The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (32 page)

An exchange of handwritten letters on February 15, 1972, marked the end of Mitchell’s three-year tenure as attorney general, a brief but uniquely turbulent period that had witnessed the Days of Rage, Kent State, and May Day; the Black Panthers and the Pentagon Papers; major struggles over school desegregation and the reform of the criminal justice system; contentious Supreme Court nominations and antitrust battles; and not least of all, the daily conduct of the Vietnam War and the treachery of the Moorer-Radford affair.

“It has been a great”—“distinct,” Mitchell’s handwritten draft had said—“privilege to serve in your Cabinet and administration, and for this opportunity and experience I am most appreciative. Respectfully submitted, John Mitchell.” On White House stationery, the president penned his “Dear John” reply, including an oblique allusion—Nixon couldn’t help himself—to the disparity in their private finances.

In my 25 years in public life I have found there are very few indispensable men.

In the campaign of 1968 and in our first three years you have been one of those rare men.

My only regret is that you are also the indispensable man to run the campaign of 1972.

But fortunately we will still be working together in the same cause.

I can’t pay you what you are worth. But if just plain “thank you” will do—you have that a thousand fold—(and Martha too!)

RN
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All that remained was the matter of Mitchell’s successor. Less than a year after he had assaulted Kleindienst over the phone—
You son-of-a-bitch, don’t you understand the English language?
—Nixon formally nominated him as the nation’s sixty-eighth attorney general; nine days later, after a perfunctory hearing, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to recommend confirmation.
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Lanky, long-haired, sharp-witted,
twenty-seven-year-old Brit Hume was already an experienced reporter when he started working, in autumn 1970, as a “legman” for Jack Anderson, the columnist whose knack for obtaining highly classified memoranda had just won him a Pulitzer Prize. Full of “brash bravado,” Hume knew news when he saw it, and on Tuesday, February 22, 1972, it dropped into his lap like a gift from the heavens.
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“This is a good one,” said Opal Ginn, Anderson’s secretary, as she handed Hume a two-page typed document. Beyond noting the ITT stationery, the reporter was initially too busy to examine the item; later, he returned to it and realized at once that it was “the single most incriminating piece of paper I had ever seen.” Dated June 25, 1971, and marked “Personal and Confidential,” it was an original ITT memo from “D. D. Beard” to “W. R. Merriam,” captioned “San Diego Convention.” It read, in full:

I just had a long talk with EJG. I’m so sorry that we got that call from the White House. I thought you and I agreed very thoroughly that under no circumstances would anyone in this office discuss with anyone our participation in the Convention including me. Other than permitting John Mitchell, Reinecke, Bob Haldeman and Nixon (besides Wilson, of course)
no one
has known from whom that 400 thousand committment [
sic
] had come. You can’t imagine how many queries I’ve had from “friends” about this situation and I have in each and every case denied knowledge of any kind. It would be wise for all of us here to continue to do that, regardless of from whom any questions come; White House or whoever. John Mitchell has certainly kept it on the higher level only, we should be able to do the same.

I was afraid the discussion about the three hundred/four hundred thousand committment [
sic
] would come up soon. If you remember, I suggested we all stay out of that, other than the fact that I told you I had heard Hal up the original amount.

Now I understand from Ned that both he and you are upset about the decision to make it four hundred thousand in
services
. Believe me, this is not what Hal said. Just after I talked with Ned, Wilson called me, to report on his meeting with Hal. Hal at no time told Wilson that our donation would be in services ONLY. In fact, quite the contrary. There would be very little cash involved, but certainly some. I am convinced, because of several conversations with Louie re Mitchell, that our noble committment [
sic
] has gone a long way toward our negotiations on the mergers eventually coming out as Hal wants them. Certainly the President has told Mitchell to see that things are worked out fairly. It is still only McLaren’s mickey-mouse we are suffering.

We all know Hal and his big mouth! But this is one time he cannot tell you and Ned one thing and Wilson (and me) another!

I hope, dear Bill, that all of this can be reconciled—between Hal and Wilson—if all of us in this office remain totally ignorant of any committment [
sic
] ITT has made to anyone. If it gets too much publicity, you can believe our negotiations with Justice will wind up shot down. Mitchell is definitely helping us, but cannot let it be known. Please destroy this, huh?
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The import of the document, dated a month before the government announced its surprise settlement in the ITT cases, was both seismic and unmistakable: Mitchell was “helping” to fix the antitrust suits against ITT in exchange for the company’s “noble committment” to help finance the 1972 Republican convention. Several of the names mentioned, like “EJG,” “Ned,” “Hal,” “Louie,” and “Wilson,” Hume did not recognize; but he certainly knew those of Nixon, Mitchell, McLaren, Haldeman, and Ed Reinecke, California’s lieutenant governor under Ronald Reagan.

The reporter’s first stop was his own source: Opal Ginn. “It sounds like Dita Beard,” she snapped; now Hume knew the first name—and gender—of the memo’s author. Ginn said Beard was ITT’s capital lobbyist and had met her once, finding the encounter unpleasant. Hume quickly ascertained that the memo’s intended recipient was ITT’s Washington vice president, Bill Merriam; that “EJG” and “Ned” were the same person—Edward J. (“Ned”) Gerrity, ITT’s public relations man in New York; that “Hal” was Harold Geneen; that “Louie” was Kentucky governor Louie Nunn; and that “Wilson” was Congressman Bob Wilson, the Republican who represented San Diego.

Hume’s next task was to get Beard to authenticate the memo. This he did the next day, with a mixture of guile and boyish charm, during an interview of Beard at the company’s Washington offices attended by two ITT public relations men. According to Hume, he showed Beard the original memo without asking if it was genuine; Beard responded by saying the penciled initial beside her name was indeed “my own little ‘D.’” After leaving to check her files, Beard, according to Hume, returned, announced she could find no trace of the document in her office, and asked: “All right, what do you want to know about it?” This Hume took as confirmation of the document’s authenticity.

Next he contacted Richard McLaren, and read him the memo over the phone. Now a federal judge in Chicago—his departure and relocation so swift they raised eyebrows
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—the former trustbuster chuckled at the memo’s reference to ITT suffering “McLaren’s mickey-mouse,” then said: “Mitchell had absolutely nothing to do with the negotiation and settlement of that case. I never discussed it with him. It was completely my operation. I made the decision as to what was the proper basis for a settlement.”

By Thursday, February 24, Beard was requesting to see Hume again. They arranged for the reporter to visit her Arlington home at ten o’clock that night. Hume arrived to find Beard dressed in the same dingy clothes she’d worn two days earlier, joined by her teenage son, Bull, her secretary, and an ITT colleague. “The atmosphere was tense and gloomy,” Hume later recalled, “as if there had been a death in the family.” He and Beard repaired to her kitchen to talk privately; her bleary eyes and slurred speech betrayed tears and drink. Over the next two hours, the lobbyist nursed a highball and chain-smoked Chesterfields as she “veered erratically from one subject to another,” alternately cocky and pathetic, weepy and profane. Thinking a notebook would inhibit his high-strung subject, Hume took no notes, but typed up a recap when he got home.

“Of course I wrote it,” Hume quoted Beard saying of the memo. She said it was meant to “put some sense into the head of that stupid shit, Merriam,” whom she depicted as unequal to the political sophistication his lofty position demanded. The PR villains at ITT wanted Beard to tell Hume she had made the whole thing up—“but that would be a lie,” she said, “and I wouldn’t lie like that.” As well, after Hume’s visit to the ITT office, Beard said, a team of security men from New York had descended on her files and started indiscriminately shredding documents, including her personal papers.

She claimed Mitchell had been informed of ITT’s role in the convention financing by Ed Reinecke, the lieutenant governor from California, during one of Reinecke’s swings through Washington—but insisted the convention pledge was unrelated to the antitrust settlement. According to Hume’s memo for the record, Reinecke had confided to Beard that when he apprised Mitchell about the existence of a $400,000 pledge to ensure San Diego hosted the convention, Mitchell had asked: “From whom?” “From Dita Beard,” Reinecke had supposedly answered. “Humph,” Mitchell reportedly replied.

The hour grew late. At last the reporter zeroed in on his target:
Did John Mitchell fix the ITT cases?
The question prompted Beard to pour forth, in between bursts of uncontrollable crying, her own version—actually, the
first
of her versions—of the Kentucky Derby encounter, which Hume recorded in his memorandum.

She said that as they were going in to get in the buffet line, Mitchell took her arm and took her aside. It was just the three of them then, she said, Mitchell, herself, and Gov. Nunn. She said that Mitchell proceeded to give her a scathing, hour-long scolding in the bluntest language for putting the pressure on the Justice Department [to approve] the mergers via Capitol Hill and other means instead of coming to see him. She said Mitchell said he had been told she was the “politician” in the company and he had heard much about her long before coming to Washington. She said he kenw [
sic
] about all the speeches she had written and gotten delivered by friendly members of Congress. She said Mitchell knew all about her, even asked about son Bull’s grades…. She said Mitchell told her he had gotten a call from Nixon saying “lay-off ITT.” Later she changed this to something, [
sic
] like Nixon saying “make a reasonable settlement.” she [
sic
] said Mitchell told her he was sympathetic but that his great problem was McLaren, whom she described as a “shit.” She said she did what she could to fight back, but she was overwhelmed by Mitchell’s diatribe. She blessed Louie Nunn for staying at her side during the whole thing. Finally, she said she asked him, “Well, do you want to work something out,” or words to that effect. She said he replied in the affirmative. She said he said, “What do you want,” meaning what companies did ITT wish to retain in the merger case settlement. She said she told him they had to have the Hartford Insurance Company “because of the economy.” And she added that they also wanted “part of Grinnell.” She said she couldn’t remember what else she asked for, but it was exactly what the company got in the settlement.

She said the agreement was reached, actually, as they went through the buffet line and then sat down to eat. She said that Harold Geneen knew nothing of the fix with Mitchell and that he still does not. I pressed her repeatedly on this, saying I found it hard to believe but she stuck to it all the way. She said this was the only meeting or conversation she has ever had with JM. She said that their discussion had nothing whatever to do with the convention negotiations and later said that her conversation with Reinecke about Mitchell’s reaction to the proposed San Diego location came after the Kentucky session.
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There was much here for a skeptical reporter to question, starting with Beard’s claim that she withheld from Harold Geneen any word of the fantastic lobbying coup she had supposedly scored—on a buffet line—in Kentucky. In fact, almost every element in Beard’s story about her encounter with Mitchell was, prima facie, preposterous.

But that had no bearing on the news value of the memo Hume had in hand. As he continued researching it, the reporter got Felix Rohatyn, who denounced the memo as “absolute bullshit,” to disclose his meetings with Kleindienst and McLaren. Those sessions appeared to contradict what Kleindienst had stated in a letter to Democratic Party chairman Lawrence F. O’Brien. In December 1971, O’Brien had written Mitchell questioning whether there was “a connection between ITT’s sudden largesse to the Republican Party and the nearly simultaneous out-of-court settlement of one of the biggest merger cases in corporate history, to ITT’s benefit.” Replying to O’Brien, Kleindienst had asserted: “The settlement between the Department of Justice and ITT was handled and negotiated
exclusively
by Assistant Attorney General Richard W. McLaren.” Now Hume had Rohatyn, an ITT director, casting Kleindienst as a party to the settlement talks. It was time to go to print.
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