by James Rosen
AG is running this—
we thk this bass ackwards
[to] let them out & disrupt traffic
would reverse policy P. & AG worked out
A mid-afternoon meeting in the attorney general’s office between Mitchell and Ehrlichman failed to resolve their dispute. Confronted with the clash of opinions, Nixon backed Mitchell, as Haldeman’s notes confirmed.
His own feeling is that he believes
let them out & [let them] raise a little hell today
may temper off tomorrow
doesn’t want [pictures on the] evening news of 5,000 in a cage
better to have trashing etc
pic. on evening news is critical
At 10:00 a.m., Mitchell emerged, like Caesar at Gaul, to declare victory. “The city is open,” he announced to newsmen, “the traffic is flowing, the government is functioning.” Rennie Davis conceded defeat at his own news conference, shortly before his arrest on conspiracy charges.66
But the action wasn’t over yet. The following afternoon, May 4, another two thousand die-hards converged on Justice. The issue was no longer the war, clearly, but John Mitchell. “Power to the people!” the youths chanted. “Off the pigs!” The cops moved in once more, this time methodically filling out arrest forms. The protesters, seemingly “broken in strength and spirit,” went quietly, with outbreaks of fighting infrequent. In all, two thousand people were arrested, right under the aquiline nose of the attorney general. For as in the siege of 1969, Mitchell stepped out onto his fifth-floor balcony to survey the scene. It was his last look at the New Left, a kind of “youth culture carnival.” The Washington Evening Star published a photograph on its front page showing Mitchell, pipe in mouth, taking it all in calmly, “looking for all the world like Stalin” to the weary protesters beneath him. Mitchell watched intently as FBI agents, squawking into walkie-talkies, closed in on John Froines, the former chemistry professor and acquitted Chicago Seven defendant, haranguing the crowd and wanted on charges similar to Davis’s. “We have him! We have him!” the agents cried, as Mitchell looked on.67
More than 12,000 Americans, “generally young [and] white,” were arrested over May Day’s seventy-two hours. More than 7,000 were detained on Monday alone, and 70 percent of those individuals were released by noon the next day; by Tuesday night, the 500 still in custody were those who refused to be fingerprinted and photographed. Most of the criminal charges stemming from the action were dropped. The nation’s capital stayed open, the war continued. The protesters had been soundly defeated, without a single shot fired. Little wonder the Yippies later declared the movement “lost the revolution at May Day.”68
Mitchell wanted all of America to know who won and who lost. Speaking a week later to the California Peace Officers’ Association, following a warm introduction by Governor Ronald Reagan, the attorney general urged local police to emulate the “decisive opposition to mob rule” that capital authorities had shown. It had been two years since May Day 1969, when Mitchell famously declared an end to patience with student rioters; now the “high tide” of violence as an instrument of social protest had passed. Mitchell said the May Day militants reminded him of “another group of civilians who roamed the streets of Germany in the 1920s, bullying people, shouting down those who disagreed with them, and denying other people their civil rights. They were called Hitler’s Brown Shirts.”
Polls showed 71 percent of Americans disapproved of the May Day action, with 76 percent regarding the mass arrests as justified. The Washington Evening Star editorialized that the “willfully lawless mob” had been “dealt with appropriately and effectively.” The symbolism was unmistakable: The attorney general had succeeded in removing the badge of “fascist” from the forces of law and order, where it had resided since the heady days of Berkeley and Columbia, and stuck it on the protesters. The left turned purple; the sixties had been stood on their head.69
For his bloody victories over the movement—the Days of Rage, the New Mobe, Kent State, May Day—John Mitchell was never forgiven. When the tables turned, and the former attorney general found himself transformed, unthinkably yet unmistakably, into an American outlaw, a target of Justice hunted as vigorously as the most radical Weatherman, no one took greater pleasure than the revolutionaries Mitchell had so thoroughly vanquished.
As late as April 1973, with the “Radical Chic” of the sixties long supplanted by the self-absorption of the “Me Decade,” as Tom Wolfe observed, five hundred die-hard Yippies staged one last march on the Mitchell home, no longer the Watergate but a grand apartment building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. “Free Martha Mitchell!” they chanted. “Fuck John!” When the Mitchells finally appeared at the window to see what all the commotion was about, the stoners cherished their last “eye-to-eyeball confrontation with Mr. Law ’n’ Order.” To commemorate the moment, they placed a giant marijuana joint on the Mitchells’ doorstep.
Mitchell’s ruin in scandal brought joy to the hippies and radicals who once dreaded him. “It took six years, but as we watched the daily Watergate soap opera, watched Mitchell shatter,” wrote Yipsters Dana Beal and Steve Conliff, “the busts and beatings and bummers and burns all started to feel worthwhile…. Mitchell became the first attorney general ever to be sent to prison. The biggest joke of the Seventies was the persecutors turned out to be the criminals.” Timothy Leary, the LSD guru imprisoned on a marijuana conviction in 1970, shared in the elation: “I watched my federal pursuers join me—the attorney general, John Mitchell.”
Other radicals savored not merely the personal irony in Mitchell’s incarceration, but cosmic validation of the movement itself. Rennie Davis, the May Day impresario, felt Mitchell’s going to prison represented “the inevitable outcome” of the sixties. “The attempt to suppress, close down, jail, imprison, vilify, [and] curse had its ultimate salvation in Mitchell having to face what he had to face,” said Davis. “It just seemed like a completion to a long process to take a stand for this country, its democracy, its openness, its stability for democratic institutions.” William Ayers, unrepentant founder of the Weather Underground, struggled to put into words the euphoria he felt upon seeing Mitchell imprisoned. “Such a wonderful—such a wonderful vindication,” he said. “It was a feeling of tremendous justice. I mean, what could be more just than John Mitchell, the chief law officer and also the chief lawbreaker, being sent to jail?”
Mark Rudd, the SDS leader and Weatherman revolutionary who led the seizure of Columbia in 1968, regarded Mitchell as “a Wall Street Nazi” and savored his incarceration—but only briefly. “I was ecstatic!” Rudd remembered. “I was thrilled. It seemed almost as if the revolution had won—although I knew it hadn’t.”70
THE COMEDOWN
Mrs. Mitchell commented that she might need an agent to accompany her full time to protect her from the press…. She was advised that she could easily avoid the press by simply stating, “No comment” to their inquiries. She indicated she could not do this.
—Assistant FBI Director J. P. Mohr, 19691
FOR THE MITCHELLS, Washington had been a mixed blessing. The attorney general had tasted all the benefits that high-level service to the nation can offer: instant access to the president of the United States; substantive, even decisive, influence over federal policy, across the broadest spectrum of issues; ’round-the-clock transportation and protection, for him and his family, by the FBI; nationwide notoriety and its attendant perks; and interaction with highly accomplished people in and out of government.
But as the most talked-about cabinet couple soon discovered, good things in Washington tend to come at a steep price. Instant access to the president, in this case, also meant constant accountability to him, and Nixon was an exceptionally needy client: consumed by politics, disdainful of leisure pursuits, personally insecure, and restless at odd hours. The constant presence of their FBI escorts was, unbeknownst to the Mitchells, a vehicle for J. Edgar Hoover to spy on them, their every word in the agents’ presence transmitted directly to
the devious and manipulative director. Fame brought the need for physical protection; and the Mitchells’ hectic schedules cut into the time they could spend, in lieu of nannies and aides doubling as nannies, with young Marty.
November 1969 saw Mitchell’s clout in the capital at its apex. Within the preceding five months, the attorney general had muscled Abe Fortas into resigning from the Supreme Court, by quietly supplying evidence of Fortas’s financial improprieties to Chief Justice Earl Warren, himself soon to retire; had stage-managed the swift Senate confirmation of Warren Burger to replace the chief; and had faced down the Yippies, Mad Dogs, and Weathermen from his balcony at Justice. That fall Mitchell appeared on the cover of Newsweek atop the headline: “Mr. Law and Order.”2
But what the media build up, they delight in tearing down. Five days after the New Mobe left town, the Senate rejected Nixon’s next Supreme Court nominee, Clement Haynsworth, an exceptionally fine man and brilliant jurist sacrificed, by Senate Democrats, as payback for what Mitchell had done to Fortas. And in April 1970, the Senate voted down G. Harrold Carswell, the administration’s second choice to fill the Fortas vacancy; a “mediocrity” with a racist past, Carswell, as even Nixon admitted (to David Frost in 1977), never deserved nomination to the nation’s highest court.3
With these defeats, Mitchell’s reputation took a beating. The headlines were grim: “Disenchantment over Mitchell Grows in Ranks of Republicans” “Mitchell Has Not Mastered His Job, Republican Senators Now Believe.” “Mitchell’s days of glory are really ending; the handwriting is becoming visible on the wall,” reported Evans and Novak. The National Observer agreed: “Except for a handful—mostly Southerners—who still see Mr. Mitchell as a political asset, congressional Republicans believe Mr. Nixon’s close friend and political confidant has become an unnecessary burden both to the party and the president.” Life magazine, in a rare editorial, demanded he resign. “In this capital,” the Washington Post observed, “the obvious possession of great power by any man nearly always generates a counter reaction…a drive by other men to bring him down.” Now it was Mitchell’s turn: “Senators are grumbling, pundits are moving to the attack, and some of the critics believe they smell blood for the first time.”4
Dissatisfaction with Mitchell was also acute at the White House. “P concludes principal fault is Mitchell’s,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. “I think probably the rejection of both Haynsworth and Carswell did hurt Mitchell with the president,” agreed William Rehnquist. Most vocal in this view was the attorney general’s prime antagonist in the administration, John Ehrlichman. “[Mitchell’s] influence was much stronger at the beginning than it was toward the end,” Ehrlichman recalled in 1992. “In fact, after the Haynsworth and Carswell debacle, I would say his influence was pretty nearly zero.” Yet Ehrlichman’s dire assessment was not universally shared. “I don’t think that’s true,” responded Henry Kissinger. “I couldn’t tell that.” Similarly, Haldeman, who spent more time with Nixon than any other aide, recognized that the defeats of Haynsworth and Carswell, while ascribed in the president’s mind principally to Mitchell, did not cause a complete loss of confidence. “I would say that Ehrlichman was more dissatisfied with Mitchell’s performance as attorney general than the president was,” Haldeman said.5
Indeed, as Haldeman’s previously unpublished notes show, Nixon responded to the attacks on his embattled attorney general by ordering the White House PR apparatchiks—speechwriter Pat Buchanan, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, and Communications Director Herb Klein—to make sure Mitchell was seen and photographed sitting next to the president in the stands at a football game, a gesture intended as the kickoff in a concerted campaign to restore the old Mitchell mystique.
Major speech for Mitchell…
Buchanan write it
Z[iegler] announce as major admin. stmt.
Klein take him on as major project
+ get him a new PR man at Justice
A reporter who interviewed Mitchell in late April 1970, when the criticism was reaching its crescendo, found him absorbing it all “without anger or embarrassment…full of certitude about himself and the world as he knows it.” But the new atmosphere in the capital, vicious and unsparing, was not without its effect. These were the days when the attorney general was most apt to puff on his pipe and remind visitors that he never really wanted the job in the first place. “I’d much rather practice law,” he grumbled.6
Then there was Martha, who had begun to attract media attention of a kind never before accorded a cabinet wife. The first break in the dam was her interview on CBS Morning News shortly after the New Mobe protests. Although Martha had observed little of the sporadically violent demonstrations, she freely volunteered the attorney general’s opinion of them. “My husband made the comment to me,” she told Marya McLaughlin, “looking out the Justice Department it looked like the Russian revolution going on. As my husband has said many times, some of the liberals in this country, he’d like to take them and change them for the Russian Communists.”7
What was this? the Washington press corps wondered. A new species! The cabinet wife who blabs her husband’s private thoughts! Hordes of reporters began flocking to the Watergate East, eager to exploit the new source of snappy comment inside an administration once derided as “twelve gray-haired guys named George.” Others took cheap shots from their desks. “To some of us,” opined the New York Post’s “ladies” columnist, Harriet Van Horne, Martha’s “tirade on CBS…sounded like an old strip of film from the white Citizens’ Council of Birmingham.”
Like George Wallace, Mrs. Mitchell has a ready-made constituency in this country. To rally that constituency one needs only to articulate the meanest prejudices of the most confused, embittered people. That such people are out there—anxious, troubled, sick of the war, of protesters, of taxes—is part of our national shame.
Such criticism forced the attorney general, not for the last time, into the delicate contortion of disavowing his wife’s remarks without appearing to disavow his wife. Lamely, Mitchell contended Martha had used the term “so-called liberals”—never mind that her interview was captured on film. “If you will transpose the word ‘liberal’ into ‘violence-prone militant radicals,’ I would be delighted to change them for some of the academically inclined Marxist Communists,” Mitchell continued. “I’d trade for the academic Marxists two-for-one, because they don’t necessarily advocate violence.”8
The stampede on the Mitchells’ apartment only made things worse, for Martha seldom thought before she spoke, and the times were volatile. “Anytime you get somebody marching in the streets,” she told Time, “it’s catering to revolution…. My family worked for everything. We even had a deed from the King of England for property in South Carolina. Now these jerks come along and try to give it to the Communists.” She also lamented the “comedown” her husband’s government service had imposed on the Mitchells. “We’re not living on the same means that we had in Rye,” she complained. “I had to sell my stock, and now we are having to dip into the till. I think the government should give us free housing.”
Taxpayers could be forgiven for believing otherwise—especially after Women’s Wear Daily reported that Martha needed four closets to house her clothes: one for “afternoon and short cocktail things,” another for handbags and shoes, another for fur coats. America now had its own media-age Marie Antoinette, a bouffant blonde in a Southern accent and sling-backed stilettos, perched above the Potomac in her Watergate condo, dispensing disdain on opponents of a deeply divisive war fought mainly by boys from the lower classes.9
Mitchell tried to skate through the commotion by affecting an air of imperturbability. “Anything my wife does is fine with me,” he would say. But official Washington was unimpressed. “Wives, all politically knowledgeable,” wrote one political reporter, “were particularly affronted by the amateurishness of Mrs. Mitchell’s performance.”10
So was Richard Nixon—but for now, the president kept his peace. He ex
pressed anger not at Martha’s outspokenness but at press accounts attributing anger to him. After the CBS Morning News fiasco, he dictated two memoranda to Haldeman to ensure Mitchell did not think the president had been trashing the attorney general’s wife. “Be sure you let John Mitchell know that I have never expressed any criticism of Mrs. Mitchell to members of the staff. When I have such criticisms, I will tell him before I tell anybody else!” Later that day, Nixon told Haldeman he had heard criticism of Mrs. Mitchell from “within the staff and among some Cabinet people.” The fault lay not with Martha or CBS, Nixon said, but with the Mitchells’ advisers.
What followed was a primer, Nixon’s four “fundamental principles” of press relations: “a great majority” of reporters opposed his administration; even friendly reporters prized the story above all else; it was, therefore, “vital always to be on guard” with reporters; and interviewees should never tape more exchanges than the reporter will use. Nixon noted that Martha had answered eighty-three questions from Marya McLaughlin. Cabinet wives like Martha must grasp these rules, and “If they are not bright enough to understand it, then that’s just too bad.” To Martha herself, whom Nixon knew to be unstable, he sent only a gracious note betraying none of his displeasure.
Dear Martha,
Don’t let the critics get you down—Just remember they are not after you—or John—but me—I appreciate deeply the loyalty and courage you and John have consistently demonstrated. We’ll come out on top in the end.
RN
Still, for this outburst of indiscretion, the president quietly imposed one penalty on Martha: He terminated her office privileges at the Department of Justice building.11
