The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (34 page)

It was much the same when a select panel of the Judiciary Committee, led by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, arrived in Beard’s hospital room to interrogate her. She had the full complement of dramatic-testimony-from-her-hospital-bed accoutrements, including nervous doctors and lawyers, a closely watched electrocardiogram, and tubes protruding from her nostrils. Midway through Kennedy’s questioning about the memo, the witness suffered a seizure; her deposition was over.

Six days later, however, Beard felt well enough to repair to a nearby apartment to chat with Mike Wallace for
60 Minutes
. Beard stuck with her revised account of the Derby incident, which now matched Mitchell’s version—unwavering from the start—wherein the irrepressible lobbyist unwisely pressed her luck with the notoriously stony attorney general. “I’ll never cease to be ashamed of that,” she blushed to Wallace, “and I don’t know why in the world I did it. It was really more in fun than anything.” She also confirmed Nunn’s recollection that she had been drinking heavily that day: “When you start out on Bloody Marys and then mint juleps all afternoon…”
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Inside the White House,
the ITT scandal now loomed as the preeminent threat to the president’s reelection. At first, Nixon nervously rescheduled a news conference because, as Haldeman noted, “there’s no way he can adequately handle the ITT question.” By the time he was ready to face reporters, on March 24, the president had devised a suitable, and clever, response. “ITT became the great conglomerate that it was,” Nixon said, “in the two previous administrations primarily, in the Kennedy administration and in the Johnson administration. It grew and it grew and it grew, and nothing was done to stop it. In this administration we moved on ITT…. We required the greatest divestiture in the history of the antitrust law.” He added: “If we wanted to do a favor for ITT, we could just continue to do what the two previous administrations had done, and that is nothing, let ITT continue to grow. But we moved on it and moved effectively.”
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In the pitched combat of the ITT hearings, Mitchell played a unique dual role: He offered strategic advice, as in the days of Haynsworth and Carswell, on how best to bring the hearings to a swift, successful end, even as he prepared to testify before them. With Mitchell’s chosen successor on the line, old divisions resurfaced between the White House and Justice, between Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson on the one hand, and Mitchell, Kleindienst, and Mardian on the other. The former group derided the nominee as “a damn fool,” and urged Nixon to withdraw the nomination, thereby ending the hearings and stanching the flow of administration blood. Mitchell, who later rued at his Watergate trial how the Kleindienst hearings were “made into a public circus,” stuck by his old deputy and “weighed in very heavily” to persuade Nixon to do likewise.
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Once again, the president followed Mitchell’s counsel—despite profound misgivings, voiced in an angry, and previously unpublished, session with Haldeman. “I really think that we’re gonna have to really rub John Mitchell’s nose in this,” the president said. The conversation ended with Nixon wishing Kleindienst would recognize the inevitability of defeat, maybe “as a result of some prodding by me.” But the nominee, recalling the lashing he had taken from Nixon on ITT a year earlier, was not about to do this president any favors.
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Finally, on March 14, 1972,
Mitchell took his turn at the Senate witness table. As he raised his right hand to be sworn in, the former attorney general still appeared, at least to Anderson, the epitome of arrogant officialdom, “wearing his petulant air of affronted dignity and annoyance with the inconveniences of the democratic process.”

Over two days of questioning, Mitchell wearily described his support for McLaren’s antitrust enforcement; defended the ITT settlement; recounted his meetings with Geneen and Rohatyn; gave his version of the Kentucky Derby incident; and dismissed the substance of the Beard-Merriam memo. “As far as I can see, there are no grounds for suspicion in this case,” Mitchell declared. “I think it is a house of cards that has been built up.” There were rough patches, however, owing chiefly to Mitchell’s overly broad denials that he had known
nothing
of the ITT-Sheraton convention pledge; had
never
discussed the ITT case with Nixon; and had, as attorney general, made
no
political decisions.
Newsweek
reported the witness “cool but testy” Washington doyenne Mary McGrory was struck by Mitchell’s “wintry face and chilling humor,” attributes that combined, she wrote, to “unnerve” the trained lawyers on the Judiciary Committee and make the witness seem “as approachable as a medieval Cardinal.”
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Committee Democrats bore down on the two meetings with Reinecke and Gillenwaters, in April and September 1971. Mitchell conceded that Reinecke “might have talked about the possibility of locating the Republican convention in the state of California” during the April visit; but this stopped short of admitting Reinecke had specifically mentioned ITT’s involvement. Likewise Mitchell reasoned that Reinecke “wouldn’t be discussing [the convention] with me in September because I understand the decision had already been made,” but again allowed as how Reinecke “may have” touched on the subject. When Senator John V. Tunney, the California Democrat, asked explicitly if Reinecke had mentioned ITT’s financial pledge, Mitchell replied: “It is quite possible Lieutenant Governor Reinecke mentioned the convention in San Diego and Sheraton Hotel or something else but it would have made no impression upon me whatsoever, I not having that interest in it.”
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In many respects, Mitchell was right to denounce the ITT scandal as a house of cards. There was no solid evidence he knew about ITT’s convention pledge at the time of the antitrust settlement with the conglomerate, nor any evidence—beyond the wild buffet-line tales of Dita Beard—to suggest Mitchell intervened to dictate the outcome of the settlement negotiations. Yet the former attorney general undeniably perjured himself at the Kleindienst confirmation hearings. When Senator Tunney asked Mitchell, “Did Mr. Reinecke ever discuss, to your knowledge, in May or April, the ITT offer to bring the Republican convention to San Diego?” Mitchell replied, “No, senator.” He then thought to add: “As far as I can tell, Mr. Reinecke must have had me mixed up with somebody else because he didn’t meet me in May, and I have also read in the paper he has retracted that statement since then about that meeting in May.”
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The second part of Mitchell’s answer framed the issue solely in terms of his
meetings
with Reinecke, but he had answered, with a flat negative, a question that was
not
so limited. Tunney had asked not whether Reinecke had
met with
Mitchell to discuss the ITT pledge in April or May, but whether Reinecke had
discussed
the subject with Mitchell during that time. Neither Tunney nor any other member of the Judiciary Committee ever thought to ask Mitchell whether he and Reinecke had
spoken by telephone
during the relevant time frames—but they had.

When Reinecke appeared before the panel, more than a month after Mitchell, the last senator to question him was Republican Hiram Fong of Hawaii, who, like Tunney with Mitchell, queried the witness about information exchanged on the ITT pledge, and without limiting his question to face-to-face meetings.

FONG:
So the only time you discussed the convention with Mr. Mitchell was in September after the ITT case had already been settled?

REINECKE:
That is correct, Senator.

Reinecke also told Senator Kennedy he had “no way of knowing” whether Mitchell knew of the ITT pledge by September.
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Later, when the ITT case consumed the energies of a whole division of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, investigators obtained Mitchell’s office records and found he had in fact spoken to Reinecke on the phone three times between April and September 1971, all before San Diego won the convention rights and the ITT cases were settled.
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When the special prosecutors confronted Reinecke with this evidence, in July 1973, Reinecke acknowledged he had misled the Judiciary Committee: “I realize [I] was not describing the entire situation, but relied on the first law of the courtroom…. Answer questions only and do not volunteer.” Reinecke pleaded that he was tired during his Senate testimony—which occurred after one day’s notice, a red-eye flight from California and four hours of White House coaching, and with no counsel present—and responded to Kennedy and Fong as he did because “every substantive question regarding Mitchell referred to meetings and not to other communications by letter, telegram or phone.”
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The prosecutors were unmoved, and Reinecke struck a deal—or so he thought—to testify against Mitchell in exchange for being left alone; immunity was never formally conferred. Accordingly, on February 4, 1974, Reinecke told a federal grand jury that the purpose of his telephone conversations with Mitchell in the spring of 1971 was “to bring [Mitchell] up to date on details…about the progress of the convention, particularly the financial commitments.” He reported Mitchell’s reaction was “encouraging, tolerant and fatherly,” but added the attorney general “was like most of those fellows in the White House. They all say the same thing, which is very little.”
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Two months later, with Reinecke a leading candidate in California’s Republican gubernatorial primary, a Washington grand jury indicted him on two counts of perjury before the Judiciary Committee. Reinecke maintained his innocence, stayed in—and lost—the gubernatorial primary, and was subsequently convicted on both counts. The following year, his conviction was overturned because the Senate had failed to follow proper procedure in establishing a quorum.
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Though Mitchell was not called as a witness, the
New York Times
noted that the charges in Reinecke’s prosecution implicitly “raise[d] questions” about Mitchell’s own testimony before the Judiciary Committee.
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Yet his dealings with Reinecke were not the only subject on which Mitchell lied at the ITT hearings. The second was his interaction with Nixon. Unlike Haldeman and a handful of White House and Secret Service aides, Mitchell was kept in the dark about the existence of Nixon’s secret taping system, and thus never imagined evidence would surface to challenge his assertion, to Republican Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska, that “with respect to ITT or any other litigation, no, I have never talked to the president about it.”
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Questioned by Watergate prosecutors after they obtained the tape of Mitchell’s April 21, 1971, meeting with Nixon, the former attorney general said he had “forgotten completely about the Kleindienst-Nixon incident and did not discuss it with anyone.”
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The ITT task force later decided not to indict Mitchell for this instance of perjury because the incriminating evidence against him was, in fact, exculpatory: The tape showed Mitchell honorably upholding the law, by intervening to persuade Nixon to preserve, not scuttle, the antitrust case.
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Mitchell also lied at the hearings, finally, to preserve the fiction that as attorney general he had kept himself strictly divorced from political matters. Everyone who followed politics in those days knew, as Reinecke mindlessly told newsmen, that Mitchell was Nixon’s preeminent political adviser and would eventually resign from Justice to spearhead the president’s reelection drive. Later, stacks of memoranda would emerge, typed on DOJ and CRP letterheads, showing Mitchell’s involvement, throughout the calendar year 1971, in countless (though not all) decisions relating to Nixon’s reelection. But Mitchell felt he could never admit as much before the Judiciary Committee, any more than Robert F. Kennedy could ever have confessed publicly that he minded his brother’s political fortunes while running the Justice Department.

Betraying no grasp of this irony, Senator Kennedy sought energetically to pin Mitchell down on the point. “Do you remember what party responsibilities you had prior to March first?” Kennedy asked, citing the date of Mitchell’s resignation as attorney general. “Party responsibilities?” Mitchell asked. “Yes, Republican Party,” Kennedy said. “I do not have and did not have any responsibilities, and I have no party responsibilities now,” Mitchell answered.
No reelection campaign responsibilities?
Kennedy pressed. “Not as yet,” Mitchell said. “I hope to. I am going to make the application to the chairman of the committee if I ever get through with these hearings.” The committee room erupted in laughter, and minutes later Mitchell was gone.
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