The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  Recognizing a cash cow when they saw one, the media began feeding the country a daily diet of Martha Mitchell. Seldom was the product healthy for the Nixon administration. Word now surfaced that during the Haynsworth battle she had brazenly called several senators’ wives, crudely lobbying for their husbands’ votes. Betty Fulbright, wife of Democrat J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, Martha’s home state, reported that Mrs. Mitchell, threatening to campaign against her husband, had used “vile and nasty” language. The attorney general’s wife exercised none of the restraint Nixon counseled. Instead, she donned outfits so licentious her husband, walking in on one of her interviews, wondered aloud if she was wearing her nightgown.12

  And she failed, time after time, to hold her liquor. Once, the Mitchells were invited to hear General Lew Walt, commander of the Third Marine Amphibious Force and freshly returned from Saigon, address a small group of administration officials and their wives at dinner. Halfway through the evening, with Lew in mid-sentence, Martha suddenly burst into tears, wailing about how sad the war was and how the United States had no business being in Vietnam. “A pained and embarrassed hush fell over the dinner table,” an eyewitness later wrote, “broken only by the awkward sounds of another guest who was sitting next to Martha trying to soothe her.” Seconds later, the attorney general had Martha on her feet and out the door, “much as a long-suffering parent comes to soothe a troublesome child.” “She’s had a long day,” the attorney general apologized.

  On another occasion, Martha ruined an evening at their neighbor’s apartment by quarreling with her husband in front of their host, who never forgot the incident.

  Martha suddenly threatened to throw her shoe across the room at her husband. “Just you try,” was Mitchell’s tired response. With one swift motion, Martha reached down, pulled one spike-heeled, sling-back shoe off her foot, and hurled it at Mitchell who, either from frequent practice or excellent reflexes, neatly ducked the flying object.

  But war had been declared, and Mitchell rose from his chair, shoe in hand, hovering over his wife, and said, “It’s time to go home.” Martha looked down at her other shoe and began to rub it. “I don’t want to go home,” she said, in a flat sort of voice, but it was not a serious challenge, and after a few seconds, she got up to leave.

  At another dinner party, Martha found herself seated beside Senator Charles Percy, the centrist Illinois Republican who had voted against Haynsworth and Carswell. “It’s liberals like you who are selling this nation down the river to the Communists,” she barked. Percy stormed off “muttering to himself all the things he would like to have said to Mrs. Mitchell.” Looking on, the attorney general only smiled broadly. Ugly as it was, the Percy incident was but mere prelude to a far more damaging episode.13

  Had Mitchell stayed in New York, practicing law, his wife’s antics would have remained their private shame. But when the wife of the most powerful man in the cabinet telephoned reporters in the year 1970—late at night, drenched in whiskey, spitting venom—it made headlines. Shortly after 2:00 a.m. on April 10, less than forty-eight hours after the defeat of Carswell, Mrs. Mitchell quietly slipped out of the bed she shared with her husband, downed a few shots, and snuck into their master bath. There she picked up the lime green telephone receiver mounted on the wall, and, over the next hour, placed three rambling calls to the Arkansas Gazette, which recorded some of the discussion. Once again Martha directed her anger at Senator J. William Fulbright, who had voted against Carswell. “I want you to crucify Fulbright and that’s it!” she ranted into the receiver. She said the senator “makes me so damn mad I can’t stand it…. Mr. Fulbright does not represent the state. He is not representing the people of Arkansas.”

  A few hours later, after Martha had returned to bed, the attorney general woke up, turned on the radio, and heard the sound of his world turning upside down. An aide to Mitchell later recalled: “He was up-set!” Call the Arkansas Gazette and find out what the hell happened, Mitchell barked. In the meantime, Mitchell’s phones were ringing off the hook. What comment do you have on Mrs. Mitchell’s remarks? “I love her, that’s all I have to say,” Mitchell said curtly. Do you, too, want to see Senator Fulbright crucified? “I just laughed and laughed and laughed,” Mitchell demurred, again seeking shelter behind a façade of patriarchal bemusement. Later he said he’d prefer if his wife spoke thereafter in Swahili. Were you asleep when Mrs. Mitchell made the calls? “I am always asleep,” Mitchell cracked. Pressed still further, the attorney general finally pleaded impotence. “What else can I do, but let her speak? She has no inclination to be quiet. She’s not politically motivated; she’s just saying what she feels.” Are your wife’s comments causing you problems at the White House? “Nobody around here tries to throttle her,” Mitchell said.14

  This was, as Mitchell knew, wishful thinking. Richard Nixon was more than ready to throttle Martha Mitchell and had already begun plotting who, with her husband incapable or unwilling, could best handle the job. Nixon saw that the press swarmed to Martha because it could profit politically and financially from her indiscretion. Reporters and editors, in turn, knew that the free-spirited, often belligerent tone of Martha’s public comments, even when offered in support of the administration, neatly undermined the buttoned-down image Nixon and his aides strove to project and the policies they aimed to advance. Haldeman’s previously unpublished notes, taken the day after the Fulbright eruption, captured Nixon’s mood: “We have to turn off Martha.”15

  In public, Mitchell portrayed his boss as delighted. Dining at the Rive Gauche, then Washington’s most fashionable restaurant, Mitchell told friends that whenever the president wanted to say something important, he reached for the phone and asked: “Now just how would you put it, Martha?” Once the after-dinner bonhomie was over, however, Mitchell grasped the growing danger, both to the administration and his own standing within it. The day after the Gazette story ran, Mitchell hired Kay Woestendiek, a former “women’s editor” at the Houston Post, as a press secretary for Martha—another dubious first for a cabinet wife—to handle the fifty interview requests piling up each day.16

  More than four hundred letters descended daily on the Mitchells’ Watergate apartment, including a fair number from Americans who urged the attorney general’s wife to “shut your big fascist mouth.” But Martha, unable to distinguish between good and bad publicity, relished the attention. “I think I’m going to join the Women’s Liberation Movement!” she declared two days after the crucifixion controversy. The weeks that followed saw Martha recounting her old opposition to Brown v. Board of Education (“Are you going to be prejudiced against me because my grandparents had slaves?”); pronouncing herself “awfully sick” of the Vietnam War; and confiding her secret support for the opposition party. Appearing on 60 Minutes in May 1970, Martha smilingly confided to CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace: “I love the Democrats.”17

  Nixon was beside himself. Haldeman’s unpublished notes, scribbled the day Martha’s comments about joining the women’s liberation movement hit newsstands, show the president casting about for ways to stop this uncontrollable force that now appeared, suddenly yet unmistakably, a threat to his presidency. “Some concern about Mitchell, and especially what can be done about Martha,” recorded Haldeman in his diary. The unpublished notes on which Haldeman based this entry were even blunter. Nixon vacillated between confronting his heavyweight himself and enlisting others: Dick Kleindienst; Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, a personal friend of the president and Mitchell’s; or Dick Moore, Mitchell’s high school chum, now a counselor at Justice.

  Moore—explain to MM press lady

  MM shld have no interviews w/ press

  she must realize all press are her enemies

  they’ll all chop her….

  [Ask] Kldst in confidence—

  what shld be done re MM?

  Bebe take on frontally?

  P. take M[itchell] on directly?18

  For Nixon, who abhorred personal confrontations and
invariably swallowed his bravado in them, such an encounter with his indispensable, steely-eyed strong man was unthinkable. It would not be the last time Nixon recoiled from the necessary task of summoning Mitchell to the Oval Office and urging self-sacrifice. So, two days later, Nixon returned to the idea of an emissary: “Someone has to talk to John.” Yet no one did, it seems, and the president’s anger boiled over when he saw the attorney general’s wife making merry with Mike Wallace—a scene, to Nixon, akin to a lion toying with a dull-witted mouse. Had no one read his primer? Didn’t anyone get it? “Did Moore put Martha on TV?” Nixon demanded of Haldeman. “Why?” Haldeman’s notes capture Nixon at a breaking point, ready to part with his consigliere if the fee for his services included his wife’s indiscretions. As the president bluntly told his chief of staff: “Mitchell goes—if Martha doesn’t.”19

  WATCH WHAT WE DO

  What we’re dealing with is desegregation, not integration. It’s desegregation. It’s an entirely different concept, but it has to be right. It’s the difference between governmental action and an open and free society.

  —John Mitchell, 19701

  IN FEBRUARY 1968, as Nixon prepared to launch his presidential campaign, CBS newsman Mike Wallace thought it strange he had not yet met the man widely known to be running it. “Hey,” Wallace asked his former CBS colleague Frank Shakespeare, then handling Nixon’s press, “isn’t it about time that I met John Mitchell?” A few days later, Shakespeare invited Wallace to an off-the-record lunch at New York’s posh 21 Club.

  As the men took their seats, Wallace mischievously asked if Nixon planned to address the same group of black publishers Hubert Humphrey recently had. Mitchell’s answer startled the newsman: “I don’t want Dick to go over there. You can buy those monkeys, anyway.” “Frank Shakespeare turned pale and I could see him kick Mitchell under the table,” Wallace wrote in 1984. “They quickly shifted to another subject.” If the incident bespeaks racial bigotry in Mitchell, it is not the final word on the subject. The New York Times reported in the summer of 1969 that although Mitchell “still uses the word ‘colored’ in his conversation, he nonetheless recognizes the need to press desegregation suits in the courts.”2

  This peculiar schism in Mitchell—retention of private prejudice amid the nobler conduct of public office—mirrored precisely Nixon’s own duality of thought and action, most pronounced, in the president’s case, in his strange combination of anti-Semitism and support for Israel; indeed, Nixon may have been the first presidential candidate to call for the U.S. to guarantee Israeli military superiority. It was a duality Mitchell shared. Newsweek’s Hal Bruno remembered Mitchell, upset once by a New York Times article, grumbling about the “Heb reporter” who wrote it. Another person close to Mitchell, also a Jew, remembered Mitchell referring privately to Henry Kissinger as “that kike.”3

  And yet, for reasons never stated—perhaps innate decency, or simple calculations of realpolitik—the attorney general, too, used his power to help Israel and Soviet Jews. Max Fisher, the late Jewish industrialist, philanthropist, and pro-Israel lobbyist, remembered pleading with Kissinger in 1970 to speed up American delivery of a few dozen Phantom fighter jets for which Israel had paid, but, owing to pressure from Arab states, never received. Completion of the deal would mark a decisive shift in American policy toward Israel: from neutrality to the guarantee of military supremacy Nixon had advocated as a candidate. Kissinger feigned impotence; Secretary of State William Rogers handled Middle East matters, he said. Israel needed the planes desperately, Fisher said. Who could convince the president? “Go see John Mitchell,” Kissinger said.

  Stunned that an attorney general would be so deeply involved in foreign policy, Fisher did as told—and got what he wanted. “Bill Rogers was a little mixed up in his perception of the Middle East,” Mitchell wryly recalled years later. “I saw to it that the Phantom deal received proper consideration.” Shortly thereafter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yitzhak Rabin—later the Jewish state’s prime minister—noted the “growing…sympathy” for Israel within the Nixon administration, “especially on the part of Attorney General John Mitchell.”

  Later in 1971, Mitchell accompanied Fisher to a Philadelphia airport to watch a group of Russian Jews clamber off a plane onto American soil. Fisher’s biographer, Peter Golden, recorded the scene: “The immigrants had undergone colossal hardships to leave the Soviet Union; they had lost their jobs, been harassed by their government and charged an exorbitant tax. Mitchell had made their journey possible by clearing several obstacles through the Justice Department. Fisher watched as the Russian Jews walked toward the terminal, and a lump rose in his throat. He glanced at Mitchell. The attorney general was crying openly, not bothering to wipe the tears from his face.”4

  For America’s blacks Mitchell shed no tears, but to ensure racial progress he did more than any executive branch official of the twentieth century. A generation after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, requiring public elementary and secondary schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” the schools were still the primary civil rights battleground—and still largely segregated. In January 1969, when Mitchell took office, 68 percent of Southern black children attended all-black schools; nearly 80 percent attended schools that were 80 percent or more black.

  For Nixon and Mitchell, the central issue was whether to continue enforcing Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which authorized the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to cut off federal funds to dilatory school districts. HEW secretary Robert Finch, Nixon’s old protégé and the former lieutenant governor of California under Ronald Reagan, favored the cutoffs; Mitchell, who liked Finch but privately ridiculed him as “Secretary Fink,” did not. The president and attorney general regarded the cutoffs, and publicized deployments of federal marshals to Southern districts, as overly provocative acts, less likely to bring about harmonious integration than to stir Southern resentment and hasten violent clashes.5

  Early on, Mitchell signaled that the administration, while committed to desegregation, opposed compulsory integration. Asked if he would sue to desegregate all-black schools in Harlem, Mitchell answered: “What you have in Harlem is a de facto situation that results from housing patterns, and we do not believe that it is practical to upset such a picture at this time.” By no means was Mitchell foreswearing action in the North; indeed, a northward thrust would later become a central part of Nixon’s bid to “nationalize” the race problem, and destigmatize the South.6

  Nixon’s vision was blurry from the start, however. In his first month in office, he publicly supported Finch’s approach. “I believe that funds should be denied to those districts that continue to perpetuate segregation,” he told reporters. But Nixon’s sympathies soon swung to Mitchell, who saw litigation, not cutoffs, as the best way to bring recalcitrant Southern school districts into line with the times. Mitchell’s route offered two advantages: It gave white leaders more time—to stall, in some cases, yes, but more often to grasp the inevitable, and let them sell it to the most intractable among their flock. Litigation also removed the political onus of desegregation from the Oval Office, and placed it upon the nation’s courts—which protected Nixon in 1972.7

  Within days of his endorsement for Finch, Nixon abruptly about-faced—and demanded a purge of Finch’s office. That the president privately wanted Mitchell in the driver’s seat (“John reign Bob in,” Haldeman’s notes recorded) became further evident when Finch was forced to grant sixty-day desegregation deadline extensions to five dilatory Southern school districts, including two in South Carolina, where Senator Strom Thurmond had toiled so devotedly for Nixon’s election. In arguing for the extensions, Mitchell warned Nixon about the dangers of disappointing Thurmond, and his followers, so early in the president’s term.8

  Such actions fed the African American view of Mitchell, akin to the Yippies’, as the devil incarnate. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), proclaimed Mitchell the cabinet member “furthest removed from the Negro problem.” Supporters of Mitchell pleaded with black friends not to prejudge him; most often, they cited his private practice work in the field of public housing. Meeting directly with black leaders for the first time in February 1969, Mitchell himself promised to avoid “haphazard” courtroom thrusts on desegregation, to “establish a pattern” that would “make a big impact.”9

  Indeed, working behind the scenes, Mitchell enforced the most progressive racial policy he could without damaging the reelection fortunes of his “client.” Nixon’s views on race relations were conflicted. As vice president, he had helped steer civil rights legislation, over the objections of Southern segregationists, to the Senate floor; and as late as 1966, he publicly warned GOP officials in Mississippi: “Republicans must not go prospecting for the fool’s gold of racist votes.” By the time he became president, however, Nixon’s personal views had hardened, succumbing both to his small-town prejudices and the polarization of the times. Ninety days into his term, discussing the Great Society, Nixon told Haldeman welfare reformers “have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks…. There has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true.”

  Still, Nixon supported school desegregation. “Don’t expect PR results,” he told Haldeman in April 1969, “just do what is right.” “You’re not going to solve this race problem for a hundred years,” he told an aide the following year. “Intermarriage and all that, assimilation, it will happen, but not in our time. Desegregation, though, that has to happen now.” In the hands of a smart politician, he reckoned, the explosive issue could be resolved peacefully and justly—and without electoral sacrifice. Thus began what the White House’s resident liberal intellectual, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, termed, only half in jest, Nixon’s and Mitchell’s “schizophrenic” behavior on desegregation: pushing quietly for biracial classrooms while publicly courting white Southerners.