The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

Shortly after election night, E. Howard Hunt placed an angry call to his old patron at the White House, Chuck Colson. “The reason I called you,” Hunt said, was because “commitments that were made to all of us at the onset have not been kept, and there’s a great deal of unease and concern on the part of the seven defendants…. What we’ve been getting has been coming in very minor dribs and drabs…. This is a long haul and the stakes are very, very high…. This thing must not break apart for foolish reasons.”

  In anticipation of their trial on burglary, wiretapping, and other charges in January 1973, the indicted men had set November 25 as a deadline for the “liquidation” of all outstanding debts. They understood the hesitancy to pay up before the election, but that was over, and the men now expected the customs of the spy game to be observed: In the event of capture, the operatives, their families, and their lawyers would stay silent—provided they were all taken care of. “We think that now is the time when a move should be made,” Hunt said, “and surely the cheapest commodity available is money.”16

  Colson took the cue. He brought a DictaBelt recording of his talk with Hunt to the office of John Dean, who made his own tape of the conversation and arranged for a transcription. On the morning of November 15, Dean rode in a government limousine to Camp David, where he found Haldeman and Ehrlichman inside the president’s empty office at Laurel Lodge. After playing the Colson-Hunt tape, Dean mentioned he was flying to New York that day to meet with Mitchell. “My instructions from this meeting,” Dean later testified, “were to tell Mitchell to take care of all these problems.”

  In that afternoon’s meeting at the Metropolitan Club, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Mitchell came face-to-face with the enormity of the problems confronting him. Joining Dean was Maury Stans, there to discuss legal and financial issues stemming from the closure of CRP, and, too, the burgeoning scandal arising from the committee’s unhappy dalliance with Robert Vesco. Only after Stans finished his unpleasant business and left did Dean begin recounting the latest Watergate troubles. Surely, Mitchell at this moment saw the future: indictment in both the Vesco and Watergate cases.

  Dean bade the older man into a private room inside the Metropolitan Club. From a bulky Sony recorder came the scratchy sounds of Hunt, whom Mitchell did not know, and Colson, whom Mitchell knew and loathed, talking in circumlocutory fashion about the indicted men’s money problems. At one point, when Hunt asserted that Mitchell had already committed perjury, Mitchell interjected: “I wonder what in the hell Hunt is talking about.” Minutes later, he disgustedly told Dean to hit the stop button and stalked out. Dean told the Senate he received “no instruction or really any indication at all at that time from Mitchell” about what to do next.

  This was not the first time Mitchell had been asked to resolve the burglars’ financial problems; that had come back in June, shortly after the arrests, when Mitchell, still campaign manager, had “turned down and turned down cold” a request that CRP pay their bail. The Metropolitan Club meeting marked the first time the problem had reappeared at Mitchell’s doorstep, in the person of John Dean, following the indictments and Nixon’s reelection. Henceforth the scandal would consist of these periodic demands for cash, and accompanying pleas for executive clemency, pressed most forcefully at critical junctures in the legal process: the eve of the burglars’ trial, their sentencing. And it would invariably be to Mitchell, widely and mistakenly regarded as the final authority behind the whole project, that these demands, sooner or later, were delivered.17

  From the beginning, immediately after the Watergate arrests, the effort to funnel hush money to the burglars and their attorneys had been led by John Dean. It was Dean who practically begged General Walters to assume the burden at CIA; Dean who summoned Herb Kalmbach from the West Coast and set the fund-raising genius in motion; Dean who supervised the payments that were actually made, through Kalmbach, LaRue, and Ulasewicz. It was in Dean’s EOB office, in September 1972, that Kalmbach announced his withdrawal from the money business and set fire to his written ledger of receipts and expenditures. It was Dean who pushed Kalmbach the hardest to reconsider, “the one that talked to me most often about this, to continue in this program,” as Kalmbach testified. “I had the feeling that Mr. Dean was the primary person directing it.” And it was Dean who, after the election, worked hardest to find a way to meet the defendants’ fresh demands, playing the tape of Hunt’s hair-raising talk with Colson for Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell, hoping one of these big men would handle the task that Dean, just thirty-four years old, could not: rounding up the money.18

  But to Dean’s surprise and dismay, no one lifted a finger to help. Smart and resourceful, the fresh-faced White House counsel—whose “ringmaster” role in the cover-up appears, in retrospect, to have owed far more to his complicity in the break-in than to any sense of “blind ambition”—worked overtime in the fall of 1972 to ensure that the burglars, Liddy, and Hunt would remain, in the parlance of the day, on the reservation. Since at least the beginning of 1971, Dean had known there were “large sums of cash” floating around the White House, leftover monies from the last two election cycles. As with the Kalmbach and CIA gambits, Dean later disclaimed authorship of the idea to use this White House fund, estimated at $350,000, to meet the burglars’ demands; instead, he attributed it to—who else?—John Mitchell.

  In his executive-session testimony before the Senate, previously unpublished, Dean was decidedly vague in describing how and when Mitchell first instructed him to access the fund. “Well, the long and short of it,” Dean testified, “was that Mitchell finally called me and said, could I speak with Haldeman about getting some of that money, the $350,000 that was there, and we’ll pay you back.” In public session, Dean claimed Mitchell, just two weeks after rebuffing Dean at the Metropolitan Club, suddenly saw the wisdom of buying the defendants’ silence and contacted him spontaneously. “To the best of my recollection,” Dean testified, “it was the first week of December that Mitchell called me and said that we would have to use some of the $350,000 fund to take care of the demands being made by Hunt and the others for money.”

  At the House impeachment hearings, Dean slid the date of this call back to some unspecified time prior to November 28. Then, at U.S. v. Mitchell, the witness remembered for the first time that Mitchell’s call had actually come on Thanksgiving Day, which Dean spent at his parents’ home in Greenville, Pennsylvania. “The call caused some excitement in the house,” Dean testified, “and I took it in the back bedroom.” Presumably these small but vivid details—the holiday setting, the Dean family’s excitement, the back bedroom—imbued the story, in the eyes of the jury and as Dean plainly hoped, with the aura of truth; no one ever posed the obverse question, which was why, if these details made the event so memorable, Dean had theretofore failed, in several forums, to mention them. Dean then claimed he raced back to Washington, reluctantly and at Mitchell’s urging, to see Haldeman and Ehrlichman, time and date again unspecified; but when asked, during friendly direct examination, what the duo said, Dean testified lamely: “I frankly don’t recall what they told me.”

  In Blind Ambition, published in 1976, Dean finally perfected his story, fusing into the single call to Greenville both Mitchell’s plea for the use of the White House fund and his suggestion that Dean return to Washington, events previously held separately. Also for the first time, Dean cast Mitchell’s call as a specific response to another event: the receipt, earlier that week, of a fresh list of money demands that Hunt’s lawyer had sent to CRP attorney Kenneth Parkinson. In no previous account had Dean linked Parkinson’s name, or this list of demands, to Mitchell’s call(s); now, in his memoir, Dean had Mitchell inquiring what action had been taken on Parkinson’s “little list.” Here Dean made a telling mistake, the most glaring of many discrepancies in his multiple accounts of the episode. Blind Ambition recounted Mitchell’s call coming on Thanksgiving Day, which fell that year on November 23; but Parkinson did not transmit the list of new demands until
December 1. Thus it would have been impossible for Mitchell to contact Dean about a list unknown to both men for another eight days.

  Mitchell, of course, flatly denied these allegations about the White House fund. “I had no control over the money and there would be no reason why I should call Dean or anybody else,” Mitchell told the Senate, “and I did not so call Dean.” Apparently, the WSPF prosecutors recognized the problems in Dean’s story, for they chose to list in the U.S. v. Mitchell indictment, as overt acts in the cover-up conspiracy, Dean’s playing of the Colson-Hunt tape for Mitchell at the Metropolitan Club (uncontested by Mitchell); Parkinson’s transmittal of the list of demands to Dean on December 1; and Haldeman’s authorization, in “early December,” for the use of the $350,000. Yet in chronicling the origins of this last, and most historically significant, hush-money scheme—one that ultimately ensnared the president himself, and led to impeachment charges against him—the indictment in U.S. v. Mitchell made no mention whatsoever of John Mitchell.19

  On the foggy afternoon of December 8, 1972, United Airlines Flight 553, bound from Washington, D.C., to Midway Airport, was cruising for landing at 4,000 feet when suddenly the plane’s nose shifted skyward; seconds later, it plowed into a neighborhood in southwest Chicago, slicing off roofs as she careened forward, obliterating four homes before bursting into flames. Forty-five passengers died, among them Mrs. Dorothy Hunt, wife of Howard Hunt and—unknown at the time—the recipient of several deliveries of Watergate hush money. Chicago police discovered Mrs. Hunt’s intact purse, which contained more than $10,000 in cash, almost all in hundred-dollar bills.20

  A father of four, Hunt was devastated. “I was very seriously considering doing away with myself,” he later confided to investigators, in previously unpublished testimony. Soon Hunt informed his Watergate codefendants he could not withstand the strain of their trial, set to begin January 8, and that he intended to plead guilty. Urging the Cubans to follow suit, Hunt warned Bernard Barker, according to previously unpublished WSPF files, that “accusations about prostitutes would come out at trial.” To his old White House chums, by whom he felt abandoned—Colson hadn’t even attended Dorothy’s funeral—Hunt was now adamant that his financial needs had to be met, and fast; and that he was owed not just money but the promise of rehabilitation, to be achieved through a timely conferral of executive clemency. By March, the ex-spy was in a venomous state: “John Dean is a son of a bitch, and I want somebody to know about that before it is too late and I am in prison!…I am very bitter towards John Dean.”21

  Worse, Hunt was not the only Watergate defendant rattling his cage. James McCord, the inscrutable master spook who had sabotaged the June 17 break-in and deceived his fellow burglars about it, was dismayed they were now considering a “CIA defense.” Under this strategy, the Cubans would plead not guilty and argue that they always believed they were carrying out an Agency mission. So fierce was McCord’s determination to protect Langley that he began seeing treachery everywhere, including on his own defense team. He quarreled with his lawyers’ plan to subpoena Richard Helms, and wondered why they (rightly) dismissed as hearsay McCord’s attempts to implicate Mitchell. “Mitchell really didn’t talk to you about it, did he?” McCord quoted his lawyers as saying, typical of their “negative-type approach.” “They can go to hell,” he fumed. Soon McCord was firing off threatening notes, including one to Jack Caulfield, Dean’s aide, vowing that if Helms was fired, and the onus for Watergate laid at CIA’s door, “every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert.”22

  Caulfield dutifully notified Dean. The strain of marshaling hush money was bad enough; but the kind of dissatisfaction McCord was expressing couldn’t be mollified with simple cash. Something else was needed: executive clemency. Up to then, all of Dean’s dealings on the issue of clemency had concerned Howard Hunt and had been limited to discussions with Colson and Ehrlichman. However, in sworn testimony before the Senate, previously unpublished, Dean claimed he was prompted to action in McCord’s case by a telephone call, out of the blue, from John Mitchell.

  McCord was off the reservation and they were having all kinds of problems with him, his lawyer was quite upset with him. He was not cooperating and playing ball as the others were. So…Mitchell called me and said he thought I should talk to [McCord] about it, and take his pulse, or make him a similar offer. I think there had been pulse-taking sessions—I’d have to check my notes on that.

  Dean’s testimony on this allegation in the ensuing forums followed the familiar pattern: Dates slid, a single call became multiple calls, face-to-face discussion became a phone conversation, and Mitchell’s complicity deepened in each retelling. Asked if he took part in the extension of clemency offers to the Watergate defendants—whether he bore guilty knowledge of what Colson was promising Hunt, and acted, through Dean and Caulfield, to tender similar promises to McCord—Mitchell dismissed Dean’s story as “a complete fabrication.” “I was out of town in Florida when [Dean] started the McCord dialogue,” Mitchell told the Senate, brandishing his office logs and adding “there would be no reason in the world for me to direct Mr. Dean to do anything vis-à-vis Caulfield or McCord or anybody else.” This was true: On the matter Mitchell considered his greatest vulnerability—the three Gemstone meetings—Hunt and McCord could offer only hearsay testimony. Whether they talked or kept silent thus mattered little to Mitchell.

  Once again, the WSPF prosecutors appear to have recognized the problems posed by their central witness and his chameleonic testimony; for in listing this charge in the U.S. v. Mitchell indictment, the conspiracy’s thirty-third overt act, the best the prosecutors could say was that Mitchell did the evil deed, by phone, sometime “in or about early January 1973.”23

  “The crux of the problem that you always had,” Dean was once asked, “was raising the money to support [the defendants], pay their legal fees and, as you testified, to keep them quiet; is that correct?” “Yes,” Dean answered.

  The money! The money! It was the bane of Dean’s existence across the latter half of 1972 and the first quarter of 1973. By the end of January, Nixon had been sworn in for a second term as president; Hunt and the Cubans had, as promised, pleaded guilty; and McCord and Liddy had stood trial and been convicted. When Earl Silbert put Alfred Baldwin on the stand, a lawyer representing Spencer Oliver and other DNC employees had interrupted the proceedings and demanded, successfully, that Baldwin be prohibited from disclosing the racy contents of the conversations that he, as the operation’s wiretap monitor, had overheard. The secrets of the DNC—and the Columbia Plaza—would remain undisclosed, for now.

  To further ensure as much, Dean that month also performed what he later called the “concrete and sweaty act” of shredding three notebooks, including an “operational diary” of the Gemstone project, seized from Hunt’s EOB safe. This detail Dean withheld from the Senate and, initially, from the WSPF prosecutors; he disclosed it only after his plea deal was completed. In a recent interview, Hunt termed Dean’s destruction of the notebooks an act of “self-preservation,” aimed at suppressing “notations that were incriminatory to him.” Of Dean’s presence at the creation of Gemstone, there is no better indication than his destruction of this evidence, and the lengths he went to conceal it.24

  Only one overarching problem remained: the money! Despite the brush-off he had gotten from Mitchell at the Metropolitan Club in November, Dean still saw the former attorney general as the most likely of the Big Three—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell—to act on the defendants’ demands. Dean also remembered the solid performance of Herb Kalmbach in raising and dispensing hush money the previous summer. Therein Dean apparently saw his, and the cover-up’s, salvation: If he could get Mitchell and Kalmbach in a room together, perhaps Kalmbach could be persuaded to return to the game.

  On January 19, Dean encountered Mitchell and Kalmbach at a trustees meeting for the Nixon Foundation at Blair House, the official residence for foreign dignitaries, located across from the
White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Afterward, Dean told the Senate, he repaired with Mitchell, Kalmbach, and Fred LaRue to Mitchell’s law office at 1701. (At U.S. v. Mitchell, Dean changed LaRue’s status at this meeting, from attendee to discussion topic.) Within a few minutes, Dean claimed, Mitchell asked Kalmbach to resume his role in the hush-money enterprise. Dean remembered Kalmbach refusing, then demurring in response to a second request, made either by Mitchell or Dean himself, for a list of potential contributors, and leaving shortly thereafter.

  Neither LaRue nor Mitchell recalled the meeting at all. Kalmbach recalled it—but not as Dean described it. The über-fund-raiser remembered Dean approaching him as the trustees’ meeting broke up, and telling him John Mitchell wanted to see him right away. Through “misty-like rain,” Kalmbach recalled, he and Dean—not Dean and Mitchell, as Dean claimed—ran the half block to 1701 and headed straight into the office of the former attorney general. There they found Mitchell and LaRue. According to Kalmbach, it was Dean who “led the conversation.”

  Mr. Dean stated that they were interested in my raising additional funds for these defendants. And the minute that came up, suddenly I knew, of course, what the reason was for this meeting. And I, of course, had made up my mind the prior August that I would not raise additional funds, and so I was just in the position of excusing myself as gracefully as possible from the meeting…. [I] said that I would not do anything further.

  Dean was “the one that talked to me most often about this, to continue in this [hush-money] program,” Kalmbach told the Senate Watergate committee; and as he told the House, it was Dean, not Mitchell, who asked him to reenter the game that drizzly day in January 1973. As for Mitchell’s role, Kalmbach made explicitly clear—in the only interview he ever gave after Watergate, to author Len Colodny, in April 1988—that there was none. “Mitchell never asked me to raise money,” Kalmbach said.