The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  9. Magruder recalled Liddy himself, prior to the January 27 meeting, boasting of having worked as an assassin for the FBI, and of having hanged one of his victims from a garage rafter; see Magruder, An American Life, p. 206. Told this, Liddy laughed and dismissed it as “utter fabrication” see G. Gordon Liddy, interview with author, August 9, 2004.

  10. Though Dean later tried to take credit for ordering Liddy to burn the charts, Mitchell and Liddy remained adamant the order came from Mitchell. For Dean’s claim, see SSCEX, Dean; UVM, 2634; and Dean, Blind Ambition, p. 78. For Mitchell’s and Liddy’s accounts, see SSC, IV: 1612; UVM, 8030; Liddy, Will, p. 200; and Liddy interview. Magruder supported Dean; see UVM 4510.

  11. Glanzer notes; SSCEX, Jeb Magruder, June 12, 1973. In fact, in the second version of the Liddy plan, the houseboat was dropped, but the call girls remained, as did the kidnapping of radicals; see Liddy, Will, p. 203. “[Liddy] had cut off all the horror aspects of it,” Mitchell told the Senate, “and it had been reduced down, basically, to the electronic surveillance.” Asked if “burglary and bugging” were again proposed, however, Mitchell said they were; see SSC, IV: 1844–57.

  12. SSCEX, Dean (very late); UVM, 8032 (shortly); SSC, II: 789 (most). Elsewhere, Magruder said Dean entered “approximately fifteen minutes” after the others; see UVM, 4511.

  13. SSCEX, Margruder. See also Lawrence F. O’Brien, No Final Victories: A Life in Politics from John F. Kennedy to Watergate (Ballantine, 1976) and Richard B. Trask, Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy (Yeoman Press, 1994), pp. 44–45.

  14. SSCEX, Magruder; SSCFR, 22. Magruder wavered on whether the safe-cracking idea arose in the first or second meeting, and whether it originated with Dean or Mitchell, neither of whom recalled it arising at all. The claim also conflicted with Magruder’s own acknowledgment that Mitchell objected to Liddy’s second plan because it was “still too broad in scope” presumably if Mitchell was raising such objections, which tracks with others’ recollections, he would not also have been proposing that Liddy study the feasibility of a burglary and safe-cracking mission in Las Vegas. Also, when Magruder first began plea-bargaining with federal prosecutors, on April 13, 1973, he claimed “there was mention of the Watergate offices of DNC as a [wiretapping] target…at both meetings” in Mitchell’s office. Perhaps alerted that a different story was being told by John Dean, who had begun meeting with the prosecutors several days earlier, Magruder dropped this claim the very next day; see Glanzer notes, April 13–14, 1973. Glanzer’s notes of April 14 showed Magruder saying “no targets” were discussed on January 27. See also SSC memo to Terry Lenzner from Marc Lackritz, Re: Meeting with John Mitchell [conducted] October 18, 1973, RG 460 WSPF, U.S. v. Mitchell (Jencks)—Mitchell, NARA.

  15. SSCEX, Dean; SSC, III: 929–30; UVM, 2632–33. A White House aide recalled Dean confiding that “the Watergate location had not been mentioned” at either meeting in Mitchell’s office; see SSC, V: 1944.

  16. Dean, Blind Ambition, p. 79.

  17. Liddy interview. Even Magruder agreed that Dean posed his objection not in moral terms, but so that “Mr. Mitchell could have deniability” see UVM, 4513.

  18. SSC, III: 1152–53 (more info); Magruder, An American Life, p. 227 (feelings); Glanzer notes (in which Magruder recalled Dean conveying “his interest in having Liddy continue”); AOP, 159 (primary season). Howard Hunt told the Senate Watergate committee, in previously unpublished testimony, that Dean was “instigating” Liddy to develop his intelligence plan; see SSCEX, E. Howard Hunt, December 18, 1973. Yet Dean later claimed he immediately took his profound moral concerns about Liddy and Gemstone to H. R. Haldeman, from whom he sought—and received—permission to disengage from Liddy altogether. Captured on tape speaking with President Nixon in March 1973, Dean said he had gone to see Haldeman “right after the [February 4] meeting” testifying before the Senate, however, Dean changed his story, saying it had taken him “several days” to get an appointment with Haldeman. This change may have stemmed from the fact that Haldeman’s office logs showed no meetings with Dean between February 2 and March 9. In Blind Ambition, Dean reverted to his first version, strongly implying he met with Haldeman immediately after the February 4 meeting. For his part, Haldeman initially accepted Dean’s claims that they met shortly after the February 4 meeting, and that they had agreed Dean should steer clear of Liddy; ultimately, however, Haldeman came to believe Dean was, as Ehrlichman put it, “salting the mine”—laying an evidentiary trail for an event that never happened. The evidence shows, in any case, that Dean continued to exhibit an interest in Liddy’s covert projects; see SSC, III: 930; SSC, VII: 2719; SSC, VIII: 3035, 3098; WHT, 136, 230, 386; Dean, Blind Ambition, pp. 79–81; Haldeman, The Ends of Power, p. 28; and WSPF draft memo by George T. Frampton, Dean’s Anticipated Trial Testimony—From The Beginning Up Until March 21, 1973, [written] July 22, 1974, RG 460 WSPF, NARA.

  19. Colson, Born Again; J. Anthony Lukas, “Why the Watergate Break-In?” New York Times, November 30, 1987 (evil genius); “Excerpts from White House Tape of a Nixon-Haldeman Talk in May 1971,” New York Times, September 24, 1981 (murderers); Raymond K. Price Jr., With Nixon (Viking Press, 1977), p. 30 (worst); AOP, 279 (Kennedy); Garment interview.

  20. WH memo to the file by Charles Colson, Subject: Howard Hunt, June 20, 1972, reprinted at HJCW, III: 246–49.

  21. Colson memo, June 20, 1972; SSC, II: 793 (O’Brien [emphasis added]). See also Liddy, Will, p. 211.

  22. SSCEX, Magruder.

  23. CI [Ehrlichman], December 9, 1988 (sinew); Douglas Martin, “Fred LaRue, Watergate Figure, Dies at 75,” New York Times, July 29, 2004; LaRue interview, September 19, 1993 (best friend); author’s transcript, NT, Nixon-Ehrlichman, EOB Office, March 16, 1973, 3:00 to 4:47 p.m. (eyes).

  24. Magruder’s grand jury testimony, at HJC, 1: 136–39 (emphases added). The official transcript reads “firm the projects,” probably a stenographic error.

  25. SSCEX, Magruder (emphasis added); Samuel Dash, Chairman, et al., v. Hon. John N. Mitchell, Attorney General of the United States, et al., Civ. A. No. 3713–70, 356 F. Supp. 1292 (1972).

  26. LaRue’s grand jury testimony of April 18, 1973, at HJC, I: 134–35. See also SSC, VI: 2281, 2331; HJCW, I:182–83; UVM, 6546–52; and LaRue interviews, September 19, 1993, and August 4, 2003. “Jeb repeatedly pushed Mitchell to agree to this,” LaRue said in 2003. “He said he was under a lot of pressure from the White House and that he needed an ‘okay’ on it.” However, this recollection contrasted with what LaRue told Senate investigators, who recorded, in a previously unpublished internal staff memorandum, that LaRue “does not remember much discussion about the plan, or strong advocacy of it by Magruder” see SSC memo of Interview with Frederick [sic] LaRue, July 6–7, 1973, by Hamilton, Lenzner, Silverstein and Moore, Dictated by Jim Moore, July, 10, 1973, RG 460 WSPF Investigative Files, U.S. v. Mitchell (Jencks Material), Box 72, NARA. In this same interview, LaRue stated that his “impression after the meeting was that no decision had been made and that what he referred to as ‘a Mickey Mouse operation’ would be shelved.” The following year, LaRue told House investigators, according to their previously unpublished internal memorandum, that LaRue “does not recall Magruder saying anything” after Mitchell deferred decision; see [HJC memo of] Interview with Fred C. LaRue, [conducted] April 9 and 10, 1974, [filed] April 10, 1974, RG 460—WSPF, Investigative Files, U.S. v. Mitchell (Jencks Material), Box 72, NARA. In this same session, four months before Nixon’s resignation, LaRue said he had to “assume” Mitchell approved Gemstone at some other time, since Magruder would not have done so on his own. “LaRue thought perhaps Mitchell had postponed the decision because he did not want LaRue involved,” the House staff reported. In later years, free from criminal repercussions, LaRue abandoned this notion, telling the author and others that Mitchell would have confided in him about any approval order.

  27. LaRue interview, September 19, 2003 (lying); WSPF notes of George Frampton an
d WSPF memo to Files from George Frampton, Subject: Meeting with Jeb S. Magruder, July 25, 1973, RG 460 WSPF—WGTF, Investigative Files, U.S. v. Mitchell (Jencks), Magruder, Boxes 73 and 109 [respectively], NARA. Frampton’s typed memo to the file recording Magruder’s newly “triggered” recollections sometimes deviated from the handwritten notes that Frampton took during his re-interview with Magruder, changes that had the effect of making the witness’s new statements conform more neatly with his earlier testimony. For example, where Frampton’s notes had Magruder quoting Mitchell as having said, “Give him [Liddy] the money and get him out of our hair,” Frampton’s memo changed the quote entirely: “Well, let’s give him this much and see what he can do with it.” This was much closer to the language that Magruder, in his Senate testimony, had already attributed to Mitchell (“Let’s give him a quarter of a million dollars and let’s see what he can come up with”). Frampton’s memo also had the effect of preserving some wiggle room for Magruder on his new claim that LaRue had somehow been distracted at the precise moment Mitchell gave the final order on Gemstone. Thus, where the prosecutor’s notes showed Magruder affirmatively changing his story to say LaRue “went to the phone,” location unspecified, Frampton’s typed memo stated: “Magruder recalls that LaRue may have gotten up to take a phone call in the other room…” (emphases added). Indeed, although they relied heavily on Magruder’s testimony at U.S. v. Mitchell, the WSPF lawyers found him a bit too eager to help them build their cases. Prosecutor Jill Vollner “complained often about his eagerness to tailor his story to the prosecutors’ needs” see Dean, Blind Ambition, p. 363. Mitchell’s defense team had access to Frampton’s memo—but not to his notes.

  28. SSC, IV: 1614–15; SSC, V: 1854 (practically).

  29. HJCW, II: 188; HJC summary, July 7, 1974; UMV, 8035, 8149–50.

  30. CI, July 10, 1986 (vehement, regardless), June 10, 1988 (hand), September 21, 1988 (Key Biscayne).

  31. Christopher Lydon, “Nixon’s Advice to Mitchell in April, 1972: ‘Start a Fight Right Now,’” New York Times, July 12, 1974.

  DNC

  1. Price, With Nixon, p. 369.

  2. SSCFR, 28–31; HJCFR, 56–60 (emphasis added). The House report also concluded that H. R. Haldeman “concurred in” Mitchell’s authorization of the break-in.

  3. Lukas, Nightmare, p. 256; Kutler, The Wars of Watergate, pp. 204, 275; Martin, “Fred LaRue, Watergate Figure.” Among the Nixon biographers and historians who traced the DNC wiretapping to Mitchell were Ambrose, Nixon, p. 562; Summers, The Arrogance of Power, pp. 402, 411; Brodie, Richard Nixon, p. 549n60; Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (University Press of Kansas, 1999), p. 256 (who got Key Biscayne’s date wrong); and Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (Random House, 1991), p. 681 (who blamed Mitchell and Magruder jointly). In a league of his own, however, was Aitken, Nixon, who found (pp. 334–35) that “with the establishing of the Nixon-Mitchell relationship came the first seeds of the later troubles of Watergate.” Aitken, who conducted numerous exclusive interviews with the ex-president, continued:

  The cynicism of mind, brevity of tongue, and ruthlessness in executing decisions that were Mitchell’s trademarks became artificially stamped on the president-in-waiting…. By encouraging the macho side of Nixon he created an atmosphere in which bad judgments were too easily made. Nixon the hater; Nixon the profane; Nixon the furious; Nixon the unscrupulous player of hardball were demons in his nature which had surfaced comparatively rarely during the first fifty-four years of his life. By contrast, there was Nixon the idealistic, the thoughtful, the sensitive, the kind-hearted and the thoroughly decent son of Hannah…. It was the arrival of John Mitchell as the strong peer relationship in his life that began shifting the balance of these conflicting forces.

  Yet while Aitken reckoned Mitchell “a bad influence, the Mephistopheles to Nixon’s Faust,” the Briton also found Mitchell’s “reach was limited,” that the Nixon-Mitchell alliance, though marked by “considerable mutual trust…never deepened into great mutual intimacy,” and that while Mitchell “had a great deal to do with building Nixon up and bringing Nixon down…[he] did not have a lasting impact on those more personal characteristics that constituted ‘the real Nixon.’” This analysis is both inherently contradictory and unsupported by the evidence. One cannot argue that Mitchell was the catalyst for Nixon’s great psychic shift, from the kind-hearted “son of Hannah” to the mean-spirited character heard on the tapes, while arguing simultaneously that Mitchell exerted “no lasting impact…on ‘the real Nixon.’” Moreover, most of Nixon’s biographers, friendly and hostile alike, would likely quarrel with Aitken’s observation that “Nixon the unscrupulous player of hardball…surfaced comparatively rarely” before 1967. Asked if Nixon himself propounded this view of Mitchell’s influence on him, Aitken said “the paragraphs…which suggest that Mitchell helped to bring out the dark side of President Nixon are my own interpretation” see letter to the author from The Rt. Hon. Jonathan Aitken, M.P., May 3, 1995.

  4. Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary on the Nomination of Earl J. Silbert, of the District of Columbia, to Be United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ninety-third Congress, Second Session (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), p. 65.

  5. SSC, VI: 2441 (sophisticated); WH memorandum to H. R. Haldeman from Gordon Strachan, Subject: talking paper, April 4, 1972, H. R. Haldeman Alphabetical Name File, [Lawrence] Higby Subject File, Copies of Gordon Strachan Memos, Box 281, NARA.

  6. SSCEX, Strachan; SSC, VI: 2503 (frequently). On Magruder’s failure to tell Strachan explicitly that it was Mitchell who approved Gemstone, see SSC, VI: 2441–52.

  7. Emery, Watergate, pp. 104–5; SSCEX, H. R. Haldeman, January 31, 1974 (rarely); SSC, VIII: 3180–81.

  8. SSCEX, Magruder; SSC, II: 532–33, 697; SSC, IV: 1618; Lukas, Nightmare, pp. 195–96; Liddy, Will, pp. 214–15. Emery cast the Mitchell-Stans discussion as an opportunity for Mitchell to have “countermanded” the Liddy disbursements, and Mitchell’s failure to do so as evidence he never “truly disapproved of Liddy’s plan.” This reading ignores the fact that Stans never specified the disbursements’ purpose, and, too, Magruder’s executive session testimony, which showed Mitchell expressing concern about Liddy’s budgetary requests; see Emery, Watergate, p. 105.

  9. UVM, 4147 (public record); Liddy, Will, pp. 188–220. Liddy’s recollection that the DNC’s Watergate offices were never targeted in any of his original Gemstone proposals conflicted with Fred LaRue’s memory that the plan reviewed at Key Biscayne had indeed specified the DNC. The discrepancy is perhaps explained by LaRue’s recollection that Magruder’s secretary typed up the Key Biscayne documents, which may have misrepresented Liddy’s actual proposals.

  10. E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974).

  11. Kurt Singer, “James McCord Was My Boss” (undated [1973], unpublished manuscript), BP Singer Features, Inc.; Jim Hougan, “The McCord File,” Harper’s, January 1980; Hougan, Secret Agenda, pp. 10–31; Schoenebaum, Profiles of an Era, p. 397; SSCEX, James McCord, March 28, 1973; Fletcher Prouty on CBS Morning News, April 2, 1973 (Dulles); Baldwin interview (fear, one of us).

  12. Liddy, Will, pp. 217–20; SSCEX, McCord; FBI memo to Mr. Tolson from J. P. Mohr, Subject: Protection of the Attorney General, February 28, 1972, FBIM. In this heavily censored FBI document, McCord’s name was blacked out, as was the word “intelligence”—the only redaction concealing something other than a name; but the context and typography make clear McCord was the speaker, and that he spoke of shifting to an intelligence role. Also suggestive of a “secret agenda” was the fact that just prior to the break-in, McCord, a man of meager personal finances, engaged in a series of transactions involving suspiciously large sums of money. The FBI later found that he opened a bank account on February 22 for a group called Dedicated Friends of a Better America, through which more than $90,000 passed before McCord closed it on April 17�
�still more than two weeks before Liddy recruited him for the Watergate mission. McCord claimed Liddy asked him to join the mission on April 12; but Liddy’s first conversation with Magruder about burglarizing DNC did not occur until “late April” see FBI memo to the Attorney General from Acting Director, FBI, [Subject:] James W. McCord Jr./And Others/Burglary of Democratic Party/National Headquarters/ June 17, 1972/Interception of Communications, July 21, 1972, FBIM.

  13. A veteran intelligence analyst reported leading CIA officials were “thunder-struck” by Nixon’s establishment of his own spy apparatus; Nixon’s men, in turn, “underestimated both the bitterness and the subtlety of the CIA hierarchs, and it is conceivable that the CIA arranged a trap at the Watergate.” See Andrew St. George, “The Cold War Comes Home,” Harper’s, November 1973. CIA’s deceptions hardly ended with Nixon; the agency’s inspector general later disclosed that from 1986 to 1994, CIA sent to successive presidents and Pentagon officials almost 100 reports from foreign agents whom Langley “knew or strongly suspected” were controlled by Moscow; see “White House Fed Flawed Data by CIA,” Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1995, and Tim Weiner, “Presidents Got 11 Tainted Reports, Senator Says,” New York Times, November 10, 1995.

  14. Hougan, Secret Agenda, pp. 20–25 (Ruiz-Williams); SSCEX, Felipe DeDiego, June 18, 1973.

  15. SSCEX, Hunt, December 18, 1973 (emphases added).

  16. CIA memo from [Richard] Helms to [redacted], Subject: Clarification of the Yeoman Story, December 4, 1973, CIA FOIA Case Number EO-1994-00130 (emphasis added).

  17. CI, November 24, 1987 (knew more), February 27, 1988 (whole thing).

  18. FBI report of SA William C. Hendricke Jr., [Subject:] Interception of Communications, June 22, 1972 (Baldwin’s education and employment); and FBI interview of Alfred Carleton Baldwin by SAs Angelo J. Lano and Daniel C. Mahan, [conducted] July 10, 1972, [filed] July 11, 1972, [hereinafter “BFBI”], both in RG 460, WSPF—WGTF Investigative Files—Witness File, Howard-Jablonsky, Baldwin correspondence, Box 105, NARA (security work, immediate need); Los Angeles Times transcript of interview of Alfred C. Baldwin III by Jack Nelson, October 3, 1972 (joke [hereinafter “BLAT”]).