the ’68 and ’72 campaigns and as a neighbor at the Watergate, where she watched Martha Mitchell ruin more than one dinner party with tearful, sometimes shoe-flinging outbursts. At such ugly moments, Chennault wrote, Mitchell would gently escort his wife from the room, “much as a long-suffering parent comes to soothe a troublesome child.” Chennault also charged that throughout the ’68 campaign, Mitchell—employing all the paranoia and techniques of the spy trade, including cryptic codes and daily changes of contact information—used her as a back channel to pass secret messages to the South Vietnamese that undercut American diplomats at Paris.48

  Any concerns Mitchell harbored about being monitored were well founded. Declassified documents later showed U.S. intelligence agencies had begun conducting surveillance of Chennault and Bui Diem as early as April 1968. One account has suggested Mitchell’s own phone was wiretapped. If it is true that, at the height of the campaign, she and Mitchell were talking at least once a day, as Chennault claimed, it is highly likely the Johnson White House learned, by one means or another, of Mitchell’s and Nixon’s shadowy dealings with the Dragon Lady. How else would Johnson have known, in his conference call with the presidential candidates on the night of October 31—minutes before announcing on live television the very bombing halt Mitchell and Nixon had feared all along—to issue an oblique reproach for the sotto voce intimations made “by some of our folks, even including some of the old China lobbyists, that a better deal might be made with a different president”?49

  Nixon said nothing to betray guilt. But the admonition apparently spooked Mitchell. Later that night, according to The Education of Anna, a “nervous” Mitchell called Chennault to say: “Anna, I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position, and I hope you have made that clear to them.” “Look, John,” she snapped, “all I’ve done is relay messages. If you’re talking about direct influence, I have to tell you it isn’t wise for us to try to influence the South Vietnamese…. I don’t think either we or the Democrats can force them to act one way or another. They have their own politics, you know.” Mitchell pressed for assurances Saigon had not been swayed by Johnson’s speech, then, after urging Chennault to stay in touch, dejectedly hung up. The next day, President Nguyen Van Thieu announced South Vietnam would boycott the next round of peace talks in Paris.50

  Election Day finally came on Tuesday, November 5. Nixon and his family, Mitchell, and the campaign’s senior staff ensconced themselves on the thirty-fifth floor of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to await the televised returns.

  By 12:30 a.m., NBC News reported Humphrey ahead by 600,000 votes. If Nixon was to win, a few crucial states—California, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio—had to go his way. “Mitchell was confident Missouri was going to come through and I had learned to trust his confidence,” Nixon later wrote. True to Mitchell’s word, Missouri went for Nixon, by a margin of 20,488 votes. Anxious, fidgety, constantly revising the electoral vote count with his ubiquitous pens and yellow pads, Nixon remained closeted in his suite, separated from his wife and daughters and allowing visits only from select members of his inner circle, like Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman.51

  Although crucial returns in Cook County, Illinois, remained under wraps at the orders of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, one of the last great Democratic machine bosses, Nixon nevertheless concluded, around 3:00 a.m., that he had won. Mitchell, summoned to Nixon’s suite along with Haldeman, concurred. Still, Daley’s shenanigans “irritated” Nixon, and he ordered Mitchell to do something about it. The order betrayed Nixon’s bitter memories from eight years earlier, when his heartbreakingly close loss to John F. Kennedy had turned on a margin possibly as slim as 111,000 votes nationwide, and Illinois emerged as the pivotal state in Kennedy’s ledger. Nixon and his entourage always believed political skulduggery by the Daley machine in Cook County had cost him Illinois.52

  With that in mind, Mitchell had, in the spring, authorized Operation Eagle Eye, a mission by GOP precinct captains in Chicago to prevent a repeat performance by the Daley machine. Vigilance in Chicago wards formed one element; the other was Mitchell’s order for downstate Illinois forces to withhold their vote tallies until Daley had released Cook County’s. “So,” Len Garment later recalled, “hour after hour, John Mitchell and Richard Daley dueled, each withholding his ultimate weapon as the sun rose over a still-sleeping America.”

  About 8 a.m., Nixon, out of patience, told Mitchell to place a call to Mike Wallace, who was live on CBS television, and challenge Daley to release his votes. We watched the TV screen as Mike took Mitchell’s call and put Mitchell’s challenge to Daley.53

  Finally, Mitchell and Haldeman convinced Nixon to get some sleep. Six a.m. came, and with 94 percent of nationwide precincts reporting, Humphrey’s lead over Nixon had shrunk to 5,000 votes. Two hours later, the networks declared Nixon the winner in California and Ohio; only Daley’s returns remained outstanding. Finally, at 8:30 a.m., Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s young personal assistant, dark-haired and handsome, burst open the doors to the candidate’s suite and excitedly blurted out the news: “ABC just declared you the winner! They’ve projected Illinois. You got it. You’ve won.” Still groggy, Nixon led the rush to a television set in an adjoining room to confirm his victory. No one in Nixon’s camp missed the delicious irony: Illinois, the very state that had cost him the 1960 election, now put him over the top.54

  After a few moments savoring the dream emanating from the television set before them, Nixon put his hand on Mitchell’s shoulder and looked to the future: “Well, John,” Nixon said expansively, “we had better go down to Florida and get this thing”—the Nixon presidency—“planned out.” Yet Mitchell, who had labored so hard to engineer the moment, could scarcely enjoy it. A tear streamed down his face, and he answered quietly: “Mr. President, I think I’d better go up to be with Martha.” Nixon remembered the scene, in his memoirs, as a “moving moment” for both men. “It was the first time anyone had addressed me by the title I had just won,” Nixon wrote. “It was also the first time that Mitchell had directly referred to his wife’s problems, which I knew had been an immense emotional strain on him…. I fully understood his desire to be with her now.”55

  Martha Mitchell had never thought much of Richard Nixon. “I
talked my husband into becoming a Republican [in 1966],” she rued in a 1974 television interview. “He’d always been a Democrat. And the day I talked him out of calling the president ‘Tricky Dick’—I could still shoot myself!” Perhaps for this reason, Mitchell’s management of the Nixon campaign had begun as a secret from his wife. “Mitchell is so unassuming,” reported the Daily News, “that his family didn’t learn he was Nixon’s campaign manager until five weeks after the appointment.”56

  At first, Mitchell tried to mollify Martha with sweet talk during his campaign-related road trips. But the last few years had not been entirely happy ones for the Mitchells. Jill Mitchell-Reed remembered a Thanksgiving dinner ruined when her volatile stepmother, unhinged by Jill’s brief, college-age flirtation with communism, responded by hurling pots and pans.57 For eight years after Mitchell married Martha in 1957, her son, Jay Jennings, had lived with them. Ten years old when Mitchell became his stepfather, Jay fled to his father’s home in Lynchburg, Virginia, shortly before he graduated from the Peekskill Military Academy in 1965. “When I left home, it was not under the most pleasant of circumstances,” Jennings recalled in 2002.

  I had gotten into an argument [with my mother]…And she took a swing at me, and I put my arm up to block her swing, and she hit her forearm on my forearm and hurt herself. And then she said I had hit her and told me to go to my room, which I did. When John Mitchell came home that night—in the only violent act I’ve ever seen this man commit—he walked into my room, swung the door open and, without a word, hit me so hard across my face that it flung me across the room. Open hand. I’d never seen him do anything like that ever before. And I was really disappointed, because he didn’t even ask me for an explanation. I’m sure he came in, my mother said I’d hit her, and he reacted to it. But for me that was it. I called my father and I said: “I’m out of here.”58

  Adding to the strain, Martha’s mother, who had also lived with her and John for several years, died in 1967. That year, Mitchell’s firm merged with Nixon’s, and the increasing devotion Mitchell showed his new partner left Martha lonely and embittered. As a cry for attention, she impulsively bundled up Marty, their six-year-old daughter, packed their belongings, and boarded the RMS Queen Mary for Europe, spending five weeks there before Mitchell flew to Scotland and persuaded her to return.

  When the campaign began in earnest, Martha, already unstable, plunged into even deeper despair. She became convinced Mitchell was carrying on affairs with at least two prominent Republican women, and lashed out through her favorite weapon: the telephone. Her crazed shrieking into Herb Klein’s ear in June was, for many in the Nixon orbit, a regular occurrence. With Mitchell immersed in the delegate hunt, Martha instructed an attorney to initiate divorce proceedings, only to relent after Mitchell again calmed her down. Fueling the rash behavior was a long-standing problem with alcohol. “The more distressed and abandoned Martha felt,” a friend remarked of this period, “the more she sought comfort in the bottle.” Finally, several weeks before Election Day, Mitchell arranged for Martha to be institutionalized at Craig House, a psychiatric facility in Beacon, New York. According to one account, it was merely “the first of many trips to the hospital alcohol would cause her to make.”

  Now, on Wednesday morning, November 6, 1968, moments after watching ABC News project him the winner in Illinois, Nixon came face-to-face for the first time with the Martha Mitchell problem. While he “understood” Mitchell’s need to be with Martha at that moment, Nixon repeatedly intruded on their time at Craig House with telephone calls demanding Mitchell’s attention to the pressing business of forming a government.59

  Another problem that lingered beyond Election Day was Anna Chennault. Having carried Nixon’s private messages to the South Vietnamese throughout the campaign, she now felt entitled to payback, or at least a measure of respect—but she got neither. Mitchell abruptly canceled her first meeting with the president-elect, then—with equal abruptness—instructed her to tell the South Vietnamese to return to the Paris talks, the better to smooth Nixon’s transition into office. Chennault felt betrayed.

  Nixon and Mitchell realized they could ill afford to make Chennault angry—or talkative, especially with reporters starting to sniff about. “You’re going to get me in a lot of trouble,” she coquettishly told one journalist. “I know so much and I can say so little.” “Whatever I did during the campaign,” she told another, “the Republicans, including Mr. Nixon, knew about.” She wrote later that Mitchell remained “concerned even after he was confirmed” as attorney general that she would go public.60

  Concern at the White House also reached high levels. Peter Flanigan, Mitchell’s deputy during the campaign and now the White House liaison to the Business Roundtable, wrote Mitchell to say he had heard “indirectly that Anna Chenault [sic] is unhappy because she has not been recognized by the Administration.”

  Since you had the liaison (if it can be called that) with this good lady I’d like your suggestions as to whether we should take some action to recognize her. If the answer is “yes” should this be in terms of an invitation to dinner at the White House or something more important…[?]61

  Flanigan was not alone in his anxiety. In previously unpublished notes, H. R. Haldeman recorded with alarm that Boston Globe reporter Tom Ottenad was

  running intensive invest of Mrs. Chennault episode

  [talking to] people in Austin + around country

  asked to see LBJ + Tom [Corcoran, a Democratic lawyer

  and friend of Chennault]—both refused…

  Jan. ’69 they published first stories

  re Repub. efforts to sabotage [the Paris talks]

  reason for renewed interest—have recently

  obtained new info

  Repub ldrs approved activity—have exact names

  feel this is an impt. footnote on Am History

  wants to see LBJ—no quotes—just info

  also [LBJ aides Walt] Rostow, [George] Christian, [Arthur]

  Temple, all told to avoid seeing + if so—say not one word

  they are not playing ball w/ them at all

  but someone may

  could cause a problem…62

  Presumably Mitchell and even Nixon himself were among the “Republican leaders” whose “exact names” were in the Globe’s possession—a state of affairs that indeed “could cause a problem” for the White House. Fortunately for Nixon and Mitchell, the Globe, for reasons unknown, dropped the story.

  But the two men took their cue. They started periodically inviting Chennault to White House and Justice Department functions, and the president, according to Haldeman’s unpublished notes, ordered his aides to give the Dragon Lady a “high-level title”—with the added admonition that it “can’t be in government.” “We have to finesse her,” Nixon privately told Henry Kissinger.63

  Amazingly, despite all the investigations, hearings, and trials that marked the collapse of the Nixon presidency, Mitchell seems never to have been questioned on the record, or under oath, about the Chennault affair. More than three decades later, its significance remained a point of sharp dispute. Richard Holbrooke, who served in 1968 on the American delegation at Paris and later became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, charged Nixon and Mitchell with having “massively, directly, and covertly interfered in a major diplomatic negotiation.”64 Former defense secretary Robert McNamara was more direct: “It was a criminal act.”

  Nixon speechwriter William Safire saw nothing “criminal” in the affair, but conceded it was “was not one of American politics’ finest hours.” John Lehman, an aide to Kissinger on the National Security Council and later secretary of the navy, simply shrugged. “That sort of thing goes on all the time,” Lehman said in 2001. “There are October Surprises and back-channels…[Nixon and Mitchell] knew that Johnson was rubber-hosing Thieu and the South Vietnamese government. And basically they just sent the message: ‘Hang on’…And so it didn’t seem to me that it was particularly unusual. I mean it
was the way the game is always played.”65

  A source close to the affair—who demanded anonymity—strongly challenged the veracity of the prime witness. “Simply do not trust what Anna Chennault says about this incident,” said the source, a senior policy adviser to Nixon and other GOP politicians in later years. “She manufactured the incident, then magnified her self-importance.”

  She caused untold problems with her perpetual self-promotion and, actually, self-aggrandizement, because she was ultimately interested only in the money. I do not put it in the realm of fantasy that she was being paid by the SVs [South Vietnamese]; she had them bamboozled, believing she was an authentic and important “channel” to the campaign. John Mitchell…did not have the bullocks to kiss her off, a tough and persistent woman who could grind you down…. Anna thought of herself as a puppet master. She had no assignment, no tasks, and was an over-the-transom type that can never be suppressed in a campaign.66

  Yet the Chennault affair continued to haunt Nixon’s presidency. His infamous orders to burglarize the Brookings Institution, issued in the summer of 1971 following publication of the Pentagon Papers and never carried out, stemmed from the president’s concern that the Washington think tank possessed documents related to “the bombing halt”—a euphemism for Nixon’s and Mitchell’s own back-channel machinations to counter it.

  Later still, when Watergate raised the specter of wide-ranging congressional probes into wiretapping by the Nixon administration, the president asked Mitchell, by then out of government, to marshal evidence showing that LBJ had ordered the bugging of Nixon’s own campaign plane in 1968. The plan was abandoned when former president Johnson threatened anew to expose the Dragon Lady’s activities. Mitchell’s fitful attempt at gathering this evidence, including calls to old chums in and out of the FBI in early 1973, was likely driven by a wish to help Nixon survive Watergate—but also by Mitchell’s desire to examine the archival record for evidence of his own involvement in the Chennault affair.