by James Rosen
Convinced the former attorney general had ordered the break-in, Ehrlichman needed time to regroup from Mitchell’s forceful denials. Late in the match and behind on points, Ehrlichman pressed his boldest thrust yet. “They say that they’ve got you made here,” he said, in the style of Jimmy Cagney. “You mean the U.S. attorney’s office?” Mitchell asked. Yes, Ehrlichman said. Did they say how? Mitchell asked. “No. And this was before anybody knew that Magruder was going to go in.” “I just don’t believe it,” Mitchell replied. Finally, as much for Nixon’s ears, he reaffirmed: “There’s certainly no possibility that I would ever turn around and say, ‘Yes, I was part and parcel of this.’”
With that, Ehrlichman asked his secretary to book their guests return flights to New York (“American Airlines, first class,” Mitchell snapped). But Mitchell wasn’t done. He wanted updates on the grand jury: “I would like to be kept advised, within propriety, as to what the hell is going on down here.” Ehrlichman mumbled about the poor intelligence flow. When Mitchell inquired again about the case being built against him, Ehrlichman replied: “The way the story is supposed to go, Magruder brought you a memorandum that said on it, ‘We are now ready to go with this operation. We will need such and such amount of money. Here are the targets that are possible. Please pick the targets that you want.’” Are you serious? Mitchell asked. “Yes, sir. And, that you,” Ehrlichman continued, “by some designation, circles or checks or something, picked the targets and authorized the operation.” “That’s about as far from the truth as it’s possible to get,” Mitchell replied.
Ehrlichman asked if Mitchell still wished to see the man in whose name he had been summoned to Washington in the first place. “He’d be happy to see you,” lied Ehrlichman. “No,” Mitchell shrugged. “I don’t want to embarrass him.” Ehrlichman then urged Mitchell, as Dean had, to retain a criminal lawyer. Before leaving, Mitchell pressed once more for some scrap of information about the extent of his jeopardy: Who were the damaging witnesses on the post–June 17 period? Ehrlichman mentioned Dean and O’Brien.
MITCHELL: Now what do they say is my involvement in it, other than knowing about it?
EHRLICHMAN: Not much. Just that. Knowing and acquiescing, and, uh, calling on Dean for help. And uh, uh, that’s about it.
MITCHELL: How did I call on him for help?
EHRLICHMAN: Just saying, uh, “Can you, can you get those fellows over there to help us raise some money,” and, uh, uh, not for what, or anything of that kind. I’ve not found anybody, as I said before, who could be identified as an actor in the process of inducing anybody to perjury or silence, or anything of that kind.
“Is anybody debriefing these witnesses after the grand jury?” Mitchell asked. No, Ehrlichman said; that would be “a violation of some section or another.” “Sure in hell was done before the election, I assure you of that,” Mitchell snapped.3
As Ehrlichman and Mitchell fenced to their bloody draw, the president sat in the Oval Office, getting an update from Haldeman on his depressing chat with Magruder. The news that Magruder was soon to testify against Mitchell, Dean, and Strachan dealt the White House a crushing blow. “Mike Wallace will get [Magruder] on ‘60 Minutes,’” Ehrlichman had warned, “and he will come across as the All-American Boy who was…serving his president, his attorney general, and they misled him.”
Now Ehrlichman returned from his tête-à-tête with Mitchell. “All finished?” the president asked airily, as if inquiring about the disposal of an insect. “Yes, sir,” Ehrlichman answered: “[Mitchell] is an innocent man in his heart and in his mind, and he does not intend to move off that position.” “Give us a little chapter and verse,” Nixon clamored, eager to know, after so many hours of rehearsal, how the play had gone. Ehrlichman complied, unreliably: The tapes invariably captured individuals recalling Watergate conversations far differently than they actually transpired. He emphasized how Mitchell, as Nixon had predicted, “lobbed mud balls at the White House at every opportunity,” and portrayed his own timidity as a virtue. “I tried to play him with kid gloves…. I never asked him to tell me anything. He just told me all this stuff.” Ehrlichman then reported on a subject he and Mitchell had not covered: the subornation of perjury in September 1972, after Magruder’s desk diary was subpoenaed.
EHRLICHMAN: [Mitchell] says Dean talked Magruder into saying the wrong things at the grand jury, and so Magruder’s got a problem.
NIXON: My God…. Mitchell was there when Dean talked him into saying the wrong things?
EHRLICHMAN: That’s what he says. That is what Mitchell says.
NIXON: What does Dean say about it?
EHRLICHMAN: Dean says it was Mitchell and Magruder. It must have been the quietest meeting in history. Everybody’s version is that the other two guys talked.
Nixon grew angry at his old friend. “Throwing off on the White House won’t help him one damn bit…. The White House wasn’t running the campaign committee.” They talked about Mitchell’s trembling hands, the likelihood of his conviction at trial. Haldeman said Dean was going to depict himself as “merely a messenger, a conduit, an agent” in the cover-up. “Boy, Mitchell sure doesn’t agree with that,” said Ehrlichman.
“I guess we’re not surprised at Mitchell are we?” Nixon asked. No, Haldeman said. “What he is saying is partly true. I don’t think he did put [the break-in] together.” Though he had predicted as much, it still bothered Nixon that Mitchell’s defense would pit him against the White House: “He shouldn’t throw the burden over here.” Nixon conceded Mitchell was right all along about Charles Colson, the special counsel who had brought Howard Hunt into the White House. Above all, it bothered the president that John N. Mitchell, the strong man, symbol of law and order in the age of radical chic, now stood poised to enter the criminal justice system—as a defendant. “This damn case!”4
Two days later, Mitchell got a call from Magruder. The younger man announced what both already knew—that he was copping a plea—and bade Mitchell goodbye. Magruder wrote in his memoir that the talk was brief and difficult, but not unpleasant; he tried to convey his “great affection” for Mitchell, even as he made clear his intention to testify in ways sure to result in Mitchell’s incarceration. According to previously unpublished testimony, Magruder began the talk with the simple, almost childlike admission: “I talked.” “If you are going the other way,” Mitchell supposedly replied, “I am going to have to hold, because there is no other choice for me…. You and I will be at loggerheads, do you understand?” “I understand,” Magruder said. The next, and last, time the two men saw each other was when Magruder took the oath at U.S. v. Mitchell.5
Fred LaRue was not far behind. The most loyal of Mitchell’s lieutenants still had dinner with Mitchell every night (“I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that much Chinese food in my life”) but worried about his condition. Who wouldn’t crack under the strain of Watergate and Vesco, or the even crueler agonies of Martha Mitchell? “LaRue said he thinks Mitchell is on the verge of breaking, by which he means suicide,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. Mitchell was said to be drinking heavily. “It became a problem in the latter stages of Watergate,” LaRue recalled. “I put him to bed a few times.” The cover-up was unraveling rapidly. On April 16 LaRue surrendered to the U.S. attorney’s office; within seventy-two hours, Mitchell was subpoenaed by the grand jury and Seymour Hersh reported in the New York Times that prior witnesses had lodged “serious allegations” against Mitchell, with new indictments expected “within the week.”6
At last, Mitchell retained a lawyer: forty-seven-year-old William G. Hundley Jr., an old-school Irishman from Brooklyn and former federal prosecutor described as “a pioneer of the government’s assault on organized crime.” As had been his practice with Peter Fleming in the Vesco case, Mitchell barely discussed with Hundley the origins or trajectory of Watergate; in this case, the silence owed both to the swiftness with which events were moving and Mitchell’s demeanor. He supplied his lawyer only a rough outline of the
Gemstone meetings, and reaffirmed his distance from the hush-money scheme. “He didn’t particularly like to talk about the case,” Hundley recalled. “He was very fatalistic about what was going to happen. I didn’t get a story telling me how innocent he was or anything like that.”7
April 20, 1973, was the day of reckoning. Assistant U.S. Attorney Seymour Glanzer, who was to examine Mitchell in the grand jury room, was reputed to be “fire-eating,” “a bludgeon,” “a very bad operator.” He swiftly warned Mitchell he was a potential target, then went straight for the jugular: the Gemstone meetings.
GLANZER: I am asking you whether or not you had an obligation to come down to the grand jury and inform them what you knew about the January-February meetings?
MITCHELL: I did not.
GLANZER: You felt you had no obligation?
MITCHELL: I had no obligation.
GLANZER: You had no obligation to advance the interest of justice?
MITCHELL: I had no obligation to come down and inform the grand jury voluntarily of anything.
Glanzer turned to the date of June 20, 1972, three days after the Watergate arrests, when LaRue and Mardian shared with Mitchell the contents of their debriefing of Liddy.
GLANZER: Mr. Mardian did not report to you that Mr. Liddy had confessed to him?
MITCHELL: Not to my recollection, Mr. Glanzer.
GLANZER: That would be something you remembered, if it happened, wouldn’t it?
MITCHELL: Yes, I would.
GLANZER:…Were you told by either Mr. LaRue or anybody else at the Committee [to Re-Elect the President] prior to June 28, 1972, that Mr. Liddy had told them that he was involved in the Watergate break-in?
MITCHELL: I have no such recollection.
Glanzer’s grilling went on for three hours. “And when he came out,” reported CBS News’ Daniel Schorr, Mitchell “was no longer smiling, but grim.” Indeed, Glanzer had scored a direct hit. His exchange with Mitchell about the briefing he got from LaRue and Mardian later formed the basis for a perjury charge, Count Five in the U.S. v. Mitchell indictment, on which the former attorney general was convicted and incarcerated.8
The scandal was also taking its toll on the Mitchells as a couple. When a family friend called one morning, indignant about a White House plot to “lay it all on Mitchell,” Martha, eavesdropping on a separate line, started screaming: “I told you! That Goddamned son-of-a-bitch president!” On the night of May 6, Mrs. Mitchell dialed her old partner in crime, UPI’s Helen Thomas, and declared: “Mr. President should resign immediately. I think he let the country down. It’s going to take a hell of a lot to get him out…. He’s been compromised.”
It marked the first demand by a prominent figure for Nixon to resign; others soon followed suit. But the atmosphere that Martha’s remarks helped create scarcely improved her husband’s chances of finding an unbiased jury of his peers. Realizing as much, his patience drained, Mitchell finally turned the tables, picking up an extension during one of his wife’s calls to Thomas. “Martha’s late night telephone calls have been good fun and games in the past,” he growled. “However, this is a serious issue. I’m surprised and disappointed that United Press International would take advantage of a personal phone call made under the stress of the current situation and treat it as a sensational public statement…. Any thought of the president resigning is ridiculous.”
Speculation swirled, too, about Mitchell’s condition. “He was never out of control, or unconscious, or staggering, or weak,” said a lawyer who represented Mitchell at the time. “But he was a steady drinker…. He would be steadily drinking Scotch every night.” Time magazine called him the Prisoner of Fifth Avenue.
If he is depressed, Mitchell reportedly does not talk about it to friends, though they find him looking grayer and older. He has assured them that he has an adequate amount of money for his defense and his family’s needs, though he is no millionaire. But not even his friends can say what happens when they are not around and John and Martha alone must confront his besmirched reputation and his shattered career.
What else could the old boy do, but kick back in his Manhattan duplex, put away another bottle of Dewar’s, and take notes in front of the television set? Like the rest of the country, Mitchell sat glued to the Senate hearings, which had begun May 17 and, like every newspaper and magazine in America, showcased a daily thrashing of his once-good name. Watergate! Vesco! ITT! The milk lobby! The Kissinger wiretaps! The Ellsberg break-in! Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters cash! Howard Hughes and the Vegas casinos! FBI black bag jobs! CIA assassination plots! There was, it seemed, no scandal of the era, the “decade of shocks” from 1963 to 1974, in which Mitchell’s name did not figure.
And the news media, drunk with power and waist deep at what Kissinger called the “orgy of recrimination,” seldom took care to distinguish leaks from plants, hearsay from eyewitness testimony, fact from fiction. When Mitchell was formally charged in the Vesco case, on May 10, Newsweek gleefully enlarged his unsmiling face so readers could see the pores on his nose, and slapped a single word across his bald head: Indicted. Time, with equal gaiety, declared: The Inquest Begins.9
For the 80 million Americans who watched the televised hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, and the millions more who tuned in on radio, 1973 was the Summer of Watergate. The hearings proved, to Nixon’s fatal detriment, enormously popular; his approval rating fell, according to the Harris Poll, from 57 percent at the hearings’ start to 32 percent at their end. By early August, three-quarters of Americans believed Nixon either planned the break-in, knew about it in advance, or helped cover it up.
The wily Southerner banging the gavel, jowly seventy-six-year-old committee chairman Sam J. Ervin Jr. of North Carolina, was, in Nixon’s eyes, a “sharp, resourceful, and intensely partisan political animal.” Challenging Nixon gave Ervin a populist persona that belied his retrograde Southern Democrat record: He had opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, Medicare, and consumer legislation; supported the Vietnam War and the draft; and lobbied in behalf of the infamous segregationist manifesto, the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, which encouraged Southern states to defy the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Blinded by hatred of Nixon and Mitchell, the national press corps was eager to forget all that and was led, as in much else, by Walter Cronkite, the era’s most trusted anchorman, who fawned over Ervin as “this Renaissance man of Washington.” Mitchell thought him “a little senile.”
Ervin’s selection of Sam Dash as majority counsel underscored the intense partisanship that animated the work of the committee. A wiretapping expert, former Philadelphia district attorney, and Georgetown University law professor, the balding, diminutive Dash, with his Buddy Holly eyeglasses and benign Jewish mien, was actually an imperious, intellectually incurious (“I think we all know what happened on the early morning of June 17,” he once dismissively cut off a witness), and fiercely partisan character. As a cross-examiner, he was both unpardonably sloppy, given to multiple, ponderous, often unintelligible queries—Tom Wolfe, watching the hearings, bemusedly hailed the dawn of “a semiliterate variety of solecism known as Dashism”—and anything but impartial, a rabbit-puncher known to use unfaithful paraphrases of prior testimony to frame his follow-ups. The year before, in Samuel Dash v. John N. Mitchell et al., he had sued, in vain, to block the enactment of the Nixon administration’s anticrime proposals, and endorsed George McGovern for president.
And the committee Republicans, his natural allies—what could Mitchell expect from them? Howard Baker Jr., a Tennessee lawyer first elected to the Senate in 1966, was the committee’s ranking GOP member. Handsome and lively, Baker was thrust into a singularly thankless position, torn between his inclination, as a party man, to defend the president and his instincts, as a smart politician, to ride the televised wave of the fin de siècle, which demanded the president’s head. His famous question—“What did the president know, and when did he know it
?”—signaled the decision he reached. As minority counsel, Baker chose his thirty-year-old protégé, Fred Thompson. An assistant U.S. attorney whose experience was in bootlegging and bank robbery cases, Thompson offered little promise of protection for the pro-administration witnesses. “Oh, shit,” Nixon moaned, upon hearing Thompson’s name. “Dash is too smart for that kid.”10
At ten o’clock on Tuesday morning, July 10, 1973, Mitchell, dressed in Wall Street suit and tie, strode into the hallowed Senate Caucus Room and took the oath, his right hand raised limply before the battalion of photographers. By this point, Mitchell stood formally indicted in the Vesco case and informally accused, on television, of numerous crimes in Watergate: approving the DNC wiretaps; reviewing logs of the illegally intercepted conversations and sending Liddy back into Democratic headquarters; launching the cover-up by ordering McCord sprung from jail; urging Magruder to destroy the Gemstone logs and commit perjury; and instructing Dean in a broad array of black arts, from obtaining FBI reports to paying hush money and extending offers of executive clemency. Of all these alleged acts, Mitchell was in fact guilty of only one: the subornation of Magruder’s perjury. To keep the original Gemstone meetings a secret, he had taken extraordinary pains—and still failed.
How the former attorney general proposed to scale the awesome edifice of allegation erected around him became a subject of consuming media interest. A two-week delay in the testimony, occasioned by the visit of Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and July Fourth recess, only heightened the anticipation. Time reported Mitchell had spent the last month riveted to his TV set, “analyzing every word of testimony, closely watching for weaknesses on the part of each witness and planning to shape an air-tight position.” The London Observer merely had him “sequestered in his New York apartment and drinking heavily.” “He’s become somewhat of a mystery man, an unknown force,” remarked CBS News’ Lesley Stahl. “Sources say not even the White House knows what he will testify to when he takes the stand.”