The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  Thus Dean clung to the fiction that he visited Mitchell’s office on June 28 and spoke with him, even though the former attorney general was in transit from Westchester. How was that possible? The conversation, Dean explained at U.S. v. Mitchell, was conducted via telephone, with Dean seated in Mitchell’s office and Mitchell at some unspecified location, on the other end of the call. “That happened from time to time,” Dean said with a straight face. “We had meetings in his office when he wasn’t there.” It was in this imaginary call that Dean “reported” to Mitchell the unhelpful response of General Walters, then asked, in language theretofore unrecalled: “Should we go back and try the Kalmbach angle?” Yes, Mitchell supposedly replied, telling Dean to contact Kalmbach, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman, and make it happen.42

  Unfortunately for the former attorney general, and for history, Dean’s deceptions at U.S. v. Mitchell fooled only those who mattered most: the judge, the jury, and the news media. The defense knew better and so did the WSPF lawyers. The Frampton memo, for example, noted “significant discrepancies between Dean’s anticipated trial testimony [and] that of other Government witnesses or evidence.” Another internal WSPF memorandum, prepared in February 1974 and also previously unpublished, demolished the myth, promulgated by Senator Ervin, among others, that Dean’s testimony before the Senate Watergate committee was “corroborated in all significant respects by the taped recordings” of President Nixon. The WSPF memo bore the title: “Material Discrepancies Between the Senate Select Committee Testimony of John Dean and the Tapes of Dean’s Meetings with the President.”43

  Dean was a problem the WSPF lawyers inherited. The original prosecutors, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert, concluded, according to previously unpublished internal memoranda, that Dean not only stood “at the center of the criminality” in Watergate, but had withheld crucial evidence in his plea-bargaining sessions, engaging in “a gradual escalation as to who is culpable.” Initially, Dean’s attorney boasted his client could “deliver Mitchell” and “deliver Magruder” two weeks later, when Magruder began cooperating with prosecutors, offering up himself, Mitchell, and Dean, the latter began implicating Haldeman and Ehrlichman—and, eventually, the president. Silbert and his team smarted when they discovered that Dean had “withheld the incriminating role he played with regard to Walters” and neglected to inform them about Kalmbach. Dean’s lawyer later claimed the omissions were “inadvertent.”44

  The president, meanwhile, wrestled with doubts about the complicity of his old friend, and whether his old friend’s batty wife could ever be kept quiet. Perched in his “hideaway” quarters in the Old Executive Office Building on June 26—the day Dean held the first of his secret meetings with General Walters—Nixon plotted with Haldeman about how to ease the campaign manager out of the campaign. Media coverage of Mrs. Mitchell’s meltdown in California was “blowing now…getting pretty big,” Nixon fretted. “Well, yeah,” Haldeman replied, “this stuff about throwing her on the bed and sticking a needle in her behind…” The chief of staff assured his boss they were “nowhere near” such a point, but it was possible—possible—Martha’s situation could raise “potential problems on the other thing, Watergate.”

  “You could use this as a basis for Mitchell pulling out,” Haldeman proposed. At this early stage, however, Nixon, secure in the power and trappings of the presidency, viewed so naked a sacrifice of his former law partner as unfathomable, and loftily rejected it out of hand: “I can’t do that. I won’t do that to him. I’d rather, shit, lose the election. I really would.” This sentiment did not last long. Two days later, the same men returned to the same subject in the same room. “I think,” said Haldeman, “lurking way down behind there is the question of [Mitchell’s] involvement in the Watergate caper.” If Mitchell left CRP, it might be a good move, the chief of staff reckoned. Nixon added his own touch: “And we would leak out the fact that [Martha’s] not well.”

  Still, the nagging Question—Did Mitchell do it?—lingered. The next day, June 29, brought more rumination. Nixon clung to the idea that Mitchell had approved Liddy’s operation without knowing specifically about the DNC wiretapping: “I think John said, ‘Well, we’re trying to get the information…don’t tell me anything about it.’ You know, that’s the way you do it, thinking probably they were going to do it the way you always do, planting a person on the other side, which everybody does.” Unlike Nixon, Haldeman was still talking daily with Mitchell, and brought from their discussions the welcome news that he was not opposed to resigning from the campaign. “If this thing escalates,” Haldeman quoted Mitchell as saying, “I think it would be very good if I’m out of the place and you could say, ‘Well, there’s a whole new team over there.’”

  Yet Haldeman remained convinced Mitchell’s resignation would be useless without an accompanying mea culpa: “The thing that bothers me is that it’s a time bomb.” Aghast at Haldeman’s (prescient) nightmarish vision—an endless stream of investigative discovery and media disclosure—Nixon concluded at last that Mitchell had to go. Haldeman assured him the story would prove a net plus for the White House. “It’ll hang totally on Martha,” he stressed. The president gave the final order: “Call the press.” Ever attentive to protocol, Haldeman suggested Mitchell receive a private audience with the president, if only for appearance’s sake. “Do it,” Nixon ordered.45

  Mitchell, for his part, was willing to go, but for the ill-starred adventure at the Watergate, he had no intention of shouldering the blame. He was, to be sure, “terribly chagrined” over the incident, as he told Nixon on June 20—but guilty? No. Meeting with Haldeman on June 29, the day after the Mitchells returned from Westchester, the former attorney general acknowledged his wife was unable to cope with the strain of Watergate and expressed fear she might “harm herself.” “He feels she’s suicidal as well as a little cracked, plus drinking very heavily, and that there’s nothing he can do to cure it,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. Mitchell’s desire to resign was thus cast in purely personal terms.46

  When he arrived at the Executive Office Building the next day for lunch with the president and Haldeman, it was not Mitchell but the others who repeatedly linked his resignation to Watergate. In so doing, Nixon and Haldeman tried—subtly, gingerly—to probe the strong man, to see whether some admission of culpability might be forthcoming. Haldeman, the former advertising executive, spoke of how “surprised” the public would be to see the gruff John Mitchell “taking this route,” heeding the demands of his eccentric but lovable wife. Nixon joined in the lathering, adding that if Mitchell waited to resign “it will be tied right to Watergate.” Here, however, Nixon realized he had gone too far; in Mitchell’s departure, the president wanted his friend to believe personal considerations, not politics, were paramount. He needed to throw a bone in that direction. “I just want it to be handled in a way that Martha’s not hurt,” Nixon said. “Yeah, okay,” Mitchell grunted; as usual, he understood the most and said the least.47

  In his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, Haldeman remembered Mitchell arriving “reluctantly” at the decision to resign, and worrying that it might appear as though he were using Martha to deflect attention from Watergate. In fact, as the tape of the meeting shows, it was Nixon and Haldeman who expressed concerns about Watergate, not Mitchell. Testifying before the Senate a month before Haldeman—but without his knowledge that the luncheon had been recorded—Mitchell depicted Nixon as the reluctant one. “The president asked me to—urged me to stay on,” Mitchell testified. “I said I could not under the circumstances…. Finally…[Nixon] reluctantly consented to the fact that I was going to leave, and we discussed a successor.”

  By July 1974, when Mitchell testified at the House impeachment hearings, the tape of the luncheon had surfaced. Asked about the divergence between his Senate testimony, which maintained Watergate was never discussed, and the tape, which prominently featured Haldeman’s warning about “more stuff…surfacing on the Watergate,” Mitchel
l pleaded ignorance. “I don’t remember that being said at all,” he testified, “and I was surprised when you gentlemen showed it to me.” Conscious of a possible perjury charge, he pleaded for committee members to place the remarks about Watergate in their “total context,” pitifully invoking Martha Mitchell’s mental problems.

  Most of the discussion at the luncheon, Mitchell argued, was focused on who would succeed him at CRP. “It had nothing whatsoever to do with the Watergate,” he said, “and I am surprised the word is even in here.” At U.S. v. Mitchell, the former attorney general clung to his story, testifying his exit from CRP stemmed from “purely personal” considerations; asked if he resigned for any other reason, he replied: “None whatsoever.” No charges were filed against Mitchell in connection with his testimony about the luncheon, but the scare he received, amid all his other legal woes, offered the starkest reminder of the supreme discourtesy his friend, the president, had shown in recording all their conversations and never telling him.48

  Photo Insert 2

  COPYRIGHT WASHINGTON POST; REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE DC PUBLIC LIBRARY

  Antiwar demonstrators clash with police outside the Justice Department during the May Day riots, May 4, 1971.

  COPYRIGHT WASHINGTON POST; REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE DC PUBLIC LIBRARY

  Mitchell and his aides observe the day’s chaos from his office balcony. Protesters seemed to sense Mitchell’s uniquely powerful place in the Nixon cabinet, and accordingly trained their antiwar fury more on the Justice Department than the Pentagon during the Nixon years.

  COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

  Riding aboard Air Force One en route from Washington to Florida on November 9, 1969, Mitchell holds court as national security adviser Henry Kissinger, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Nixon, and Secretary of State William Rogers listen. Mitchell played a pivotal, though deliberately unheralded, role in the formation of Nixon’s foreign policy. “Henry had his ideas,” Mitchell later said of Kissinger, “but what could he do? He had no feel for politics.”

  COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

  Nixon makes a point to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer aboard the U.S.S. Saratoga in the Atlantic Ocean on May 17, 1969. Later, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Moorer received classified documents illegally obtained by a yeoman who served on Kissinger’s National Security Council staff. John Ehrlichman, seen here peering over Nixon’s shoulder, led the investigation into the JCS spying case, but it was Mitchell who was sent to confront the admiral. “Boy,” Nixon said at the time, “you couldn’t have a better man than Mitchell over to talk to Moorer.”

  COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

  Vice President Agnew, Nixon, and Mitchell receive California governor Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office on January 23, 1971. “Have to have Mitchell handle…contact with Reagan,” Nixon had decreed. As the preeminent symbol of law and order in the age of “radical chic,” Mitchell’s voice was equally, if not more, prominent than Reagan’s in the advocacy of conservatism during the Nixon era.

  COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

  John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman aboard Air Force One on April 27, 1973, three days before Watergate forced both men out of the White House. “I have always found Bob Haldeman to be an honest, straight-forward individual,” Mitchell said in 1988; Ehrlichman he considered “a conniving little S.O.B.”

  COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

  White House aides applaud the president in the Roosevelt Room on Election Day, 1972. From left, Nixon, press secretary Ron Ziegler, Haldeman, Kissinger, Rose Mary Woods, Herb Stein, John Dean, Harry Dent, Arthur Flemming, Charles Colson, William Safire (partially obscured), and Peter Flanigan.

  COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

  Nixon visits the headquarters of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue on September 18, 1972. From left, Clark MacGregor, Fred LaRue (with pipe), Jon Foust, Paul Wagner, Robert Marik, Nixon, and Jeb Magruder. This is the first published photograph showing Nixon with either LaRue or Magruder, who recently had gotten “roaring drunk” together to celebrate the confinement of the original Watergate indictments to the five arrested burglars, G. Gordon Liddy, and E. Howard Hunt.

  COPYRIGHT WASHINGTON POST; REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE DC PUBLIC LIBRARY

  Surrounded by reporters and photographers, and trailed by his attorney, Plato Cacheris, Mitchell is led into the Senate Watergate hearings on July 10, 1973, by the same uniformed policemen who once cheered his law-and-order gospel. Such chaotic scenes, at courthouses and federal prison, grew more common for Mitchell as he became, like Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities, a “professional defendant.”

  COPYRIGHT WASHINGTON POST; REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE DC PUBLIC LIBRARY

  Attorney William Hundley leans in as Mitchell, who was rarely photographed in his eyeglasses, prepares his testimony that day. CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl and UPI reporter Helen Thomas hover nearby.

  COURTESY HARRY BENSON

  Suite 555 at the Essex House on Central Park South roars with Scotch and song on the evening of April 28, 1974, as Mitchell celebrates his acquittal in the so-called Vesco trial. From left are Mitchell defense attorney John Sprizzo; the former attorney general; Walter Bonner, an attorney for Maurice Stans; and an unidentified reveler.

  COLLECTION OF AUTHOR

  Ex-president Nixon welcomes Mitchell and his daughter Marty, then eighteen, to San Clemente for a party on September 2, 1979, thrown in honor of Mitchell’s release from prison. With guests assembled poolside, Nixon praised Mitchell for his “character, loyalty, and guts.”

  COURTESY DEBORAH GORE DEAN

  Mitchell watches as his companion Mary Gore Dean opens Christmas gifts at Marwood, the Gore family estate in Maryland, in December 1985. “You just dream after you have lost your husband, as I did,” Mrs. Dean told the author, “that someone this wonderful could come into your life.”

  COURTESY DEBORAH GORE DEAN

  Mary’s daughter Deborah Gore Dean, who referred to Mitchell as “Daddy,” attends a function with him, circa 1985. In Deborah Dean’s federal indictment in the HUD scandal, Mitchell would be listed, posthumously, as unindicted co-conspirator number one; the special counsel in the case publicly blamed Mitchell for having denied him a seat on the Supreme Court.

  COURTESY DEBORAH GORE DEAN

  Attorney General William French Smith welcomes Mitchell back to the Department of Justice for the unveiling of his official portrait, by artist Gloria Schumann, on January 7, 1985. Rose Woods was among the two dozen people on hand for the private ceremony.

  COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED

  From left, Richard A. Moore, Nixon, Mitchell, and Vice President George H. W. Bush at a party, circa 1986. Nixon’s inscription, dated February 14, 1987, reads: “To John Mitchell, who helped all three of us in our political careers. From Dick Nixon.”

  OFF THE RESERVATION

  DAVID FROST: Which in general is easier to do as attorney general: hide [a mistake] or change it?

  MITCHELL: Well, over the long haul it’s probably easier to change it. In the short haul it’s probably easier to hide it.

  —The David Frost Show, 19711

  IT ALL WENT exactly as Haldeman planned. The newspapers improbably cast Mitchell as a modern-day Duke of Windsor—an incurable romantic who surrendered political power for the woman he loved. Suggestions that Watergate prompted Mitchell’s abdication were muted. “Investigation today turned up no evidence that any pressure had been applied to Mr. Mitchell to resign,” reported the New York Times; the Washington Post quoted a CRP spokesman who insisted Mitchell had “absolutely no knowledge” of the break-in, and resigned solely “for the reason stated.”2

  In the Oval Office, the president sighed with relief, marveling to Haldeman how “the Mitchell thing couldn’t have come at a better time from our standpoint.” Our sta
ndpoint: That Mitchell’s interests diverged from his own the president now assumed as fact. Nixon also believed, wrongly, that Mitchell planned to accept full blame for Watergate. “He goes in and he takes responsibility for it. He understands that, doesn’t he?” “He mentioned that himself,” Haldeman replied, equally erroneously.

  Even more amazing, they still expected Mitchell, in addition to confessing, to obstruct the ongoing FBI investigation. “I want [Mitchell] to call Kleindienst and [Acting FBI Director L. Patrick] Gray in,” Haldeman fantasized, “and say: ‘Look, this happened. I used to sit on the National Security Council…. Your people are investigating stuff that must not be investigated. That’s the signal you’ve gotten from the CIA. For Christ’s sake, smarten up. Smarten up and turn this off. Go ahead and toss your cards to the grand jury on the open-and-shut case [of the arrested men], and let it go at that.’”3

  Throughout the summer of 1972, as a trickle of minor disclosures kept Watergate in the news, Mitchell repeatedly denied his resignation from CRP had had anything to do with the “caper” that was growing, slowly but surely, into a scandal. Seated next to Mrs. Mitchell on an Amtrak Metroliner to New York, joined by a reporter, Mitchell smiled at the mere suggestion and jabbed his pipe in Martha’s direction. “She spent a million dollars last year, and now I have to earn it!”4

  The means to that end was a return to the old Nixon-Mitchell law firm, which, after the ascension of two partners to the presidency and attorney generalship, had been renamed Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander, and had cultivated, in legal and governmental circles, a reputation the Times described as “the firm to see.” But of the fourteen new partners hired during Mitchell’s stint in government, eleven were in their thirties, the rest in their forties; they were far less likely than lawyers who had been with the firm prior to 1969 to applaud the administration’s conduct of the Vietnam War, and they proved, upon Mitchell’s return, less than welcoming. When he returned full-time, under an agreement that his name would rejoin the firm’s shingle effective January 2, 1973, the short lapse between the Watergate arrests and Mitchell’s sudden return to the full-time practice of law—and, too, the ugliness of the Martha Mitchell incident in Newport Beach—lent an uneasy air to Mitchell’s homecoming.5