The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  At a minimum, the episode served notice on high-level Washington, as early as the spring of 1968, that Richard Nixon and John Mitchell were men to be watched carefully. And when they assumed office, as president and attorney general of the United States, respectively, few of their peers in the intelligence community—at the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency, especially—forgot that lesson.

  Richard Nixon had finally won the presidency—but what, exactly, had John Mitchell contributed? Did he mastermind the candidate’s remarkable comeback from the debacle of ’62—or had Mitchell’s rigidity and inexperience almost cost Nixon the election? Syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak faulted Mitchell for missing “a golden opportunity” to enlist blacks and liberals, a mistake that “very nearly proved fatal” to Nixon’s candidacy. They even bestowed a derisive name on the Wall Streeter’s supposedly divisive and overly cautious approach: “Mitchellism.”67

  By contrast, Richard Kleindienst called Mitchell the most politically astute operative he ever saw—and nothing argued more strongly in Mitchell’s favor than victory itself. Republicans accounted for only 26 percent of all registered voters that year, yet Nixon carried thirty-two states (302 electoral votes) compared to Humphrey’s thirteen (191) and Wallace’s five (45). Mitchell’s machine captured Florida, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia; turnout in each, save for Kentucky, exceeded 1960 and 1964 levels. “[W]hat Mitchell accomplished in 1968 was incredible,” Dwight Chapin marveled.68

  Operating with “complete autonomy,” Mitchell took few risks—and made few mistakes. He ensured his candidate stuck to the themes of Miami: honorable peace in Vietnam, law and order at home. Where Nixon considered televised debates with Humphrey, if only to redeem his ashen performance against JFK, Mitchell knew better and, as he put it, “turned off any debates.” The New York Times reported that Mitchell “kept the staff lean and on its toes…. Even during the toughest moments of the campaign, Mitchell apparently never lost his self-possession or his temper.” BusinessWeek agreed:

  A key and possibly crucial difference between Nixon’s 1960 and 1968 presidential campaigns was organization, and it was Mitchell who provided the administrative hand that made the Nixon machine a textbook operation. Even under the pressures of the tightening campaign, Mitchell is not recorded to have ever lost his temper, blamed anyone else for a mistake or even stalled a decision.69

  Mitchell felt his work was done. He could now return to Wall Street and resume his bond practice, buoyed by his nationwide stature and ready to reap the benefits of his law partner’s ascension to the presidency. Martha Mitchell could also resume her old, quieter life, as a mother and the lovably eccentric, perpetually inebriated housewife of a rich lawyer in Rye. It all sounded idyllic—but Richard Nixon had other plans.

  LAW AND ORDER

  Of all the public officials I ever met in my life, [John Mitchell] cared less about what people thought about him than anybody.

  —William D. Ruckelshaus, 19941

  IN MIAMI, MITCHELL boasted he was “invulnerable” to any appeal to join the new administration. But Nixon insisted. “Even as John Mitchell was helping me develop a list of candidates for attorney general,” Nixon wrote in 1978, “I decided that I would try to persuade him to accept the position himself. I wanted someone who shared my concern about permissiveness in the courts and even in many law enforcement agencies. Mitchell was tough, intelligent, and fair. Moreover, I counted him my most trusted friend and adviser and I wanted to have his advice available, not just on legal matters but on the whole range of presidential decision-making.”2

  The day after the election, Nixon asked Mitchell to take the job; but as John Ehrlichman remembered, “Martha Mitchell was in a sanatorium, drying out, and Mitchell declined Nixon’s offer.” “I spent a day with him, workin’ on him,” Nixon told David Frost in 1977. “I didn’t know why he wouldn’t do it. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even want to come down for the election night business, and all that sort of thing. And he told me a little about Martha’s problem, but only saying, you know, ‘She’s, she’s not really up to it emotionally.’”3

  Mitchell, who privately referred to Washington as “Disneyland East,” made no secret of his reluctance to serve. “I did decline this post repeatedly—twenty-six times, I think,” he told an interviewer in August 1969. “This was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I’ve got all the things I’ve ever wanted. I’m a fat and prosperous Wall Street lawyer, which is just what I always wanted to be.”4

  Nixon sensed the real obstacle. Had she remained in Rye, Martha Mitchell could have continued on in her blissfully intoxicated way, another rich eccentric; but in the glare of the Washington spotlight, the aging belle’s fragile psyche would be placed in the cruel hands of opportunistic partisans and dowdy society columnists. “[N]umber one [problem in Mitchell’s mind] would be Martha Mitchell,” recalled Len Garment, “who had very real psychological problems that pre-existed the presidency.”

  [T]hey were discernible to everyone. I mean, she was—whatever she was clinically, she manifested very profound characteristics that were, I mean, that were—that were aberrant. I mean, that were uncontrollable.…So [Mitchell] knew that and he knew that would present a problem, bringing her down to this heady hothouse atmosphere of Washington. Sort of like carrying an explosive substance into a very hot area.

  So what convinced Mitchell his wife could survive Washington? For one thing, Nixon was unrelenting, disrupting the Mitchells’ stay in Beacon with a steady stream of plaintive calls, pleading for Mitchell to change his mind. Nixon told Frost he rebuffed Mitchell’s assertion that Martha was “not really up to it emotionally” by contending, against all reason, that public life might actually help her: “Being an amateur psychiatrist—we all are, aren’t we?—I said, ‘If you move her to Washington, she may be better.’” Susie Morrison, Mitchell’s secretary, said Martha’s psychiatrist had agreed: “It was her doctor’s decision it might be good for her.”

  But there was another reason behind the change of heart. Mitchell simply could not turn down a direct request from the president-elect of the United States, even if it came from a man he felt could not “piss straight in the shower” without his help—or perhaps especially if it came from such a man. “John Mitchell, I believe, was an intense patriot. He loved his country more than God,” said Brent Harries. “He was guided by ethics and morals that transcended common sense…. I do remember Mitchell saying, ‘When the president of the United States asks you to do something, it isn’t just a request.’”

  Decision made, Mitchell now aimed to sell it to his wife. According to Martha, he used a lot of “sweet talk and patriotic speeches” and claimed he needed her, “with her superior insight into human nature,” to help him choose the new cabinet. Flush with visions of power, Martha practically leapt out of bed. As she checked out of Craig House, she implored the hospital staff to hurry; their delays were “holding up the selection of Nixon’s Cabinet.” In later years, when he looked back on Martha’s tragic trajectory, her ex-husband, according to an intimate, felt “very responsible for having brought her to Washington, and having gotten her into [this] kind of life…”5

  Nixon got his man, but Mitchell imposed a price. Richard Kleindienst, the hard-nosed Goldwater operative who proved instrumental in Nixon’s victory, had returned to Phoenix to resume his own law practice. Mitchell called him a week after the election. “Dick, the president-elect wants me to be the attorney general.” “Super, John, and congratulations,” Kleindienst replied, elated. “I really don’t want the job,” Mitchell shot back. “I’d much rather stay in New York and practice law. However, [Nixon] is adamant. To come to the point, I’ve just informed him I would do it if I could have you as my deputy. How about it?” Kleindienst begged off; he had kids in school and needed to make money. Within forty-eight hours, Nixon was on the line. “Dick, I need John as the attorney general. He’s agreed to do it if you come back and hel
p him.” To this direct appeal from the president-elect, Kleindienst also proved helpless to resist.6

  On December 11, 1968, Nixon introduced Mitchell and the rest of his cabinet on nationwide television. The next day, the New York Times quoted an unnamed source as saying Mitchell was “very pragmatic and has no hard-cut ideological viewpoint. Some would classify him as a liberal, some see him as a conservative.” The Washington Post called Mitchell a “take-charge man” who had switched his registration from independent to Republican less than two years earlier.7

  Mitchell granted his first interview to Lyle Denniston of the Washington Evening Star, which ran a scowling photograph of the attorney general-designate beneath the headline: “He’s No ‘Gang-Buster’ Type.” Denniston neatly captured the attitude and mannerisms that became hallmarks of Mitchell’s strained relationship with reporters: the “frayed elegance,” his “jealous worry that his privacy may be fading,” and his “sometimes caustic way of putting off a question he considers to be an inanity.” Thus when Denniston asked where Mitchell stood on crime and law and order, Mitchell replied tersely, “I am against crime and in favor of law and order.” He also fretted: “I’ve somehow got to dispel the notion that I’m a tough cop and an arch-conservative.”8

  Perhaps Mitchell, following the attacks on Ramsey Clark, was trying to smooth the way for his own confirmation hearing, which came to order before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 14. Having prevailed by the slimmest of pluralities, Richard Nixon entered office facing opposition control in both houses of Congress, the first chief executive so disadvantaged in 120 years. The Senate’s advice and consent on the Mitchell nomination afforded Democrats their first theater of revenge. “[S]ome liberal Democrats on the committee who resented the Republicans’ attacks on Clark intended to rough up the man who devised them,” the New Yorker reported.9

  The senators focused heavily on civil liberties, a response to Nixon’s disparagement of Clark and accompanying vow to combat more aggressively the surge in street crime that marked the sixties. According to FBI statistics, crime between 1961 and 1969 rose nearly 150 percent, with violent crimes soaring by 130 percent, murders more than 60 percent, and robberies 180 percent. Organized crime, then a $50 billion industry ($260 billion in current figures), formed a large part of the problem; yet Clark, on philosophical grounds, had prohibited federal prosecutors from wiretapping organized crime figures. Such measures, Clark argued, were warranted only in national security cases, a stance that made him Nixon’s campaign whipping boy.10

  Taking his seat before the Judiciary Committee, Mitchell opened with the chummy collegiality of the legal fraternity, praising Clark as “an outstanding individual of great legal capacity” who had done “a fine job” as attorney general. Then Mitchell redeemed Nixon’s campaign pledge, testifying that the wiretapping provisions in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, passed by Congress the previous year, “should be used…not only in national security cases but against organized crime.”

  Reporters covering the two-hour session thought Mitchell had an “easy time of it,” demonstrating he “isn’t likely to talk his way into trouble when representing the Nixon administration on Capitol Hill.” Only one senator gave Mitchell a hard time: Samuel J. Ervin, the disarmingly folksy, seventy-two-year-old North Carolina Democrat who, despite a decade of opposition to racial integration, considered himself the Senate’s leading constitutional conscience. Ervin grumbled there was “something incompatible with marrying the function of the chief political adviser and chief agitator with that of prosecutor of government crimes.” Mitchell told Ervin he would run the Justice Department as “the legal, and not the political, adviser of the president.” The ’68 campaign, he said, was “my first entry” into politics, and added: “I trust it will be my last.” “I commend your answer,” Ervin replied. With that, the committee voted unanimously to recommend Mitchell’s confirmation to the full Senate.11

  America in 1969 was a nation of TV-watchers: More than 90 percent of U.S. households boasted a television set, with 78 million in usage. A veteran of the Checkers speech, the 1960 debates, and the media-savvy campaign just concluded—derided in a bestselling book as “the selling of the president”—Nixon knew his war on crime had to be waged in the streets and on the small screen. In this he saw John Mitchell as his most potent weapon. With his stern features and no-nonsense speaking style, Mitchell could project exactly the crime-fighting image the president sought for his administration as a whole. “In the ’68 campaign, ‘law and order’ became one word,” recalled Mitchell aide Jack Hushen. “And there was no question that President Nixon was going to try to have a tough-appearing lawman running the Justice Department.”12

  Loyal soldier that he was, Mitchell gamely went along with his scripted role, willingly colluding in the creation of the false, authoritarian public image that President Nixon demanded of him. Few at the time recognized that as attorney general, Mitchell was playing a role, one he saw as distasteful but necessary, and that, like most actors, he occasionally bristled at his lines. Partly this reflected recognition of the role’s incongruity; Mitchell was warm and genial in private, his eyes more likely to twinkle than glare. Yet his unease with Nixon’s PR plan also reflected the times: Liberalism in the late 1960s dominated American culture, popular and political, and Mitchell knew he would pay a high price for challenging it. In his legal career, he had cultivated a nonpartisan image; now Mitchell was to become America’s preeminent symbol of counterrevolution in the age of amnesty, acid, and abortion. Mitchell’s discomfort showed when he sought to “dispel the notion that I’m a tough cop and an arch-conservative.”

  But the president, according to Haldeman’s previously unpublished notes, held an almost romantic vision of Mitchell’s “toughness” and its PR value to the administration:

  problem is not what we do—but appearance

  not getting the points we

  shld on crime…shld have Mitchell do like J. Edgar [Hoover] used to—

  no one else in Admin. can put this on

  play tough SOB role—as crime fighter

  time to go on real crusade—not just do good

  put all PR effort we can into this area

  need to make asset of Mitchell’s toughness

  He should do more on TV, speeches etc.

  VP + others shld build up Mitchell…

  as helluva crime-fighter—fair…

  don’t make John likable—

  make him a tough crime-fighter13

  Mitchell stepped into character immediately. Shortly after being sworn in, his “balding forehead perspiring profusely,” Mitchell held his first news conference. Here he introduced his top aides. As deputy attorney general, Dick Kleindienst would run day-to-day business at DOJ. Then came the assistant attorneys general, most of them politicians: Jerris Leonard, head of the civil rights division, was a former GOP state legislator in Wisconsin whom Mitchell had known since 1963. William Ruckelshaus, chosen to lead the civil division, had failed in his bid to unseat Indiana senator Birch Bayh. Will Wilson, a former Texas state attorney general and state Supreme Court justice, would oversee the criminal division. For antitrust, Mitchell selected Richard McLaren, a corporate lawyer from Chicago with no political background. Finally, as assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel—a job known as “the president’s lawyer’s lawyer”—Mitchell, relying on Kleindienst’s recommendation, selected a forty-four-year-old former Supreme Court clerk and Goldwater campaign worker named William H. Rehnquist.14

  “We will always have crime, and you’re always going to have a hell of a lot of it,” Nixon conceded privately. But he also understood that the president and the attorney general needed to stand up for the uniformed cops manning the front lines—and so did Mitchell. “[O]n more than one occasion,” Rehnquist recalled in 1993, Mitchell “took the side of ‘law and order’ against the advice not only of the usual critics outside the administration, but of other critics within
it.”15

  Watergate later made it unfashionable to mention, but as attorney general, John Mitchell played an invaluable role in modernizing, strengthening, and relegitimizing American law enforcement. He was the most visible federal official in the early 1970s to look beyond the hostility to cops then in vogue and see that, with proper training and equipment, police could turn the tide against crime—and serve with honor. Picking the right battles on Capitol Hill; backing career prosecutors; donning the tough-guy mask to preach law and order in an era of radical chic: These were Mitchell’s weapons.

  Only in the District of Columbia did the federal government exercise jurisdiction over law enforcement; so Nixon decided to make the capital a showcase for his war on crime. Three days after taking office, he ordered Haldeman to “move…fast” on an anticrime initiative. “[Push] hard on law and order,” the president demanded. “Announce a tripling of police.” Four days later, in his first news conference, Nixon said he’d ordered Mitchell to develop an “urgent” plan to vanquish D.C. crime.16

  Over the next two years, Mitchell responded with a broad range of reforms aimed at both the District of Columbia and federal criminal statutes. “This model anti-crime program will point the way for the entire nation,” he would declare, “at a time when crime and fear of crime are forcing us, a free people, to alter the pattern of our lives.”17 Mitchell’s proposals included “no-knock” drug laws, preventive detention of criminal suspects, expanded wiretapping powers, interagency strike forces against organized crime, steep budget increases for police groups. The news media painted Nixon and Mitchell in A Clockwork Orange tones, sinister futuristic jailers armed with nightsticks, computers, and syringes. But by latter-day standards, most of the attorney general’s proposals were fairly tame and included notable civil liberties precautions; preventive detainees, for example, were only locked up on a judge’s order, after a hearing. Critics on the left were apocalyptic. “There will be no storm troopers, swastikas or brown shirts,” warned an alliance of the nation’s largest student and radical groups. “The slogan for fascism in the United States will be ‘law and order,’ and that is what preventive detention laws are all about.” The New York Times lamented the “hard line…straight-to-the-right dourness in criminal matters that perfectly reflects the campaign promises of the president and the public personality of the attorney general, John N. Mitchell.”18