The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  Absent any basis to challenge McLendon’s account, the scene she found at the Mitchell apartment that night bespoke a physical confrontation that occurred shortly before her arrival. If history offers any guide, however, Martha most likely lunged at her husband and hurt herself in the process. She was prone to physical outbursts: the altercation with her son; the smashing of the chair over John Alexander’s head; her unfortunate swing at Steve King; a brazen smack to Marty’s face, right in front of the nuns at the child’s Sacred Heart school; and the occasion outside the Mitchells’ New York building, in June 1973, when she cursed and struck a female reporter three times.

  Finally, there was Martha’s reply to a reporter’s question, in September 1973, about whether Mitchell tried to force her into psychiatric care. She called that “a goddamned lie” and added: “I never had a fight with him.” This was ten months after the alleged incident.25

  Martha made her last public appearance at a party at the Museum of Modern Art in September 1975. There she encountered a record producer and playfully asked why he hadn’t invited her to record. “I didn’t know you sang,” he responded. With that she launched into a rendition of “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” “She was good,” the producer marveled, “right on pitch.”26

  The rest of Martha’s life was given over to acute pain of body and soul. “Martha Mitchell Has Blood Disease,” the Times reported three weeks later; she had been undergoing tests for a month in Northern Virginia Doctor’s Hospital. She was suffering from multiple myeloma, a rare and extremely painful form of cancer, diagnosed in less than 8,000 cases a year and cause unknown, in which the patient’s bone marrow produces excessive numbers of white blood cells, creating multiple tumors in the marrow. The Times reported the disease was “uniformly fatal” the New York Post said Martha’s case was discovered at a “fairly advanced” stage. She had already suffered two cracked ribs and two fractured vertebrae.27

  The following month, she entered New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for treatment and remained there for seven months, with Mitchell reportedly paying the bills. Though Martha’s few remaining friends cursed him for choosing to “ignore” her in these dark final days, the fact was she barred him from visiting and forbade her doctors from updating him. Peter Fleming, Mitchell’s attorney in the Vesco trial, recalled him calling “with emotion in his voice” and asking Fleming to find out what he could about Martha’s condition: “It was evident…that he cared about her.”28

  When she returned to her ghostly home at 1030 Fifth Avenue, in April 1976, Martha was reported “thin, weak and fighting for her life.” Her only regular visitor was her son, Jay Jennings. “Mom seems in relatively good spirits,” he told the Times, “but she seems to have withdrawn a bit to fight this by herself.” She had barely arrived home when she fell and fractured her arm.29

  With her condition rapidly declining, Martha’s lawyers filed what they called a “dire emergency motion” demanding Mitchell cough up $36,000 in back alimony payments. To the affidavit Martha attached a sheaf of her outstanding bills. On the Fifth Avenue property, she owed nearly $10,000 in rent; Con Edison was threatening to shut off her electricity; and her local supermarket, Gristedes, was discontinuing food deliveries. “Unless I receive some substantial payment from the defendant,” she pleaded, “I do not know how I will survive.” Mitchell, while not wishing to “exacerbate” Martha’s problems, pleaded hardship, and responded with an equally pathetic filing. “I have no regular income and my expenses are financed with borrowed funds.”

  In contrast to [Martha’s] assertions, my financial condition necessitates a basic and simple lifestyle. Not only am I living on borrowed funds, but I am also supporting [Marty], age fourteen, who, at her own insistence, has been living with me on weekends and holidays from the school she attends in Connecticut.30

  On May 20, the New York State Supreme Court ruled in Martha’s favor, ordering Mitchell to pay in full the $36,000 she demanded. Five days later, absent any indication he would comply, she signed papers authorizing attorneys to raid her safety deposit box and sell the engagement ring with which Mitchell had proposed to her in 1957; the proceeds were to be divided among two live-in nurses who had never been paid.31

  The cancer, meanwhile, had consumed Martha’s bones and spread to her adrenals, kidneys, and lymph nodes; she was hemorrhaging around the adrenals and heart; and stomach ulcers had provoked internal bleeding. She was taken, on a stretcher, unconscious, to Sloan-Kettering, where, after contracting pneumonia, she died alone before dawn on May 31, 1976. She was fifty-seven.32

  John Mitchell took control of the arrangements for the funeral, which was held in Martha’s native Pine Bluff. Reporters and photographers were relegated to the fringes, and there was no visitation; hundreds of local residents who came to pay their last respects to the deceased, once “the most quoted, vilified, idolized and satirized woman in the country,” were kept, on Mitchell’s orders, outside locked doors. Still, zoom lenses captured Mitchell, bookended by Marty and Jay Jennings, strolling somberly past the carnation-covered casket.

  No decent person could look upon Martha’s final days and fail to feel sympathy for her. She died in precisely the way she most feared to live: penniless and alone. There was some evidence she finally recognized how badly she had behaved for so many years. “Martha had a striking change of personality,” McLendon reported. Doctors who’d once found her among the most difficult of patients now pronounced her the most reasonable. “I must have been cuckoo before,” she said upon awakening from one of her surgeries.

  There had been moments of clarity before. Once, at the height of her fame, in 1970, a perceived snub from Pat Nixon’s social secretary sent Martha into one of her rages—then came the tears. “It’s just unbelievable,” she cried to the Washington Post’s Dorothy McCardle. “Somebody should get down and bleed for me. I try so hard.”33

  HANDS OF THE GODS

  God, they’re going to indict a former attorney general of the United States…. What the hell more do they want? You know what they want. They want blood.

  —Richard Nixon, 19731

  ON THE CLOUDY afternoon of October 10, 1973, Spiro T. Agnew, twice elected vice president of the United States, pleaded no contest in a Baltimore federal court to having failed to report $29,500 in taxable income for the year 1967. While governor of Maryland—and as vice president, right up through the preceding January—Agnew had been taking cash payments from local engineering firms in exchange for state contracts, a scheme that netted him roughly $100,000. The judge sentenced Agnew to three years’ probation and a $10,000 fine. At that exact moment, by prior arrangement, Agnew’s terse letter of resignation was hand-delivered to Secretary of State Kissinger. “I hereby resign the Office of Vice President of the United States,” the letter read, “effective immediately.”2

  The vice president’s stunning fall pained Mitchell. He had been instrumental in Agnew’s selection in 1968, and was decisive, four years later, in persuading Nixon to keep him on the GOP ticket. As late as the mid-1980s, Mitchell continued to do business with the disgraced, reclusive figure he affectionately called Ted, and to ask others about him: “Don’t you think he’s a pretty decent guy?”3 Even closer to home, however, the spectacle in Baltimore likely gave Mitchell a glimpse of his own future: Here was the vice president of the United States being treated like a common criminal! Taken on a perp walk! Could Nixon’s former attorney general expect any better?

  It was, perhaps, with such visions in mind that Mitchell, in the summer of 1973, unbeknownst to the press or public, began negotiating a deal of his own. “Mr. Mitchell wants to discuss a plea bargain and cooperation,” his attorney, Hundley, declared at the outset of a secret conversation with WSPF prosecutor James Neal. Astonished and excited, Neal figured Mitchell had finally decided to testify against Nixon. While the existence of Nixon’s tapes had been publicly disclosed, no one outside the White House had heard them yet, and prosecutors worried th
ey might refute the testimony of their star witness, John Dean. A plea from Mitchell would make any case against Nixon easier to prove.

  A formal meeting was set for Mitchell’s suite at the Woodley Park hotel in Washington that August. Neal, a gruff former marine, arrived to find Mitchell calmly sucking on his pipe. They talked for hours, bantering and fencing, comfortable enough to address each other as John and Jim. Neal pointedly reminded Mitchell how Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had jockeyed to make him the fall guy in Watergate: That much had become clear at the Senate hearings. “Well,” Mitchell replied after a few puffs of smoke, “you don’t know everything, Jim.”

  “Mitchell made it abundantly clear,” said Hundley, that “Nixon was the greatest president that ever lived and [that he] knew nothing about him and would never, never ever say anything bad about Nixon because there was never anything bad to be said about him.” Mitchell added: “I would never, ever testify against Haldeman or Ehrlichman.” He knew all about their treachery, but believed implicating Nixon’s top aides was as bad as turning on the president himself. How about Chuck Colson? Neal asked. Now he had struck a nerve. “I would love to give him up,” Mitchell replied. Neal began quizzing Mitchell on specific meetings. Then it suddenly dawned on him: “This man is not prepared to cooperate.”

  Mitchell had come there with the idea that he would accept responsibility for everything, and he would enter a plea to whatever we wanted provided we would give up the pursuit of—he didn’t care about Haldeman or Ehrlichman so much—but we’d give up the pursuit of the president…. We said, “Well, thank you very much. That’s not what we are interested in.”

  “One thing John Mitchell would never be is a fink,” Hundley later said. “He didn’t have a fink bone in his body.” The next time Mitchell saw Neal was in Judge Sirica’s courtroom, at the start of U.S. v. Mitchell.

  Like most of Mitchell’s enemies, Neal secretly liked him. In August 1978 he wrote to the Parole Commission to urge Mitchell’s early release from prison (it was denied). “I was convinced,” Neal wrote, “that his offenses emanated not from an evil soul but from a misguided and foolish loyalty to the president of the United States.”

  Mitchell sparred with Neal at trial, but never took it personally. After the verdict came back, he autographed Neal’s copy of All the President’s Men: “To one of the nicest guys I know unfortunately cast in the wrong spot at the wrong time.”4

  On March 1, 1974—one day after the jury was selected in the Vesco trial—Leon Jaworski, the Houston lawyer appointed special prosecutor after Nixon’s rancorous dismissal of Archibald Cox in the “Saturday Night Massacre” four months earlier, stood in Sirica’s wood-paneled Washington courtroom and announced that the foreman of the grand jury had some material “to be delivered to y’all.” It was a bulging black briefcase containing a fifty-page indictment. U.S. v. Mitchell had finally arrived. “It was a heart-rending moment,” Jaworski later wrote. “I had always liked John Mitchell.”

  That the case bore the name of the former attorney general offered fitting tribute to Mitchell’s special place in the mind and heart of Richard Nixon. Those formally charged included six former White House or CRP officials—Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Strachan, and Mardian—and one other man, Ken Parkinson, the outside counsel retained by CRP after the Democrats filed their civil suit. Mitchell faced six counts of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, false declarations to the FBI and the grand jury, and perjury before the Senate Watergate committee. Of those charged, he was the only former cabinet member; he faced, if convicted on all counts, the harshest possible punishment: thirty years in prison and $42,000 in fines (nearly $175,000 in current figures). “We’re going to fight this all the way,” Hundley told reporters, “and expect to be vindicated in the courts.” Use of the plural—courts—hinted at a fact Hundley confirmed only years later: that Mitchell’s legal strategy conceded conviction at trial and rested entirely on hopes Judge Sirica would make reversible errors.

  Eight days later, a “heavy” phalanx of Metropolitan Police Department officers, the kind of uniformed cops who had cheered Mitchell on when he preached the law-and-order gospel, surrounded him on his walk of shame into the courthouse, where he was soon to enter his plea to a second round of criminal charges and be booked, fingerprinted, and photographed for his mug shot. Roughly 250 protesters came to celebrate. “Rot in jail!” they shouted. “Sieg Heil!”5

  Mitchell’s problems had reached their peak: He was on trial in New York, indicted in Washington, estranged from his wife, responsible for their thirteen-year-old daughter, deep in debt, vilified the world over. Private letters from this time, previously unpublished, captured both Mitchell’s sadness and his determination to preserve—more for the morale of his few remaining friends, it seemed, than for himself—the old veneer of equanimity. Writing in 1973 to his former secretary, Susie Morrison, Mitchell fawned over “the little pigtailed pixie in the picture you sent” and flirted mischievously.

  As for me and my problems, it’s all your fault. If you had not turned me down when I first propositioned you, I would have had entirely different interests and not gone on to the current situation….

  As for the future there is just no way to tell where it is all going to end in this climate. I guess we will just have to wait and see how it comes out. In the meantime, it sure as hell ain’t fun.

  A year later Mitchell wrote again to Morrison, also embroiled in a bitter divorce:

  Your limbo situation is just like mine. All she [Martha] wants to do is cause grief on all sides and will not come to a decision. I do hope I can dispose of the matter soon….

  I’m sure you have been following the Watergate matter in the papers and know it is still up in the air. I really appreciate your offer of help but am not sure you would be safe there with me considering all the circumstances….

  Love ya,

  JNM6

  Following his acquittal in the Vesco case, in April 1974, Mitchell faced still another obstacle before he could stand trial in Watergate: an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee weighing Nixon’s impeachment. James D. St. Clair, the president’s criminal lawyer, had demanded Mitchell’s appearance. For the weary witness the impeachment panel offered at best a tedious replay of the Ervin hearings, at worst another perjury trap.

  On July 5, 1974, after nearly three hours of private questioning by House investigators, Mitchell insisted he would testify publicly only if compelled by legislative subpoena. The committee voted to issue the subpoena. Accordingly the former attorney general appeared before lawmakers in Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building four days later, exactly a year after his showdown with the Senate. Arriving early, he found few members in attendance. Mitchell looked around, one representative recalled, “smiled that thin-lipped smile, and said, ‘I guess I’m not playing to a full House.’”

  A major event for Mitchell in the interval between his Senate and House appearances was his discovery, along with the rest of the country, of Nixon’s taping system. Surely Mitchell shared the angry astonishment that other intimates of Nixon’s, kept in the dark about the surreptitious recording, later described; but Mitchell’s sense of betrayal must have been exceptional. Not only was he Nixon’s closest friend in government—or the closest Nixon came to having one—but the edited transcripts disseminated by the White House, published widely in May 1974, painted a wretched portrait of Nixon scheming with his minions, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean, to make Mitchell the fall guy.

  “You were named as the big enchilada,” representative Wayne Owens declared, with vacuous glee. Congressman Charles Rangel, the gravelly-voiced Harlem Democrat, sought a “better understanding” of the Nixon-Mitchell relationship, particularly as illuminated in the tapes of April 14, 1973: the day Mitchell’s entrapment became priority number one at the White House. “Why is it that in these transcripts it seems as though the president is very anxious for you to plead guilty…that you should be served as an hors d’oeu
vre, to stay away from the main dish?” Rangel asked. “It just seems as though the loyalty that you have expressed…the president and his other people have not expressed that same deep feeling about your involvement, or lack of it. Could you help us out on why this might be?” Mitchell suggested Nixon was “operating on a lot of misinformation,” but added: “I am going to have some interesting reading.”

  After more than a day in the House dock, Mitchell departed through one of the long corridors of the Rayburn Building. “Walking with his lawyers, he simply ignored the press,” one representative observed. “To me it was a terrible shame to see him, a former attorney general of the United States…walking silently down halls where he had once been greeted with high praise and admiration.”7

  Nothing is known about what reaction Mitchell had, if any, to the eerie sight, on August 9, 1974, of Richard Nixon smiling as he boarded Marine One, the first president of the United States to resign, leaving the White House in disgrace with the specter of criminal prosecution hovering over him. Mitchell issued no public comment—save for one small reference, almost an aside, buried in a legal motion his attorneys filed with Judge Sirica on August 12. Seeking a postponement of the cover-up trial, due to pretrial publicity, Mitchell, through his lawyers, argued Nixon’s “forced resignation” had unfairly lent credence to the belief that the ex-president “and his close associates, i.e., Mitchell, were criminal conspirators in Watergate.”