The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (36 page)

Sears’s first move was to visit the White House, and the ubiquitous John Ehrlichman. Where Mitchell was slow to act, Ehrlichman was eager—even though previously unpublished notes show he was informed of Mitchell’s call to the Swiss embassy and warned not to provide similar assistance. “[D]on’t help,” read Ehrlichman’s notes, “SEC investi[gati]ng.” Undaunted, Ehrlichman followed up Sears’s visit by firing off a memo to the attorney general, requesting calls be placed to several embassies on Vesco’s behalf. This Mitchell did not understand—perhaps because the request came from the reviled Ehrlichman—so the attorney general reportedly called Sears at home and asked for a briefing at their next meeting, set for January 12.
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Sears cut to the chase. The SEC probe was murdering Vesco and ICC. Creditors were growing “disturbed” by the negative publicity, and Vesco was “deathly afraid” the SEC lawyers would recommend formal charges against him. Sears asked “if it would be at all possible to try and get some assistance in terms of…an opportunity for…ICC and Vesco…to sit down with either the chairman or the commission.” Mitchell remained reserved. According to Sears, the attorney general “listened and puffed and nodded,” then allowed as how Vesco and ICC appeared to deserve some kind of help. “I would at least discuss it with Bill Casey,” Sears quoted Mitchell as saying. Sears later claimed that before leaving, he gave Mitchell two documents: a memo to the attorney general from Sears, explaining Ehrlichman’s requests; and a memo from Vesco’s corporate lawyer, detailing SEC attempts to keep Vesco behind bars in Switzerland. Sears testified Mitchell “did scan” the documents; Mitchell claimed he never saw them until trial.
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Casey later testified it was in December 1971 or January 1972 that Mitchell first discussed the Vesco case with him. The SEC chairman hardly felt as though the attorney general was attempting to put in a fix; to the contrary, he remembered Mitchell “merely bringing the situation to my attention.” Yet one small divergence in their recollections later prompted a perjury charge against Mitchell: whether he mentioned to the chairman, as Casey claimed, that the SEC staff had tried to keep Vesco in jail in Switzerland.
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Unwisely, Mitchell plunged deeper into Vesco’s netherworld. The financier was eyeing Intra Bank in Beirut, into which the U.S. government had deposited foreign aid funds. On January 19, Mitchell again summoned Mark Felt, this time to ask if the FBI had a man in Beirut. Felt assured Mitchell the Bureau did indeed have a legal attaché—code for spy—at the U.S. embassy there. As Felt later testified, “[Mitchell] said that he would like to send a message to the ambassador but through the FBI communications channel because he didn’t want to go through the State Department channel…. He had requested that a message be sent relating to the ambassador to the effect that Mr. Vesco was highly regarded by the attorney general and by the administration and that any cooperation they could give to him would be appreciated. So a cablegram to this effect was sent.”

According to published reports, Mitchell also personally telephoned Theodore A. Korontjis, the FBI legal attaché in Beirut, and instructed him to approach Ambassador William B. Buffum directly on Vesco’s behalf. To establish contact with Korontjis, Mitchell used the FBI’s communications system, again bypassing State. Ambassador Buffum reportedly “did not take kindly” to Mitchell’s methods. Incensed, the ambassador cabled Washington to ask why Vesco deserved special treatment, only to hear back that he didn’t. Queried by the State Department, Mitchell said Korontjis must have misunderstood him or exceeded his instructions.

The Beirut episode, like the Swiss jailing incident, came to haunt Mitchell. “The genesis of this,” he later testified, “was a request from somebody over at the White House—I believe it was John Ehrlichman—that such a representation be made in connection with whatever Mr. Vesco’s activities were in Lebanon, which had, I gather, been hampered somewhat by the Swiss jailing incident.” Asked on cross-examination if he had tried to open doors for Vesco abroad, Mitchell testified it was “more to establish a fact or clear a misimpression than…to open a door.” Yet Mitchell’s claim that his overtures to Ambassador Buffum came solely at Ehrlichman’s instigation contradicted Mitchell’s corresponding claim never to have received the memo in which Ehrlichman requested such overtures; no one caught the discrepancy.
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“Are you sure Bob
Vesco is everything you represent him to be?” So a newly skeptical Mitchell greeted Harry Sears in the attorney general’s office on the morning of February 11, 1972. Sears’s reply was notably ambivalent: “Bob Vesco is my friend and I am his advocate…. I have to take this position until somebody proves I amwrong.”
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Like all of Sears’s meetings with Mitchell in this period, the February 11 session later provoked sharp clashes of memory—and criminal charges against the former attorney general. Most important among these disputes was Sears’s claim to have informed Mitchell on this occasion that Vesco wished to contribute to the president’s 1972 reelection campaign; in typical style, the ICC chairman “wanted to be among the top contributors” to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP). “I told [Mitchell that Vesco] was talking about giving very substantial amounts,” Sears testified. Mitchell supposedly asked what Vesco had given in ’68; Sears didn’t know. Mitchell then supposedly said this was a matter for Maurice Stans, the former secretary of commerce now managing CRP’s finance committee, to handle.
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Owlish and bespectacled, a big-game hunter and enjoyer of the finer things, the sixty-two-year-old Stans stood imperiously astride the nexus of politics and finance. As head of CRP’s Finance Committee, he was, by March 1972, well on his way toward raising $60 million for Nixon’s reelection drive, a then unheard-of sum for a political campaign and equivalent to roughly $256 million in current figures. Prior to joining Nixon’s cabinet—where Stans developed courteous, but never especially close, relations with his Watergate neighbor, Mitchell—Stans had served as President Eisenhower’s budget director. In between his government stints, Stans earned millions as a senior partner in a powerhouse New York investment banking firm, and was elected, in 1960, to the Accountants’ Hall of Fame.
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On March 8, 1972, Vesco himself and ICC president Laurence Richardson arrived at CRP, located at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the White House, to meet with Stans and Daniel Hofgren, a CRP fund-raiser. Vesco, according to Richardson’s testimony, began by saying he had contributed generously to Nixon in ’68 and wanted to do better in ’72. “But I have a problem,” Vesco said. “My company and I are under investigation by the SEC…. It’s completely without merit and amounts to a personal vendetta and harassment.” He concluded: “I want to find a way to bring the case to a conference and a settlement.” Stans, according to Richardson, replied: “Well, I can’t help you with this, but let’s see if we can get you an appointment with John Mitchell today while you are here.”

Richardson recalled that Stans picked up the phone, but failed to make the appointment with Mitchell. “How much you got in mind to give?” Stans asked. “I want to be in the front row,” Vesco answered, his
arriviste
ambitions laid bare; he proposed $500,000 in two installments. Stans asked if Vesco understood the new election law. “I’m not sure I do,” Vesco replied. After April 7, Stans explained, all contributions of the size Vesco had in mind had to be publicly reported, along with the donor’s name; thus Vesco might want to make the first payment of $250,000 before April 6. Vesco agreed.

As he and Richardson left, Vesco bragged how “clever” he had been in broaching the SEC problem; he had not asked directly for a quid pro quo for his contribution, but made plain his desires. In fact, it was the white-haired Stans who’d played the snickering Vesco for a fool. “Stans was a true professional,” wrote Vesco’s biographer. “He knew exactly where to draw that line while giving Vesco the come-on. Vesco…did in fact think he was buying influence. Although Stans did not offer any discouragement, he knew how not to transgress the boundaries of criminal liability.”
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That same night, Daniel Hofgren strolled the corridors of the Washington Hilton, wading among two thousand tuxedoed guests at a fund-raiser for GOP candidates. At one point, Hofgren spotted a familiar face: John Mitchell, whose resignation as attorney general had taken effect a week earlier. “I recall going up to him and saying, ‘Did you see Mr. Vesco?’” Hofgren later testified. “And [Mitchell] turned around and said, ‘You stay away from that,’ and that was the sum and substance of my conversation.” Asked what happened next, Hofgren replied: “When John Mitchell says, ‘You stay away from it,’ I stay away from it.” Mitchell, of course, remembered no such conversation—and once again, it earned him a perjury charge.
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If the Watergate era
was defined by the corrupting influence of cash in the American political system, the moment when Richardson and Sears showed up at the well-appointed offices of Maurice Stans, on April 10, 1972, was paradigmatic—even if, as a jury later found, no crimes occurred. Assembled were three upright, business-suited members of “the greatest generation,” one carrying a briefcase stuffed with $200,000 in hundred-dollar bills. The meeting, like the briefcase, bulged with connotations: No one suffered any delusions the cash was being given anonymously, past the date required by the new law, because Robert Vesco believed in détente or wage and price controls.

Ever the hustler, Vesco had had trouble rounding up the cash. In the end, he required a loan from the Bahamian bank he controlled. At ICC offices on April 7, he had scowled at Richardson: “One more thing. I have got a message for Stans that I want you to give him.” “What’s the message?” “Tell Stans to get that fuckin’ SEC off my back,” Vesco said. “Well, I will give him the message,” Richardson replied, “but not in those words.” “Be damned sure you give him the message,” Vesco persisted.
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Now, the following Monday, Richardson placed the briefcase atop Stans’s desk, angled it toward him, and opened it just enough for the former commerce secretary to see the Ben Franklins stacked inside. “Mr. Stans, here is your currency,” Richardson said. “Do you want to count it?” Stans said that wouldn’t be necessary. Richardson closed the briefcase, set it aside, and sat down. According to Sears, seated on a couch across the room, Richardson then uncorked the genie. “Mr. Vesco wants me to deliver you a message,” Sears quoted Richardson as saying. “He’d like to get some help.” “Tell him that’s not my bailiwick,” Stans supposedly replied. “That’s John Mitchell’s department.” “Now, wait a minute,” Sears interjected, bolting from the couch. “What we brought here today is a political contribution. There’s nothing else involved. Larry, I think perhaps we better leave.” Richardson took the hint. When the two were alone, Sears was spitting mad. “Larry, what the hell is that all about?” “Well,” Richardson replied, “I really think Bob would have wanted me to deliver the message stronger.”
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That afternoon Sears went to see Mitchell, now officially campaign manager. According to Sears, the meeting dwelt on two main topics: Vesco’s cash contribution, delivered in the bulging briefcase to Maurice Stans in the same building hours earlier; and Vesco’s continuing desire for an audience with William Casey. Mitchell denied learning about the briefcase, but agreed the question of an audience with Casey had again arisen. “The situation is worse, if anything, as far as the SEC staff attitude,” Sears pleaded. Having shared a drink with Casey at his own Watergate apartment four days earlier, Mitchell knew this was so; the agency’s staff believed Vesco guilty of crimes. Rather than tell Sears that himself, Mitchell picked up the phone and asked his secretary to get Casey on the line. “Harry Sears is here,” Mitchell told him. “He would like very much to sit down with you for a few minutes.” Casey was free at four o’clock; Sears finally had his elusive audience with the SEC chairman.
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