The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (58 page)

NIXON:
I would dump him; it would kill him financially. John Mitchell has a serious problem with his wife. He was unable to watch the campaign and as a result, underlings did things without his knowledge.

EHRLICHMAN:
[…] The minute you dump on Mitchell indirectly by saying he didn’t have a chance to watch the underlings, the underlings are going to produce their diaries and show Mitchell was in eighteen meetings where this was discussed, ratified, approved, authorized, financed.

NIXON:
Was he?

EHRLICHMAN:
I gather so.

NIXON:
Well, Mitchell, then, did it.
²⁶

Aides who had struggled to navigate the scandal’s choppy waters now began washing up at the Oval Office, looking for a lifeline they thought only the president of the United States could throw them. The requests—framed always in the indirect bureaucratic fashion of government men managing a problem, not as desperate cries for help in a capsizing criminal conspiracy—started with pleas for executive clemency and hush money, and climaxed in demands that the president perform swiftly the unpleasant chore the coconspirators all believed, in shared delusion, would instantly and tidily dispose of the matter: Sacrifice John Mitchell. It was Nixon’s response, grudging at first, ultimately enthusiastic, that sealed Mitchell’s fate.

Contrary to received wisdom, Nixon’s tapes did not reveal him “a manipulative, master politician overseeing every detail” (
Washington Post
), “the key figure in the cover-up conspiracy” (
Time
) who “knew virtually everything about Watergate and the imposition of a cover-up, from the beginning” (historian Stanley Kutler). Yes, the tapes showed Nixon
became
a party to the cover-up, inarguably by February 1973; this much Nixon himself confessed to David Frost. “I will admit…I was not prosecuting the case.”

I will admit that during that period, rather than acting in my role as the chief law enforcement officer in the land…I did not meet that responsibility…in some cases going right to the edge of the law in trying to advise Ehrlichman and Haldeman and all the rest as to how best to present their cases, because I thought they were legally innocent, that I came to the edge. And under the circumstances, I would have to say that a reasonable person could call that a cover-up.

Worse than belying Nixon’s Quaker morality, the tapes demolished his carefully cultivated image as a competent chief executive, a steel-trap mind harnessed to the demanding business of presidential decision-making in the atomic age. From his first days as president, Nixon’s aides were privately shocked by how he wasted “countless hours” on “rambling and rumination.” The president’s management style, Ehrlichman recalled in 1982, “would involve his chewing on a subject for a while and then leaving it and going off to other things and then coming back to it unannounced. Very often it was hard to pick up his train of thought…. This could go on over a period of days.”
²⁷

In Watergate Nixon “didn’t know what the truth was,” Ehrlichman told a symposium audience. “He didn’t know what he had said, didn’t know what he had done, and the fact was whatever he was saying was truth at that particular moment.” The tapes unmasked Nixon not as the take-charge boss of a criminal conspiracy but rather as an aging and confused politician lost in a welter of detail, unable to distinguish his Magruders from his Strachans, uncertain who knew what and when, what each player had told the grand jury, whose testimony was direct, whose hearsay. Charles Colson told the House that Nixon seemed “genuinely confused by all of the conflicting accounts.” Alexander Butterfield, the aide who saw Nixon more frequently than any other save Haldeman and who publicly disclosed the existence of the taping system, acknowledged that the transcripts betrayed in the president “a seeming incoherence of speaking style.” “One of the things that did strike me when I read the transcripts,” agreed Magruder, “was that really, how much—or how little—information [Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman] really did have.”

No one benefited more from the president’s estrangement from the facts of Watergate than his chief accuser, John Dean—and no one, besides Nixon himself, suffered more from this disadvantage than John Mitchell, the highest-ranking administration official imprisoned on the strength of Dean’s testimony. Dean was keenly aware of his mental superiority over the president. In
Blind Ambition
, Dean wrote that Nixon was lucid and logical only sporadically, and was mostly rambling, forgetful, and disorganized, unable to remember what Dean told him from day to day. In a 1989 interview, Dean recalled much the same of Mitchell: “He wasn’t sharp…. He didn’t remember a lot of details…. I had to—used to prepare Mitchell to testify, to go up on the Hill. And he wasn’t very good. He wasn’t a very good witness. He couldn’t hold facts. He couldn’t hold information.”
²⁸

Dean ended Nixon’s and Mitchell’s careers, producing in the president both everlasting fury and regret (“Oh, the incredible treachery of that son-of-a-bitch!”), and exposing the limitations of the mental machines that had propelled the older men, respectively, from Whittier and Blue Point to the White House and Wall Street. Dean was younger, smarter, quicker, more tightly wired into the bureaucracy, and better versed in the origins, players, and events of Watergate. Against this backdrop commenced Nixon’s infamous series of meetings and phone calls with Dean—some twenty in all, between February 27 and April 17—that marked the endgame in the Watergate cover-up and changed the course of American history.

The first White House
aide to approach Nixon that winter was Colson, who laid the groundwork in a chat with Haldeman. “This Watergate thing is not going to go away,” Colson warned, “and it seems to me that John Mitchell must have been responsible for this. And if he was, we damn well better bring him in and make him take the responsibility.” In Nixon’s office February 13, Colson sought assurances the president would take a “hard nose” stand against the Ervin committee interrogating White House aides. “If they want Haldeman, Ehrlichman, me,” Colson said, “we have to limit the areas that they’re gonna go into.” And whoever ordered the break-in, Colson argued in a clear reference to Mitchell, should say so and spare the president further grief. “If it’s gonna come out in the hearings, for God sakes, let it out,” he cried.

COLSON:
At least get rid of it now, take our losses.

NIXON:
Well, who the hell do you think did this? Mitchell? He can’t do it; he’ll perjure himself so he won’t admit it. Now that’s the problem.

Next came Dean. The tapes show Dean ran circles around the president, used his superior comprehension of the scandal to shape the topics discussed, options considered, and courses pursued. Asked during the impeachment hearings by Democratic congressman John Conyers if he ever withheld information from Nixon during Watergate, Dean replied: “I didn’t walk in every time and volunteer everything that might be on my mind.” Chief among Dean’s deceptions was his implication of Mitchell. In his talks with Nixon, Dean was careful never to say explicitly that the former attorney general approved the break-in; but the counsel made his suspicions clear enough. “Mitchell probably puffed on his pipe and said, ‘Go ahead,’ and never really reflected on what it was all about,” Dean told Nixon on March 21. Where the hush money was concerned, Dean cast Mitchell as the scheme’s father, himself as a
mere messenger
:

Arrangements were made through Mitchell, initiating it. And I was present in discussions where [it was agreed] these guys had to be taken care of.

Dean later cast the March 21 morning session, the infamous “cancer on the presidency” meeting, as his bid to end the cover-up. Yet the conversation appears, in retrospect, more an attempt to draw Nixon into the plot, precisely because Mitchell had proved so immovable. “How much money do you need?” Nixon finally asked. Dean, citing a figure that had appeared nowhere else, estimated the defendants would cost a million dollars over the next two years. “We could get that,” Nixon replied. “You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.” But, he added, “the question is who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?” “Well,” Dean shot back, “I think that is something Mitchell ought to be charged with. And get some pros to help him.”
²⁹

Dean had laid out three scenarios for Nixon that day: continuing the payments and thereby maintaining the cover-up; limited disclosure, with complicit aides appearing before a reconvened grand jury, under whatever immunity could be negotiated; and self-immolation, with all parties left to fend for themselves. Nixon recognized that all three scenarios converged, that “in the end, we are going to be bled to death, and it’s all going to come out anyway.”
What to do?
The immediate answer was for Dean to regroup the Big Three—Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman—and figure something out. Mitchell should come down from New York. “Mitchell has to be there because he is seriously involved and we’re trying to keep him with us,” Nixon said; but the president increasingly saw his old consigliere as a toxic figure: “I think I need to stay away from the Mitchell subject at this point, do you agree?”

Dean neglected to tell Nixon that as they spoke, the hush-money gears were busily grinding away. Shortly before Dean stepped foot into the Oval Office that morning, he had contacted Fred LaRue and informed him of Hunt’s latest demand: $120,000. When LaRue sought direction, Dean declared he was out of the money business; LaRue would have to decide for himself. LaRue refused to make any deliveries on his own authority. Dean’s answer was predictable: Talk to Mitchell. Asked why none of this arose during his exhaustive “cancer” briefing, Dean said he was “just sort of following along.”

Mitchell’s response to Hunt’s demand for $120,000 gave rise to numerous “overt acts” in the
U.S. v. Mitchell
indictment. These alleged acts of conspiracy included a phone call Mitchell received in New York from Haldeman, right after the “cancer” meeting, the last half of which Haldeman had attended, and Fred LaRue’s phone conversation with Mitchell later that day, held at the urging of Dean, wherein Mitchell supposedly “authorized” LaRue to pay Hunt $75,000 in cash.

Neither charge had merit. Haldeman’s call to Mitchell made no mention of hush money; it was, instead, classically Haldemanian, brisk and businesslike, merely to inform Mitchell the president wanted to see him in Washington. Then there was Mitchell’s “order” to pay Hunt. The WSPF prosecutors tried to prove Mitchell initiated the fateful discussion, but neither phone company toll records nor Mitchell’s logs showed him placing any calls to LaRue on March 21. LaRue’s testimony shifted, but both men agreed he did seek Mitchell’s advice. Mitchell said he asked what the money was for and whether previous payments had been made. “Legal fees,” he quoted LaRue saying, and yes, there had been previous payments. “If I were in your position,” Mitchell remembered saying, “I would pay the money.” John Doar, chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, later rebuked him: “You did tell [LaRue] that it was all right and make that payment?” “No,” Mitchell replied firmly. “As I testified before, Mr. Doar, he asked me what I would do
if I were he
, and I said under the circumstances I would make the payment.”
³⁰

Once more, Mitchell had skated past the onrushing danger, which on this occasion had materialized in the person of Fred LaRue—
the best friend the president and I ever had
. Such was the poisonous pinstriped atmosphere of Watergate: Peril appeared most often in the form of smiling friends, colleagues—even the president of the United States, whom Mitchell, the next morning, flew to Washington to see, in their final meeting.

THE BIG ENCHILADA

This is the time for strong men.

—Richard Nixon, 1973
¹

IT WAS A MARK
of their estrangement that Nixon, before seeing Mitchell, felt the need to confer with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean. The group gathered in Nixon’s Executive Office Building (EOB) office on the afternoon of March 21, 1973. Dean continued to deceive: When Nixon asked what should be done about Howard Hunt’s demand for $120,000—evidence the president never definitively authorized the payments in the morning’s “cancer” meeting—Dean responded: “Mitchell and LaRue are now aware of it, so they know how [Hunt] is feeling.”
What were Mitchell and LaRue planning to do?
“Well, I have not talked with either of them,” Dean said. That was a lie: It was from Dean that Fred LaRue had learned of Hunt’s latest demand in the first place.

Before they arrived in Nixon’s office, Dean had cornered Haldeman and warned that “if the cover-up was to proceed, we would have to draw the wagons in a circle around the White House.” “The best tactic to deal with the entire matter,” he told Haldeman, “would be to get Mr. Mitchell to step forward, because if [the prosecutors] got Mr. Mitchell…that would solve everybody’s problem…. They would have a big fish.” In Nixon’s presence, Ehrlichman piled on, arguing Mitchell should “step out.” Nixon fidgeted. Mitchell’s sacrifice made him uneasy. The tape ends with him abruptly fleeing his own office: “I don’t have any time. I am sorry. I have to leave.”
²

At eleven the next morning, Mitchell arrived at Haldeman’s West Wing office. Already present were Ehrlichman and Dean. What transpired next spawned the tenth and final “overt act” attributed to Mitchell in his indictment. Once again, accounts differed sharply on the crucial point: whether Mitchell, as the special prosecutors alleged, “assured Ehrlichman that E. Howard Hunt, Jr., was not a ‘problem’ any longer.”

Mitchell, of course, denied reassuring anyone. “I would not know whether Hunt’s problems have been taken care of or not,” he told the Senate. Asked at the impeachment hearings if the March 22 meeting touched at all on Hunt’s demand, Mitchell replied “none whatsoever,” adding, with certain logic: “I didn’t know whether LaRue had followed through on his conversation with me or not, so I would not have any basis to make that statement [that Hunt was no longer a problem].”

The most damning testimony about Mitchell’s role in the March 22 meeting came, as usual, from Dean. Speaking with Haldeman four days later, as recorded in
The Haldeman Diaries
, Dean claimed that “in the meeting…Mitchell said there was no problem on this matter, and that’s all we knew about it.” More remarkable than Haldeman’s entry, however, was the
absence
of one on March 22—the day on which Mitchell supposedly said, in Haldeman’s presence, that Hunt was no longer a problem. Dean also recounted the March 22 meeting for Nixon on April 16, 1973:

Ehrlichman said at that time, “Well, is the problem with Hunt straightened out?” He said it to me, and I said, “Well, ask the man who may know: Mitchell.” Mitchell said, “I think that problem is solved.”

Ehrlichman remembered it differently. “It was
Mr. Dean
saying just, ‘Is that matter taken care of?’ without reference to Hunt or anybody,” Ehrlichman told the Senate. Mitchell responded, Ehrlichman said, by “sort of grunting and saying, ‘Maybe’ or ‘I guess so’ or something very vague.” Nor did Haldeman remember the former attorney general offering the “assurances” alleged by the WSPF: “Mitchell…turned to Dean and said, ‘Let me raise another point. Have you taken care of the other problem—the Hunt problem?’ Something like that…. Dean kind of looked a little flustered and said, ‘Well, well, no. I don’t know where that is,’ or something. And Mitchell said, ‘Well, I guess it’s taken care of.’ And so we
assumed
from that that Mitchell
had
taken care of it.”

Three of four attendees at the meeting thus agreed: Mitchell never “assured” Ehrlichman that Hunt was no longer a problem. Only Dean seemed to hear the words escape Mitchell’s lips. No matter; on this charge, too, the jury in
U.S. v. Mitchell
convicted the former attorney general.
³

Still later on the
afternoon of March 22, the same cast trudged into Nixon’s EOB office. It marked the last time Mitchell saw Nixon during his presidency and the
only
time these five central players—Nixon, Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean—met face-to-face. It must have been a nerve-wracking experience for Dean; at any moment talk could have turned to the question of who authorized the break-in, and after Mitchell’s denial, heads would have turned Dean’s way. Yet the anticipated Armageddon never happened. Instead, after strained pleasantries, the session swiftly degenerated into the kind of aimless, purposeless colloquy Nixon favored. Amazingly, those issues most desperately in need of resolution—responsibility for the break-in, the status of the hush money, the likelihood they would all soon be indicted—the participants never got around to discussing. The closest they came was when Mitchell made passing reference to impeachment, the first person to do so in Nixon’s presence.

The former attorney general advised Nixon to rescind his claim of executive privilege against the Ervin committee, with three conditions. First, the White House could not, on separation-of-powers grounds, allow Dean, the president’s lawyer, to appear before the committee; other White House aides could only be interrogated in executive session; and only about Watergate, without senators straying into areas like “Henry Kissinger, foreign affairs.”

Soon the president cleared the room except for Mitchell. Alone with his old friend for the last time, the president harkened back to the Eisenhower days, sneering at Ike’s decision to force the resignation of his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, when it surfaced that Adams had accepted gifts from a businessman under investigation. “What happened with Adams,” Nixon began, “I don’t want it to happen with Watergate…. I think [Adams] made a mistake, but he shouldn’t have been sacked…. And, uh, for that reason, I am perfectly willing to—I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it’ll save it—save the plan. That’s the whole point.”

Investigators later cited these remarks as irrefutable evidence of both men’s complicity in the Watergate cover-up. Largely ignored was the absence of any response by Mitchell and Nixon’s next words, which were prompted by the rectitude he saw, and resented, in his old law partner. “On the other hand, uh, uh, I would prefer, as I said to you, that you do it the other way. And I would particularly prefer to do it the other way if it’s going to come out that way, anyway.”

Mitchell began to respond (“Well—”) but Nixon continued his lament. It would be unfair to fire men like Haldeman and Dean. “Eisenhower—that’s all he ever cared about. Christ, ‘Be sure he was clean.’ Both in the [Checkers] thing and the Adams thing. But I don’t look at it that way. And I just—that’s the thing I am really concerned with. We’re going to protect our people if we can.”
⁴

Eighteen hours later the
roof caved in, and all that remained of the life Mitchell had worked since 1938 to build—honor and distinction in the legal fraternity, solid standing in the Establishment—was destroyed forever. On Friday, March 23, spectators who had queued up to observe the sentencing of the Watergate defendants watched Judge John J. Sirica take the bench and announce he would first deal with a “preliminary matter.” McCord had written Sirica a letter on March 19 that the judge, citing an appearance of impropriety, had initially refused to accept. Now “Maximum John” read the letter aloud. “In the interest of justice,” McCord had written, “and in the interest of restoring faith in the criminal justice system…I will state the following…”

1. There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.

2. Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to…the government’s case.

3. Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial.

Saying he had “never done this before” in fifteen years on the bench, Sirica deferred sentencing McCord until they could meet in chambers, in the presence of counsel and a stenographer. Next the judge sentenced the other defendants, with a severity that validated his nickname but was also, he announced, “provisional,” contingent on the men’s willingness to testify more candidly before the grand jury and Senate. Liddy, the stoic, convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and eavesdropping, received a sentence of six to twenty years; Barker, Martinez, Sturgis, and Gonzalez, each of whom had pleaded guilty to the same charges as Liddy, got the maximum, forty years each; and Hunt, the career spy who made an impassioned plea for mercy (“Four children without a mother; I ask that they not lose their father, as well”) received Sirica’s unique brand of it: thirty-five years.

The reverberations from McCord’s letter proved, as the
Times
noted, “explosive…immediate and dramatic.” Earl Silbert announced the grand jury would be reconvened the following Monday. McCord, free on bond and sporting a new lawyer, appeared that Friday at the Dirksen Building offices of Sam Dash, the Georgetown University professor named chief counsel to the Ervin committee, and Fred Thompson, the Tennessee lawyer appointed minority counsel.