The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  The final installment in Anderson’s troika of ITT columns, published March 3, charged Mitchell and the conglomerate were “trying to lie their way out of a scandal over the suspicious, sudden settlement of a landmark antitrust suit against ITT.” The columnist seized on Hushen’s press release, which featured Mitchell saying he had “no knowledge of anyone from the [Republican National] committee or elsewhere dealing with International Telephone and Telegraph.” “This is false,” Anderson charged.

  In mid-May last year, California Lt. Gov. Ed Reinecke and an aide, Edgar Gillenwaters, met with Mitchell in his Washington office to discuss efforts to hold the convention in San Diego. We could not reach Reinecke, but Gillenwaters told us he and Reinecke personally informed Mitchell that ITT had offered to put up as much as $400,000 to support a GOP convention in San Diego. “He liked the idea of [having the convention in] San Diego,” Gillenwaters said of Mitchell. “He didn’t need any persuading. He said, ‘If you can do it, more power to you.’”42

  In fact, this was false: Reinecke and Gillenwaters had not met with Mitchell in May 1971. Having confirmed as much through his office logs—which recorded meetings with the California duo on April 26 and September 17, 197143—Mitchell might have expected to extinguish the matter with the cooperation of Reinecke, his fellow Republican. But the lieutenant governor, then a leading candidate to succeed Reagan, was busy giving interviews to seemingly every reporter who called to follow up on the Anderson column, expertly sticking his foot, with every question and answer, in Mitchell’s mouth. To the Washington Star’s Bob Walters, who asked if it was true that he and Gillenwaters had informed Mitchell of the ITT pledge, contrary to Mitchell’s denials, Reinecke blithely answered: “Yes, we discussed it. That was part of the package we were offering to the party.” The Californian unthinkingly described the attorney general as “my input to the political arm of the administration,” and told Walters he had the impression Mitchell already knew of ITT’s pledge from Congressman Wilson. “It was widely known then that it was [Mitchell] who was making the political decisions,” Reinecke foolishly added to a reporter the following day.44

  Without checking his own records or consulting Mitchell, one of the most powerful and respected figures in their party, Reinecke had blindly gone on record with a version of events that was both wrong, at least as to the dates involved, and highly damaging to men whose fortunes bore significantly on Reinecke’s own. From Mitchell’s point of view, it was difficult to tell which of Reinecke’s implications was worse: that contrary to his own denials, Mitchell knew about ITT’s convention pledge while the antitrust cases were being settled, or that he was, while serving as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, “making the political decisions.”

  Before the day was out, according to later testimony, Reinecke received a call from Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian in Washington. Shortly thereafter, the lieutenant governor commenced one of the most pronounced about-faces in American history, beginning with a written statement “clarifying” his earlier remarks. “After checking and verifying our records,” Reinecke said of himself and Gillenwaters, “we learned that our meeting with…Mitchell was on April 26, 1971. At this time we did not discuss the Republican convention because the idea had not developed at that date….[W]enever discussed or thought of any connection between the Sheraton Hotel and ITT.” His earlier statements had been in error, Reinecke said, because he had been “trying to recall the purpose and dates of several trips to Washington at a time when I was out of town and did not have access to my files or records.”45

  In fact, even had Reinecke and Gillenwaters drowned Mitchell in details about the ITT pledge in their April 26 meeting, it would not have left the attorney general “pleased” or “delighted,” as Reinecke at one point claimed. Previously unpublished documents show that Mitchell—a full two months after the April 26 meeting—was urging Haldeman to “slow down” on preparations for San Diego as the host city “until the president has had an opportunity to give serious thought to San Diego.” Surely Mitchell would not have egged Reinecke on if Nixon had not yet settled on San Diego.46

  Reinecke’s witless responses to the swirling charges would have occasioned little long-term concern but for the equally unwise intervention, at this juncture, of Kleindienst. Incensed by Anderson’s allegations, the attorney general designate demanded the Senate Judiciary Committee reopen its hearings into his nomination, a move that was, Kleindienst admitted years later, “rather impetuous.” “I did not want to live the rest of my life under a cloud of suspicion,” he said. He tracked Mitchell down at the White House and told him the plan. Mitchell counseled against it. What did he need that for? Who cared what Jack Anderson wrote? Kleindienst was adamant. “John, if the record isn’t made straight at once, this matter will make the Teapot Dome scandal look like a tea party.”47

  What had, until Kleindienst’s display of haste, been a Washington hullabaloo, of scant interest to the electorate, was now far graver: a congressional hearing, a legal matter, the wood from which perjury indictments are carved. It was also an election year, with a Democratic Congress eager to embarrass the Republican president seeking reelection. The nightmare Mitchell had warned Nixon about—“you will have a Senate investigation…these bastards up there [will] burden us with it”—was now upon them.

  Presided over by Judiciary Committee chairman James O. Eastland, a conservative Mississippi Democrat and regular ally of Mitchell’s, the Kleindienst nomination hearings became the longest in American history, running twenty-two days and consuming 1,751 pages in testimony and exhibits. The committee heard sworn testimony from Mitchell, Kleindienst, and McLaren; Reinecke and Gillenwaters; Louie Nunn, Jack Anderson, and Brit Hume; Harold Geneen and a half dozen other ITT officials, and—under the most unusual circumstances—Dita Beard.

  Democrats used the hearings to exhume the ITT settlement and assail the administration’s antitrust policy. The Nixon White House, under siege as never before, threw its full array of resources into the fight: lawyers, PR men, congressional arm twisters—even covert operatives. Indeed, the administration’s working group on the ITT controversy fielded a roster of future Watergate veterans: John Dean, Charles Colson, Robert Mardian, Richard Moore, E. Howard Hunt. The last, a former CIA officer hired by the White House to declassify sensitive documents and conduct covert operations, like the Ellsberg break-in, played a singular role in debriefing the affair’s central witness.

  Distraught and teetering on the verge of mental collapse, Beard followed the orders of ITT executives and fled the capital. She boarded a United Airlines flight for Denver on March 2, just before the third Anderson column. An hour before touchdown, she told a stewardess she felt faint. The flight attendant returned with an ammonia inhaler, whereupon Beard, according to the plane’s passenger illness report, “started turning gray and blue around the mouth.” Within hours of landing, Beard checked into the Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital, where a doctor retained by the Judiciary Committee later determined she was suffering from “coronary artery disease with angina pectoris.”

  Under orders from Colson aide Wally Johnson, Hunt flew to Denver to interview the elusive witness. Sporting an arresting wig and fake credentials acquired, like all his other tools of the trade, from old comrades at CIA, Hunt appeared at Beard’s bedside one night around 11:00 p.m. Initially “very suspicious” of Hunt, the sedated patient agreed to talk with him on her daughter’s assurances. Beard told Hunt she had fled the “hostile environment” of Washington because she felt there was “nobody she could trust.” On the prime question—was the memo implicating Mitchell authentic or not?—the stricken lobbyist yielded little of value. “She was quite sure that she had not written it,” Hunt later told the Senate Watergate committee, in previously unpublished testimony; but he also added that she “left it up in the air” and was responding “under heavy sedation.”48

  With the aid of David Fleming, Beard’s ITT-paid attorney, and Robert F. Bennett, a
shadowy power broker and CIA operative in Washington (later U.S. senator from Utah), a sworn statement was drawn up and issued in Beard’s name. In it she called the original memo a “forgery” and a “hoax.” “I did not prepare it and could not have,” Beard swore, “since to my knowledge, the assertions in it regarding the antitrust cases and former Attorney General Mitchell are untrue.” Beard also sharply challenged Brit Hume’s account of their talk in her kitchen on the night of February 24. “Who in their right mind would write something like this?” she claimed she told Hume. “This isn’t mine.” “I don’t care what you say,” she quoted Hume as replying, “I’m going to prove a connection between San Diego and the settlement, and I’m going to use you to prove it.” She remembered discussing the Kentucky Derby encounter, but added: “I had had several drinks. I was suffering intense chest pains at that time…I can in no way recall what I said to Mr. Hume.”

  It was much the same when a select panel of the Judiciary Committee, led by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, arrived in Beard’s hospital room to interrogate her. She had the full complement of dramatic-testimony-from-her-hospital-bed accoutrements, including nervous doctors and lawyers, a closely watched electrocardiogram, and tubes protruding from her nostrils. Midway through Kennedy’s questioning about the memo, the witness suffered a seizure; her deposition was over.

  Six days later, however, Beard felt well enough to repair to a nearby apartment to chat with Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. Beard stuck with her revised account of the Derby incident, which now matched Mitchell’s version—unwavering from the start—wherein the irrepressible lobbyist unwisely pressed her luck with the notoriously stony attorney general. “I’ll never cease to be ashamed of that,” she blushed to Wallace, “and I don’t know why in the world I did it. It was really more in fun than anything.” She also confirmed Nunn’s recollection that she had been drinking heavily that day: “When you start out on Bloody Marys and then mint juleps all afternoon…”49

  Inside the White House, the ITT scandal now loomed as the preeminent threat to the president’s reelection. At first, Nixon nervously rescheduled a news conference because, as Haldeman noted, “there’s no way he can adequately handle the ITT question.” By the time he was ready to face reporters, on March 24, the president had devised a suitable, and clever, response. “ITT became the great conglomerate that it was,” Nixon said, “in the two previous administrations primarily, in the Kennedy administration and in the Johnson administration. It grew and it grew and it grew, and nothing was done to stop it. In this administration we moved on ITT…. We required the greatest divestiture in the history of the antitrust law.” He added: “If we wanted to do a favor for ITT, we could just continue to do what the two previous administrations had done, and that is nothing, let ITT continue to grow. But we moved on it and moved effectively.”50

  In the pitched combat of the ITT hearings, Mitchell played a unique dual role: He offered strategic advice, as in the days of Haynsworth and Carswell, on how best to bring the hearings to a swift, successful end, even as he prepared to testify before them. With Mitchell’s chosen successor on the line, old divisions resurfaced between the White House and Justice, between Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson on the one hand, and Mitchell, Kleindienst, and Mardian on the other. The former group derided the nominee as “a damn fool,” and urged Nixon to withdraw the nomination, thereby ending the hearings and stanching the flow of administration blood. Mitchell, who later rued at his Watergate trial how the Kleindienst hearings were “made into a public circus,” stuck by his old deputy and “weighed in very heavily” to persuade Nixon to do likewise.51

  Once again, the president followed Mitchell’s counsel—despite profound misgivings, voiced in an angry, and previously unpublished, session with Haldeman. “I really think that we’re gonna have to really rub John Mitchell’s nose in this,” the president said. The conversation ended with Nixon wishing Kleindienst would recognize the inevitability of defeat, maybe “as a result of some prodding by me.” But the nominee, recalling the lashing he had taken from Nixon on ITT a year earlier, was not about to do this president any favors.52

  Finally, on March 14, 1972, Mitchell took his turn at the Senate witness table. As he raised his right hand to be sworn in, the former attorney general still appeared, at least to Anderson, the epitome of arrogant officialdom, “wearing his petulant air of affronted dignity and annoyance with the inconveniences of the democratic process.”

  Over two days of questioning, Mitchell wearily described his support for McLaren’s antitrust enforcement; defended the ITT settlement; recounted his meetings with Geneen and Rohatyn; gave his version of the Kentucky Derby incident; and dismissed the substance of the Beard-Merriam memo. “As far as I can see, there are no grounds for suspicion in this case,” Mitchell declared. “I think it is a house of cards that has been built up.” There were rough patches, however, owing chiefly to Mitchell’s overly broad denials that he had known nothing of the ITT-Sheraton convention pledge; had never discussed the ITT case with Nixon; and had, as attorney general, made no political decisions. Newsweek reported the witness “cool but testy” Washington doyenne Mary McGrory was struck by Mitchell’s “wintry face and chilling humor,” attributes that combined, she wrote, to “unnerve” the trained lawyers on the Judiciary Committee and make the witness seem “as approachable as a medieval Cardinal.”53

  Committee Democrats bore down on the two meetings with Reinecke and Gillenwaters, in April and September 1971. Mitchell conceded that Reinecke “might have talked about the possibility of locating the Republican convention in the state of California” during the April visit; but this stopped short of admitting Reinecke had specifically mentioned ITT’s involvement. Likewise Mitchell reasoned that Reinecke “wouldn’t be discussing [the convention] with me in September because I understand the decision had already been made,” but again allowed as how Reinecke “may have” touched on the subject. When Senator John V. Tunney, the California Democrat, asked explicitly if Reinecke had mentioned ITT’s financial pledge, Mitchell replied: “It is quite possible Lieutenant Governor Reinecke mentioned the convention in San Diego and Sheraton Hotel or something else but it would have made no impression upon me whatsoever, I not having that interest in it.”54

  In many respects, Mitchell was right to denounce the ITT scandal as a house of cards. There was no solid evidence he knew about ITT’s convention pledge at the time of the antitrust settlement with the conglomerate, nor any evidence—beyond the wild buffet-line tales of Dita Beard—to suggest Mitchell intervened to dictate the outcome of the settlement negotiations. Yet the former attorney general undeniably perjured himself at the Kleindienst confirmation hearings. When Senator Tunney asked Mitchell, “Did Mr. Reinecke ever discuss, to your knowledge, in May or April, the ITT offer to bring the Republican convention to San Diego?” Mitchell replied, “No, senator.” He then thought to add: “As far as I can tell, Mr. Reinecke must have had me mixed up with somebody else because he didn’t meet me in May, and I have also read in the paper he has retracted that statement since then about that meeting in May.”55

  The second part of Mitchell’s answer framed the issue solely in terms of his meetings with Reinecke, but he had answered, with a flat negative, a question that was not so limited. Tunney had asked not whether Reinecke had met with Mitchell to discuss the ITT pledge in April or May, but whether Reinecke had discussed the subject with Mitchell during that time. Neither Tunney nor any other member of the Judiciary Committee ever thought to ask Mitchell whether he and Reinecke had spoken by telephone during the relevant time frames—but they had.

  When Reinecke appeared before the panel, more than a month after Mitchell, the last senator to question him was Republican Hiram Fong of Hawaii, who, like Tunney with Mitchell, queried the witness about information exchanged on the ITT pledge, and without limiting his question to face-to-face meetings.

  FONG: So the only time you discussed the convention with Mr. Mitchell was in September a
fter the ITT case had already been settled?

  REINECKE: That is correct, Senator.

  Reinecke also told Senator Kennedy he had “no way of knowing” whether Mitchell knew of the ITT pledge by September.56 Later, when the ITT case consumed the energies of a whole division of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, investigators obtained Mitchell’s office records and found he had in fact spoken to Reinecke on the phone three times between April and September 1971, all before San Diego won the convention rights and the ITT cases were settled.57 When the special prosecutors confronted Reinecke with this evidence, in July 1973, Reinecke acknowledged he had misled the Judiciary Committee: “I realize [I] was not describing the entire situation, but relied on the first law of the courtroom…. Answer questions only and do not volunteer.” Reinecke pleaded that he was tired during his Senate testimony—which occurred after one day’s notice, a red-eye flight from California and four hours of White House coaching, and with no counsel present—and responded to Kennedy and Fong as he did because “every substantive question regarding Mitchell referred to meetings and not to other communications by letter, telegram or phone.”58

  The prosecutors were unmoved, and Reinecke struck a deal—or so he thought—to testify against Mitchell in exchange for being left alone; immunity was never formally conferred. Accordingly, on February 4, 1974, Reinecke told a federal grand jury that the purpose of his telephone conversations with Mitchell in the spring of 1971 was “to bring [Mitchell] up to date on details…about the progress of the convention, particularly the financial commitments.” He reported Mitchell’s reaction was “encouraging, tolerant and fatherly,” but added the attorney general “was like most of those fellows in the White House. They all say the same thing, which is very little.”59