The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (29 page)

HAIG:
That’s what I think, sir—

NIXON:
And I—we gotta remember that, basically, he’s our ally, in terms of what we believe in. And the worst thing we can do now is to hurt the military. I—I tried to get [that] through Henry’s head. But—but that’s what, that’s the line we’re playing on today.

HAIG:
Sure.

NIXON:
Don’t you agree?

HAIG:
Absolutely.

NIXON:
We [have] just got to do that. And in June [when Moorer’s term as chairman was to expire], of course, we can take a look—but not now…. After all, Moorer’s a goodman, and he’s with us. This thing, of course, is pretty bad! It’s, uh—understand: not the, not sending the information over [to the Pentagon], but goin’ through briefcases, that goes too far!

Of Haig’s self-incriminating display of familiarity with the spying operation—“that’s right” he said, when Nixon suggested the wrongdoing predated Moorer—the president took no note. Instead, phoning Haig two days later, Nixon further assuaged the guilty, retracting his implied threat about Moorer’s reappointment. If Moorer “thinks maybe now he’s blown it,” Nixon wanted to Haig to know, “he hasn’t.”
⁶⁴

Minutes after hanging up with Haig on Christmas Eve, Nixon had Mitchell on the line. His mind fixed on Yeoman Radford, and, too, on the federal prisoner whose sentence Nixon had just commuted—former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa—the president offered Mitchell, destined within six years’ time to become the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to be incarcerated, some eerily prophetic words.

NIXON:
I’ll tell you, being in prison isn’t, isn’t all that, uh, that it’s cracked up to be. You have some lonely days.

MITCHELL:
I would certainly believe it…

NIXON:
Incidentally, on our other subject [Moorer-Radford], I think we are better advised—I mean to—we’ve really just got to keep the lid on it…keep it under as close control as we can. But I, uh—we cannot move to do anything to discredit the uniform. That’s what I’m convinced of.

On Christmas Day, Nixon rang the party he trusted least: Mel Laird. Mitchell had already spoken to the defense secretary, and heard his smug reminders about how he had warned Kissinger, early on, about the JCS treachery under President Johnson. After holiday greetings, the president clumsily transitioned to the Moorer-Radford affair (“Oh, incidentally, on that, er, matter that you’re familiar with…”) and spun a tale that acknowledged the case’s severity yet preserved the fiction of Moorer’s remove from it.

NIXON:
I’ve given the orders around to everybody, that we not allow this thing to hurt the military. You know, we, we know it’s wrong—

LAIRD:
I know.

NIXON:
—but we must cut it. So we gotta clean it up, but we gotta stand by Moorer and these fellows, because they are good guys. They just—they just got trapped in a system that was bad.

Ironically, Laird, who played no role in the spying, received the only presidential rebuke in the affair. On the tape, Nixon’s tone is sharp and reproachful.

NIXON:
As you pointed out to Mitchell, apparently, eh, you knew about this
years
ago. This has been goin’ on for
years!
And they—

LAIRD:
Yeah.

NIXON:
—and it’s just surprising they had it now, and I just think it’s the way the system works.

LAIRD:
Well—

NIXON:
But now that it’s done, we’ll, uh—

LAIRD:
…I’m just gonna stay out of it now, and just shut it off.

NIXON:
Absolutely. Leave it. Stay out of it, and let Mitchell do whatever has to be done.

The next day, Nixon rang Admiral Moorer. Mitchell, of course, had already done the tough work of confronting the chairman, freeing Nixon to stay above the fray and discuss only the previous night’s (aborted) air raids over Vietnam. The commander-in-chief’s tone was inquisitive and deferential, a layman eager to learn from the expert (“Can you do that?” he asked after Moorer said his pilots would rely on instrument readings to launch attacks during bad weather). Moorer, in turn, played the dutiful subordinate, wishing the boss Merry Christmas, repeatedly and artlessly touting his dedication: “I know what your objectives are…. We’re keeping the Situation Room fully up to date…. I just want to show you I’m watching it…I assure you.”

Finally, on New Year’s Day, the president interrupted his preparations for a prime-time interview with Dan Rather to reach out to the one man out of whom Nixon, all along, had insisted he did not want to hear a peep: Kissinger. In the mercurial former professor, the Moorer-Radford affair was just the kind of thing to bring on another bout of neurotic insecurity and resignation talk. As it happened, they ignored the passing crisis, focusing instead on Nixon’s plan to end the draft and Laird’s opposition to it. Suddenly Kissinger had an idea. “Let me talk to Moorer,” he proposed. “He owes us one.” “He sure does,” Nixon replied.

The two had come full circle. Less than two weeks after learning of the Joint Chiefs’ spying—a “lesion” Nixon admitting having created with his and Kissinger’s incessant back-channel plotting—the president had blithely resumed scheming with his national security adviser, whom he had ten days earlier described as “not a good security risk,” to use the Joint Chiefs as a back channel to circumvent the secretary of defense.

Save for his rejection
of Mitchell’s proposal to wiretap Jack Anderson, the president had followed all of the attorney general’s recommendations during the crisis: The liaison office was abolished; Radford and Welander were banished to remote posts; Moorer was confronted but retained as chairman; Laird was held at bay; a security officer was installed at NSC; and Kissinger was dissuaded from raising holy hell.

In later years, John Ehrlichman would argue that Mitchell’s performance as attorney general, especially his fumbles in the Supreme Court nomination battles of 1969–70, progressively diminished the president’s esteem for his former law partner. “[Nixon] had very high confidence in [Mitchell] to begin with and that eroded over time,” said Ehrlichman, “until by 1973 it was down below zero.”
⁶⁵

Yet the Moorer-Radford tapes show that as 1972 dawned, some sixty days before Mitchell left the government for good, the president’s admiration for his attorney general had rebounded completely from its nadir—which was not the back-to-back rejection of Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees, but Mitchell’s insufficiently ruthless response to the Pentagon Papers. Six months earlier, Nixon had mused how much “better off” he would be after Mitchell was gone. Now the president marveled anew at Mitchell’s singular indispensability.

“Boy, you couldn’t have a better man than Mitchell over to talk to Moorer,” the president waxed to Haldeman on December 23. “He’s the only one in the Cabinet who even approaches as much respect as [Treasury Secretary John] Connally. Connally, as you know, is strong, tough; but Mitchell is even more steely than Connally.”

“He is,” Haldeman agreed, “and he’s a little more serious…. Mitchell scares ya. I mean, to people who don’t know him—I didn’t really realize it, but people are really afraid of John Mitchell.”

“That’s right. ’Cause he looks at them with those steely eyes, and he doesn’t—he puffs on his pipe…”

“And he is—he is a tough cop!”

CLOUD OF SUSPICION

If everybody had just gone in and told the truth. But maybe they didn’t know what the truth was.

—Richard Nixon, 1972
¹

FROM THE MOMENT
they met in 1967, John Ehrlichman resented John Mitchell. The undistinguished zoning lawyer from Seattle had known Nixon longer, worked more menial jobs for him; but the renowned Wall Street bond expert had gone straight to the top, enjoying the more privileged relationship with the candidate.

In the White House, Ehrlichman worked tirelessly to expand his portfolio. At first he supervised the seedy investigations of Nixon’s private gumshoe, Anthony Ulasewicz, and acted as a neutral paper-pusher in policy battles embroiling more senior men; by 1970, he exercised near-total control over U.S. domestic policy. In widening his turf, Ehrlichman seized on the president’s periodic disappointments with the attorney general, seeing them as mandates to annex Mitchell’s areas of influence. Ehrlichman always denied this, saying his actions reflected only the president’s deepening dissatisfaction with Mitchell; but the patterns were pronounced.

One of Ehrlichman’s tactics was to cultivate Mitchell’s own aides. William Rehnquist recalled Ehrlichman asking him, in 1969, to draft an opinion on a desegregation statute without telling Mitchell. “I felt, ‘Gee, that’s an odd thing to do. Here’s the guy I work for, John Mitchell, and I’m supposed to not tell him what I’m doing?’” Rehnquist recalled in 1993. “I felt there was antipathy [there].”

At other times, Ehrlichman’s instigations reached across departmental lines. Frank Carlucci, later President Reagan’s defense secretary, remembered chairing his first meeting, in 1970, as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. “Ehrlichman called me aside and said, ‘The president doesn’t think John Mitchell’s managing worth a damn! His place is a mess! You’re to go over and tell him to shape up!’ That was my very first assignment,” Carlucci recalled in 2001. “I screwed up my courage and went over and tried to tell John Mitchell in a very nice way that he was—that he needed to take a more—a deeper interest in the management of his department. And I can still see him just puffing on his pipe. He didn’t blow up. He just sort of looked at me and said goodbye.” Such crude manipulations Mitchell generally dismissed as “typical Ehrlichman,” the annoying but ultimately irrelevant agitations of a “smart ass” Mitchell regarded as “full of shit.”

Still another Ehrlichman tactic was to develop elaborate critiques of Mitchell’s policy performance and present them to Nixon, who invariably instructed Ehrlichman to right things as he saw fit. In no area of federal policy was Ehrlichman’s
lebensraum
campaign more determined than that of antitrust law. “From the administration’s earliest days,” John Dean wrote, “Ehrlichman viewed antitrust policy as a weak link in Mitchell’s ties to the president, a subject the conniving domestic policy czar could, with the right approach to the president, successfully wrest from Mitchell’s control.” Like any agency chief, Mitchell resisted such encroachments; as the
Washington Evening Star
noted, Mitchell “succeeded more than any other Cabinet officer in warding off White House intrusion upon his preserves.” But in the case of antitrust, Ehrlichman’s poaching would have catastrophic repercussions: the biggest Washington scandal since Teapot Dome.
²

At the time Mitchell
selected him to head DOJ’s antitrust division, Richard W. McLaren was a respected Chicago lawyer and former officer of the American Bar Association. McLaren’s lucrative practice defending corporate clients against antitrust charges initially raised questions about whether, as the government’s chief trustbuster, he would vigorously press such cases.

The business climate of the late sixties offered genuine cause for alarm. Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the United States experienced the greatest merger mania in its history, with almost 10,000 formerly independent firms absorbed into other companies. Over 1966–67, corporate acquisitions rose by 26 percent, a surge the Federal Trade Commission termed “the sharpest increase in merger activity in modern industrial history.” By 1968, 200 corporations controlled more than 60 percent of America’s manufacturing assets and total annual profits.
³

McLaren swiftly signaled his intention to arrest these trends. In early 1969, the new assistant attorney general vowed to “go after big company mergers” and cozy reciprocal deals between parent and subsidiary companies that “freeze out the little guy.” In this McLaren clearly enjoyed the confidence of his boss. Mitchell promised the
Wall Street Journal
: “The public is going to be protected. That’s the purpose of the antitrust laws, or at least that should be their purpose.” By August, DOJ had challenged six high-profile mergers in court, and the trend continued.
⁴

Nixon was not impressed. The president’s dissatisfaction surfaced as early as March 1969, after
Barron’s
editorialized that conglomerates had become “corporate scapegoats.” “The real villains happen to be the U.S. trustbusters,” the magazine charged. Upon reading this, Nixon wrote to Mitchell, in previously unpublished notes: “John—This is right! I agree.” Underlining the word “trustbusters,” Nixon ordered:

“Keep a very close watch on them. They tend, at times, to be anti-business professionals.” “It was a constant battle,” Mitchell later told the Watergate prosecutors. “There were always complaints about McLaren not carrying out administration policy, basically from Ehrlichman, but also from Stans, Connally, Flanigan…. Everybody in Washington bitched about McLaren. I was McLaren’s strongest defender.”
⁵

Indeed, McLaren kept up his jihad against conglomerate mergers over the next three years—and Mitchell consistently backed him. Even the
New York Times
, never effusive in its enthusiasm for the administration, acknowledged McLaren had proved “rather aggressive” in his stewardship of the Antitrust Division; and the minions of consumer advocate Ralph Nader, even more hostile, conceded McLaren “has been fully supported by Mitchell in this campaign.”
⁶

None of this was lost on Nixon, who, in a March 1972 conversation with Charles Colson, captured by the White House taping system and transcribed by the Watergate prosecutors, lamented Mitchell’s strong support for McLaren.

NIXON:
[Treasury Secretary John] Connally was very, very strong, as you may recall…against this whole antitrust policy.

COLSON:
Oh, hell everybody—yeah, the whole administration was.

NIXON:
Except for Justice.

COLSON:
Except for McLaren.

NIXON:
Mitchell, McLaren…. Mitchell was on the other side. To his credit, he defended McLaren.
⁷

Ehrlichman eagerly stoked the fires of Nixon’s discontent, writing to him in early 1971: “Your strong views on how the administration should conduct antitrust enforcement are not being translated into action…. You should authorize us to require all government-wide antitrust policy work to be coordinated through one White House office.” Nixon agreed. Ehrlichman’s notes captured Nixon’s mood that fall.

McLaren threatening resignation—he should go
[…]
Mitchell problem…anti-trust

What Ehrlichman really needed to gain control of the policy was a perfect example of the “Mitchell problem,” a crystalline case in which the Antitrust Division could be seen unmistakably exceeding its charter. In fact, that case was there all along, weaving its way through the courts since 1969, ever fraught with the potential to explode, which it finally did on Mitchell’s last day as attorney general.
⁸

“You read a book
from beginning to end,” Hal Geneen once said. “You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.” Born in Bournemouth, England, in 1910, the baptized son of a converted Russian Jewish father and Roman Catholic Italian mother, Harold Sydney Geneen moved to the United States with his family when he was one year old. He parlayed his New York University accounting degree into a series of corporate positions, including an executive stint at Raytheon, where he was acclaimed as a management genius. In 1959, he became president of International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT).

Over the next decade, Geneen, a stalwart Republican, elevated corporate mergers to an art from, steering ITT through takeovers, uncontested and hostile, of 110 domestic and foreign companies, with another 61 to follow in his eleventh year at the helm. This rapacious gobbling of other companies—in rather disparate fields—enabled ITT to maintain an annual growth rate of 11 to 12 percent. By 1969, ITT was the nation’s largest pure conglomerate, with sales and assets totaling almost $8.5 billion—roughly $50 billion in current figures.
⁹

That year, the Nixon administration inherited—but actively prosecuted—lawsuits against three separate ITT mergers: with the Canteen Corporation, a leading vending machine company with operations in forty-three states worth over $322 million; the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, the nation’s fourth-largest property-casualty insurance company, with consolidated assets worth almost $2 billion; and the Grinnell Corporation, a leading manufacturer and seller of sprinkler and burglar-alarm systems, with sales and assets of nearly $525 million (all in 1968–69 figures).
¹⁰