The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (45 page)

The first forum in which Magruder gave sworn testimony about the Key Biscayne meeting was the grand jury in Washington, D.C., where he appeared on May 2, 1973. There, Magruder was careful to avoid directly attributing the final order for the Watergate break-in to any one individual. “I think
we all agreed
that there was [
sic
] potentially problems” with the Gemstone operation, Magruder testified. “But basically
we
did agree to fund the projects, because
we
felt that there were enough individuals that were interested in this information and
we
thought that there could possibly be some use put to this information by
ourselves
as well as [by] other individuals in the White House.”
²⁴

Unpublished until now is Magruder’s executive session testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, conducted behind closed doors on June 12, 1973, declassified in 2002, and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. There Magruder testified: “The method by which I worked with Mr. Mitchell, he would take the copies that were in his files and he would mark them in whatever form. He usually wrote little notes on them, checked off what he was interested in. We went through that process.
He indicated verbal approval, gave me back the sheets, and that was it
.”

Not content to hear that Mitchell offered only “verbal” approval of Gemstone, the Senate Watergate committee’s Democratic counsel, Sam Dash—a liberal critic of the Nixon White House who had once sued Mitchell to block his anticrime initiatives—moved quickly in this private session to prompt the witness, with a leading statement, to say Mitchell’s order was in writing. Magruder, seeking leniency, took his cue.

DASH:
There was a notation that Mr. Mitchell made.

MAGRUDER:
My recollection is that I gave him the papers and he jotted some things down on the papers, but I can’t recall what that was, exactly. Just simply some comment about the thing, gave it back to me. I just can’t recall what he noted on these papers. It was some input he wanted to make.

With further help from Dash, Magruder managed admirably, by the time he testified in public session—two days later—to refresh his memory. He went from recalling nothing about Mitchell’s jottings to remembering that they “indicated the project was approved,” and, too, the “targets” Liddy was to wiretap, “specifically Mr. O’Brien’s office.”
²⁵

Finally there was LaRue. From his first sworn testimony to interviews he gave three decades later, LaRue never wavered in testifying that Magruder left Key Biscayne
without
approval of Gemstone. Appearing before the grand jury in April 1973, LaRue recalled that at the end of the lengthy meeting, Magruder gave Mitchell the last of the twenty-nine decision memos, Mitchell read it over, and asked LaRue: “What do you think?” “I don’t think it’s worth the risk,” LaRue quoted himself replying. Then Mitchell, after a few seconds of silence, declared: “Well, we don’t have to do anything on this now.” “That was the end of the meeting,” LaRue testified. His story remained the same before the Senate, the House, and the jury in
U.S. v. Mitchell
.
²⁶

LaRue’s testimony obviously posed severe problems for Magruder, who had depicted Mitchell not as withholding decision at Key Biscayne, but as actively approving Gemstone, marking up the document and handing it back. According to a previously unpublished memorandum by a staff lawyer on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF), just six days after LaRue testified on nationwide television in July 1973, Magruder, his memory suddenly “triggered,” appeared at the WSPF offices to amend his story of the Key Biscayne session, and advanced, for the first time, the dubious claim that Mitchell gave the order when LaRue was on the phone or out of the room. “Basically,” LaRue replied, “the guy that’s lying is Magruder.”
²⁷

Mitchell was never formally
charged with ordering the Watergate break-in. However, the notion that he did order it, LaRue’s testimony be damned, persisted, a cloud that loomed larger over Mitchell’s legacy than any of the criminal acts for which he was actually tried.

In July 1973, Mitchell spent three days testifying before the Senate Watergate committee, the first of many forums where he publicly denied, unwaveringly and under oath, authorizing the break-in. Indeed, the constantly mutating story of Magruder, and the constancy of Mitchell’s, in forum after forum, provided one of the most striking contrasts in the whole affair. To the Senate, the former attorney general noted that the Gemstone plan was the last item submitted for his review on that day in Key Biscayne, leading him to wonder aloud “whether somebody thought they were going to sneak it through, or there would be less resistance” at the end of a long session on other matters. When Magruder handed him the document, Mitchell told the Ervin committee, his reaction was very simple: “This again? We don’t need this. I’m tired of hearing it. Out. Let’s not discuss it any further…. It was just as clear as that.” The former attorney general said his rejection was so swift the matter received “practically no discussion.”
²⁸

Mitchell held to this story at all points: the Senate hearings, the House impeachment hearings,
U.S. v. Mitchell
. A previously unpublished House staff memo recorded Mitchell’s claim that he told Magruder to “take the plan and ‘shove it.’” Asked at his trial if he, Magruder, and LaRue had discussed the pros and cons of Liddy’s modified plan, Mitchell told the jurors: “I am not sure we ever got that far”—though he did acknowledge he understood the plan “proposed a crime.”
²⁹

Mitchell grew no less adamant with age. “I turned down Magruder in Key Biscayne,” he told an interviewer less than two months before his death. “I turned that down out of hand.” Asked if he was forceful enough in rejecting Magruder’s Gemstone pitch at Key Biscayne, Mitchell replied: “Under the setting and the circumstances, what was said was vehement enough to [convey] ‘Get the hell out of here and don’t bring any of that nonsense around me.’…The conclusion I’ve come to in my own mind [is] that these things were under way and they were going to go ahead regardless.”
³⁰

Closing out a week in the Florida sunshine with his wife and daughter, Mitchell had no idea he would spend the rest of his life entangled in
Rashomon
-like clashes of memory over meetings and phone calls with a cast of younger men he’d treated like sons, with criminal charges in the offing. In his next meeting with President Nixon, in the Oval Office on April 4, 1972, Mitchell said nothing about having approved a covert break-in and wiretapping operation against the chairman of the Democratic Party. Instead the former attorney general spoke fondly of Key Biscayne, a period of rest, relaxation, and only a little business. “We had some of the people down from the committee,” Mitchell told Nixon, “where we could spend a couple of days, you know, with quiet.”
³¹

DNC

Watergate is probably unique among major political scandals—no one got hurt except the perpetrators.

—Raymond K. Price Jr., 1977
¹

THE SENATE WATERGATE
committee’s final report devoted only four of its 1,250 pages to the break-in. It did not say who ordered the Watergate operation. Similarly, the House Judiciary Committee’s final report recoiled, at least initially, from hard judgment about the events of Key Biscayne: “
They
considered the proposal for electronic surveillance, and, according to Magruder, approved its revised budget.” Elsewhere, however—even after acknowledging Fred LaRue’s exculpatory testimony—the House report stated flatly the break-in was “approved in advance by Mitchell…[and] implemented under Mitchell’s direction.”
²

Historians largely agreed. “Most investigators have been unwilling to accept [Mitchell’s] disclaimers,” wrote J. Anthony Lukas in his 1976 landmark
Nightmare
, the first major study of Watergate. “Because of the events that followed, they largely accept Magruder’s version of the [Key Biscayne] meeting.” Several biographers of Nixon hewed the same line, and as late as 2004, the
New York Times
repeated the falsehood in—of all places—LaRue’s obituary.
³

If Mitchell did not give the order, who did? Conspirators ascribed various motives to the skulduggery when they testified before the major investigative bodies, one of which—the House impeachment committee—never even mentioned in its 755-page final report the name of R. Spencer Oliver Jr. The executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen was the one DNC employee whose telephone was actually monitored during the three-week life span of the Watergate surveillance operation. The other wiretap “victim” was Chairman O’Brien, on whose secretary’s phone Watergate burglar James McCord placed a defective wiretap, which sat, inoperative and undisturbed, for the duration of the Watergate operation. This led Earl Silbert, the original lead prosecutor in Watergate, to tell the Senate he and his staff concluded one possible motive for the DNC mission was “blackmail…to compromise Oliver and others.”
⁴

Blackmail? R. Spencer Oliver Jr.?
Why on earth would John Mitchell—trusted adviser to the president of the United States on the highest affairs of state—have bothered to order the bugging of an obscure DNC apparatchik? The answer, of course, was that Mitchell never did; the machinations that led to the famous arrests of June 17, 1972, transpired unbeknownst to him. Burning curiosity about who ordered the break-in gripped Mitchell to his grave. Only after his death was the mystery solved.

A few hours after
the Key Biscayne meeting ended, Magruder instructed his administrative assistant, Robert Reisner, to give Gordon Liddy the long-awaited word:
Go
. Of this development Magruder also made sure to keep his own patron, H. R. Haldeman, well informed. On the day after the Florida House session, Gordon Strachan, a young lawyer who had joined Haldeman’s staff in August 1970, following a two-year stint with the Nixon-Mitchell law firm in New York, informed Haldeman in writing: “Magruder reports that 1701 now has a sophisticated political intelligence-gathering system with a budget of 300 [thousand].” Haldeman was scheduled to sit down with Mitchell to discuss a wide variety of political matters on April 4, 1972. For this event, Strachan, following custom, prepared a “talking paper” to guide Haldeman through likely areas of discussion. The paper’s second item concerned intelligence. “Gordon Liddy’s intelligence proposal ($300) has been approved,” wrote Strachan. “Now you may want to cover with Mitchell…who should be charged with the responsibility of translating the intelligence into an appropriate political response.”
⁵

Most intriguing about these communications between Strachan and Haldeman was that Strachan twice specified $300,000 as the price tag for Liddy’s intelligence operation—even though, by all accounts, the final plan submitted for review carried a budget of only $250,000. Here was the first hint that something was amiss in the story of Mitchell approving Gemstone at Key Biscayne. For his part, Strachan insisted he accurately recorded the figure Magruder cited to him. He told the Senate that when Magruder called to say Gordon Liddy’s plan had been approved, it was simply “assumed” that it was Mitchell’s approval Magruder was conveying.

For the Democrats on the Senate Watergate committee, Strachan’s assumption wasn’t good enough. “A $300,000 expenditure could only be approved by Mitchell, is that so?” asked Wayne H. Bishop, the committee’s chief field investigator, during Strachan’s July 1973 testimony in executive session, previously unpublished. “Well,” Strachan answered, “that is a very different question.”

Magruder made expenditures of substantial amounts of money without Mitchell’s knowledge…. He spent $100,000 on a Republican National Committee film that Mitchell didn’t know anything about. And when I told Haldeman and gave him a copy of the script, Haldeman called up Mitchell, and I was on the phone when he was talking; Mitchell went through the roof…. Another time, Magruder told me that he and LaRue decided to increase the direct mail budget from $4.5 million to $5.5 million without Mitchell’s approval.

Thus Magruder, when it suited him, acted behind Mitchell’s back. As Strachan also told the Senate, Magruder “would frequently inform me that a matter had been decided by someone when it had not in fact been decided by that individual.”
⁶

Some historians later cited Strachan’s April 4 “talking paper” as evidence of Mitchell’s ultimate complicity in the Gemstone operation. This was misguided. For one thing, the talking paper was worded, like Strachan’s memo of the previous day, in vague passive tense (“Liddy’s intelligence operation proposal…
has been
approved”), without any explicit assertion of Mitchell’s authorization. Second, and more important, the document made no reference to wiretapping or any other illegal activity.

As it happened, during their meeting on April 4, neither Mitchell nor Haldeman raised the subject of Liddy or his intelligence program. “My meetings with Mitchell very rarely, if ever, followed the agenda,” Haldeman later testified.
⁷

Gordon Liddy also assumed,
when he got Magruder’s message to move forward on Gemstone, that Mitchell was behind the order. Now that he had his “go” order, Liddy confidently came calling on Hugh Sloan, CRP’s treasurer, demanding a first cash installment of $83,000 on the promised $250,000.

Sloan was taken aback by the numbers involved and refused to disburse the money before checking with his own boss, CRP finance committee chairman Maurice Stans, who in turn promised to check with Mitchell, the campaign manager. Stans tracked Mitchell down and mentioned Liddy’s request for a “substantial” sum. “What is it all about?” According to Stans, Mitchell replied: “I don’t know…. Magruder is in charge of the campaign and he directs the spending.” Stans was incredulous. “Do you mean, John, that if Magruder tells Sloan to pay these amounts or any amounts to Gordon Liddy that he should do so?” “That is right,” Mitchell answered.

To Mitchell, the matter was routine; by that point Magruder had authorized millions in campaign expenditures. Still, the concern exhibited by Stans, a peer in rank and age, evidently made an impression on Mitchell, who, according to previously unpublished testimony, soon cornered Magruder on the issue. “Does Liddy need that much right away?” Magruder recalled Mitchell asking. “Yes, he does,” Magruder replied. The fact that Mitchell pressed Magruder like this showed the former attorney general was surprised by the amounts Liddy was demanding—a surprise Mitchell never would have exhibited if, just seven days earlier, he had signed off on a $250,000 wiretapping operation to be run by Liddy.
⁸

A few weeks later, near the end of April, Liddy recalled, he was summoned to Magruder’s office, where the CRP deputy asked a curious question. “Gordon, do you think you could get into the Watergate?” It marked the first time anyone had mentioned the Watergate complex to Liddy. Yes, he answered, the Watergate was a high-security building, but it could be done. “How about putting a bug in O’Brien’s office?” Magruder continued. This was even more curious, for by that point it was a matter of public record that the DNC chairman was spending most of his time in Miami, preparing for the convention. “For that, it’s a bit late,” Liddy replied. “Okay, so he’s in and out,” Magruder countered. “We want to know whatever’s said in his office, just as if it was here, what goes on in this office.” Liddy agreed to do the job. “The phones, too,” Magruder added. “And while you’re in there, photograph whatever you can find.”
⁹