The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  Mitchell, of course, denied reassuring anyone. “I would not know whether Hunt’s problems have been taken care of or not,” he told the Senate. Asked at the impeachment hearings if the March 22 meeting touched at all on Hunt’s demand, Mitchell replied “none whatsoever,” adding, with certain logic: “I didn’t know whether LaRue had followed through on his conversation with me or not, so I would not have any basis to make that statement [that Hunt was no longer a problem].”

  The most damning testimony about Mitchell’s role in the March 22 meeting came, as usual, from Dean. Speaking with Haldeman four days later, as recorded in The Haldeman Diaries, Dean claimed that “in the meeting…Mitchell said there was no problem on this matter, and that’s all we knew about it.” More remarkable than Haldeman’s entry, however, was the absence of one on March 22—the day on which Mitchell supposedly said, in Haldeman’s presence, that Hunt was no longer a problem. Dean also recounted the March 22 meeting for Nixon on April 16, 1973:

  Ehrlichman said at that time, “Well, is the problem with Hunt straightened out?” He said it to me, and I said, “Well, ask the man who may know: Mitchell.” Mitchell said, “I think that problem is solved.”

  Ehrlichman remembered it differently. “It was Mr. Dean saying just, ‘Is that matter taken care of?’ without reference to Hunt or anybody,” Ehrlichman told the Senate. Mitchell responded, Ehrlichman said, by “sort of grunting and saying, ‘Maybe’ or ‘I guess so’ or something very vague.” Nor did Haldeman remember the former attorney general offering the “assurances” alleged by the WSPF: “Mitchell…turned to Dean and said, ‘Let me raise another point. Have you taken care of the other problem—the Hunt problem?’ Something like that…. Dean kind of looked a little flustered and said, ‘Well, well, no. I don’t know where that is,’ or something. And Mitchell said, ‘Well, I guess it’s taken care of.’ And so we assumed from that that Mitchell had taken care of it.”

  Three of four attendees at the meeting thus agreed: Mitchell never “assured” Ehrlichman that Hunt was no longer a problem. Only Dean seemed to hear the words escape Mitchell’s lips. No matter; on this charge, too, the jury in U.S. v. Mitchell convicted the former attorney general.3

  Still later on the afternoon of March 22, the same cast trudged into Nixon’s EOB office. It marked the last time Mitchell saw Nixon during his presidency and the only time these five central players—Nixon, Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean—met face-to-face. It must have been a nerve-wracking experience for Dean; at any moment talk could have turned to the question of who authorized the break-in, and after Mitchell’s denial, heads would have turned Dean’s way. Yet the anticipated Armageddon never happened. Instead, after strained pleasantries, the session swiftly degenerated into the kind of aimless, purposeless colloquy Nixon favored. Amazingly, those issues most desperately in need of resolution—responsibility for the break-in, the status of the hush money, the likelihood they would all soon be indicted—the participants never got around to discussing. The closest they came was when Mitchell made passing reference to impeachment, the first person to do so in Nixon’s presence.

  The former attorney general advised Nixon to rescind his claim of executive privilege against the Ervin committee, with three conditions. First, the White House could not, on separation-of-powers grounds, allow Dean, the president’s lawyer, to appear before the committee; other White House aides could only be interrogated in executive session; and only about Watergate, without senators straying into areas like “Henry Kissinger, foreign affairs.”

  Soon the president cleared the room except for Mitchell. Alone with his old friend for the last time, the president harkened back to the Eisenhower days, sneering at Ike’s decision to force the resignation of his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, when it surfaced that Adams had accepted gifts from a businessman under investigation. “What happened with Adams,” Nixon began, “I don’t want it to happen with Watergate…. I think [Adams] made a mistake, but he shouldn’t have been sacked…. And, uh, for that reason, I am perfectly willing to—I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it’ll save it—save the plan. That’s the whole point.”

  Investigators later cited these remarks as irrefutable evidence of both men’s complicity in the Watergate cover-up. Largely ignored was the absence of any response by Mitchell and Nixon’s next words, which were prompted by the rectitude he saw, and resented, in his old law partner. “On the other hand, uh, uh, I would prefer, as I said to you, that you do it the other way. And I would particularly prefer to do it the other way if it’s going to come out that way, anyway.”

  Mitchell began to respond (“Well—”) but Nixon continued his lament. It would be unfair to fire men like Haldeman and Dean. “Eisenhower—that’s all he ever cared about. Christ, ‘Be sure he was clean.’ Both in the [Checkers] thing and the Adams thing. But I don’t look at it that way. And I just—that’s the thing I am really concerned with. We’re going to protect our people if we can.”4

  Eighteen hours later the roof caved in, and all that remained of the life Mitchell had worked since 1938 to build—honor and distinction in the legal fraternity, solid standing in the Establishment—was destroyed forever. On Friday, March 23, spectators who had queued up to observe the sentencing of the Watergate defendants watched Judge John J. Sirica take the bench and announce he would first deal with a “preliminary matter.” McCord had written Sirica a letter on March 19 that the judge, citing an appearance of impropriety, had initially refused to accept. Now “Maximum John” read the letter aloud. “In the interest of justice,” McCord had written, “and in the interest of restoring faith in the criminal justice system…I will state the following…”

  1. There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.

  2. Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to…the government’s case.

  3. Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial.

  Saying he had “never done this before” in fifteen years on the bench, Sirica deferred sentencing McCord until they could meet in chambers, in the presence of counsel and a stenographer. Next the judge sentenced the other defendants, with a severity that validated his nickname but was also, he announced, “provisional,” contingent on the men’s willingness to testify more candidly before the grand jury and Senate. Liddy, the stoic, convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and eavesdropping, received a sentence of six to twenty years; Barker, Martinez, Sturgis, and Gonzalez, each of whom had pleaded guilty to the same charges as Liddy, got the maximum, forty years each; and Hunt, the career spy who made an impassioned plea for mercy (“Four children without a mother; I ask that they not lose their father, as well”) received Sirica’s unique brand of it: thirty-five years.

  The reverberations from McCord’s letter proved, as the Times noted, “explosive…immediate and dramatic.” Earl Silbert announced the grand jury would be reconvened the following Monday. McCord, free on bond and sporting a new lawyer, appeared that Friday at the Dirksen Building offices of Sam Dash, the Georgetown University professor named chief counsel to the Ervin committee, and Fred Thompson, the Tennessee lawyer appointed minority counsel.

  Previously unpublished documents show that McCord gave Dash a rather muddled account of the origins and execution of the Watergate operation, hampered both by the inherent limitations of McCord’s testimony—mostly hearsay derived from Liddy, and even then severely garbled in the retelling—and, too, by McCord’s dishonesty. He omitted the fact that he had begun wiretapping Spencer Oliver’s DNC telephone a full three days before Liddy’s men gained first entry; that he had directed Baldwin to focus “primarily” on sex talk; that he had censored and withheld the wiretap data from Liddy; and so on. What McCord did tell Dash was sometimes preposterous. “Liddy got Mitchell to change [the target] from O’Brien’s apartment to O’Brien’s office at the DNC,” McCord ch
arged, adding Liddy “also got permission from Mitchell to delay the project.” In no other account of Watergate was O’Brien’s apartment mentioned as a target, nor had Liddy secured Mitchell’s sanction for delay; rather Liddy had chafed at Mitchell’s slowness to approve the project.

  The news media feasted like never before. Mitchell had told reporters he didn’t have “the faintest idea what McCord intends to reveal,” but his blissful ignorance would not last long. On March 26, the Times led with a story headlined: “McCord Reported to Link Mitchell to Bugging Plot.” Similar stories ran in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Roiled by the commotion, Martha Mitchell dialed the New York Times office and declared, with characteristic delicacy, that somebody was trying to make John Mitchell “the goat” in Watergate. “I fear for my husband,” she said. “I’m really scared. I have a definite reason. I can’t tell you why. But they’re not going to pin anything on him. I won’t let them, and I don’t give a damn who gets hurt. I can name names.”

  Struggling to keep his alcoholic wife in check, the former attorney general missed an appointment with the president. “You saw the paper, so you know why I didn’t come by yesterday,” he told Haldeman on March 28. No, Haldeman said, he hadn’t seen the paper; what was Mitchell talking about? “Martha told me she called the Times,” Mitchell said. “Good Lord, what did she say?” “Just what you’d expect someone full of whiskey to say,” Mitchell snapped.5

  In fact, Martha had anticipated the scandal’s next phase, wherein each of Mitchell’s former protégés, certain he was being made the scapegoat, sought reassurance from his former mentor. The first to arrive at Mitchell’s door—always a step ahead—was Dean, who was mulling fleeing the country. “Mitchell could arrange it,” he fantasized. “He, too, might consider going to some country where we’d be safe from prosecution.” When Dean asked if he was “being set up,” Mitchell, surely knowing better, assured him the White House would never do that to him.6

  Next was Magruder, who visited Mitchell in New York on March 27. Fearing for his future, Magruder foraged for assurances that if he went to prison he would receive family and legal support, executive clemency, employment assistance. Mitchell supposedly advised him to “continue to hold with the cover story…and the conditions would be met.” “I can’t accept [assurances] from you,” Magruder replied, calling into question his purpose in visiting Mitchell in the first place, “because you are here in New York.” If similar promises could be extracted from Haldeman—the preeminent symbol, outside of the president himself, of White House power—Magruder would “feel better.” The two agreed to meet with Haldeman at the White House the next day.7

  Seated in Haldeman’s office on the morning of March 28, Mitchell later recalled, Magruder returned to “this perjury question.” The trio embarked on what Mitchell described as “a quick run-through” of the improvisations Mitchell, Dean, and Magruder had spun back in September 1972, shortly before Magruder’s third appearance before the grand jury, when they needed to come up with an explanation for the two pencil entries in Magruder’s desk diary recording the Liddy presentations in the attorney general’s office. It was, in short, Mitchell’s recurring nightmare, triggered anew by McCord’s defection: how to explain the Gemstone meetings. Haldeman icily told Magruder he had better iron out the differing stories with Dean and Mitchell directly.

  The ensuing showdown took place that afternoon, in a vacated West Wing office. Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean—the three Gemstone veterans—approached this session, their last together, warily; Magruder, who had borne the heaviest burden of perjury at the grand jury and break-in trial, was wariest of all. He trusted Mitchell, but not Dean, who had begun sending signals he was not going to stick with the story all three had agreed upon when Magruder’s diary was subpoenaed. Mitchell and Dean, meanwhile, had also spoken the day before, and the message the former attorney general sternly delivered to the younger man boiled down to: Stiffen up. According to Haldeman, who recounted Dean’s side of the discussion to the president, Mitchell also warned Dean that if his recollection of the Gemstone meetings differed from Mitchell’s, Dean would have “a problem because you won’t be believed.”

  Magruder sought common ground. “I said to Mr. Dean that…he had to be able to agree there was only one meeting [in Mitchell’s office], because that was [our] agreement…. Mr. Mitchell indicated, I think, his willingness to work on that problem with me; but Mr. Dean said that he hoped he would not have to testify. And I said, ‘Fine, if you don’t have to testify, there is no problem. But,’ I said, ‘what happens if you do testify?’ [Dean] said, ‘I can’t give you any assurances as to what I would do.’” Now Magruder became desperate. “If you go back and say, ‘Actually we discussed intelligence,’ I am two feet in the grave!” Mitchell, according to Magruder, tried to play “conciliator,” saying he was sure Dean would step up when the time came. Magruder left the meeting scarcely reassured—and “furious” at Dean.

  Dean, for his part, recalled Magruder nervously clasping his hands, Mitchell gripping his pipe, gaze averted, face “long and gray.” “I was very evasive with them,” Dean testified. “They were getting the message that I wasn’t going to perjure myself…. I liked Jeb as a friend, and I wanted to let him down very easily. He had a problem with my testimony, as did Mitchell, and I wasn’t going to budge an inch.” Then Dean recalled that the former attorney general, responding to Dean’s speculation about ultimate culpability in Watergate, suddenly and surprisingly admitted having ordered the break-in, under the mistaken belief that the men Liddy selected for the mission would have no connections to the campaign committee. When this passage from Blind Ambition was read to him one week before he died, in November 1988, Mitchell reacted incredulously. “Ridiculous,” he spat, interrupting the reading. “This conversation’s ridiculous.” At the part where he admitted guilt, Mitchell clucked: “Oh, jeez.” And when the passage was over: “Pardon me while I go out and throw up.”

  Dean’s story carried great significance: the one and only time John Mitchell admitted authorizing the Watergate break-in. But was it true? The story first surfaced in Dean’s executive session testimony before the Senate. Here, however, Dean made no mention of Mitchell having asked for Dean’s hypothesis. Nine days later, in public session, Dean for the first time identified the fateful exchange as having come during the March 28 showdown, “at the end.” Once again, Dean made no mention of Mitchell soliciting any hypotheses. At the House impeachment hearings, none of this—the March 28 showdown, the great Mitchell admission—came up at all. At U.S. v. Mitchell, Dean told a story largely in accord with the version he gave in Blind Ambition. Each retelling was liable to differ in its account of what Mitchell actually said: whether he thought the DNC operation would be “one or two times” removed from CRP, “three or four times.” As usual, no investigator showed any interest in Dean’s discrepancies.

  At no time, however, did Dean claim that Mitchell made his momentous admission when Jeb Magruder was out of the room; indeed, Dean’s accounts invariably implied that Magruder was present when Mitchell incriminated himself. Why, then, did Magruder not readily recall it? As Mitchell’s sole accuser in the Key Biscayne conflict, surely Magruder had compelling incentive to remember Mitchell confessing his ultimate responsibility for the DNC operation in front of a corroborating witness like Dean.

  Yet Magruder never mentioned any such confession by Mitchell to the Senate, in either executive or public session, nor in his book, An American Life—all forums in which Magruder recounted the March 28 showdown at length. Not until his testimony at U.S. v. Mitchell, offered, like Dean’s, in exchange for leniency, did Magruder suddenly recall this unforgettable moment Dean claimed they both witnessed, and even then Magruder’s recollection clashed with Dean’s. The sharp conflicts in the three men’s recollections, characteristic of their doomed entanglement, created, at a minimum, reasonable doubt that Mitchell ever said anything of the kind.8

  However, even if Mitchell di
d not volunteer the mea culpa ascribed to him, his mere presence at the March 28 meeting, and in similar discussions around this time, belied his culpability in the scandal. He was party to these discussions because he feared disclosure of the Gemstone meetings—a prospect made inevitable by McCord’s rupture—and he wanted to learn, before the grand jury did, what the other attendees of those meetings would testify had happened in them. Mitchell never ordered the Watergate operation, never even heard a proposal targeting that site, but he’d sat at the pinnacle of American law enforcement and twice listened to Gordon Liddy propose similar crimes and never ordered Liddy arrested or fired. Never mind that Mitchell rejected Liddy’s plans; it was the same calculus, about the terrible appearance of it all, that had first thrust Mitchell into the cover-up, when Magruder faced the grand jury.

  The cannibalism unleashed by the McCord letter did not go unnoticed, or unfelt, by Richard Nixon. On March 27, the president had listened as Haldeman related the view, fast gaining adherents, that “Mitchell could cut this whole thing off, if he would just step forward…. Mitchell did sign off on it. And if that’s what it is, the empire will crack…all the people getting whacked around in order to keep the thing from focusing on John Mitchell, when inevitably it is going to end up that way, anyway.” As usual, Nixon was wracked by indecision and unsure how, or whether, to approach his old friend. He couldn’t answer The Question: Did Mitchell do it? “What I can’t understand,” he told Haldeman, “is how Mitchell would ever approve [the break-in]. Magruder I can understand…. He is not a very bright fellow…. Mitchell knows enough not to do something like that.”