The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  63. Linda Wertheimer, ed., Listening to America: Twenty-Five Years in the Life of a Nation, as Heard on National Public Radio (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), pp. 1–3 (scented, 318,000); “City Shutdown Foiled, 6,000 Protesters Held,” Washington Evening Star, May 3, 1971 (normal).

  64. Kleindienst, Justice, p. 77.

  65. Wells, The War Within, pp. 500–12 (Halloween, ugly mobs); Beal and Conliff, Blacklisted News, pp. 412–13 (war zone, grotesque).

  66. HN, May 3, 1971; WI [Ehrlichman], November 20, 1985 (overplay); “City Shutdown Foiled,” Washington Evening Star (flowing).

  67. Wells, The War Within, pp. 506–7 (broken); “2,000 March to Protest at Justice Dept.,” Washington Evening Star, May 4, 1971 (power, pigs); CBS Evening News, May 4, 1971 (carnival); “The F.B.I. Homes in and Gets Its Man,” New York Times, May 5, 1971 and “The FBI Muffles an Echo,” Washington Evening Star, May 5, 1971 (Froines).

  68. Kleindienst, Justice, p. 80 (arrest and release figures); “City Shutdown Foiled,” Washington Evening Star (young, white); Beal and Conliff, Blacklisted News, p. 413 (lost the revolution). May Day cost Washington taxpayers $3.9 million, while a class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union later resulted in a $12 million judgment; see Wells, The War Within, pp. 503–13. Then assistant attorney general William Rehnquist told newsmen “qualified martial law” applied on May Day; see Woody West, “Justice Official Defends Procedure in Arrests,” Washington Evening Star, May 6, 1971.

  69. Fred P. Graham, “Mitchell Urges All Police Copy Capital’s Tactics,” New York Times, May 11, 1971; Wells, The War Within, p. 511 (polls); “The Mob and the Law,” Washington Evening Star, May 5, 1971 (willfully, effectively).

  70. Dana Beal, “I Remember Martha,” YIPster Times, June/July 1976 (Free Martha); “How We Got Nixon Before He Got Us” (shatter); and “The Legacy of 1970” (joke), all reprinted in Beal and Conliff, Blacklisted News, pp. 43, 343, 445; David Sheff, “Timothy Leary,” Rolling Stone, December 10, 1987; Davis interview; Ayers interview; Rudd interview.

  THE COMEDOWN

  1. FBI memo from J. P. Mohr to Mr. Tolson, December 17, 1969, Subject Protection of the Attorney General; FBIM.

  2. Newsweek, September 8, 1969.

  3. “Senate Bars Haynsworth, 55–45,” New York Times, November 22, 1969; “Senate Rejects Carswell by 51–45 Margin,” New York Times, April 9, 1970; David Frost, I Gave Them a Sword: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon-Frost Interviews (Wm. Morrow, 1978), p. 157.

  4. Jude Wanniski, “Disenchantment Over Mitchell Grows in Ranks of Republicans,” National Observer, April 20, 1970; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Mitchell Has Not Mastered His Job, Republican Senators Now Believe,” Washington Post, April 20, 1970; “Mitchell Should Go,” Life, April 17, 1970; Oberdorfer, “Mitchell’s Power” (capital, blood).

  5. THD, 109–10; Rehnquist interview; John Ehrlichman, interview with author, March 13, 1992; Kissinger interview; Haldeman interview.

  6. HN, December 3, 1969; Oberdorfer, “Mitchell’s Power.”

  7. Delaney, “Mitchell’s Wife Says.”

  8. Dan Rather and Gary Paul Gates, The Palace Guard (Warner Books, 1975), p. 55 (gray-haired); Harriet Van Horne, “Tempering Justice,” New York Post, November 24, 1969; “Mitchell Comments on Wife’s Comments,” New York Times, November 25, 1969; Associated Press, “Violence Top Peril: Mitchell,” New York Daily News, November 24, 1969.

  9. Fischer, “Warbler of Watergate” “Eye Too, Eye Too,” Women’s Wear Daily, March 20, 1970. Many liberals likened Martha to Marie Antoinette; see Paul Healy, “Martha Always Says Mouthful,” New York Sunday News, April 19, 1970.

  10. Robertson, “Martha Mitchell” McLendon, Martha, pp. 112–13.

  11. White House memo from The President to Mr. Haldeman, [no subject], December 1, 1969 [I and II], reprinted in Oudes, From: The President, pp. 74–76; McLendon, Martha, p. 109 (Dear Martha); Robert H. Phelps, “Comments Cost Mrs. Mitchell Her Office,” New York Times, December 19, 1969.

  12. UPI, “Mrs. Mitchell Called an Arm Twister,” Newsday, December 9, 1969; Isabelle Shelton, “Mrs. Mitchell Tried to Twist Some Arms,” Long Island Press, December 15, 1969; McLendon, Martha, pp. 112–13; UPI, “Mrs. Mitchell Won’t Toe Designers’ Fashion Line,” New York Times, March 22, 1970 (nightgown). McLendon asserted, without substantiation, that Martha made the “arm-twisting” calls at Mitchell’s behest.

  13. Chennault, The Education of Anna, pp. 173–99; Isabelle Shelton, “Martha Mitchell Plays Role to the Hilt,” Long Island Press, March 29, 1970 (Percy).

  14. McLendon, Martha, pp. 121–22; Dorothy McCardle, “Women’s Lib for Mrs. Mitchell?” Washington Post, April 13, 1970; Healy, “Martha Always Says Mouthful” Robertson, “Martha Mitchell.”

  15. HN, April 11, 1970.

  16. Myra MacPherson, “Press Aide,” Washington Post, April 11, 1970; Healy, “Martha Always Says Mouthful.”

  17. McLendon, Martha, p. 123; Healy, “Martha Always Says Mouthful.” Isabelle Hall, “Martha’s Mail: 10 to One in Her Favor,” Washington Post, April 20, 1970. McCardle, “Women’s Lib” Judith Michaelson, “She’d Love to Go Back to the Kitchen,” New York Post, April 25, 1970; Robertson, “Martha Mitchell” Myra MacPherson, “Laughing Along with Martha,” Washington Post, May 13, 1970. Ten of eleven letters supported Martha, the Washington Post reported. “I should have married someone like you,” wrote a Tampa man. An Oregonian declared: “We need a lady like you for president—someone who will tell it like it is.” But many resented Martha’s outspokenness. “I can now understand why the Attorney General always has such a dour look,” wrote a Minneapolis woman. “He probably has ulcers which you helped give him.” A San Francisco woman clucked at “such a little mind in a big head,” while a Dallas man asked: “Have you ever tried being quiet?”

  18. THD, 149; HN, April 13, 1970 (emphasis in original). In annotations he added to his diary in the early 1990s, Haldeman wrote: “Martha’s behavior was…due to both emotional and drinking problems. It was a source of embarrassment to both John and the administration. However, John was always patient with her.”

  19. HN, April 15, 1970 (talk to John), May 18, 1970. Haldeman’s corresponding diary entry reads: “[The president] says Mitchell has to go unless he can solve the Martha problem” see THD, 167.

  WATCH WHAT WE DO

  1. Makay and Brown, The Rhetorical Dialogue.

  2. Mike Wallace and Gary Paul Gates, Close Encounters (Morrow, 1984), p. 130; Viorst, “‘The Justice Department’” (colored). Questioned closely about this passage, Wallace recalled: “I was stunned at his candor, not surprised especially to hear him say that…Bought doesn’t necessarily mean money—well it does mean corrupted, but it doesn’t necessarily mean cash; it means quid pro quo.” Did Shakespeare really kick Mitchell under the table? “Shakespeare knew the kind of reporter I was, and he wasn’t absolutely certain that I would necessarily abide by the ‘off-the-record’ background lunch protocol that had been set up. I don’t know that he kicked him, but it was more than a nudge.” See Mike Wallace, interview with author, October 26, 1997.

  3. Hal Bruno, interview with author, April 13, 2002; confidential source interview with author (kike).

  4. Peter Golden, Quiet Diplomat: Max M. Fisher (Cornwall, 1992), pp. 205–7; Yitzhak Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs (University of California Press, paperback ed., 1996), p. 165 (Rabin also recalled Mitchell saying in November 1972: “If you need a good campaign manager, I’m available!”). Ed Koch, then a Democratic congressman, also recalled that Mitchell, with help from Minority Leader Gerald Ford, “made it possible for unlimited numbers of Soviet Jews and non-Jews to enter the United States under refugee status known as ‘parole status.’” “For that alone,” Koch said, “[Mitchell] should receive some mercy, no matter where he has been consigned—purgatory or hell—for his misdeeds” see letter from Ed Koch to the author, March 19, 1993 (emphasis added).

  5. Nixon, RN, p. 543 (statistics); Harris, Justice, pp. 180–81; Vi
orst, “‘The Justice Department’” (“Fink”).

  6. “Fighting Crime in America,” U.S. News & World Report.

  7. The President’s News Conference of February 6, 1969. Mitchell’s proposal to substitute legal action for funding cutoffs had long been advocated by John Doar, the assistant attorney general for civil rights under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson—and later Mitchell’s cross-examiner at the House impeachment committee during Watergate; see Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 320.

  8. HN, February 17, 1969 (reign); John Robert Greene, The Limits of Power: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 43; Leon E. Panetta and Peter Gall, Bring Us Together: The Nixon Team and the Civil Rights Retreat (J. B. Lippincott, 1971), pp. 61–73.

  9. Grover, “Cabinet Enigma” memo on Meeting with Attorney General John N. Mitchell, February 18, 1969, Box D61, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Papers, Library of Congress; reprinted in Dean J. Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy (Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 28.

  10. Graham, The Civil Rights Era, pp. 302–3; Jack Bass and Walter DeVries, The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945 (Meridian, 1977), p. 29 (fool’s gold); THD, 53 (emphasis in original); HN, April 15, 1969; Safire, Before the Fall, p. 237 (hundred years, intermarriage); Daniel P. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (Vintage, 1973), p. 156; WH memo for [the] Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare from Alexander P. Butterfield, Subject: Note from the President, March 26, 1969; WHSF—SMOF, JDE Subject File, Desegregation, Box 30, NARA (forthright; emphasis in original); Ehrlichman interview (embarrassed); Leonard interview, October 14, 1999. In undermining Finch’s standing with Nixon, the attorney general had inside help: At his suggestion, Robert Mardian, a Goldwater campaign veteran who worked the South and West for Nixon in ’68 and owed his allegiances to Mitchell and Kleindienst, was named HEW’s general counsel. “I didn’t have a very comfortable time at HEW,” Mardian later recalled, “because [Finch’s aides] all referred to me, almost to my face, as Mitchell’s spy” see Robert Mardian, interview with author, August 2, 1993; Evans and Novak, Nixon in the White House, pp. 144; and Ehrlichman, Witness to Power, pp. 199–200.

  11. Viorst “‘The Justice Department’” (hard-pressed); HN, February 17, 1969 (hit, too); Panetta and Gall, Bring Us Together.

  12. Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights, pp. 29–30.

  13. HN, June 30, 1969 (emphasis in original); Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights, p. 30 (record number). Time praised Mitchell for bringing “several important court suits that could hasten integration” see “Nixon’s Heavyweight,” Time, July 25, 1969.

  14. Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970); Michael Barone, “Nixon’s America,” U.S. News & World Report, September 20, 1999; Warren Weaver Jr., “Mitchell Urges a Wide Revision on Voting Rights,” New York Times, June 27, 1969; Warren Weaver Jr., “Nixon Rights Bill Appears Doomed by a G.O.P. Attack,” New York Times, July 2, 1969; “Excerpts From Statements by Mitchell and McCullough on the Voting Rights Bill,” New York Times, July 2, 1969; Congressional Quarterly Almanac, Vol. XXV, 1969 (Congressional Quarterly, 1970), pp. 411, 421–27; Congressional Quarterly Almanac, Vol. XXVI, 1970 (Congressional Quarterly, 1971), pp. 192–93; Graham, The Civil Rights Era, pp. 346–65; Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights, pp. 76–93.

  15. “Sit-In at Mitchell’s Office,” Washington Evening Star, July 1, 1969; Associated Press, “Mitchell’s Office Site of Sit-In,” New York Post, July 1, 1969; “Nixon’s Heavyweight,” Time; Harris, Justice, pp. 193–94.

  16. Reichley, “Elm Street’s New White House Power” Harris, Justice, p. 194.

  17. “The President’s Men,” PBS; CI, August 13, 1986.

  18. WH memo from Daniel P. Moynihan for John D. Ehrlichman, [no subject], November 25, 1969, WHSF—SMOF, JDE Subject file, Box 21, NARA (lawyer-like); Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, pp. 157–58.

  19. Evans and Novak, Nixon in the White House, pp. 152–55 (public unrest); Panetta and Gall, Bring Us Together, pp. 253–62; Bass and DeVries, The Transformation of Southern Politics, pp. 29–30 (opposite); Warren Weaver Jr., “Nixon Missile Plan Wins in Senate By a 51–50 Vote,” New York Times, August 7, 1969.

  20. The President’s News Conference of September 26, 1969.

  21. Osborne, The Second Year, p. 22 (respect); Panetta and Gall, Bring Us Together, p. 302.

  22. EN, February 7, 1970; HN, February 19, 20, and 27, 1970.

  23. HN, February 27, 1970 (bullet, so be it); WH memo for the president from Bryce Harlow, Subject: Charlotte School Situation, February 11, 1970; POF, HW File, Box 5, NARA.

  24. Evans and Novak, Nixon in the White House, p. 173; Statement About Desegregation of Elementary and Secondary Schools, March 24, 1970.

  25. Robert Mardian, interview with author, September 14, 1993.

  26. George Shultz, interview with author, April 29, 1996. In an uncharacteristic fit of peevishness, Shultz threatened to follow Agnew. “Shultz says if Mardian stays, he’ll resign,” Haldeman recorded; see HN, March 31, 1970. Both men stayed on.

  27. George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (Scribner’s, 1993), p. 1046; and George P. Shultz, “How a Republican Desegregated the South’s Schools,” New York Times, January 8, 2003. As President Reagan’s secretary of state, Shultz related the Mitchell story to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, to illustrate how the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue could shift from “whether” to “how.”

  28. Leonard interview, March 17, 1992; Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights, p. 37. Even George McGovern acknowledged in 1994: “Nixon was actually pretty good on civil rights questions” see Strober and Strober, Nixon, p. 114.

  29. Robert R. Detlefsen, Civil Rights Under Reagan (ICS Press, 1991), p. 26.

  30. CBS Morning News, July 23, 1973 (Vernon Jordan); Graham, The Civil Right Era, p. 320.

  31. Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights, p. 64.

  32. Kleindienst interview. Nixon was also instrumental in the South’s economic development. President Clinton’s secretary of labor acknowledged that thanks to Nixon’s revenue-sharing programs, the South’s “population and share of the gross national product exploded” see Robert B. Reich, “Without a Cause,” New York Times Book Review, March 7, 1999.

  ROBBING THE PRESIDENT’S DESK

  1. SSCEX, W. Donald Stewart, February 19, 1974.

  2. Landau interview, December 16, 1993 (emphasis in original).

  3. Author’s transcript, NT, Nixon-Kissinger, Conversation No. 17–132, White House Telephone, January 1, 1972, 2:43 p.m.–3:56 p.m., NARA (press conferences); Thompson, The Nixon Presidency, pp. 142, 204–5 (entirely trust, there goes Henry); Kissinger interview.

  4. THD, 335–36 (gold standard); TPOP, 165 (MIRV). To author Len Colodny, Mitchell boasted of how Nixon persuaded the Soviets, in exchange for a corresponding American pledge, to abandon construction of a weapon system that Nixon, blocked by Congress, “couldn’t have built anyway” see CI, December 5, 1987. Mitchell also discussed with Colodny the attorney general’s role in the Four Power Talks on Berlin, including the use of his own Watergate apartment, in February 1971, for secret strategy sessions. “I think that there was a ‘two-track’ [back-channel policy] going on over in Germany, too,” said Mitchell. He described Egon Bahr, an aide to West German chancellor Willy Brandt and a key interlocutor in the negotiations, as “a slippery character” who forced Nixon and Mitchell to “devise the program of getting Willy Brandt to act without Bahr closing it off” see CI, July 10, 1986. Ken Rush, the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, also remembered the strategy sessions at the Watergate; see Thompson, The Nixon Presidency, pp. 338–39.

  5. TPOP, 209–10. Richard Ober, the CIA official in charge of Project Chaos, rebutted internal complaints about its legality by noting t
hat “members of the administration, including Dr. Kissinger and Attorney General Mitchell, have been briefed on this program.”

  6. Notes of interview with John Mitchell (May 8, 1985), 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. [by Robert Gettlin]. Mitchell told Gettlin the files showed President Kennedy had “smoked pot in the White House.”

  7. CI, August 17, 1986.

  8. DOJ memorandum of meeting [by]J. N. Mitchell, Subject: Cambodia/ South Vietnam, April 28, 1970, reprinted in its entirety in Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 1484–85. In his memorandum, Mitchell noted Kissinger “was leaning against…the use of U.S. forces in Cambodia.”

  9. Richard Helms handwritten notes, “Meeting with the President on Chile at 1525,” September 15, 1970; reprinted in Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New Press, 2003), p. 35.

  10. Gettlin interview (devious); CI, March 8, 1985 (didn’t like), April 19, 1988 (knock off).

  11. Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 209–10.

  12. Haldeman interview.

  13. Alexander Haig, interview with author, July 27, 2000 (Harvard faculty); CI, January 24, 1986 (Machia-fucking-vellian, psychopath).

  14. Isaacson, Kissinger, pp. 212–13, 789n2.

  15. FBI memo for Mr. Tolson, Mr. DeLoach, Mr. Sullivan, and Mr. Bishop from John Edgar Hoover, [no subject], May 9, 1969, 5:05 PM, reprinted at HJC, VII: 143–45; TPOP, 91.

  16. FBI Summary of Interview of John G. [sic] Mitchell [conducted May 11, 1973], [filed] May 12, 1973, reprinted at HJC, VII: 163–65.

  17. Assistant FBI director William Sullivan told the Los Angeles Times he sent the wiretap records to the White House because he suspected the aging Hoover would use them to coerce Nixon and Mitchell into retaining him as FBI director. Sullivan called Hoover “a master blackmailer” who aimed “to keep Mitchell and others in line” see Edward W. Knappman, ed., Watergate and the White House, Volume 1: June 1972–July 1973 (Facts on File, 1973), p. 50. Robert Mardian, to whom Sullivan transferred the files, said Sullivan warned him the Kissinger taps “would destroy the presidency” Mardian interview. Mitchell thought Sullivan “a little nuts” and accused him of “name dropping and wheeling and dealing” in a bid to replace Hoover; see FBI Summary of Interview with John G. [sic] Mitchell. At the same time, Mitchell shared Sullivan’s concerns about Hoover’s custodianship of the records: “Hoover is tearing the [FBI] apart trying to get at them,” he told Nixon in October 1971. “Hoover won’t come and talk to me about it. He’s just got his Gestapo all over the place.” Nixon agreed the records belonged “in a special safe” see Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), pp. 400–401. Later, Nixon disingenuously told Hoover’s successor, Clarence M. Kelley, in June 1973: “That an officer of the Bureau would suggest that Edgar Hoover would blackmail the attorney general or the president of the United States—I just couldn’t believe it. And I don’t believe it today” see author’s transcript, NT, Nixon-Kelley, Conversation no. 933-5, Oval Office, 10:05 a.m. to 10:35 a.m.