by James Rosen
31. Paul R. Lusignan, “Public Housing in the United States, 1933–1949,” Cultural Resource Management 25, 1 (U.S. Department of the Interior, 2002).
32. Stewart and Kenyon, “Bond Counsel.” Elsewhere, Mitchell recalled the judge dismissing the program as “a New Deal dan-fangled idea” see Denniston, “He’s No ‘Gang-Buster.’”
33. Gilbert Hahn, Notebook of an Amateur Politician: And How He Began the D.C. Subway (Lexington Press, 2002), pp. 43–44 (passion); Mitchell-Reed, interview, May 5, 1992; J. Robert Mitchell, interview, February 26, 1998.
34. George J. Marlin and Joe Mysak, The Guidebook to Municipal Bonds: The History, The Industry, The Mechanics (American Banker/Bond Buyer, 1991), pp. 22–25 (sour); William A. Madison, interview with author, June 6, 1993.
35. Francis Maloney, interview with author, June 22, 1993.
36. Stewart and Kenyon, “Bond Counsel” Evans, “A History” Denniston, “He’s No ‘Gang-Buster’” Milton Viorst, “‘The Justice Department Is an Institution for Law Enforcement, Not Social Improvement,’” New York Times Magazine, August 10, 1969. Evans erroneously reported that Mitchell made partner in 1940.
37. Mitchell-Reed, interview, May 5, 1992; Clyde Jay Jennings, interview with author, August 1, 2002.
38. Denniston, “He’s No ‘Gang-Buster’” MACT 252; Brenton Harries, interview with author, November 3, 1994; Robert Shogan, A Question of Judgment: The Fortas Case and the Struggle for the Supreme Court (Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), pp. 16–17 (archangels).
MORAL OBLIGATIONS
1. Helen Dudar, “Man in the News: John Mitchell Indicted,” New York Post, May 12, 1973.
2. Moore later served, from August 1989 to September 1992, as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland.
3. Richard Reeves, “Nixon’s Men Are Smart but No Swingers,” New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1968; Don Bertrand, “Two County Men May Be in Nixon Cabinet,” New York Daily News, November 17, 1968; Milton Viorst, “‘The Justice Department Is an Institution for Law Enforcement, Not Social Improvement,’” New York Times Magazine, August 10, 1969. See also the family history written by Mitchell’s niece; Dan Rather and Gary Paul Gates, The Palace Guard (Warner Books, 1975), p. 250; and Theodore H. White, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (Dell, 1975), p. 115.
4. Letter to the author from Alyce N. Guthrie, April 18, 1995. Another account claimed Kennedy reported to Mitchell “during training,” but Kennedy’s training long preceded Mitchell’s; see Evans, “A History of the Firm.”
5. William Safire, “Watch What We Do,” New York Times, November 14, 1988.
6. Author’s transcript of The Robert K. Dornan Show, [aired] October 17, 1971, UCLA Film and Television Archive (combat role); CI [Hunt], January 16, 1991; E. Howard Hunt, interview with author, January 26, 2003.
7. Log Book[s] of the USS PT 536, 5 June 1944–30 September 1944 (in Mitchell’s hand); 1 October 1944–31 December 1944 (Mitchell’s hand); 1 January 1945–31 May 1945 (in Mitchell’s hand until April 18); Log Book[s] of the USS PT 541, 1 April 1945–31 July 1945; 1 August 1945–4 December 1945; Memorandum from Commander Clark W. Faulkner to Commander in Chief, United States FLEET, May 10, 1945, Subj.: War Diary—June 1944 to December 1944 (Inclusive)-Forwarding of; Office of Naval Records and Library; and Memorandum from Commander Clark W. Faulkner to Commander in Chief, UNITED STATES Fleet, July 2, 1945, Subj.: War Diary—Month of June 1945–Forwarding of; Office of Naval Records and Library, National Archives.
8. Letter to the author from Russell Addeo, September 27, 1994; Russell Addeo, interview with author, January 10, 1995; John Bonham, interview with author, September 6, 1995; Thomas Wardell, interview with author, September 6, 1995; Adam Mancino, interview with author, September 10, 1995; John Duersteler, interview with author, July 19, 2003; Emery Lewis, interview with author, July 19, 2003; E. C. “Duke” House Jr., “Ron 37 PT Boaters Harvey and Mitchell,” The PT Boater 53, 1 (Spring 1998); Barry C. Weaver, ed., Awards and Casualties of the United States PT Boat Service in World War II (Orders and Medals Society of America, 2000), which contained no entries for Mitchell; and the Guthrie letter, April 18, 1995, which stated flatly: “Mitchell did not receive any medal or award for PT service.”
9. Madison interview.
10. MACT, 252.
11. Letter to Glen Moore from Francis X. Maloney [cc’d to the author], April 27, 1999 (peer); Joe Alex Morris, Nelson Rockefeller: A Biography, (Harper, 1960), pp. 284–88; Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (Holt, Rinehart, 1976), pp. 270–73.
12. Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer 1908–1958 (Doubleday, 1996), pp. 534–36, 833.
13. Ibid; WCHC (earnings).
14. The $2 million figure first appeared in Stewart and Kenyon, “Bond Counsel.” It was repeated in David Harrop, Paychecks: Who Makes What? (Harper, 1980), p. 119.
15. Ashman and Engelmayer, p. 32; Morrison interview; Ken and Peggy Ebbitt, interview with author, October 11, 1993; Mitchell-Reed, interview, November 22, 2003; McLendon, Martha, p. 60; Rod Nordland, ed., The Watergate File (Flash Books, 1973), p. 16 (amicable). The final agreement also required Mitchell to maintain a six-figure insurance policy with Bette as its beneficiary. Immediately after the divorce, Mitchell paid $25,000 in alimony, a figure that grew the following year to $53,000. By 1972, Mitchell had paid at least $386,542 to his ex-wife; see Elizabeth S. Suyker v. John N. Mitchell, New York State Supreme Court (Nassau County), [filed] April 12, 1967, WCHC.
16. Outside of the Watergate scandals, the question of how and when the Mitchells met occasioned more dispute than any other area of Mitchell’s life. Profiling Martha at the height of her fame, the New York Times placed the date in 1957, but switched it, after her death, to 1954; see Nan Robertson, “Martha Mitchell: Capital’s Most Talked-About,” New York Times, May 1, 1970, and John T. McQuiston, “Martha Mitchell, 57, Dies of Bone-Marrow Cancer,” New York Times, June 1, 1976. Newsweek reported the couple met “at a dinner party” during Martha’s separation from her first husband, which lasted from May 18, 1956, when Clyde Jennings moved out of his and Martha’s Stuyvesant Town apartment, to August 1, 1957, when a court in Dade County, Florida, granted their divorce; see “Washington’s Own Martha,” Newsweek, November 30, 1970; McLendon, Martha, p. 59; Agreement between Clyde Jennings Jr. and Martha B. Jennings, July 1, 1956; and Final Decree of Divorce and Custody, Martha Beall Jennings v. Clyde Jennings, Jr., Circuit Court, 11th Judicial Circuit, Dade County, August 1, 1957.
Martha’s authorized biographer claimed a mutual friend, a television executive, arranged a blind date by telling Martha, who was still married, that his pal Mitchell was “terribly unhappy and needs some cheering up.” The TV man and his mistress supposedly accompanied John and Martha on their first date, at a French restaurant in Greenwich Village in 1956 (that same night, after spiriting Martha to his Park Avenue pied-à-terre for a nightcap, Mitchell reportedly told Martha he would marry her, adding, “Your problems are my problems”); McLendon, Martha, p. 57. Martha’s other biographers asserted, without elaboration, only that she met Mitchell “at a party in 1957” see Ashman and Engelmayer, Martha, p. 32.
Jill Mitchell-Reed thought it was not a mutual friend, but her father’s Wall Street chum, Roald Morton, who introduced him to Martha; see Mitchell-Reed, interview, February 23, 1992. Another intimate of Mitchell’s thought he met Martha when hiring her as his legal secretary, while two others independently recalled her being an airline stewardess Mitchell met on the road; see J. Robert Mitchell, interview, February 26, 1998 (secretary); and Marv Segal, interview with author, October 23, 1997, and Jerris Leonard, interview with author, October 14, 1999 (stewardess). Law partner Bill Madison was adamant that Mitchell “picked [Martha] up” when his commercial flight, bound for Memphis in “1953 or ’54,” was diverted to Little Rock; see Madison interview (asked to name Mitchell’s greatest mistake in life, Madison replied: “Taking that plane to Memphis that landed in Little Rock”). Martha’s
cousin, Ray West, recalled meeting Mitchell for the first time in early May 1956, prior to the date Martha’s first husband vacated their apartment; see McLendon, Martha, p. 57.
Martha herself told Time in 1969, “I first met John in New York about 15 years ago,” leading the magazine to conclude, erroneously, that the two “met on a weekend in New York in the early ’50s and were married several months later” see “The Warbler of Watergate,” Time, December 5, 1969. The most reliable fact on the subject is the Mitchells’ verified date of marriage: December 19, 1957. That this came only eleven days after Mitchell’s divorce from Bette suggests strongly that his affair with Martha commenced while he was still married to his first wife.
17. McLendon, Martha, pp. 24–54; Ashman and Engelmayer, pp. 32–33; Clyde J. Jennings Jr., interview with author, July 23, 2002.
18. Brenton Harries interview.
19. Winzola McLendon, “The Amazing Martha Mitchell,” Look, July 28, 1970; Louis M. Kohlmeier, “A Velvet Glove,” Wall Street Journal, August 5, 1970; Sheila Moran, “Mitchell: Recluse on Central Park South,” New York Post, February 19, 1974; Thomas W. Evans, interview with author, April 23, 1992.
20. Robert H. Connery and Gerald Benjamin, Rockefeller of New York: Executive Power in the Statehouse (Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 259–60.
21. MACT, 253–54; Delfiner and Rudy, “The John Mitchell Story.”
22. Ibid., 254, 299. Mitchell himself disliked the term “moral obligation.” “I don’t know whether that accurately describes it,” he said in 1975. “I think it could be described more as a legislative appropriation aspect of the obligation.” See also Gerald Benjamin and T. Norman Hurd, eds., Rockefeller in Retrospect: The Governor’s New York Legacy (Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, 1984), p. 86. Also providing the state’s backing was the approval of the bond offering by the state comptroller, as mandated under the law that created HFA.
23. “New York State Bills Creating 2 New Agencies Signed by Rockefeller,” The Daily Bond Buyer, April 22, 1960; MACT, 256–61; and Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, p. 469.
24. Daily Bond Buyer, November 1984.
25. Record of these offerings, and of the retention of Caldwell, Trimble, and Mitchell as counsel for them, can be found in issues of The Daily Bond Buyer, 1960–67, passim. See also letter to John N. Mitchell from Robert F. Muse, March 11, 1970, JMRC; Maloney letter, op. cit.; and Benjamin and Hurd, Rockefeller in Retrospect, p. 85.
26. J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (Bantam, 1977), p. 6 (wink); Morrison interview (kingmaker); “The Sharp New Line on Antitrust,” BusinessWeek, June 21, 1969.
27. “A Conversation with John Mitchell: Moral Obligation Bonds, the Industry’s Old Days, and More,” The Bond Buyer, September 26, 1991 [reprinting previous interviews with Mitchell, including one from November 1984, from which this exchange was taken].
28. Stephen Grover, “Cabinet Enigma: New Attorney General Poses Question Marks on Antitrust Rights,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 1969 (emphasis added).
29. Denniston, “He’s No ‘Gang-Buster’” (honor), and Richard G. Kleindienst, Justice: The Memoirs of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst (Jameson, 1985), p. 41 (invariably); and Closing document, Re: Perkins to Mitchell/Sunset Lane, Rye, N.Y., September 30, 1964; and Closing Statement, Sale of Premises, Sunset Lane, Rye, N.Y., by John N. Mitchell and Martha B. Mitchell to Peer T. Pedersen and Lucy S. Pedersen, March 28, 1969, WCHC. On two occasions when he purchased property in Connecticut, lots of nine and twenty-one acres, respectively, contracts show Mitchell paid the seller a total of one dollar. The documents leave unanswered how else, if at all, Mitchell recompensed the sellers; see Contract between William D. Mewhort and Charlotte W. Mewhort, Norwalk, and John N. Mitchell and Martha Beall Mitchell [undated]; and Contract between Ruth E. Boski, Norwalk, and John N. Mitchell and Martha Beall Mitchell [undated; c. March 3, 1961], WCHC.
30. Lewis H. Lapham, “The Attorney General Has Heard It All Before,” Life, February 13, 1970; author’s transcript of Here’s Barbara, WJLA TV program, [aired] December 4, 1969, WHCA, Tape No. 3545, NARA.
THE HEAVYWEIGHT
1. William Ruckelshaus, interview with author, March 8, 1994.
2. “Martha Mitchell: Dream Is Gone,” Newsday, February 19, 1974; and Nixon Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Mitchell Partnership Agreement, December 31, 1966, WCHC. Displeased at not being named partner in the new firm, Trimble was bought off at considerable expense. He received annual payouts tied to the average earnings of the new firm’s partners, with Mitchell himself making up the difference if his annual earnings exceeded the average of the firm’s top three earners. Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken claimed Mitchell, burning with “eagerness to gain proximity to a future president,” took a 60 percent salary cut to “fit in with the remuneration structure” at Nixon Mudge. Likewise Tom Evans claimed in 1992 that Mitchell “was making twice as much as the other senior partners; he came here [to Nixon Mudge] and took what amounted to a 50 percent cut, but within a couple of years, he was making more money than he had been.” In fact, Mitchell’s tax returns show his salary actually grew 10 percent after his first year with the new firm, and 58 percent by the second; see, Aitken, Nixon: A Life (Regnery, 1993), p. 333; Thomas W. Evans, interview with author, April 23, 1992; and WCHC.
3. Joseph C. Goulden, The Superlawyers: The Small and Powerful World of the Great Washington Law Firms (Weybright and Talley, 1971), p. 225; and McLendon (1979), Martha, pp. 67–68.
4. Kleindienst, Justice, p. 40 (beaten); HN, April 24, 1969 (DDE); The President’s News Conference of August 24, 1960; “Transcript of Nixon’s News Conference on His Defeat by Brown in Race for Governor of California,” New York Times, November 8, 1962; Thompson, The Nixon Presidency, p. 370 (Hess); and William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House (Belmont Tower, 1975), pp. 263–64. Estimates of the vote margin in 1960 vary somewhat, with sources as disparate as the Associated Press, the Republican National Committee, Congressional Quarterly, and the Clerk of the House of Representatives releasing figures ranging from a low of 111,803 votes to a high of 119,450; see Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (Atheneum, 1961), p. 422. Subsequent scholars supported the Nixon camp’s cries of foul play; see Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon, Volume I, The Education of a Politician 1913–1962 (Touchstone Books, 1987), p. 606 (“Charges of fraud in Texas and Illinois were too widespread, and too persistent, to be entirely without foundation”), and Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 132–34.
5. Beth Fallon, “Black-Letter Day for Two Former VIPs,” New York Daily News, February 20, 1974.
6. Don Oberdorfer, “Mitchell’s Power Still Unmatched,” Washington Post, April 19, 1970, and Safire, Before the Fall, p. 263 (heavyweight); Odle interview, (teacher); Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober, Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency (HarperCollins, 1994), p. 294 (Santarelli).
7. Frank van der Linden, Nixon’s Quest for Peace (Robert B. Luce, 1972), p. 33.
8. Bruce Oudes, ed., From: The President, Richard Nixon’s Secret Files (Perennial Library, 1990), pp. 11 (end tables), 335 (wines), passim (the press).
9. CI, October 24, 1987 (“Milhous”); and van der Linden, Nixon’s Quest, p. 35 (emphasis in original). In fact, Mitchell’s name was added to the firm’s shingle four years after Nixon’s was.
10. Viorst, “‘The Justice Department.’”
11. Jack Landau, interviews with author, December 2 and 16, 1993, and January 12, 1994 (shower); CI, January 5, 1988 (mystified), December 15, 1987 (grandson); Henry Kissinger, interview with author, March 30, 1995; and letter from Jerris Leonard to the Friends of John Mitchell, January 10, 2002 (protected).
12. H. R. Haldeman, interview with author, September 26, 1993; Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon: Volume 1 (Warner, 1979), pp. 326–27.
13. Denniston, “He’s No ‘Gang-Buster.’”
14. St
ephen C. Shadegg, Winning’s a Lot More Fun (Macmillan, 1969), p. 109.
15. Evans interview.
16. Jules Witcover, The Resurrection of Richard Nixon (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970), p. 210.
17. Jeb Stuart Magruder, An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate (Pocket Books, 1975), p. 58.
18. Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm: My Journey from Brooklyn, Jazz, and Wall Street to Nixon’s White House, Watergate, and Beyond (Times Books, 1997), p. 119; Thompson, The Nixon Presidency, p. 110.
19. Garment, Crazy Rhythm, pp. 119–20. Garment’s chronology was confused. He claimed the “Mitchell moment” occurred in Nixon’s office “late in 1967,” with the men’s room proffer coming a few weeks later, at the black-tie dinner; however, Garment also said the dinner was held to celebrate the merger of the Nixon and Mitchell law firms, which occurred January 1, 1967.
20. Leonard Garment, interview with author, March 13, 1992.
21. Grover, “Cabinet Enigma” (news conference); Denniston, “He’s No ‘Gang-Buster’” (bare, hidden, publicity).
22. Ken Adelman, “You Do What Needs to Be Done,” Washingtonian, April 1988.
23. Rowland Evans Jr. and Robert D. Novak, Nixon in the White House: The Frustration of Power (Vintage, 1972), p. 27 (emphases in original); Oberdorfer, “Mitchell’s Power,” carried a slightly different version of Mitchell’s blunt soliloquy.
24. Relman Morin, The Associated Press Story of Election 1968 (Pocket, 1969), pp. 135–36.
25. Kleindienst, Justice, p. 48.
26. SSC, VII: 2890.
