The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  This last claim was one Mitchell, having reviewed the tapes of April 1973, was uniquely equipped to rebut. He believed the whole idea of the Frost interviews a “mistake” on Nixon’s part. “In his opinion,” Mardian wrote after talking with Mitchell, “Nixon really had not thought the matter out when he agreed to do the shows; that he could have done it with a better format and a more sympathetic questioner. He thought Nixon was brilliant in the second interview and that the third show was ‘blah.’ He felt that the first show put him in a very bad light.” Publicly, however, Mitchell said nothing.

  Mitchell’s primary fear in those days was not incarceration. Running into a reporter from the Nixon days, the former attorney general joked matter-of-factly about his date with “the slammer.” He confidently told a friend: I can face jail. Prison was not the problem; the trouble was Marty. “The only thing he worries about is his daughter,” a friend said. The question of who would look after the girl on weekends and holidays, and in summertime, when she returned from boarding school in Connecticut, was uppermost in Mitchell’s mind. He settled on a rotating group that included Ken and Peggy Ebbitt, Mitchell’s friends in Bronxville (“We practically raised the girl,” Ken later remarked); Sandy Hobbs; and Jill Mitchell-Reed.

  For Marty, only sixteen, the vilification and incarceration of her father, so soon after the ugly decline and death of her mother, made for one of the seventies’ most traumatic individual experiences. “Her father was the strong person in the family that she went to when her mother was difficult and was drinking,” Hobbs recalled. “So here she was, losing the strong person in her family. It was a horrible situation.” “Her father was the love of her life,” Mary Dean said. “She loved him more than anything in the world. I never saw a daughter and father closer.”

  Reporters who went looking for Mitchell at this time found he had “virtually disappeared.” He was spending all his remaining free time with Marty, holed up in his East Fifty-second Street apartment building. Even there he found no refuge from the censuring eyes of the outside world: A neighbor in the building boasted to a reporter about letting the elevator door slam in Mitchell’s face. “If it had been anybody else, I would have held it,” the neighbor said. “It was just my way of saying, ‘Screw you, John Mitchell.’” Upstairs, Mitchell and Marty whiled away the remaining hours cooking, reading, watching TV together. His last Sunday with the girl was June 19, Father’s Day.

  A group of old Nixon loyalistas, led by Pat Buchanan, tried to throw a farewell party, but the Old Stone Face wouldn’t have it. All expressions of sympathy he rejected. I don’t want any of that hearts-and-flowers stuff, he would say. What does it lead to? The day before he was due in Montgomery, Mitchell’s most improbable sympathizer, Rabbi Korff, called once more. Was there anything he could do? No, Mitchell said, your prayers, that’s all. “My call is not perfunctory,” Korff insisted. “I know, and I appreciate it more than I can say,” Mitchell said. “You are a great friend, and I value your friendship, but there is nothing anyone can do.”

  “They got what they wanted,” Mitchell said of his arch nemeses, the WSPF lawyers. “But I am not down. I’ll live through it. There’s nothing I did that I wouldn’t do again with a clear conscience.” Now the rabbi quoted from Scripture: They that hate thee will be clothed in shame. Mitchell merely repeated what he had told the holy man once before: My mistake was in men, not law.6

  Clad in a dark green pinstripe suit, briefcase bulging with notes for a planned memoir, surrounded by reporters and camera crews, the former attorney general strode onto Maxwell’s grounds at precisely 11:25 a.m. on Wednesday, June 22, 1977. Ah, we got you now, we got you now, Big John! the inmates jeered. Got you now. You’ll be here for a while. You ain’t nothin’ but another convict with a number now!

  The jubilation extended beyond the prison grounds. Outlaws the world over, from radical Mark Rudd to mobster Meyer Lansky, exulted in the spectacular downfall of Mr. Law and Order. Mitchell ignored the commotion, pausing only to offer a steadying hand to a cameraman stampeded by his colleagues. “Watch it son, don’t hurt yourself.” Then, with that slight smile: “Good morning, gentlemen.” Anything to say today, Mr. Mitchell? “Yes, indeed. It’s nice to be back in Alabama. It’s a nice day in Alabama.”

  Despite the surrealism of the moment and the unprecedented shame it carried for him, the certitude that he now “personified Watergate more than anyone except Nixon himself,” Mitchell was walking tall. “The big man seemed as glacially composed as ever,” Time observed. “He never complained,” said Plato Cacheris, who accompanied his client on the walk. “I think he took it better than I did.”

  First Mitchell made the acquintance of the warden. “I indicated to him that he’ll be treated like any other inmate here,” Grunska said. Then came the ritual known to all convicts as R&D: receiving and discharge. It was at this point that Mitchell officially traded in his identity for an impersonal assigned number: 24171-157. Four times the former attorney general was fingerprinted. (“In case we make a mistake; they smudge sometimes,” the guard said; was he being sarcastic? ); then Mitchell was photographed a dozen times (“Different copies for different offices; I’m told you know all about it,” the guard said—unmistakable impertinence!).

  Next, 24171-157’s belongings were confiscated and his measurements taken. The cash he was carrying was credited toward his account at the commissary, where he could purchase his beloved pipe tobacco, snack items, and popular jailhouse reading material like Playboy and Penthouse. His watch and ring were shipped home; when the same was proposed for his suit, Mitchell raised his first objection. “Just hang it up in the closet. I think I’ll be needing it very soon.” He didn’t say why. He was permitted to keep his shoes. Then he was issued bed linens and the clothes he was expected to wear for the duration of his stay: four pairs of white boxers, four white T-shirts, four pairs of white socks, one pair of dark socks—for weekends and “off” hours—four light brown collared shirts, four pairs of dark brown khaki pants, and one pair of steel-tipped shoes.

  For his first meal as an imprisoned felon, Mitchell was taken to lunch by one of the “hacks,” as guards were informally known. Plodding through the cafeteria “chow line,” Mitchell patiently waited his turn like everyone else. The cuisine reflected the Southern surroundings: grits, biscuits, collard greens, cornbread, Southern fried chicken, and other items that, the New York Times gleefully noted, “a Wall Street lawyer might find unfamiliar.”

  Suddenly Mitchell came face-to-face with a snarling con named Bobby Lawson, a convicted bookmaker doling out vegetables across the counter. Prison authorities had repeatedly assured Mitchell’s lawyers none of Maxwell’s inmates could claim any grudge against the former attorney general. Yet back in May 1974, when the Supreme Court had invalidated 494 wiretap cases, the requisite forms having been improperly signed years earlier by Mitchell’s executive assistant, the case of Bobby Lawson was, remarkably, one of four in which Mitchell remembered signing the forms himself; thus while many other convicts had seen their convictions overturned, Lawson had not. “Welcome to Maxwell, Mr. Mitchell,” Lawson now sneered. “You put enough of us here.” Mitchell looked Lawson straight in the eye without budging. You son-of-a-bitch, I didn’t put anybody here, he snapped. Mitchell let his eyes linger an extra second before moving down the chow line. He had survived his first test of manhood on the inside.

  At 5:00 a.m. the following morning, a loudspeaker woke the inmates with a crisp, irritatingly cheerful “Good morning!” Mitchell rose from the steel-frame bottom bunk to which, in deference to his age and in violation of seniority rules, he had been assigned. He left his six-by-seven-foot cubicle and headed for the bathroom, where he showered, shaved, and brushed his teeth in the company of the forty-five other convicts with whom he now shared Maxwell’s F Barracks. Like all new arrivals, the former attorney general was initially thrown in with a group of “unassigned” workers whose job was to report to the camp’s shuffleboard court every day at no
on, be counted, and await further instructions. Their orders usually included such menial tasks as hoeing the rose garden, picking up cigarette butts, and emptying wastebaskets. When, on his third day at Maxwell, he quickened his step but still arrived late for this assembly, the hack in charge relished the moment. I don’t care if your name is John Mitchell! You ain’t gonna be late for my counts! You understand that? If you’re late again, you’ll get an hour’s extra duty for each minute you’re late!

  In time, Mitchell was assigned to toil in the prison’s education department, devising new programs for the inmates, doing a little teaching, and clerking in the prison library. It did not take the other inmates long to figure the former Wall Street innovator could prove useful as a source of free legal advice; he became a popular man. Even Bobby Lawson lightened up. Mitchell wound up drafting the bookmaker’s appeal. When a federal judge rejected it, Mitchell took the rebuff personally. “I appointed that man to the bench!” he marveled. “I didn’t realize I’d appointed a bunch of idiots as judges!” But a chow-line friendship was now cemented. “How’s the soup today, Bobby?” Mitchell would ask. “It’s just like your Filipino cook used to make for you at the Justice Department,” Lawson would say, smiling.

  After a few weeks, Mitchell began corresponding with old friends, taking pains, as always, to minimize his troubles. To his former secretary, Susie Morrison, whom he regarded almost like a daughter, the former attorney general described his time at Maxwell as “just plain dullsville.” “I do a lot of legal work for the inmates and have had a few successes,” he joked, “but by and large I could accomplish more on the outside.”

  One inmate thought Mitchell in the early going appeared “pale, apprehensive, and perhaps a little afraid,” but most prisoners treated the “celebrity criminal” with an uncharacteristic deference that bordered on reverence. Some maintained a studied aloofness, but others rushed to solicit Mitchell’s friendship; few wanted to reenter civilian life unable to boast of having known Big John in the joint.

  Even the prison administrators seemed in awe of him. It was not lost on the inmates that while they were invariably summoned over the PA system with a curt barking of their surname and a command to report to a given place, the first time Mitchell’s presence was required, the overhead speakers emitted words never before heard at Maxwell: “Attention on the compound! Mister Mitchell, please come up to the control room.”

  Before long, the former Nixon consigliere acquired his own crew, a group dubbed “Mitchell’s Boys.” They included a recidivist criminal serving time for transporting stolen merchandise across state lines, named Gene Franklin—he and Mitchell became inseparable—and Maurice “Blackie” Malaway, a con roughly the same age as Mitchell. In the evenings, work assignments completed, the trio would haul lawn chairs out onto the Green, a meadow on the banks of the Alabama, to hold court. Some nights, pipe in hand, Mitchell would regale his boys with tales of the high and mighty characters he had known on the outside.

  Gazing on the state capitol one night, Mitchell recalled Governor Wallace’s fondness for booze, and mused: “I’ll bet old ‘Bourbon George’ is up on the seventh floor and drunk as a skunk by this time.” The tapes? They should have been destroyed. Haldeman and Ehrlichman? Only grunts and pipe smoke. But for the two men he considered the most despicable in the Nixon White House—Colson and Dean—Mitchell had a few choice words, all right. “The classic stool pigeon,” he said of Dean. “All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. He knew what it was all about.” And Colson? “If it weren’t for him, Watergate would never have happened,” Mitchell said. “A born-again Christian? Ha! I’d take my chances with the lions!”

  That Nixon frequently telephoned Mitchell while he was in prison—three times a week, according to one report—was attested to by several sources. “I would go to see him in jail…in connection with parole,” Hundley recalled years later, “and the camp superintendent would say to me, ‘Don’t go in now. He’s talking to Nixon and he wouldn’t want you to hear him.’ Of course, I’d go in and say: ‘That’s great. Here you are in the slammer and he’s out there in San Clemente!’” “Ah, Bill,” Mitchell would shrug, “don’t be like that.”7

  Three months into his sentence, Mitchell made his first bid for mercy. In court papers filed in September 1977, William Hundley disclosed his client was suffering from heart problems brought on by hypertension and from a rare and severe case of degenerative arthritis in his right hip. The condition had grown “extremely painful,” Hundley wrote, with Mitchell’s “mobility…severely impaired.” Though he sought no specific sentence reduction, Hundley said Watergate had had a “traumatic and devastating” effect on Mitchell’s family—particularly for Marty, who was “of sensitive years.” Mitchell’s finances also lay in ruins. He owed nearly $500,000 in legal fees and personal loans, Hundley said, and would remain in debt the rest of his life. “The result produced by these circumstances constitutes the severest fine,” Hundley wrote.

  The petition also explicitly refuted remarks Nixon had made to David Frost, in which the ex-president alleged that had it not been for Martha’s “mental and emotional problem that nobody knew about…there’d have been no Watergate.” Nixon had it backward, Hundley argued: “[Watergate] was the apparent proximate cause of the increasing mental conflicts of defendant’s wife.” The only other reference to Watergate was—for the first time—an expression of remorse. “Counsel is authorized by Mr. Mitchell to advise the court that he is truly sorry for and regrets those actions of his that resulted in his conviction,” Hundley wrote.

  After reviewing Mitchell’s motion—and one filed by Haldeman, who responded to the Frost interview by angrily accusing Nixon of admitting his “guilt” only after ensuring “his pockets are lined with $600,000”—Judge Sirica was unmoved. The record, he said, was insufficient for the granting of mercy. Instead he scheduled a hearing and took the unusual step of dispatching Herbert Vogt, deputy chief of probation for the District of Columbia, to visit the Big Three—Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman—in their respective cells, armed with a piece of equipment sure to stir fear and loathing in all Watergate convicts: a tape recorder. If the men wanted Sirica’s mercy, they would have to make their own statements of contrition, and the judge was determined they should be captured on tape, a fitting—or perhaps mocking—counterpoint to the incriminating recordings that had figured so prominently at U.S. v. Mitchell.

  Ehrlichman took the exercise most seriously. Imprisoned at the Swift Trail Camp in Arizona, he spoke to Vogt for twenty minutes in a highly confessional, quasi-psychoanalytical tone, ruing how he had “abdicated my moral judgments and turned them over to someone else. And if I had any advice for my kids, it would be to never, ever defer your moral judgments to anybody—your parents, your wife, anybody. That’s something that’s very personal. And it’s what a man has to hang on to.” Haldeman, working as a chemist in the sewage treatment facility at Lompoc Federal Prison and reported by his lawyer to be suffering “indignity, horror, fear, shame, disgust and all the other overwhelming emotions that assail a thinking man who is required to enter prison,” also spoke at length into Vogt’s portable cassette recorder. Uniquely, the former chief of staff, struggling to convey how “very real” his remorse was, invoked religion. “I am sorry for what I’ve done, for what I’ve been responsible for, for what’s been the result of the damage to many, many people, and, I think, to the whole governmental system,” Haldeman said. “I recognize my responsibility to atone.”

  Mitchell, as ever, proved the most laconic. He was the only defendant to acknowledge the presence of the man operating the tape recorder—slyly calling attention to the coercive element in the proceedings—and his statement of contrition was, by far, the most lawyerlike. “Mr. Vogt,” Mitchell began, “in the moving papers that my counsel filed with the courts, in support of the motion for reduction of sentence that you referred to, my counsel stated that he was authorized by me to advise the court that I was truly sorry for and re
gretted those actions of mine that resulted in my conviction before the court, and I wish to confirm to you and to the court my authorization to my counsel to include that statement in the motion papers.”

  Keeping safe distance from remorse, Mitchell merely confirmed he had authorized Hundley to express regret on his behalf; moreover, the sorrow extended only to those actions that resulted in conviction—not to his actions, period. Now he fairly drowned in legalisms. “My reflections have convinced me that the convictions resulting from my actions—which I have reviewed and which I now, of course, find that they have been reviewed and affirmed by the appropriate lower courts, and I know that our judicial process has run its course and I, of course, accept that outcome.”

  The question now was: Would Sirica buy it? The answer came on October 4, 1977, in a two-and-a-half-hour hearing held in the same courtroom where the judge had presided over U.S. v. Mitchell. Now semiretired and recently recovered from a heart attack, Sirica ordered the new Watergate tapes played in full. For the better part of an hour, the air was thick with the eerie voices of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell; Nixon, once again, was absent. Afterward, Hundley pleaded that Mitchell was “severely crippled” by the arthritis in his hip. Haldeman’s lawyer, John Wilson, reprised old arguments about the “legal unfairness” of Nixon’s pardon. “There does seem to be an element of unfairness,” Sirica allowed. “But Mr. Nixon paid a great penalty as the first president to be forced to resign in disgrace.”