by James Rosen
Fleming’s emotionalism, coupled with that of Stans’s lawyer, Walter Bonner, who alternately preached, shouted, pleaded, and cried in asking the jurors to give Stans back his good name, contrasted starkly with the coolly reasoned approach John Wing adopted. “This isn’t a ‘fix’ case,” he said, using Fleming’s preferred word. “It is a case of men trying to use their political power to influence the officials in the SEC…. These men don’t call a fix a fix—it would be gauche. They call a fix a ‘request for help.’”
John Mitchell took the stand and deliberately lied to you to get out of this…. Ladies and gentlemen, John Mitchell has no right to lie under oath any more than you or I or anyone else has, and if you find that John Mitchell lied under oath and if he gets away with it, what man in the country shall have respect for law?71
Stans remembered himself and Mitchell reacting differently to Wing’s summation. “John Mitchell was a tower of strength,” Stans recalled in 1992. “There were times when my confidence would flag because of the manner in which the prosecutor was demonstrating bravado…. It bothered me particularly when I heard Wing give his closing address to the jury. Mitchell had to firm me up, [saying] ‘Maurice, this is just part of the show they’re putting on. It’s not going to affect the jury in any way. Just relax and we’ll see.’ He was confident of acquittal…. I took a lot of consolation from being in with him rather than being alone, I’ll tell you.”72
The nine men and three women on the jury deliberated for twenty-eight hours over three days. Inside the jury room, foreman Sybil Kucharski later told the New York Times, it was her “impression” that the jury was initially inclined to vote eight-to-four for conviction. But no formal vote was taken. In fact, in the first voice vote, on the indictment’s first count—a conspiracy charge against Mitchell—the jury split evenly, five for conviction, five for acquittal, and two undecided. “We were off in little groups and screaming and yelling,” Kucharski said. “Some of us were emotional.”73
With the jurors embroiled in screaming matches, the panel’s wealthiest and best-educated member, investment banker Andrew Choa, a late substitute for an ailing juror, encouraged them to skip ahead to the perjury counts, and to consider the witnesses’ credibility. “The overall perception of Mitchell by the jury was that he was a man of integrity,” Choa recalled two decades later. Soon, the jurors were asking for copies of the indictment and documentary evidence presented at trial. They asked Gagliardi to reread portions of the election laws and his instructions about what constituted conspiracy and perjury. Later—showing they were again proceeding meticulously through the indictment—the jurors asked for the testimony of Mitchell and Hofgren, and that of Sears on his efforts to enlist Mitchell in quashing the SEC subpoena against Vesco.74
Finally, at 12:50 on Sunday, April 28, jury foreman Kucharski sent Judge Gagliardi a note saying the verdict was in. “How do you find the defendant Mitchell on Count One?” asked Court Clerk James E. Matarese. “Not guilty,” Kucharski announced, provoking gasps in the courtroom. The process was repeated fourteen more times. Stans collapsed in nervous exhaustion and tears. Fleming bolted up and began to cry. Mitchell, “seemingly the coolest man in the courtroom,” told Fleming to “take it easy, you worked hard.”75
Holding court at an impromptu press conference, Mitchell lauded the jurors as “a cross-section of America” embodying the genius of the nation’s legal system. “If there is a place you can get justice, it is from the American people,” Mitchell waxed. “That’s why I have great faith in America, and why I love the American people.” Suddenly, a long-haired youth started shouting: “It is the fascist ruling class like you—” before marshals dragged him from the room. “It’s all right,” quipped an unfazed Mitchell. “He wasn’t on the jury.” Do you think the verdict will affect your Watergate trial? “You are off bounds with your question,” Mitchell growled. Had the Nixon administration been exonerated by the verdict? “I don’t believe the Nixon administration was involved.” Do you know if President Nixon has been informed of the verdicts? a female reporter asked. “Honey,” Mitchell smiled, “I guess you never covered the White House.”76
That evening, Suite 555 of the Essex House erupted in laughter, liquor, and song. “Within an hour, I’ll have my first drink,” Mitchell joked, downing his second Dewar’s. Soon he was launching into “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Someone turned on the local news, which led with the verdict and interviews with the jurors. The room fell silent. “Great people,” Mitchell shook his head. “Real Americans. Honest people.”
A reporter asked if Nixon had telephoned Mitchell to congratulate him. “I wouldn’t tell you that one way or the other,” Mitchell snapped. As revelers began filing out, a doctor, unknown to Mitchell, shook his hand. “If you ever need a psychiatrist,” the man said, “I’d be glad to help.” “If I ever need a psychiatrist,” Mitchell shot back, “I’ll plead guilty first.”77
GEMSTONE
Mitchell’s an honest man. He just wasn’t tending the shop—he had problems with his wife—these jackass kids and other fools around did this thing, and John should have stepped up to it. That’s what happened, in my opinion.
—Richard Nixon, 19731
MITCHELL STOOD AT the brink of ruin. From the Vesco scandal he had escaped with his freedom—but not for long. His indictment in the Watergate case was handed down the very day the jury was selected in the Vesco trial. Unable to practice law, his fortune drained, Mitchell now faced war on a second front, a todeskampf against the unlimited resources of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and the news media.
Vilified from coast to coast, his name and image demonized on every newsstand and broadcast outlet, the former attorney general was now a professional defendant, the highest-ranking in American history. Rumors abounded that regardless of the outcome in the Watergate trial, Mitchell would also be indicted in the ITT scandal and the milk fund case (an investigation into whether the Nixon administration illegally exchanged milk price supports for large campaign contributions from dairy lobbyists). Who could withstand such an onslaught? “One of these days,” Peter Fleming told Judge Gagliardi, “we are going to find that we reach a due process point where, by the sheer proliferation of charges, a government can force a man either to admit a guilt which he does not feel or to bankrupt himself…. The economics of this thing are overwhelming.”2
How had it come to this? How had the nation’s top law enforcement official become Public Enemy Number One? Mitchell’s woes originated in the fact that his confederates, in and out of government, were too often beneath him. If Mitchell grasped this, he likely regarded it as part of the devil’s pact he made when, at Nixon’s insistence, he left Wall Street for the grimier councils of government. Indeed, the attorney general was surrounded by men who would never have made it into his office at Mudge Rose.
If there was one single moment where Mitchell could have changed the course of his life, intervened to avert his rendezvous with ignominy, it was shortly after eleven on the morning of January 27, 1972, and the arrival in his office at the Department of Justice of three men: John Wesley Dean III, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and George Gordon Liddy.
Trim and mustachioed, self-assured to the point of cockiness, Gordon Liddy was general counsel to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President—CRP to insiders, CREEP to detractors. He cut an odd figure. A graduate, like Mitchell, of Fordham and its law school, and an ardent anticommunist, Liddy joined the army in 1957 and later served for five years as an FBI agent. By the mid-1960s, he was an assistant district attorney in Dutchess County, New York, where he led a celebrated raid on Timothy Leary’s LSD-drenched compound. He also pulled odd stunts, like firing a live pistol in a courtroom to impress a jury, and lost a bid for Congress. In 1969, GOP connections landed him a job in the Treasury Department. Two years later, he sought a transfer to the White House, but met resistance. For reasons never explained—perhaps the Fordham connection—Mitchell went to bat for him. At the White House, Lid
dy’s curious persona again set him apart. He harbored a weird fascination with Germany, and the Third Reich in particular, peppering his speech with Nazi-specific terms like Einsatzgruppen and arranging a White House screening of Triumph of the Will, the landmark Nazi propaganda film. “Adolf Hitler incarnate!” a colleague muttered.3
In September 1971, along with E. Howard Hunt, Liddy conceived and supervised the break-in at the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. By year’s end, however, the Nixon White House was shifting focus from Ellsberg to the task of reelecting the president, and to attendant fears that antiwar radicals would disrupt the Republican convention. Liddy wanted to be near the action. Bud Krogh, an aide to John Ehrlichman, arranged a meeting between Liddy and John Dean.
Callow and slight of build, his “ferretlike” face framed by light blond hair that hung shaggily over his suit collar, Dean was hardly Liddy’s kind of man. But the youthful lawyer had an intriguing proposal: How did Liddy feel about coming over to CRP as general counsel and running a “first-class intelligence operation”? According to Liddy, he told Dean such an operation, supporting professional clandestine missions of an offensive and defensive nature, would cost a hell of a lot of money, and Dean shot back: “How’s a half a million for openers?” Liddy, impressed, told Dean that was “just about right”—for openers—but that when all was said and done, the figure would likely double. “No problem,” Dean replied.4
Photo Insert 1
COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED
COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED
COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED
Born in Detroit on September 5, 1913, the future attorney general moved with his family to Long Island when he was five years old. He excelled at many sports, especially golf and ice hockey, and industriously sold fishing bait and muskrat hides. At Jamaica High School, from which he graduated in 1930, Mitchell was a B+ student and president of his senior class—his only bid for elective office.
COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED
“There were three sons,” held a Mitchell family saying, “and they were guns.” Top: From left, James Robert Mitchell, John N. “Jack” Mitchell, Joseph “Scranton” Mitchell, and their parents, Joseph C. Mitchell and Margaret Agnes McMahon (partially obscured), circa 1930. Both Scranton and an older sister, Margaret, not pictured here, died young.
COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED
Mitchell, his girlfriend Elizabeth “Bette” Shine, and an unidentified classmate on June 15, 1938, the day Mitchell graduated from Fordham University’s School of Law.
COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED
With his parents and Bette on their wedding day, October 12, 1940. Family lore held that the moment Mitchell first saw Bette he vowed to marry her. In a love letter dated May 6, 1937, Mitchell reassured her: “You will certainly be the favorite daughter-in-law as well as the favorite sister-in-law.”
COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED
With daughter Jill and son Jack, circa 1950.
COURTESY JOHN BONHAM
U.S. Navy lieutenant Mitchell in the South Pacific, circa 1944.
COURTESY JOHN BONHAM
Mitchell, second from right, steering a PT boat on the high seas. Mitchell served honorably and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but neither official military records nor a privately owned PT boat museum could verify claims that he earned two Purple Hearts and the Silver Star, that he commanded the young John F. Kennedy, or that he rescued Colonel “Pappy” Boyington at sea. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was later said to have discreetly informed the attorney general that the Bureau knew about these exaggerations.
COURTESY JOHN BONHAM
Flush with success on Wall Street and living in upscale Rye, New York, Mitchell entertains an unidentified lady friend as Bette enjoys a cigarette, circa 1953. “I think what killed their marriage is what kills a lot of marriages,” a family friend said of John and Bette. “John was up and coming. He was ambitious. He wasn’t home, and she was lonely.”
COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED
With daughter Jill and second wife Martha Elizabeth Beall, circa 1960. Mitchell married Martha at an elopement center in Elkton, Maryland, on December 19, 1957—eleven days after his divorce from Bette was finalized.
COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
President Nixon watches as Chief Justice Earl Warren swears in Attorney General Mitchell, January 22, 1969. Martha Mitchell holds the Bible.
COURTESY SAM DANIELS, COLLECTION OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Mitchell and his Justice Department team. Top row, from left: Assistant Attorneys General William Ruckelshaus, Will Wilson, Sr., Johnnie M. Walters, Richard McLaren, William Rehnquist, Jerris Leonard, and J. Walter Yeagley. Seated from left: Assistant Attorney General Leo Pellerzi, Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, Mitchell, Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, and Assistant Attorney General Shiro Kashiwa.
COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
“Nixon had no really close relationship with anybody,” Henry Kissinger told the author; but Mitchell was the closest thing to a friend Nixon had in government. The president watches as Mitchell introduces him to Justice Department employees on January 30, 1969.
COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
The two attend the Los Angeles Rams–Kansas City Chiefs football game on August 23, 1969.
COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
Standing in the Rose Garden at the White House on June 20, 1970, the attorney general addresses winners of an essay contest about the perils of drug abuse as wife Martha and daughter Marty look on.
COPYRIGHT WASHINGTON POST; REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE DC PUBLIC LIBRARY
Donald Rumsfeld, then the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, busts up HEW secretary Robert Finch (left), Martha Mitchell, and the attorney general, during a black-tie party in the Mitchells’ Watergate duplex, January 29, 1970.
After Ehrlichman sanctioned Liddy’s transfer to CRP, Dean arranged for Liddy to meet his new boss: Jeb Magruder, CRP’s campaign director until Mitchell could leave Justice and assume the reins. Young, slender, and handsome, his jet-black hair and sad brown eyes offset by smartly patterned shirts and ties, Magruder was a protégé of H. R. Haldeman, who had installed Magruder at CRP over Mitchell’s objections. Born on Staten Island, Magruder came from a financially comfortable family. Foundering at Williams College, he volunteered for the army and served as a guard along the Korean demilitarized zone. By 1963, he had attended IBM training school and earned a master’s in business administration from the University of Chicago. A romance with politics formed in 1962, with impressive Chicago ward work for a first-time congressional candidate named Donald Rumsfeld. After a stint in the Goldwater campaign, Magruder managed Southern California for Nixon in ’68. The following year, Haldeman brought him to Washington to streamline the White House’s sprawling communications apparatus. Magruder later wrote that he tried to get along with everyone he met, as a matter of instinct; his eagerness to please made him vulnerable to pressure.5
Liddy disliked Magruder even more than he did Dean. Magruder admitted he knew nothing about intelligence and balked at Liddy’s salary and title demands. “I knew that I had to resist him from the onset,” Liddy wrote later, “in what I knew would be a prolonged conflict.” The dispute over job terms required a decision from Mitchell. Accordingly, on November 24, 1971, John Dean escorted Liddy into the attorney general’s office for the first meeting between the two men. Mitchell wasted few words: Liddy could have the title and salary he wanted. To Liddy’s surprise, there was no discussion of intelligence, which, from his talks with Dean, Liddy understood to be his primary function. “I didn’t spend a hell of a lot of time with Liddy,” Mitchell recalled. “[I] left the matter to Dean.”6
After the meeting, Dean instructed Liddy to prepare a proposal for a comprehensive campaign intelligence plan that could be presented to Mitchell. Excited, Liddy shared the good news wi
th his old partner in crime, E. Howard Hunt, and took up residence at CRP in December 1971.
It was to John Dean’s everlasting regret, and the nation’s, that at his own moment of decision, he didn’t take Mitchell’s advice. When Dean came to the attorney general in July 1970 and said he had been offered the job of counsel to the president, Mitchell, in between puffs on his pipe, advised him not to take it. Dean was better off staying at Justice, Mitchell argued, where the young man had a bright future; but Dean, ambitious and status conscious, ignored this wise counsel and opted for the White House job.7
Now, at 11:00 a.m. on January 27, 1972, Dean once again found himself seated in one of the faded red leather chairs in the attorney general’s office, alongside Magruder and Liddy. The lawyer–cum–covert operator was finally going to present his master plan for a “first-class” campaign intelligence operation to Mitchell. Liddy strode into the attorney general’s office carrying an easel and, under his arm in a brown paper wrapper, a set of large, professionally printed charts. Mitchell lit his pipe and began gently rocking in his big black chair. After preliminary talk about campaign finance laws, Liddy summarized his qualifications for the covert mission at hand, the many experts he had consulted, and the tight security precautions surrounding the entire operation. Next, he distributed sheets of paper with dollar figures on them.