The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  In their 1974 manifesto, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, Ayers and his comrades, by then among America’s most sought-after fugitives, charged that Nixon, Mitchell, and Hoover “set into motion a plan to discredit, divide and set back the movement…. Infiltration and sabotage were carried out by a variety of police agencies, including the FBI, the Nixon-Mitchell team, military intelligence, and local red squads…. In the last period they have inflicted some serious blows which have set back the struggle.”10

  Mitchell may have authorized the government’s counterinsurgency against the New Left, but the executioners of his policies often acted without his knowledge or consent. Of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, known internally as COINTELPRO—a covert campaign of infiltration and disruption targeting groups ranging from the Socialist Workers Party to the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers to the Ku Klux Klan—Mitchell was later found to be wholly unaware. At one point, in fact, the enormous surveillance net cast by the federal government in the late sixties and early seventies ensnared Mitchell himself: A wiretap directed at an FBI target captured the attorney general’s own voice.11

  From this great surge of police activity against radicals and anti-war activists came a series of federal indictments that solidified Mitchell’s image as the era’s reigning symbol of law and order. Paradoxically, the success of Mitchell’s campaign would be measured not in the number of convictions secured—the prosecutor’s traditional metric—but by its cumulative impact on the targeted groups. In the Chicago Seven trial, for example, none of the five riot convictions withstood appeal. The Harrisburg Eight were acquitted of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger (indictments Mitchell later said he authorized to “get Hoover off the hook” after the FBI director prematurely aired the charges in public). The case of the Seattle Eight, in which members of the Seattle Liberation Front were slapped with conspiracy and riot charges after a February 1970 protest, ended in a mistrial (though six of the eight wound up serving time). The prosecutions of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, indicted in the Pentagon Papers case, were thrown out amid revelations of government misconduct. And the trial of the Gainesville Eight, which CBS News called “the seventh major conspiracy case in which the Justice Department took on the radical antiwar movement,” ended with a Pensacola jury acquitting the defendants of plotting to disrupt the 1972 Republican convention.12

  Contemporaneous commentators initially saw this string of acquittals and overturned convictions as evidence of Mitchell’s ineptitude, the inevitable result when a Wall Street bond lawyer tried to play top cop. Only after Mitchell’s tenure in government, and the ebbing of the antiwar movement, was it possible to look back and discern the causal connection between the two. “I think the movement was set back by Nixon and Mitchell,” reckoned Ayers. “But the measure of their effectiveness is not how many convictions they got. It’s what they did to disrupt and dismantle.”

  By 1973, students were more likely to attend kung fu classes than antiwar protests. Broad social trends—the rise of individualism, the drug culture—also contributed to attitudinal changes among American youth; but it was of incalculable symbolic significance that the attorney general of the United States stood firm in the media age against the lawless, nihilistic excesses of “the movement.” “Mitchell’s greatest tactical success came from his handling of the high-riding radical left,” Newsweek declared in the spring of 1973. “[Although] the Justice Department has not sustained any major convictions…the cost in time and money to the defendants was sufficient to defang the antiwar left nearly two years before Mr. Nixon was able to bring U.S. troops home from the Vietnam War.”13

  Each spring and fall of Mitchell’s years in power witnessed record-shattering marches on Washington, unprecedented breakdowns in civil order, and bloody street clashes that included challenges and threats directed at Mitchell himself.

  During his first days in office, Mitchell worried most about black militants. He discussed the Black Panthers with an FBI bodyguard, and the agent, following strict orders, typed and sent up the Bureau chain of command every word Mitchell said. These remarks invariably made their way to the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, who actively used Mitchell’s security detail, previously unpublished documents show, to spy on the attorney general. Thus when Mitchell rued the popularity the Panthers enjoyed among white youths, Hoover took note, underlining the passage in his agent’s report.

  The attorney general…commented on the objectionable content of the films shown him by the [FBI’s] Domestic Intelligence Division…entitled “Huey Newton’s Birthday” and “Off the Pig,” two Black Panther films used to recruit and for propaganda purposes. [Mitchell] stated what was of particular note was the number of white girls in attendance at Black Power rallies, and the fact that one of these objectionable films has been shown at Cardoza [sic] High School and that both films had been shown at high schools and college campuses across the country.

  A week later, Mitchell expressed apprehension to his FBI detail over the prospect of “racial demonstrations” on the first anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In this Mitchell proved prescient. FBI documents showed that “due to the racial tension in the Washington, D.C., Detroit and Chicago areas…the attorney general delayed his departure from the office last night.” That Mitchell touched a nerve among the country’s leading black revolutionaries became clear when Bobby Seale accused Mitchell of moving the country “closer and closer to open fascism” and publicly exhorted black brothers and sisters, from a San Francisco jail cell, to “bust the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell regime in their asses and let them know the struggle is here.”14

  The Nixon administration closely monitored the New Left’s internal dynamics and schisms, leading the president himself to caution Mitchell that month that “we may soon have to face up to more than dialogue.” Nixon’s prophecy soon came true. The Weathermen announced a return to Chicago that would “bring the war home…attack the beast from within as the peoples of the world attack it from without.” Dubbed by organizers the Days of Rage, the plan called for thousands of armed, angry young revolutionaries to gather on the evening of October 8 in Lincoln Park—where helmeted police had routed demonstrators fourteen months earlier—then plunge into the city’s streets to wreak havoc and “off the pig.”

  In large measure, the action was a personal challenge to Nixon’s tough new attorney general, a test of his mettle. Weatherman leader Mark Rudd hoped the Days of Rage would make a “national statement” and “get the attention of those who would fight Mitchell.” Another Weatherman, Susan Stern, exulted that a previous demonstration, in Seattle, had “made John Mitchell look like an idiot,” and routinely excoriated him in public and private settings. “Nixon’s the real conspirator—him and all the other capitalists—Rockefeller, Mitchell; they conspire against the people of the world,” she told reporters. Stern also anxiously wrote her mother: “We are reliving the McCarthy era, and Mitchell and Nixon will shut up any voice that even attempts to speak up for freedom and truth. If I can’t speak for such things, then I don’t want to live at all.”15

  As the Days of Rage approached, the White House watched with apprehension. An aide to John Ehrlichman alerted the attorney general to the president’s growing concern. “From all reports,” the aide wrote, “leftist leaders are counting on serious disorders in Chicago, with resulting ‘police brutality,’ to polarize student opinion and increase participation in the Moratorium activities.” Nixon instructed Mitchell to “work closely” with Chicago officials to “keep the [Days of Rage] from getting out of control.”16

  On the appointed night, Ayers, Dohrn, and their Weatherman comrades gathered in Lincoln Park. But the army of angry youths—“tens of thousands,” the underground press had promised—stayed home. In all, “no more than a couple hundred” people showed up. “My stomach sank,” Ayers wrote, years later. “I felt like running away, slipping into the darkness and disappearing, but I knew
I couldn’t…. There’s no turning back now, I said to myself.” The group swiftly set out for Chicago’s Gold Coast, the city’s wealthiest section. Whooping and hollering, the rabble flung bricks and pipes, smashing the windows of a bank and a Rolls-Royce. However, as David Dellinger disapprovingly noted, the Weathermen also vandalized “a disproportionately high percentage of…Volkswagens and other old and lower-priced cars…small shops, proletarian beer halls, and lower-middle-class housing.”

  More than a thousand Chicago police officers—scarred by the previous year’s convention rioting and primed for a “kill or be killed” confrontation—perched along barricades. Amid the ensuing frenzy of bullets, nightsticks, and tear gas, a squad car plunged into a live crowd; “bodies were just mangled.” After two hours, twenty-eight policemen lay wounded and at least six Weathermen were shot; sixty-eight were arrested and untold others fled with their injuries. Recurring clashes over the next three days led to almost 300 arrests and damage to 1,400 businesses, residences, and automobiles.17

  Mitchell pronounced the Weathermen “psychopaths.” Episodes like the Days of Rage he blamed on “Leninists and Trotskyites.” Testifying in federal court in 1980, he identified the Weather Underground as “one of the radical, if not the most radical, groups” ever to operate in the United States. Mitchell recalled President Nixon expressing concern that the group was “impacting on foreign policy.” Nixon’s worry, Mitchell testified, was that the North Vietnamese would balk at negotiating as long as “groups like the Weather Underground were creating disturbances.”

  To Mitchell, the violence posed a basic question: “Who’s going to run the show—the present Establishment or a new Establishment?” “They’re stuck,” he told an interviewer shortly after the Days of Rage. “They want to burn down buildings, but they don’t have anything with which to replace them. In the theater, they’d call it a second-act problem…. It’s all very well to break the law in the name of the higher morality,” he added, “but the hard part is submitting to the penalties imposed by the law.”18

  The Weathermen had no intention of submitting to Mitchell’s penalties; instead they would escape them, by forming a clandestine nationwide network. Between October 1969 and September 1973, the Weather Underground would claim credit for twenty bombings across the country, in which no one was harmed—save three of the organization’s own members, who perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970 after one of their own creations exploded prematurely.

  Death was never far from the Weather front, as the youthful residents of the doomed townhouse—and John Mitchell—came to understand. In the Weather Underground’s third communiqué, dated July 26, 1970, and mailed to the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Post, the group exulted how “every move of the monster-state tightens the noose around its own neck.” The group also issued a chilling warning to the attorney general: “Don’t come looking for us, dog; we’ll find you first.”19

  With the Days of Rage over, Nixon and Mitchell steeled themselves next for a massive march on Washington over the long weekend of November 13–16, 1969. The organizing group, the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, or “New Mobe,” estimated more than 250,000 people would participate, a record turnout for the first major antiwar action against the administration. Peaceful and radical groups were both expected to attend. An ad hoc crisis group, including top officials from Justice and the Pentagon, concluded the potential for calamitous damage to the capital, even casualties, was “extremely high,” with the disorder likely to exceed anything seen in the 1967 encircling of the Pentagon, the 1968 Democratic convention, or the Days of Rage.20

  At the White House, a young aide named Tom Charles Huston—later infamous as the author of the Huston Plan, a broad menu of domestic spying programs made public during the Watergate hearings—circulated a series of “intelligence memos” assessing the likelihood of violence at the New Mobe march. Previously unpublished, the Huston memos show Mitchell was a primary target of the protesters. Relying on information supplied by undercover informants, Huston reported that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were organizing a mob to “break into the Justice Department [by] breaking windows and possibly using Molotov cocktails” then, while police raced to Justice, the group would “blow up” the Vietnamese embassy. Another informant claimed the Revolutionary Youth Movement and SDS’ “Mad Dog” and “Running Dog” factions were planning “action tactics” at DOJ and the embassy.21

  Mitchell sounded the alarm. Playing off of Spiro Agnew’s recent denunciation of antiwar activists as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” the attorney general told Meet the Press some New Mobe leaders were “more than snobs…active militants” eager to “destroy…the institutions of our government.” Marchers were to include the Weathermen, the Yippies, a lesser-known outfit called the Crazies, and the New Mobe’s own steering committee, “dominated,” according to one account, by members of the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party. Indeed, North Vietnam’s prime minister cabled the group: “I wish your ‘fall offensive’ a brilliant success.”22

  When DOJ denied the New Mobe’s request to march up Pennsylvania Avenue, the left lambasted Mitchell. Senator George McGovern, the liberal Democrat from South Dakota who would become the Democrats’ standard-bearer in 1972, harrumphed that Pennsylvania Avenue “belongs to the people of America—not to Attorney General Mitchell.” McGovern also denounced Mitchell’s “inflammatory” predictions of violence. Columnist Clayton Fritchey likewise accused the attorney general of conjuring a “faceless enemy” to justify repression: “The Justice Department foresees violence. But from whom? From peace leaders like Mrs. Martin Luther King, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin?”23

  During the testy negotiations that followed, a new figure from the administration held his first news conference: a handsome, blond-haired thirty-one-year-old aide to Kleindienst named John W. Dean III. To Dean, the attorney general privately exhibited a “blasé” attitude about the marchers and their demands: “What a nuisance this all is,” Mitchell would say. “He’d attend the meetings at Justice,” Dean recalled in 1977, “and sit there puffing away at his pipe, annoyed by the whole thing.” Unlike Mitchell and Kleindienst, Dean felt the marchers’ demand for Pennsylvania Avenue should be granted and admittedly worked, in tandem with another young aide, “behind the backs of our superiors” to reverse DOJ’s ruling. Even so, the New Mobe was vowing to march up Pennsylvania Avenue no matter what. Kleindienst nervously asked how they could be stopped. “Concertina wire, several rolls of it,” a general replied. Aghast at the vision of Coretta Scott King ensnared in barbed wire, Kleindienst called Mitchell. “This is absurd,” he said. Mitchell also heard from the president. Soon after, the New Mobe’s request was approved.24

  Knowing Mitchell was a target of the demonstrators, the FBI urged him to bolster security around his office. The attorney general waved off these warnings—but acted swiftly to fortify the capital. If violence erupted on a mass scale, the decision of whether to deploy federal troops—as well as the specific units called up and the timing and duration of their deployment—would be the attorney general’s to make. So stated a secret memorandum drafted by Mitchell and the Pentagon, entitled “Interdepartmental Action Plan for Civil Disturbances,” and approved by Nixon the previous spring.25

  Some 28,000 troops in the Washington area were available for deployment. The Defense Department also ordered several units outside the city’s 100-mile radius to a “state of readiness.” As the demonstration neared, the Pentagon moved an additional 9,000 troops, all “thoroughly trained in civil disturbance control,” DOD officials said, to special posts across the city’s network of military installations. Unless Mitchell called for the troops’ active deployment, however, primary law enforcement responsibility during the action lay with a special 2,000-man detail of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department. Backing up the cops would be 1,500 members of the National Guard; 400 park p
olice; 300 reserve officers on desk duty; and 2,500 self-policing “marshals” supplied by the New Mobe.26

  Mitchell yielded no quarter. On the eve of the march, he spoke at a GOP fund-raiser in Milwaukee, striking what the Washington Post called “the most partisan notes of his ten months in office.” The antiwar protests were part of a larger “disease of cynicism” that Mitchell attributed to the “deception” of the previous administration. LBJ had tried to solve problems through an “illusion of words,” Mitchell argued, the nourishment of “impossible dreams” as a result, “the poor and the black who had relied on Utopian promises…now distrust the government’s ability to act on their behalf.” Middle-class families who trusted Washington to manage the economy were now “caught in increasing inflation,” and the young, dispirited by the dashed hopes of the sixties, felt driven to “reject the established political process and…turn to violence and confrontation.”

  That last route, Mitchell warned, was a dead end; confidence in the law and “civil tranquility” would be restored. “The foreign policy of this government cannot—and will not—be formulated in the streets of Washington,” he declared.27