The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (15 page)

The New Left felt the heat. Unknown to the public at large until his nomination as attorney general, the stern-faced Mitchell, with his vows to crush the movement, quickly instilled in American radicals a palpable sense of dread. “Mitchell and the rest are out to destroy youth culture,” proclaimed a revolutionary group in Boston. An SDS member spoke of the “darkened” climate for activists, “more menacing” than under the previous administration; the Black Panthers’ David Hilliard declared America “a dictatorship headed by Attorney General Mitchell.”

“Mitchell was a symbol,” said Bill Ayers, a member with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, of the infamous Weathermen. A Marxist offshoot of SDS, the Weathermen took their name from a line in Bob Dylan’s 1965 alienated-youth anthem “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Initially they mounted resistance to “Amerikkkan” imperialism in armed street clashes with police. Later they assumed clandestine identities, changed their collective name to the Weather Underground, and began detonating bombs at courthouses, correctional facilities, police stations, the Capitol, the Pentagon. In Mitchell’s rise to power Ayers saw “one more step in…a kind of impending American fascism.”

In their 1974 manifesto,
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism
, Ayers and his comrades, by then among America’s most sought-after fugitives, charged that Nixon, Mitchell, and Hoover “set into motion a plan to discredit, divide and set back the movement…. Infiltration and sabotage were carried out by a variety of police agencies, including the FBI, the Nixon-Mitchell team, military intelligence, and local red squads…. In the last period they have inflicted some serious blows which have set back the struggle.”
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Mitchell may have authorized the government’s counterinsurgency against the New Left, but the executioners of his policies often acted without his knowledge or consent. Of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, known internally as COINTELPRO—a covert campaign of infiltration and disruption targeting groups ranging from the Socialist Workers Party to the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers to the Ku Klux Klan—Mitchell was later found to be wholly unaware. At one point, in fact, the enormous surveillance net cast by the federal government in the late sixties and early seventies ensnared Mitchell himself: A wiretap directed at an FBI target captured the attorney general’s own voice.
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From this great surge of police activity against radicals and anti-war activists came a series of federal indictments that solidified Mitchell’s image as the era’s reigning symbol of law and order. Paradoxically, the success of Mitchell’s campaign would be measured not in the number of convictions secured—the prosecutor’s traditional metric—but by its cumulative impact on the targeted groups. In the Chicago Seven trial, for example, none of the five riot convictions withstood appeal. The Harrisburg Eight were acquitted of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger (indictments Mitchell later said he authorized to “get Hoover off the hook” after the FBI director prematurely aired the charges in public). The case of the Seattle Eight, in which members of the Seattle Liberation Front were slapped with conspiracy and riot charges after a February 1970 protest, ended in a mistrial (though six of the eight wound up serving time). The prosecutions of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, indicted in the Pentagon Papers case, were thrown out amid revelations of government misconduct. And the trial of the Gainesville Eight, which CBS News called “the seventh major conspiracy case in which the Justice Department took on the radical antiwar movement,” ended with a Pensacola jury acquitting the defendants of plotting to disrupt the 1972 Republican convention.
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Contemporaneous commentators initially saw this string of acquittals and overturned convictions as evidence of Mitchell’s ineptitude, the inevitable result when a Wall Street bond lawyer tried to play top cop. Only after Mitchell’s tenure in government, and the ebbing of the antiwar movement, was it possible to look back and discern the causal connection between the two. “I think the movement
was
set back by Nixon and Mitchell,” reckoned Ayers. “But the measure of their effectiveness is not how many convictions they got. It’s what they did to disrupt and dismantle.”

By 1973, students were more likely to attend kung fu classes than antiwar protests. Broad social trends—the rise of individualism, the drug culture—also contributed to attitudinal changes among American youth; but it was of incalculable symbolic significance that the attorney general of the United States stood firm in the media age against the lawless, nihilistic excesses of “the movement.” “Mitchell’s greatest tactical success came from his handling of the high-riding radical left,”
Newsweek
declared in the spring of 1973. “[Although] the Justice Department has not sustained any major convictions…the cost in time and money to the defendants was sufficient to defang the antiwar left nearly two years before Mr. Nixon was able to bring U.S. troops home from the Vietnam War.”
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Each spring and fall
of Mitchell’s years in power witnessed record-shattering marches on Washington, unprecedented breakdowns in civil order, and bloody street clashes that included challenges and threats directed at Mitchell himself.

During his first days in office, Mitchell worried most about black militants. He discussed the Black Panthers with an FBI bodyguard, and the agent, following strict orders, typed and sent up the Bureau chain of command every word Mitchell said. These remarks invariably made their way to the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, who actively used Mitchell’s security detail, previously unpublished documents show, to spy on the attorney general. Thus when Mitchell rued the popularity the Panthers enjoyed among white youths, Hoover took note, underlining the passage in his agent’s report.

The attorney general…commented on the objectionable content of the films shown him by the [FBI’s] Domestic Intelligence Division…entitled “Huey Newton’s Birthday” and “Off the Pig,” two Black Panther films used to recruit and for propaganda purposes. [Mitchell] stated what was of particular note was the number of white girls in attendance at Black Power rallies, and the fact that one of these objectionable films has been shown at Cardoza [
sic
] High School and that both films had been shown at high schools and college campuses across the country.

A week later, Mitchell expressed apprehension to his FBI detail over the prospect of “racial demonstrations” on the first anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In this Mitchell proved prescient. FBI documents showed that “due to the racial tension in the Washington, D.C., Detroit and Chicago areas…the attorney general delayed his departure from the office last night.” That Mitchell touched a nerve among the country’s leading black revolutionaries became clear when Bobby Seale accused Mitchell of moving the country “closer and closer to open fascism” and publicly exhorted black brothers and sisters, from a San Francisco jail cell, to “bust the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell regime in their asses and let them know the struggle is here.”
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The Nixon administration closely monitored the New Left’s internal dynamics and schisms, leading the president himself to caution Mitchell that month that “we may soon have to face up to more than dialogue.” Nixon’s prophecy soon came true. The Weathermen announced a return to Chicago that would “bring the war home…attack the beast from within as the peoples of the world attack it from without.” Dubbed by organizers the Days of Rage, the plan called for thousands of armed, angry young revolutionaries to gather on the evening of October 8 in Lincoln Park—where helmeted police had routed demonstrators fourteen months earlier—then plunge into the city’s streets to wreak havoc and “off the pig.”

In large measure, the action was a personal challenge to Nixon’s tough new attorney general, a test of his mettle. Weatherman leader Mark Rudd hoped the Days of Rage would make a “national statement” and “get the attention of those who would fight Mitchell.” Another Weatherman, Susan Stern, exulted that a previous demonstration, in Seattle, had “made John Mitchell look like an idiot,” and routinely excoriated him in public and private settings. “Nixon’s the real conspirator—him and all the other capitalists—Rockefeller, Mitchell; they conspire against the people of the world,” she told reporters. Stern also anxiously wrote her mother: “We are reliving the McCarthy era, and Mitchell and Nixon will shut up any voice that even attempts to speak up for freedom and truth. If I can’t speak for such things, then I don’t want to live at all.”
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As the Days of Rage approached, the White House watched with apprehension. An aide to John Ehrlichman alerted the attorney general to the president’s growing concern. “From all reports,” the aide wrote, “leftist leaders are counting on serious disorders in Chicago, with resulting ‘police brutality,’ to polarize student opinion and increase participation in the Moratorium activities.” Nixon instructed Mitchell to “work closely” with Chicago officials to “keep the [Days of Rage] from getting out of control.”
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On the appointed night, Ayers, Dohrn, and their Weatherman comrades gathered in Lincoln Park. But the army of angry youths—“tens of thousands,” the underground press had promised—stayed home. In all, “no more than a couple hundred” people showed up. “My stomach sank,” Ayers wrote, years later. “I felt like running away, slipping into the darkness and disappearing, but I knew I couldn’t…. There’s no turning back now, I said to myself.” The group swiftly set out for Chicago’s Gold Coast, the city’s wealthiest section. Whooping and hollering, the rabble flung bricks and pipes, smashing the windows of a bank and a Rolls-Royce. However, as David Dellinger disapprovingly noted, the Weathermen also vandalized “a disproportionately high percentage of…Volkswagens and other old and lower-priced cars…small shops, proletarian beer halls, and lower-middle-class housing.”

More than a thousand Chicago police officers—scarred by the previous year’s convention rioting and primed for a “kill or be killed” confrontation—perched along barricades. Amid the ensuing frenzy of bullets, nightsticks, and tear gas, a squad car plunged into a live crowd; “bodies were just mangled.” After two hours, twenty-eight policemen lay wounded and at least six Weathermen were shot; sixty-eight were arrested and untold others fled with their injuries. Recurring clashes over the next three days led to almost 300 arrests and damage to 1,400 businesses, residences, and automobiles.
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Mitchell pronounced the Weathermen “psychopaths.” Episodes like the Days of Rage he blamed on “Leninists and Trotskyites.” Testifying in federal court in 1980, he identified the Weather Underground as “one of the radical, if not the most radical, groups” ever to operate in the United States. Mitchell recalled President Nixon expressing concern that the group was “impacting on foreign policy.” Nixon’s worry, Mitchell testified, was that the North Vietnamese would balk at negotiating as long as “groups like the Weather Underground were creating disturbances.”

To Mitchell, the violence posed a basic question: “Who’s going to run the show—the present Establishment or a new Establishment?” “They’re stuck,” he told an interviewer shortly after the Days of Rage. “They want to burn down buildings, but they don’t have anything with which to replace them. In the theater, they’d call it a second-act problem…. It’s all very well to break the law in the name of the higher morality,” he added, “but the hard part is submitting to the penalties imposed by the law.”
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The Weathermen had no intention of submitting to Mitchell’s penalties; instead they would escape them, by forming a clandestine nationwide network. Between October 1969 and September 1973, the Weather Underground would claim credit for twenty bombings across the country, in which no one was harmed—save three of the organization’s own members, who perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970 after one of their own creations exploded prematurely.

Death was never far from the Weather front, as the youthful residents of the doomed townhouse—and John Mitchell—came to understand. In the Weather Underground’s third communiqué, dated July 26, 1970, and mailed to the editors of the
San Francisco Chronicle
and
New York Post
, the group exulted how “every move of the monster-state tightens the noose around its own neck.” The group also issued a chilling warning to the attorney general: “Don’t come looking for us, dog; we’ll find you first.”
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