by James Rosen
In fact, Liddy had already embarked on his frantic drive out to Burning Tree, Powell Moore in tow, before Mitchell, in California, even learned of the arrests. Liddy’s memoir eliminated all doubt about who ordered him out to Burning Tree and why: It was not Mitchell but Magruder himself. Liddy recounted how he had used the White House Situation Room that morning to place a “secure” call to Magruder at the Polo Lounge. A “short while” later Magruder called Liddy back from a pay phone. “Why did you use McCord?” Magruder cried. Liddy struggled to keep Magruder focused on the most urgent matter: preparing a statement for Mitchell’s use at an afternoon press conference. Contrary to Magruder’s testimony at U.S. v. Mitchell, Liddy never raised the idea of getting hold of Kleindienst. Liddy returned to 1701 and immediately reassured Powell Moore, the spokesman on duty that morning, that the CRP leadership in California was aware of the arrests and at work on a statement for Mitchell. Then Magruder called again. “I was set for another bout of sniveling,” Liddy wrote, “but it never came; instead he had a message for me from Mitchell. I was to find Dick Kleindienst, the attorney general, and ask him to get McCord out of jail immediately. ‘Tell him “John sent you” and it’s a “personal request from John.” He’ll understand.’”
Liddy immediately grasped the futility of Magruder’s plan but felt bound to carry it out. “An order from John Mitchell,” he wrote, “was not to be disobeyed.” It was precisely the combination Magruder was banking on: the force of the Mitchell name and Liddy’s Germanophilic reverence for orders. It was Liddy, as directed by Magruder, who placed a call to locate the attorney general, and who was told by Kleindienst’s wife, Marnie, where the attorney general was. Liddy grabbed Moore and raced for Bethesda.9
By all accounts, Liddy’s excursion to Burning Tree proved as disastrous as his raid on the DNC. He found the attorney general seated at lunch and, using hand gestures, beckoned Kleindienst from his table. Kleindienst had met Liddy only once before, three years earlier, and held him in low regard. Kleindienst excused himself and strode to the archway where Liddy and Moore stood. “I’m carrying a personal message from John Mitchell,” Liddy said; “could we speak privately?” The three retreated to an empty locker room. Though the men recalled different language, all agreed on the outcome.
“What’s this about John?” Kleindienst began. Liddy started to inform him of the arrests, but Kleindienst already knew about them. Liddy then said the arrested men had been working under his direction. “Jesus Christ!” Kleindienst exclaimed. Liddy announced he was relaying a message from Mitchell, but Kleindienst shrewdly interrupted. “Did you receive it from Mitchell directly?” No, Liddy acknowledged; it came through Magruder. “I don’t know how you can do this,” Liddy began, “but I’m supposed to tell you that it’s a ‘personal request from John.’ Anyway, he wants you to get McCord out of jail right away—before it’s found out who he really is.”
Liddy tried to make clear he understood the preposterousness of Magruder’s request, asking rhetorically what would happen to Kleindienst if word of such intervention got out. “Me? Fuck what happens to me!” Kleindienst exploded. “What happens to the president if I try a fool thing like that? It’s the Goddamndest thing I ever heard of! Jesus Christ! That’s what everybody ought to be thinking of—the president! What the fuck did you people think you were doing in there?” Liddy started to explain, but Kleindienst cut him off. “God, this is terrible,” he said. “I can’t imagine John Mitchell asking me to do a thing like that…. You tell whoever it was that John Mitchell knows me well enough to call me himself.” Kleindienst curtly dismissed Liddy, then called a senior DOJ official and ordered him to treat the Watergate case like any other.10
Chatting with Governor Reagan as their limousine sped across Los Angeles, Mitchell had no idea Liddy had visited Burning Tree, nor any clue a criminal conspiracy, falsely invoking his own name, was under way. In fact, Mitchell did not learn about Burning Tree until the following day, when an informant reported him “amazed.” Seated next to Reagan that morning, all the former attorney general knew was that he faced a press conference in less than two hours’ time and needed a statement in case reporters asked about the arrests. As it happened, no reporters asked Mitchell about Watergate. That night, the Mitchells, the Magruders, and the other CRP couples attended the party at the Schreiber estate. Vicki Carr sang as the CRP crowd mingled at poolside with Jimmy Stewart, Jack Benny, Zsa Zsa Gabor, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood. The sublime evening was the last peace Mitchell ever knew.11
Before boarding the Gulfstream II that carried them back to Washington on Monday, June 19, Mitchell and Fred LaRue—the only man besides the former attorney general who could pacify Martha Mitchell when she was on the warpath—resolved to keep her in the dark as long as possible about the Watergate arrests. The plan called for Martha to remain at the plush Newporter Inn at Newport Beach while Mitchell headed back to the capital. “I think you need a rest,” he told her. Fatigued from her cross-country train treks in behalf of Nixon-Agnew, she agreed to stay for a while. That Sunday, Marty and two other young girls, daughters of an FBI agent who formerly guarded the Mitchells, went to Disneyland; that evening, there was another swank party, this one attended by the president’s brothers, Edward and Donald Nixon.12
It wasn’t until Monday morning, when her husband had already left for Washington, that Martha finally read about the arrests in the Los Angeles Times. “Jesus Christ!” she said later. “I jumped out of bed like a sheet of lightning.” For all her lunacy, Martha reacted to the news that ultimately destroyed her life with remarkably clear vision. First she wondered whether McCord, the man responsible for “debugging” the Mitchells’ Watergate apartment, was a double agent. Then she saw the future. “This could land my husband in jail,” she said. A previously unpublished FBI report recounted the eyewitness testimony of Steve King, the ex–FBI agent guarding Martha for CRP:
Mrs. Mitchell then began drinking straight gin (no ice) from the wet bar on the first floor of the villa. Typical of her comments at this time was the statement, “Those bastards left me out here without telling me anything.”
Phone calls, usually a comfort, brought Martha only more dissatisfaction; her husband, Magruder—all of them were giving her the runaround. Restless and agitated, she reached for her Salem Longs and a pack of matches. When she struck the sulfur, however, the entire book exploded, “severely” burning her right hand. A doctor was summoned to the Mitchells’ villa, gave her an injection to ease the pain, and prescribed Phenaphen to get her through the next few days.13
While her husband grappled with the embryonic scandal back home, Martha prowled her villa, bitter at being deceived. On Wednesday, young Marty, accompanied by a personal aide to the Mitchells, Lea Jablonsky, returned to Disneyland. Steve King was supposed to pick the girls up, but he contacted the FBI agent who had done so three days earlier and asked him to repeat the favor, since “something very serious had come up at the room and he could not leave under any circumstances.” The previously unpublished FBI report containing the agent’s account is the saddest document of the Watergate era.
When we arrived at the Newporter Inn, I told [Jablonsky] that I would help her carry some of the numerous packages that they had purchased at Disneyland to the villa. When the three of us got within approximately fifty feet of the villa we heard a loud woman’s voice. MARTY MITCHELL then said, “Oh, oh, mother has been drinking again.”
When we got to the door of the villa, it was locked. [Jablonsky] knocked and [King] answered the door. We walked into the vestibule of the villa, at which time I noted Mrs. MITCHELL standing in the living room of the villa, screaming at [King]. When she saw me she stated, “[Redacted] you FBI fellows never treated me like a prisoner or kept me locked up like this son of a bitch. This son of a bitch won’t let me leave here.” [Redacted] then went over to Mrs. MITCHELL and attempted to calm her. I told Mrs. MITCHELL that everything would be all right and departed the villa.
[King] follow
ed me outside and then advised me [that] at some time in the afternoon Mrs. MITCHELL had gotten hold of one or two bottles of whiskey in her upstairs bedroom, without his knowledge. After she had consumed quite a bit of it he heard her making telephone calls. Acting upon orders from Mr. MITCHELL not to let her use the telephone when she was drunk, he tried to get her to hang up the telephone by talking to her through the locked door. However, when she would not hang up the telephone, he forced the door open and pulled the plug of the telephone from the wall…
When I arrived at the Newporter Inn, [King] met me outside the villa and stated that when Mrs. MITCHELL had awakened that morning she seemed quite calm but suddenly for some reason she started ranting and raving again and insisted that she be allowed to go to the main section of the Newporter Inn and make a telephone call. [King] stated that when he would not let her out of the front door, she attempted to force her way. She swung at [him] and when he ducked, she hit the front door glass with her hand and arm, broke it, and began to bleed quite profusely.
Once again, a doctor was summoned. King and others forcibly restrained Martha while the physician, brandishing a needle, removed her pants and administered sedatives. The shots only further inflamed the hysterical woman. King, only thirty-one, finally called John Mitchell, who in turn dialed a man he knew only casually: Herb Kalmbach, the president’s chief fund-raiser, based in Newport Beach. Kalmbach took Martha to the hospital, where her hand received six stitches. In the meantime, Mitchell arranged for longtime personal friends Ken and Peggy Ebbitt, of Bronxville, New York, to fly cross-country and bring Martha back to New York on a red-eye flight. “She needed psychiatric care,” Ken recalled.14
Installed in the Westchester Country Club until Mitchell could fly up from Washington to reclaim her, Martha again took to the telephone, announcing to UPI’s Helen Thomas: “I’m not going to stand for all those dirty things that go on.” Finally, on Monday, June 26, the former attorney general appeared at the Westchester Country Club. According to Winzola McLendon, Martha’s gossipfrau and ersatz Boswell, Mitchell “broke down and cried” when he saw his wife’s injuries. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, he eased her into a private limousine (though an official with the Federal Aviation Administration sighted Mrs. Mitchell boarding a helicopter in White Plains). The media feasted on the cross-continental tragedy of “the nation’s most talked-about marriage.” “John Smuggles Martha Out of Sight,” shouted the Daily News.15
In retrospect, these awful days immediately following the Watergate arrests marked the beginning of the end for Martha Mitchell, a long, irrevocable slide into mental and physical anguish and alienation from her family and the world at large. Yet as the great scandal unfolded, a number of writers, some with personal or financial interests at stake, conspired to depict this tragic episode as somehow emblematic of the Nixon administration’s latent fascism, the former attorney general’s disturbed and drunken wife as a brave “political prisoner” beaten into silence to stop her from disclosing all the “dirty things” she knew. Lecturing at the University of Delaware in 1974, Shana Alexander claimed Martha was “the only one in Washington” who had consistently told the truth: “Everybody else was lying, and if ever a heroine was unsung, it’s Martha Mitchell.” Helen Thomas gushed that Martha “seemed to speak for a broad spectrum of women in the country—and some men too—in a way that no other female public figure has in recent times,” and lauded Mrs. Mitchell’s “patriotism” for “bucking the most powerful people in the country even though she was afraid.” In fact, when Martha was finally given her chance to speak truth to power, to expose, under oath and on the record, all the “dirty” business she had been forced to witness in the years when it had been her terrible misfortune to be Mrs. John N. Mitchell, she rambled inconclusively for seventy-three pages of deposition testimony before emerging, amid a swarm of reporters and cameramen, to say meekly: “I’ve never really known anything about the Watergate case.”16
The sad, unappealing truth was that Martha Mitchell was a sick, mean, and ignorant woman, roiling with vanity and insecurity, demeaning to people she considered beneath her, and prone—as if all that weren’t enough—to violent bursts of alcoholism. Sally Quinn, wife of Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and coanchor of the CBS Morning News, recalled how the more responsible reporters “began to get a little afraid” of Martha’s outbursts. “We sort of stepped back and said, ‘Wait a minute; this doesn’t sound right to us,’” Quinn said, on-air. Helen Thomas suffered no such compunctions. A White House aide, spotting her, once taunted: “Why don’t you get some class, Helen, and hang up on Martha Mitchell?” Nixon personally followed Thomas’s reporting—with disgust. “For her to print another story on that poor sick Martha,” he fumed. “She knows Martha’s sick…. God almighty, I’d just say that’s unconscionable.” This dichotomy between friends and users, reporters with integrity and cynical exploiters of an ill person, emerged clearly even to a child—Martha’s own. Thomas reported that during one of her calls with Martha, young Marty Mitchell could be heard “screaming” in the background: “Don’t talk to her, she’s no friend.”17
Jeb Magruder’s first move after returning to Washington was to set up a strategy session immediately after Mitchell, Mardian, and LaRue got back from Los Angeles. For good measure, Magruder requested the presence of John Dean, who, himself returning from an unusual trip to Manila, had arrived at his office to find a secretary’s note requesting his presence at Mitchell’s Watergate apartment at six that evening.18
By the time the June 19 evening meeting commenced, bringing together Mitchell, Magruder, Dean, LaRue, and Mardian, their options were fast evaporating. The FBI had already uncovered McCord’s true name and CRP affiliation, and linked the Cubans to Howard Hunt, who was still on the White House payroll. Gordon Liddy remained, for the moment, under the authorities’ radar, but the prospect of containing the scandal, the CRP men’s only hope, was rapidly diminishing. Dispensing scotch and sarcasm that night, the jet-lagged Mitchell knew far less about the state of play than some of his visitors. Dean, for example, concealed the fact that a few hours earlier, he had met privately with Liddy and, as Liddy recalled, assured him: “Everyone’ll be taken care of.”19
Magruder later told prosecutors the evening session had chiefly been a discussion “about alternatives.” But he also claimed the talk turned to the subject of destroying documents. Notes taken by the prosecutors, previously unpublished, read: “Jeb said he better get rid of stuff and they concurred.” Later that night, Magruder took his Gemstone documents—Liddy’s proposals, the wiretap synopses prepared by Baldwin and heavily edited by McCord, the spurious photos of Democratic documents (purportedly taken near O’Brien’s file cabinets but set against a shag rug found only in the Howard Johnson’s motel)—and burned them in his home. He later wrote of sitting cross-legged before his fireplace, chuckling one last time over the “graphic details” that the wiretaps had captured about the personal lives of DNC staff members.20
In his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, Magruder shifted blame for the document destruction from himself ( Jeb said he better get rid of stuff and they concurred ) to the room at large: “It was agreed generally, and I can’t get specific as to who said what at this meeting exactly, but get rid of the files.” Magruder’s story changed still more dramatically when he retold it in An American Life. Now he suddenly remembered the scene with precision, how Dean had arrived a few minutes before himself, and the men, drinking freely, grew dour and self-pitying. Before leaving for a tennis date with Vice President Agnew, Magruder wrote, he asked Mitchell what should be done with the Gemstone file; Mitchell supposedly replied by saying maybe Magruder “ought to have a little fire” at his house that night.
The idea that he should “get rid of stuff” had been Magruder’s own, in his early talks with prosecutors; it became a “general” consensus when the witness testified before the Senate; and then, in Magruder’s book, the idea had become Mit
chell’s.21
On the witness stand at U.S. v. Mitchell, Magruder stuck with this story, adding only the detail that he reported back to Mitchell the following morning that the deed had been done. Under cross-examination by Plato Cacheris, however, Magruder was forced to admit that the first time he recalled Mitchell ending the June 19 meeting with the “little fire” suggestion was in December 1973, during an office interview with WSPF prosecutor Jill Volner. In all previous forums, the witness agreed—his confession to federal prosecutors in April 1973, his grand jury appearance in May 1973, and his Senate testimony in June 1973—Magruder had never once mentioned Mitchell ordering the destruction of documents. Moreover, Magruder admitted he had already made plans to destroy all incriminating documents—with the ubiquitous Gordon Strachan—on the morning of June 19, some seven hours before the meeting in Mitchell’s apartment.22
The indictment in U.S. v. Mitchell listed the order to destroy the Gemstone documents as the fifth “overt act” in the Watergate cover-up conspiracy, the third ascribed to Mitchell. The former attorney general, of course, always denied the charge: “There was no suggestion by me or anybody else at that time that Mr. Magruder would actually, in June, start a fire in his fireplace.” Most other witnesses agreed. Even John Dean, who was present for the entirety of Magruder’s visit to the Mitchell apartment and whose own testimony would, in time, create equal trouble for the former attorney general, never heard the damning order that Magruder attributed to Mitchell. Nor did Mardian.
