The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  For his part, the former attorney general claimed he first learned of the payments to the Watergate defendants in September 1972, and that he neither aided nor impeded the scheme. He told House investigators, according to previously unpublished documents, that he thought the disbursements were solely for legal fees, and that he “knew that the payments were in cash, but he did not know of the covert manner” in which they were being made.

  Since Fred LaRue worked so closely with Dean in the hush-money enterprise—deciding sums, arranging drop-offs—prosecutors hoped the Mississippian, after copping his plea, would testify that Mitchell was the driving force behind it. But LaRue’s residual affection for Mitchell, on such vivid display when LaRue broke down and wept before the grand jury, apparently prevented him from further implicating his old friend. LaRue came close, previously unpublished documents show, wavered back and forth—but never pulled the trigger.

  Thus after explicitly telling the Senate Watergate committee he never briefed Mitchell on his own machinations with Dean and Kalmbach, LaRue told federal prosecutors he “discussed with Mitchell these money disbursements—discussed where $ would come from.” LaRue told the prosecutors “either Dean or Mitchell caused [him] to contact Kalmbach,” but added Dean “appeared to be directing” the effort. The farthest LaRue went was to claim he presented a “cash disbursement summary sheet” to Mitchell in July 1972. “Mitchell said you ought to get rid of it + he destroyed it,” the prosecutors’ notes read. Yet in recounting to Senate investigators how he entered the hush-money scheme, LaRue spoke only of Dean, not of Mitchell, and made no mention of the incriminating summary sheet Mitchell had supposedly ordered him to destroy. LaRue also told Senate investigators he “[could] not remember whether he was getting his instructions from Mitchell or from Dean,” but that, in any case, he “[did] not recall Dean seeking approval from higher-ups” in the operation. Elsewhere LaRue said that as early as June 28, 1972, he and Mitchell discussed “commitments” to the Watergate defendants; but LaRue also claimed he “did not raise the subject with Mitchell because he had the impression that this fund-raising area was Dean’s responsibility and that there was consequently no need to tell Mitchell.”

  With House impeachment investigators in April 1974, LaRue continued his strange Mississippi two-step, claiming Mitchell “was aware of how much money was going out” but that Dean “made the final decisions.” Later that year, at U.S. v. Mitchell, LaRue returned Mitchell to an authorial role, claiming the former attorney general “asked me to work with Mr. Dean on…meeting these commitments.” LaRue reaffirmed he “did discuss…the payment of monies with Mr. Mitchell,” then swore his and Mitchell’s talks covered “only the vaguest generalities.” Finally, LaRue told prosecutors that Dean and Mitchell had jointly dispatched him in January 1973 to solicit rich Republican donors, without betraying his true purpose, in an effort to replenish the depleted $350,000 White House fund. This was aborted when the donors, including Cincinnati businessman Carl Lindner, demanded to know the reason for their largesse. Even here, however, LaRue told the House he undertook this mission “after discussions with Dean.”25

  Until now, President Nixon had mostly been a spectator at the Watergate drama, the recipient, in his White House aerie, of news good and bad, a largely passive actor alternately baffled and intrigued, enraged and delighted as developments warranted. Outside of the “smoking gun” meeting, when Nixon acquiesced in Haldeman’s proposal to get CIA involved on national security grounds—a step taken under the mistaken belief, propagated by Dean, that the proposal had the endorsement of John Mitchell—Nixon had had little role in the daily machinations of the cover-up. He had also indicated his ex post facto approval when Haldeman informed him, thirty-nine days later, that Hunt, “at considerable cost,” had been made “happy”—“They have to be paid,” Nixon had agreed—but even here, the president’s role had been passive, and not irrefutably discernible as a witting obstruction of justice.

  In the days surrounding his second inauguration, however, Nixon watched the situation deteriorate rapidly. On January 14 and 15, the New York Times ran a pair of articles by Seymour Hersh, far more worrisome than anything Woodward and Bernstein had published, headlined “4 Watergate Defendants Reported Still Being Paid” and “Pressures to Plead Guilty Alleged in Watergate Case.” On February 7, the Senate created a select committee to probe Watergate. Nixon’s thoughts on The Question ran toward the uncharitable. “I mean, let’s face it,” he snapped to Haldeman and Ehrlichman on December 11. “We all know who the hell should have handled this. Goddamnit, it was Mitchell, and he wasn’t handling it.”

  NIXON: I would dump him; it would kill him financially. John Mitchell has a serious problem with his wife. He was unable to watch the campaign and as a result, underlings did things without his knowledge.

  EHRLICHMAN: […] The minute you dump on Mitchell indirectly by saying he didn’t have a chance to watch the underlings, the underlings are going to produce their diaries and show Mitchell was in eighteen meetings where this was discussed, ratified, approved, authorized, financed.

  NIXON: Was he?

  EHRLICHMAN: I gather so.

  NIXON: Well, Mitchell, then, did it.26

  Aides who had struggled to navigate the scandal’s choppy waters now began washing up at the Oval Office, looking for a lifeline they thought only the president of the United States could throw them. The requests—framed always in the indirect bureaucratic fashion of government men managing a problem, not as desperate cries for help in a capsizing criminal conspiracy—started with pleas for executive clemency and hush money, and climaxed in demands that the president perform swiftly the unpleasant chore the coconspirators all believed, in shared delusion, would instantly and tidily dispose of the matter: Sacrifice John Mitchell. It was Nixon’s response, grudging at first, ultimately enthusiastic, that sealed Mitchell’s fate.

  Contrary to received wisdom, Nixon’s tapes did not reveal him “a manipulative, master politician overseeing every detail” (Washington Post), “the key figure in the cover-up conspiracy” (Time) who “knew virtually everything about Watergate and the imposition of a cover-up, from the beginning” (historian Stanley Kutler). Yes, the tapes showed Nixon became a party to the cover-up, inarguably by February 1973; this much Nixon himself confessed to David Frost. “I will admit…I was not prosecuting the case.”

  I will admit that during that period, rather than acting in my role as the chief law enforcement officer in the land…I did not meet that responsibility…in some cases going right to the edge of the law in trying to advise Ehrlichman and Haldeman and all the rest as to how best to present their cases, because I thought they were legally innocent, that I came to the edge. And under the circumstances, I would have to say that a reasonable person could call that a cover-up.

  Worse than belying Nixon’s Quaker morality, the tapes demolished his carefully cultivated image as a competent chief executive, a steel-trap mind harnessed to the demanding business of presidential decision-making in the atomic age. From his first days as president, Nixon’s aides were privately shocked by how he wasted “countless hours” on “rambling and rumination.” The president’s management style, Ehrlichman recalled in 1982, “would involve his chewing on a subject for a while and then leaving it and going off to other things and then coming back to it unannounced. Very often it was hard to pick up his train of thought…. This could go on over a period of days.”27

  In Watergate Nixon “didn’t know what the truth was,” Ehrlichman told a symposium audience. “He didn’t know what he had said, didn’t know what he had done, and the fact was whatever he was saying was truth at that particular moment.” The tapes unmasked Nixon not as the take-charge boss of a criminal conspiracy but rather as an aging and confused politician lost in a welter of detail, unable to distinguish his Magruders from his Strachans, uncertain who knew what and when, what each player had told the grand jury, whose testimony was direct, whose hearsay. Charles Colson told the
House that Nixon seemed “genuinely confused by all of the conflicting accounts.” Alexander Butterfield, the aide who saw Nixon more frequently than any other save Haldeman and who publicly disclosed the existence of the taping system, acknowledged that the transcripts betrayed in the president “a seeming incoherence of speaking style.” “One of the things that did strike me when I read the transcripts,” agreed Magruder, “was that really, how much—or how little—information [Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman] really did have.”

  No one benefited more from the president’s estrangement from the facts of Watergate than his chief accuser, John Dean—and no one, besides Nixon himself, suffered more from this disadvantage than John Mitchell, the highest-ranking administration official imprisoned on the strength of Dean’s testimony. Dean was keenly aware of his mental superiority over the president. In Blind Ambition, Dean wrote that Nixon was lucid and logical only sporadically, and was mostly rambling, forgetful, and disorganized, unable to remember what Dean told him from day to day. In a 1989 interview, Dean recalled much the same of Mitchell: “He wasn’t sharp…. He didn’t remember a lot of details…. I had to—used to prepare Mitchell to testify, to go up on the Hill. And he wasn’t very good. He wasn’t a very good witness. He couldn’t hold facts. He couldn’t hold information.”28

  Dean ended Nixon’s and Mitchell’s careers, producing in the president both everlasting fury and regret (“Oh, the incredible treachery of that son-of-a-bitch!”), and exposing the limitations of the mental machines that had propelled the older men, respectively, from Whittier and Blue Point to the White House and Wall Street. Dean was younger, smarter, quicker, more tightly wired into the bureaucracy, and better versed in the origins, players, and events of Watergate. Against this backdrop commenced Nixon’s infamous series of meetings and phone calls with Dean—some twenty in all, between February 27 and April 17—that marked the endgame in the Watergate cover-up and changed the course of American history.

  The first White House aide to approach Nixon that winter was Colson, who laid the groundwork in a chat with Haldeman. “This Watergate thing is not going to go away,” Colson warned, “and it seems to me that John Mitchell must have been responsible for this. And if he was, we damn well better bring him in and make him take the responsibility.” In Nixon’s office February 13, Colson sought assurances the president would take a “hard nose” stand against the Ervin committee interrogating White House aides. “If they want Haldeman, Ehrlichman, me,” Colson said, “we have to limit the areas that they’re gonna go into.” And whoever ordered the break-in, Colson argued in a clear reference to Mitchell, should say so and spare the president further grief. “If it’s gonna come out in the hearings, for God sakes, let it out,” he cried.

  COLSON: At least get rid of it now, take our losses.

  NIXON: Well, who the hell do you think did this? Mitchell? He can’t do it; he’ll perjure himself so he won’t admit it. Now that’s the problem.

  Next came Dean. The tapes show Dean ran circles around the president, used his superior comprehension of the scandal to shape the topics discussed, options considered, and courses pursued. Asked during the impeachment hearings by Democratic congressman John Conyers if he ever withheld information from Nixon during Watergate, Dean replied: “I didn’t walk in every time and volunteer everything that might be on my mind.” Chief among Dean’s deceptions was his implication of Mitchell. In his talks with Nixon, Dean was careful never to say explicitly that the former attorney general approved the break-in; but the counsel made his suspicions clear enough. “Mitchell probably puffed on his pipe and said, ‘Go ahead,’ and never really reflected on what it was all about,” Dean told Nixon on March 21. Where the hush money was concerned, Dean cast Mitchell as the scheme’s father, himself as a mere messenger:

  Arrangements were made through Mitchell, initiating it. And I was present in discussions where [it was agreed] these guys had to be taken care of.

  Dean later cast the March 21 morning session, the infamous “cancer on the presidency” meeting, as his bid to end the cover-up. Yet the conversation appears, in retrospect, more an attempt to draw Nixon into the plot, precisely because Mitchell had proved so immovable. “How much money do you need?” Nixon finally asked. Dean, citing a figure that had appeared nowhere else, estimated the defendants would cost a million dollars over the next two years. “We could get that,” Nixon replied. “You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.” But, he added, “the question is who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?” “Well,” Dean shot back, “I think that is something Mitchell ought to be charged with. And get some pros to help him.”29

  Dean had laid out three scenarios for Nixon that day: continuing the payments and thereby maintaining the cover-up; limited disclosure, with complicit aides appearing before a reconvened grand jury, under whatever immunity could be negotiated; and self-immolation, with all parties left to fend for themselves. Nixon recognized that all three scenarios converged, that “in the end, we are going to be bled to death, and it’s all going to come out anyway.” What to do? The immediate answer was for Dean to regroup the Big Three—Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman—and figure something out. Mitchell should come down from New York. “Mitchell has to be there because he is seriously involved and we’re trying to keep him with us,” Nixon said; but the president increasingly saw his old consigliere as a toxic figure: “I think I need to stay away from the Mitchell subject at this point, do you agree?”

  Dean neglected to tell Nixon that as they spoke, the hush-money gears were busily grinding away. Shortly before Dean stepped foot into the Oval Office that morning, he had contacted Fred LaRue and informed him of Hunt’s latest demand: $120,000. When LaRue sought direction, Dean declared he was out of the money business; LaRue would have to decide for himself. LaRue refused to make any deliveries on his own authority. Dean’s answer was predictable: Talk to Mitchell. Asked why none of this arose during his exhaustive “cancer” briefing, Dean said he was “just sort of following along.”

  Mitchell’s response to Hunt’s demand for $120,000 gave rise to numerous “overt acts” in the U.S. v. Mitchell indictment. These alleged acts of conspiracy included a phone call Mitchell received in New York from Haldeman, right after the “cancer” meeting, the last half of which Haldeman had attended, and Fred LaRue’s phone conversation with Mitchell later that day, held at the urging of Dean, wherein Mitchell supposedly “authorized” LaRue to pay Hunt $75,000 in cash.

  Neither charge had merit. Haldeman’s call to Mitchell made no mention of hush money; it was, instead, classically Haldemanian, brisk and businesslike, merely to inform Mitchell the president wanted to see him in Washington. Then there was Mitchell’s “order” to pay Hunt. The WSPF prosecutors tried to prove Mitchell initiated the fateful discussion, but neither phone company toll records nor Mitchell’s logs showed him placing any calls to LaRue on March 21. LaRue’s testimony shifted, but both men agreed he did seek Mitchell’s advice. Mitchell said he asked what the money was for and whether previous payments had been made. “Legal fees,” he quoted LaRue saying, and yes, there had been previous payments. “If I were in your position,” Mitchell remembered saying, “I would pay the money.” John Doar, chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, later rebuked him: “You did tell [LaRue] that it was all right and make that payment?” “No,” Mitchell replied firmly. “As I testified before, Mr. Doar, he asked me what I would do if I were he, and I said under the circumstances I would make the payment.”30

  Once more, Mitchell had skated past the onrushing danger, which on this occasion had materialized in the person of Fred LaRue—the best friend the president and I ever had. Such was the poisonous pinstriped atmosphere of Watergate: Peril appeared most often in the form of smiling friends, colleagues—even the president of the United States, whom Mitchell, the next morning, flew to Washington to see, in their final meeting.

  THE BIG ENCHILADA

  This is the time for strong me
n.

  —Richard Nixon, 19731

  IT WAS A MARK of their estrangement that Nixon, before seeing Mitchell, felt the need to confer with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean. The group gathered in Nixon’s Executive Office Building (EOB) office on the afternoon of March 21, 1973. Dean continued to deceive: When Nixon asked what should be done about Howard Hunt’s demand for $120,000—evidence the president never definitively authorized the payments in the morning’s “cancer” meeting—Dean responded: “Mitchell and LaRue are now aware of it, so they know how [Hunt] is feeling.” What were Mitchell and LaRue planning to do? “Well, I have not talked with either of them,” Dean said. That was a lie: It was from Dean that Fred LaRue had learned of Hunt’s latest demand in the first place.

  Before they arrived in Nixon’s office, Dean had cornered Haldeman and warned that “if the cover-up was to proceed, we would have to draw the wagons in a circle around the White House.” “The best tactic to deal with the entire matter,” he told Haldeman, “would be to get Mr. Mitchell to step forward, because if [the prosecutors] got Mr. Mitchell…that would solve everybody’s problem…. They would have a big fish.” In Nixon’s presence, Ehrlichman piled on, arguing Mitchell should “step out.” Nixon fidgeted. Mitchell’s sacrifice made him uneasy. The tape ends with him abruptly fleeing his own office: “I don’t have any time. I am sorry. I have to leave.”2

  At eleven the next morning, Mitchell arrived at Haldeman’s West Wing office. Already present were Ehrlichman and Dean. What transpired next spawned the tenth and final “overt act” attributed to Mitchell in his indictment. Once again, accounts differed sharply on the crucial point: whether Mitchell, as the special prosecutors alleged, “assured Ehrlichman that E. Howard Hunt, Jr., was not a ‘problem’ any longer.”