The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (17 page)

Jack Landau remembered it all vividly. “[Mitchell] and I were standing out on the balcony of the attorney general’s office and one of the disruptions happened right under the balcony. And the police shot in tear gas and the wind blew the wrong way and the tear gas hit us.”

And we started coughing and he started coughing very badly, and he fell forward and there’s a wire along the balcony that’s electrified to get the pigeons off, and he got electrocuted—not electrocuted, but shocked. He got shocked by the wire and pulled back, and started to cough very badly and he stumbled backwards into his office to his chair, which was right near the window and he looked at me and started to turn purple. He said: “If I pass out, don’t let Kleindienst call in those troops!”
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Despite the massive numbers of protesters who rallied for the march, antiwar leaders closed out 1969 feeling frustrated. A Gallup Poll that month showed nearly 65 percent of Americans supported the president’s conduct of the war. Nixon’s steady troop withdrawals undercut claims he was expanding the fighting. The November action, for all its strength, had not stopped the killing in Southeast Asia; and turnout for the New Mobe’s next action, in December, proved infinitesimal by comparison. As one historian noted, the winter of 1969–70 marked “a time of significant depression” for the movement. With the radicals in retreat, few—including Mitchell—foresaw that the fiery zenith of campus unrest still lay ahead, and that the spark would be lit not on the marble steps of Berkeley, or in the streets of Washington, but along a placid grassy slope in the great middle of the country.
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On Thursday, April 30, 1970,
President Nixon announced in a prime-time televised address that he had ordered U.S. forces to commence offensive operations inside Cambodia, a limited incursion designed to “clean out” North Vietnamese and Vietcong “sanctuaries” serving as staging grounds for attacks on American troops. Nixon knew the decision would arouse strong emotions, especially on college campuses; but he, like Mitchell, was determined not to let student radicals control the foreign policy of a nuclear superpower. “We live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” Nixon warned. “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed.”
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Within hours, American campuses were ablaze with anger. Stanford students rioted Days of Rage–style, smashing windows and looting shops. At the University of Maryland, an assault on the ROTC building, and the cops defending it, injured fifty. Protesters at Princeton firebombed an armory. At Ohio State, a six-hour battle between students and police, backed by the National Guard, saw one student shot, six hundred arrested. Strikes shut down classes at Columbia, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, Notre Dame, Brandeis—a firestorm that spread to 80 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities.
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Nowhere was the tension greater than at Ohio’s Kent State University. Reared mostly in the heartland, the student population had, over the preceding two years, grown increasingly radicalized. As a freshman later told the FBI, in previously unpublished testimony, the school by May 1970 harbored as many as a thousand “hard-core militants who would destroy the system by violent means…[and] many more who are sympathetic to such militants.” After two days and nights of lawlessness in the streets of Kent, including the torching of an ROTC building and skirmishes with the National Guard, a rally at noon on the fourth of May drew more than a thousand demonstrators to the Kent State campus commons. The provocations—profane chants and taunts, hurled rocks and bottles—conformed to the deplorable norms of the day; but the response did not. After tear gas failed to disperse the mob, the jittery Guardsmen, armed with World War II–and Korean War–era rifles, and not much older than the students they faced, turned suddenly and fired into the crowd, squeezing off sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds, killing four and wounding at least nine. “My God,” a woman screamed, “they’re killing them!”
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On May 4, 1972,
Doonesbury
,
the syndicated satirical comic strip, depicted Zonker Harris, a long-haired, perpetually stoned student-philosopher, leaning on a wall in a meadow and sharing his thoughts with silent protagonist Michael Doonesbury. “They say it’s very pretty in Ohio this time of year,” mused Zonker in the first panel. “They say it was a very pretty day exactly two years ago at Kent State,” he continued in the second. The third panel was wordless. Finally Zonker added: “Have a nice day, John Mitchell.”

The cartoon captured the extent to which Mitchell, 350 miles away on the fourth of May, became forever identified with the killings at Kent State. His dark association with one of the most traumatic events in American history was immortalized on August 13, 1971: the day Mitchell announced publicly that Justice would not empanel a federal grand jury to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against any of the Guardsmen. Mitchell told reporters there existed “no credible evidence of a conspiracy” by the Guardsmen and—more important—“no likelihood of successful prosecutions of individual Guardsmen.” “Mitchell Drops Kent State Case” cried the front page of the
New York Times
; four days later the paper acknowledged, in an editorial titled “Justice at Kent State?” that Mitchell was “probably right” when he cited the impossibility of tying specific Guardsmen to specific deaths.
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Only years later did it become clear that the attorney general followed orders and not his own conscience. Previously unpublished notes and documents establish the Kent State case as perhaps the clearest example of Mitchell’s curious collusion, against his own inclinations, in the villainous public role Nixon assigned him. Although Mitchell supported the Cambodian offensive, he warned the president on April 26 it would create “political difficulty” at home. Yet the day before the killings, according to previously unpublished notes, Nixon sat in the Oval Office and pondered how to extract political mileage from the fevered sentiment he excited among the young. “Never underestimate the value of turning the student thing to our advantage—especially if they get rough,” Nixon told Haldeman. “We
have
to go on the offensive against the peaceniks.”
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When word of the shootings flickered across news wires, “grim-faced” White House aides huddled over clacking ticker-tape machines, aghast that National Guardsmen had gunned down unarmed American students on a Midwest college campus. Both Nixon and Mitchell grasped at once the moral gravity and political explosiveness of the Kent State case. Jerris Leonard, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, was among the first to see Mitchell after the news broke. “He was pretty shocked,” Leonard recalled. “He couldn’t believe it…. His immediate impression was, ‘Get cracking on it, get the facts.’” The facts proved elusive. Within days, the FBI had three hundred agents working the case; but KSU had shut down and its students scattered across the country, hugely complicating the investigation.
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Over the next few weeks, DOJ lawyers prepared a thirty-five-page summary of the FBI’s findings, and transmitted it to Mitchell on June 22. While acknowledging that the final moments preceding the shootings were “shrouded in confusion,” the DOJ summary also noted that six Guardsmen had “pointedly” told the FBI their lives were
not
in danger, that “it was not a shooting situation.” Multiple eyewitnesses agreed, and the summary speculated that some Guardsmen’s claims of imminent, life-threatening peril were likely “fabricated subsequent to the event.”

In the end, however, despite the fact that the DOJ summary discounted this evidence and held the Guardsmen at fault, the Department faced an insurmountable hurdle in prosecuting them because the FBI possessed “no ballistics evidence to prove which Guardsmen shot which student.”
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Richard Nixon had his
own ideas about what happened at Kent State, and from the first moment he worked assiduously to ensure those ideas prevailed. Haldeman informed Nixon of the tragedy: NBC News was reporting that the Guard had “gunned down” the students. Nixon processed Kent State as he did all other phenomena: through the prism of political opportunism. Haldeman’s previously unpublished notes recorded the president’s first reaction.

need to get out story of sniper

can’t we get something going—Mitchell
[
…
]

this will finish
[Ohio Governor]
Rhodes

unless he turns this

As public outrage mounted—compounded by the shooting deaths on May 14 of two black students, during a night of campus violence at Mississippi’s Jackson State College—the president alternated between two modes of response. On one hand, he struggled to “find [a] more effective way to communicate in view of [the] tragedy,” asking Mitchell to “brainstorm the school problem” and ordering the vice president:

don’t
say
anything
about students

[be]
non-political in every respect

pitch one nation—reconciliation

[…]

must be conciliatory re: youth

+ some way admit we’re wrong in our rhetoric

need to show sincerity in saying
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At a hastily scheduled news conference on May 8, Nixon spoke in similar terms when asked what he thought students were trying to tell him. “They are trying to say that they want peace,” Nixon replied. “They are trying to say that they want to stop the killing. They are trying to say that they want to end the draft. They are trying to say that we ought to get out of Vietnam. I agree with everything that they are trying to accomplish.” He added defensively: “I did not send these men to Vietnam.”

Yet at other times, Nixon hardened. He resented the harmful impact the domestic upheaval was having on his foreign policy, and came to regard
all
student dissent as an expression of radicalism. To him the episode showed the “totalitarianism of the left,” and evoked in him the language of war. “Have to get out the anti-student line,” he told Haldeman. “Get our offensive launched.”

we now have the lines drawn
[…]

just as well to have the student thing out
[in the open]

they want to run the country
[…]

K. State showed people against students

people are fed to teeth w/ rioting kids […]

the public is
not
with students
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John Mitchell took a less embattled view. When thirty black students descended on his office to protest the Jackson State killings, the attorney general sat them down for a friendly chat, then personally visited the campus—overruling the objections of agents in the FBI’s Jackson field office. He told a group of students from Fordham law school, his alma mater, the Kent State shootings “sickened and saddened” him. Though he blamed the unrest on “nihilists,” he also pointed out that National Guard regulations called for minimal use of force.
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