The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  Spearheading the fight against Dean’s nomination was Senator William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat who, as chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, had cultivated a reputation as a leading penny-pincher on behalf of the American taxpayer. In colloquies with Proxmire, Dean had airily dismissed suggestions that developers lobbied her as something that would have been “a tremendous waste of time” on their part, and she declared: “I have never given or approved or pushed or coerced anyone to help any developer.” In the end, the Senate withheld confirmation and Dean was denied the promotion, but the damage to her life and career was to prove far worse.

  Spurred by the Proxmire hearings, HUD’s inspector general launched a probe of the Mod Rehab program. Released in April 1989, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report documented a five-year pattern wherein hundreds of millions of dollars in Mod Rehab funds were allocated “on an informal, undocumented, and discretionary basis.” A follow-up probe by a House subcommittee found “rampant abuse, favoritism, and mismanagement.” From there, the Justice Department took over, and the affair acquired the one appurtenance that, in the post-Watergate era, conferred major status on medium-sized scandals: a special prosecutor.

  Mitchell’s death likely spared him another go-round with the special counsel, but Dean was not so fortunate, and in her thirteen-count federal indictment, issued in July 1992, the man she called “Daddy” appeared as “Unindicted Co-conspirator One.” Nunn and Shelby, who cooperated with the prosecutors, were listed as numbers two and three. The indictment charged Dean with conspiracy to defraud the government, acceptance of illegal bribes (in dealings unrelated to Mitchell), and lying to Congress in her statements to Proxmire.

  In a lengthy interview conducted four months before she was indicted, Dean seemed strangely at a loss in knowing what to believe—or how to feel—about John Mitchell. “What his role was, precisely, is in doubt,” she said. Her one certainty was that Mitchell never divulged to her his financial stake in Mod Rehab funding decisions. “I did not know that John Mitchell had any involvement himself until after he was dead,” she said, adding that he only sought two favors during her tenure at HUD. The first was a routine call seeking information; the second was a request that she write the July 5, 1984, letter to Nunn telling him the Arama project had been approved for funding.

  When the OIG report was released, eight months after Mitchell’s death, Dean was “flabbergasted” to see his name listed as one of the consultants who profited from the Mod Rehab contracting process. “I thought people were lying about John to get me,” she said. Angrily, she telephoned the inspector general’s office and took “strong exception” to the inclusion of Mitchell’s name. “I want to see a copy of the check that Louie Nunn supposedly wrote to John Mitchell!” she demanded. When the agent said he couldn’t produce it, she threatened to hold a press conference, exposing the OIG report as a smear of Mitchell, and hung up. Next she dialed Jack Brennan. “I am furious!” she cried. “I will not allow them to slam John like this!” “And Jack said, ‘Whoa, little Debbie [laughs], whoa!’ He said, ‘You may not want to do that. Because John did have some dealings with HUD; they just weren’t with you.’ And I said, ‘What?!’ And he said, ‘Well, how much detail do you want me to go into?’ And at that point I decided that what I did not know was my defense.”

  Dean’s case, described by the New York Times as “an illustration of the ways of power in Washington,” took five weeks to try. If convicted, she faced up to sixty-two years in prison and fines totaling $3.2 million. She spent six days on the stand, trying to persuade the jury that despite her closeness to Mitchell, her powerful position at HUD, and the consulting fees he earned from the agency’s decisions, the two never discussed the projects in which he had a financial interest—the very convergence of events that, a year and a half earlier, she had conceded to an interviewer would not “sound believable.” Prosecutor Robert O’Neill hammered her mercilessly, waving the “Daddy” notes in her face and denouncing her to the jury. “Her six days of testimony is worth nothing,” O’Neill said. “You can throw it out the window into a garbage pail for what it’s worth.”

  The jury convicted Dean on all counts. Yet her legal odyssey had only just begun. At sentencing, in February 1994, she stopped short of acknowledging guilt, but, in a letter read aloud in open court by Judge Thomas F. Hogan, she said she “mourn[ed] the fact that this case has cast dishonor on myself, my family, and a department whose mission I heartily admire.” As for “Daddy,” she said, “I should not have entertained any inquiries from John N. Mitchell on any HUD matter.” Judge Hogan sentenced her to twenty-one months in prison and fined her $5,000—only slightly more than what she was convicted of accepting in illegal gratuities. The special prosecutor denounced the sentence as “far too lenient.”

  Two years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals threw out five of Dean’s convictions while affirming the other seven (one count had already been dismissed). Unbowed, Dean appealed her convictions to the Supreme Court, where she also lost. To pay her legal bills, which exceeded $750,000, she went into the antiques business, at first selling off pieces handed down by her mother. But she never served time. Instead, she spent six months under house arrest in 2002, during which time she was permitted to report to her Georgetown shop and make buying trips to New York.

  Mitchell died before the OIG report was released, before his name surfaced publicly in the HUD scandal, and before the Justice Department commenced the longest-running independent counsel’s investigation in American history. He never had a chance to defend himself, against charges real (“Unindicted Co-conspirator One”) or imagined (“knowingly profited from poverty,” cried the Washington Post’s Haynes Johnson). And there was good reason to believe that “the weight of the malice” that reduced Debbie Dean to tears was really directed, all along, at the former attorney general, for the special prosecutor in the case was Judge Arlin M. Adams, a patrician Philadelphia lawyer appointed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals by President Nixon in October 1969.

  Adams had clashed with Mitchell at the 1968 Republican convention, when the Pennsylvania politico defected to Rockefeller’s camp, a betrayal that earned him a tongue-lashing from Mitchell he never forgot. In addition, Adams blamed Attorney General Mitchell for blocking his ascension to the Supreme Court. In 1990—while he was serving as independent counsel in the HUD probe and Deborah Gore Dean was under investigation, soon to be indicted—Adams told USA Today he “might have been a Supreme Court justice…if I hadn’t offended John Mitchell.” Naturally, Adams denied any animosity toward either Mitchell or Dean, but seldom has there been a more glaring case of a prosecutor harboring a conflict of interest.

  The woman Mitchell considered his daughter carried the burden of that conflict, residue from the Nixon years, well into the twenty-first century, but this was not entirely unanticipated. “Mere mention of John’s name…just starts all sorts of things happening,” she realized after she saw Mitchell cited in the OIG report. “There are just certain names that people react to, and John has one of those names. And it really frightened me.”7

  EPILOGUE

  Everyone assumes I know the whole Mitchell story, but no one knows the whole Mitchell story.

  —William Hundley, 19851

  DOGGED BY HEALTH problems in his final years—including a mild stroke he suffered overseas, and concealed from intimates—Mitchell still followed politics, but from above the fray. He watched the Iran-Contra scandal unfold with a sense of déjà vu, bemused both by Len Garment’s reemergence as the lawyer representing former national security adviser Robert McFarlane (“a pretty heady little character” with “a hell of an ego”) and by the star turn of Oliver North’s bombshell secretary, Fawn Hall (“the current Mata Hari”). He worried President Reagan was verging “pretty close” to a replay of Nixon’s fate.

  As a former campaign manager, Mitchell took special delight in the 1988 presidential election. He recoiled when Vice Pre
sident Bush chose Dan Quayle, an inarticulate, largely unknown senator from Indiana, as his running mate, and savored the moment when Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, looking to burnish his military credentials, donned an oversized helmet and clambered incongruously atop a tank. “I swear you couldn’t tell him from Mickey Mouse!” Mitchell chuckled.

  Shortly before 5:00 p.m. on November 9, 1988, with Bush’s electoral triumph not yet twenty-four hours old, Mitchell was walking home from his meager Global Research office in Georgetown when he suddenly collapsed on the sidewalk outside 2812 N Street. He had been through a lot in his seventy-five years, including the unnerving sight, just four days earlier, of federal agents grilling Debbie Dean about activities he had deliberately concealed from her.

  As he plodded along N Street, a nine-year-old skateboarder rolled past him, taking note of the man’s “nice suit” and bald head. Then the youngster heard “an audible thump” over his shoulder, and wheeled around to see the older man’s body splayed across the sidewalk, his head resting on the root of a tree. Panicked, the child ran to his house and called for an ambulance. Two passersby immediately recognized the stricken man and attempted to rouse him. “Come on, Mr. Mitchell!” they shouted. One man started performing CPR.

  Paramedics briefly restored Mitchell’s heartbeat and blood pressure, but he stopped breathing during the three-minute ambulance ride to George Washington University Hospital and never recovered. The strong man had succumbed to a massive heart attack and was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m.

  The networks all carried the news instantly. (ABC News’ Peter Jennings committed the very first biographical error, erroneously describing Mitchell as “attorney general during the Watergate scandal” in fact, he’d left office almost four months before the famous arrests.) In a surprisingly compassionate editorial, the New York Times mourned the death of this “complex, taciturn man” who, though “bright, charming and not personally ambitious,” had “sadly…made himself a monument to unquestioning loyalty and corrosive suspicion.” Early editions of the Washington Post carried a paragraph in Lawrence Meyer’s obituary that read:

  He was the ultimate Nixon loyalist. Unlike some of his codefendants, Mitchell wrote no memoir, no kiss-and-tell insider report, no novelized version of his time in Washington. He lived according to his own code and to the end of his Watergate ordeal, he was a stand-up guy.

  Later editions omitted the heretical words of praise. For comment, the Post turned, of all people, to Jeb Magruder, who sent Mitchell to prison with false testimony, but now remembered him “a mentor, almost like a father,” and Bob Woodward, another tormentor who wrongly surmised “what few secrets of the Nixon administration that may still remain went with him.”

  The funeral service, held at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Washington, was a bittersweet reunion of aging White House and Justice Department colleagues. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger stayed away, as did William Rehnquist. But Dick Kleindienst, Bob Mardian, and Fred LaRue were there, along with Bill Safire, Len Garment, Rose Woods, Ron Ziegler, Dwight Chapin, Jerris Leonard, and Don Santarelli. Last but not least, seen escorting Mary Gore Dean to her seat in the front pew, was the man Mitchell still referred to as “the president.” Now seventy-five and basking in the glow of a surprisingly successful rehabilitation campaign—“He’s Back!” Newsweek trumpeted on a 1986 cover—the ex-president had no words for the mourners or press, kind or otherwise, about his most loyal friend. Mingling inside the vestibule at St. Alban’s, he could only be heard to say, in his oddly disembodied way: “He was a friend of ours.”

  Dick Moore, a friend since their hockey days in 1930, delivered the eulogy. “He was the strongest man I ever knew,” Moore said. “It has been said that you can judge a man by the friends he makes—and keeps. By that test John Mitchell was a giant. He made good friends in every phase of his life, in his every field of endeavor…indeed, in every one of the fifty states…. It is no exaggeration to say that every friend John Mitchell made throughout his lifetime was still his friend the day he died.”

  It is hard to imagine a more significant testimonial but it is easy to understand. After all, those of us who really knew John Mitchell knew that what he went through was the most unfair, cruel treatment of a public figure in the life of this cynical city. But the restraint, the grace, the courage with which John Mitchell faced his ordeal made the bond of friendship—and love—even stronger.

  Moore said he had tried to think of the phrase that best described his departed friend, and finally found it in—of all places—the Washington Post. It was the very phrase the paper’s editors had cut from their late editions. “John Mitchell was a stand-up guy,” Moore said. “To Mary and to John’s family, I say this: You will find lasting comfort in the sure knowledge that this stand-up guy loved you.”2

  Was there something in the way Attorney General Mitchell exercised power that foreordained his fall? Or was Mitchell’s disgrace the result of a fundamental flaw in the man’s character, an inescapable consequence that would have obtained had he never held high office at all? Or was he simply a victim of others’ malfeasance?

  Such questions inevitably resurrect old debates, timeless and irresoluble, about the relative impact of historical forces and great men; but those interested in Mitchell’s case—and all who consider America a nation of laws should consider his the ultimate cautionary tale—must keep uppermost in mind the vilified figure’s own enduring words: “You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say.”

  One of the central ironies of the Watergate era—a recognizable product, with its IBM management ethos, omniscient, voice-activated recording machines, and televised dénouement, of the Information Age—was John Mitchell’s collusion in a public image so starkly at odds with his real personality. Eulogizing the former attorney general in the New York Times, William Safire noted the “abyss” between man and persona. “Dour, stern, taciturn, forbidding on the outside, and warm, loyal, staunch, steadfast on the inside,” Safire wrote. “Few public men have so deliberately cultivated the widespread misconceptions of themselves.” This schism persisted through Watergate, the seismic scandal in which Mitchell, the advocate of expanded wiretapping powers who bore no responsibility for the bugging in question, was falsely cast as its most culpable figure.

  His conviction was heralded as a solemn reminder of the supremacy of law and “the price of arrogance,” as the New York Times put it in 1975. Yet Mitchell, according to those who knew and worked with him, never wielded power in arrogant fashion. Unlike Bobby Kennedy, Mitchell chose the attorney general’s small cubbyhole office in the Department of Justice, not the grand ceremonial room, as his working quarters. He communicated his thoughts orally and committed little to paper not because he feared self-incrimination, but because Mitchell, unlike Nixon, eschewed self-aggrandizement and knew the best way to achieve results was through the cultivation of people, not of ideas through memoranda.

  “The John Mitchell I know is far different from the man the public perceives,” John Dean remarked in 1977. “I don’t look upon Mitchell as being the sinister force…. I saw him more as a restraining influence on Nixon and some of the people in the Nixon White House.” Indeed, stories of Mitchell abusing his personal power—using it spitefully or punitively, throwing his weight around, demeaning subordinates—were rare, and invariably involved upstart junior types envious of Mitchell’s power and determined to usurp it for themselves.

  Mitchell used his power to advance the greater good, which he happened to see as indistinguishable from the fortunes of Richard Nixon. One Friday afternoon in October 1970, the attorney general was hosting a luncheon at the Department of Justice, seated at the head of a long table, when an aide brought a note that made him scowl. “Who gave her a visa?” he growled. The State Department, the aide said. The woman in question was Mrs. Nguyen Cao Ky, wife of South Vietnam’s vice president, then en route to an antiwar rally on the National Mall. Support for “the Movemen
t” from so prominent a citizen of the very country the United States was spilling blood and treasure to defend was simply unacceptable. “Where is she now?” Mitchell asked. Over the Atlantic. “Can we have the plane land in Boston?” Mitchell asked. What reason could the pilots give for the diversion? “I don’t know,” Mitchell blurted out, “quarantine, epidemic, anything! I don’t care!” The next morning, local news radio reported a commercial airliner carrying the wife of South Vietnam’s vice president had developed engine trouble and turned back for an emergency landing. Mrs. Ky never made it to the rally.

  On those occasions when he saw Nixon’s dark impulses threatening the national interest, Mitchell, to his everlasting credit, repeatedly intervened on behalf of the republic. He did nothing, for example, when the president, as captured in previously unpublished notes, issued this order a few months before the midterm elections of 1970:

  Mitchell—no prosecutions whatever re Mafia or any Italians until Nov.

  Mitchell was one of the few men, perhaps the only one, who had the standing and guts to tell the president he was wrong. This happened in the ITT case, when Nixon ordered the Justice Department to drop its appeal of a court decision favorable to the conglomerate and demanded the immediate firing of Richard McLaren, the intractable chief of the antitrust division. It happened again in the Moorer-Radford affair, when Nixon, more justifiably, wanted to prosecute the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top uniformed military commander, for espionage; it was Mitchell who dissuaded the president from this course of action, which would have done incalculable damage to the nation and its armed forces. Mitchell’s appeals on such occasions may have been couched in the language of raw political calculus, not on the basis of good governance, but Mitchell knew his man and served the greater good with the approach most likely to steer Nixon on the responsible path.