The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (64 page)

WEICKER:
Is this your definition, by the way, this kind of testimony, of—what is the expression—“stonewalling”?

MITCHELL:
I don’t know that term. Is that a Yankee term from Connecticut?

At last it was Mitchell who brought the house down. Still, Weicker elicited one response from Mitchell that later formed a perjury charge: when Mitchell denied ordering the destruction of the Gemstone documents in his apartment on the evening of June 19, 1972. Weicker also scored with his closing question. He asked if Mitchell, as an officer of the court, felt he had done “the right thing” withholding from the authorities his ex post facto knowledge of the Ellsberg break-in. “I think, in retrospect, [coming forward] probably would have been the right thing to do,” Mitchell conceded.

Another day in the witness chair, five hours long, had come to an end. As Ervin banged the gavel, Mitchell turned to Bill Hundley and murmured, in one of his patented stage whispers: “This is a great trial they’re conducting up here, isn’t it?”
¹⁶

As agonizing as the
Senate Watergate hearings were for Mitchell—and he had to endure a third day of often vicious questioning from Dash—his testimony was a crucible for the nation, too. The spectacle of Mr. Law and Order parting the veil on the cynical realities of postwar American politics, dryly acknowledging he had run Nixon’s reelection while still attorney general, and had purposely withheld, shortly after leaving that office, his knowledge of break-ins, forgeries, and other crimes, all committed in the name of national security—this, to many, was shocking stuff in 1973, and hard to stomach.

Though Mitchell had been one of the nation’s most famous figures over the preceding five years, his three days of televised testimony marked his most extensive and sustained exposure to his countrymen, and stirred deep divisions over the truth and meaning of his words. Gallup and Harris polls showed John Dean won more favorable reviews than Mitchell (or Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who testified in August), and that Dean was more likely, despite his pervasive deception of the panel, to be seen as “truthful.” At the same time, a focus group of “ordinary” Americans, conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with citizens in Dayton, Des Moines, and like locales, found Mitchell came across genially, “more of a Godfather than The Godfather.”

Major newspapers split in their reactions, though on balance they took a dim view of Mitchell’s performance. Most predictably reproachful were the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
. The former expressed skepticism Mitchell would ever have disclosed the White House horrors, even with Nixon safely reelected; the latter likened his reasoning for remaining silent to the infamous remark by an army major in Vietnam: “We had to destroy the village to save it.” Appraising Mitchell’s testimony, the
Post
editorial board was “astounded by its arrogance…easy amorality and obtuseness.”

Beyond the bastions of the Eastern Establishment, the response to Mitchell proved slightly more balanced. The
Los Angeles Times
withheld judgment on Mitchell’s professions of innocence and the conflicts between his testimony, Dean’s, and Magruder’s, but its editors also found it amazing the president never picked up the phone and asked Mitchell what the hell was going on: “It is a portrayal of splendid isolation that strains belief.” The
Arkansas Democrat
found Mitchell’s denials “strain rational thinking and his recantations have a hollow ring…. Mitchell may not be that man [who approved the break-in]. But he is also not the indecisive, uninformed pushover he made himself appear to be in his testimony.” The
Nashville Tennesseean
acknowledged that Mitchell “stuck to his story,” but took note of how his hands began “shaking perceptibly whenever he lifted them from the witness table.” The editors also harkened back to a statement Mitchell had made in 1971, after the May Day riots, in which he denounced antiwar protesters who believed “their cause is so right they can commit any wrong.”

The
Richmond News Leader
assailed the Ervin committee for turning its investigation into “a political hanging party.” “John Mitchell was the first witness who did not bow before the committee with the goodie-two-shoes deference of the teacher’s pet,” the paper editorialized. “He was sardonic, categorical. He countered countless ‘do-you-mean-to-tell-me’ questions with unperturbed responses that yes, that was precisely what he meant to tell them. And he was plausible.” Yet in this same imperturbability, liberal novelist Mary McCarthy, writing in the
London Observer
, saw “nothing human.” “The weariness and boredom of [Mitchell’s] voice suggested that this was all ridiculous, preposterous, but also that he could not take the trouble to work up a lie that somebody might conceivably believe,” McCarthy wrote. “He seemed rancorously determined to insult the intelligence of the committee, the press, the TV audience—everybody, the world at large.” Even theologians weighed in. A Baptist minister, sermonizing on “the moral dilemma of Watergate,” admonished Mitchell for violating the “spiritual law which forbids men to do evil even when they think good will come of it.”

Mitchell’s top-dollar lawyers had advised him not to testify at all, that to appear on Capitol Hill for televised hearings, what Eric Sevareid hailed as “the biggest Washington spectacular since those McCarthy days,” would only damage the former attorney general’s chances for a fair trial. But they respected the way he took his punishment. “Mitchell knew this was a big political show,” recalled Plato Cacheris. “He did not take it personally…. He recognized this was part of the game that was going on.”
¹⁷

BLEED FOR ME

Haven’t I talked enough today? These people are tired of listening to me.

—Martha Mitchell, 1974
¹

ONE EVENING IN
the spring of 1995, former senator Russell Long, the Louisiana Democrat and longtime chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, led a visitor on a tour of his fourteen-room duplex in the Watergate apartment complex. A retired widower in sweater and slacks, the senator had lived in the apartment since 1973, when he purchased it from John and Martha Mitchell. The visitor followed Long from the apartment’s private elevator up through two spacious floors and, finally, into a large master bedroom.

From there Long strode, with a sudden surge of enthusiasm, into an adjoining bathroom, and proclaimed: “There it is!” Confused, the visitor asked, “There
what
is?” “The telephone!” Long pointed at the tiled wall opposite the commode, where there sat, mounted at hip level, a faded lime-green Princess telephone, an early-seventies relic whose circular dialing mechanism lay inside the curved, detachable receiver.

“That’s the original phone, the one Martha used to use, late at night. She and John would go to sleep right over there,” Long said, pointing out to the bedroom, “then she’d get up late at night, have a few pops, and use this phone to call Helen Thomas, or whoever. Poor Mitchell wouldn’t know a thing about it,” he concluded, chuckling softly. “He’d wake up the next morning, open up the front page of the newspaper, and see what the hell his wife had had to say in the middle of the night!”
²

It was no way to live. The attorney general strove to project an image of bemused indifference to his wife’s antics, but the reality was that Martha Mitchell wrought havoc on their already stressful lives, and contributed mightily—as Richard Nixon always maintained—to her husband’s spectacular downfall. The trouble began long before Watergate, before Martha’s problems became evident to the reporters who quoted her, or to the public that alternately adored and despised her. What began as a refreshing novelty—an outspoken woman, in an age of docile domesticity, upstaging her tight-lipped, singularly powerful husband—quickly degenerated into rank commercial exploitation and, finally, into tragedy.

Compounding the difficulty was a tendency among the media, born in some quarters of genuine admiration, elsewhere of greed, to glorify Martha Mitchell, to cast her as a brave and lonely heroine—the sassy “defender of America,” as Martha herself once listed her occupation.
Newsweek
crowned her “the most liberated woman in the world,” notwithstanding Martha’s own declaration, seven months earlier, that she wondered how feminists “have any respect for themselves.” The
New York Daily News
welcomed the presence of Washington’s “spirited, sexy strawberry blonde,” while the
New York Post
championed her as “the essence of exquisite Southern charm.”
³

To be an American in the year 1970 was to find the image—and sound—of Martha Mitchell virtually inescapable; a single thirty-day period brought more than 5,000 newspaper items about her. She graced the covers of
Time, Look,
and
Life
, and beamed her dimpled smile from the
Today
show,
60 Minutes
, and every national and local network in the country.

Perhaps it was mildly amusing, amid the era’s disquieting upheavals, when a woman of Martha’s prominence traveled to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston to witness the opening of the first box of rocks retrieved from the lunar surface by the Apollo 14 astronauts—and she said the things looked like dirty potatoes. And maybe, in some small way, it enlivened the national discourse when the attorney general’s wife chided a senator at a social function (“It’s liberals like you who are selling this country down the river to the communists”), or demanded the mayor of New York City, John V. Lindsay, leave the Republican Party, or taunted him during an interview with Barbara Walters on the
Today
show, schoolyard style, by deliberately mispronouncing his name (“Lindsley…Lindsley…When I don’t like somebody, I usually have a nickname for them”). And perhaps some found it refreshing when Mrs. Mitchell told reporters we should “extinguish the Supreme Court,” on the well-reasoned grounds that “it’s absolutely asinine for those nine old men to rule against the people.”
⁴

This last blast crystallized the problem with Martha Mitchell as a public figure. The catalyst for her remarks was
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg
, a landmark decision upholding the constitutionality of court-ordered busing as a means of school desegregation. Whether one agreed with the ruling or not, the gravity of the underlying problems warranted, for the benefit of the nation—or at least her husband, tasked with enforcing the ruling—the calmest possible environment in which to proceed. Yet at a time when integration was a burning issue, and the government was still committed to a “war on poverty,” Martha mindlessly inflamed racial and class tensions.

In a widely publicized interview, she admitted having harbored racist views of blacks “in the last ten to twenty years,” and brazenly challenged a reporter: “Are you going to be prejudiced against me because my grandparents had slaves?” “I can’t get over saying ‘colored,’” she said on another occasion. “I said it all my life. All the Negroes seem to resent it and I don’t know why.” Nor was Mrs. Mitchell’s insensitivity limited to African Americans. “I grew up with [Jews],” she crowed to
Women’s Wear Daily
. “Many of them are my best friends.” She cited her sorority sisters, the president of the Pine Bluff Country Club, and “a lot of big people in business,” members of “the Jewish race.”
⁵

Ill-advised as these remarks were, none of them caused John Mitchell as much trouble as her comments on Vietnam, which veered, with characteristic volatility, between clumsy advocacy and stinging criticism of the Nixon administration’s policies. “War, war, war,” she moaned in April 1970, “I’m getting awfully sick of it. It just turns my stomach.” Yet a month later she welcomed the incursion into Cambodia as “100 percent wonderful” by July she was urging friends to send their draft-age sons to Canada.

The discomfort reached its climax 30,000 feet above ground, aboard Air Force One, as the president and select guests flew cross-country from San Clemente to Washington, D.C., in September 1970. Unaccompanied by her husband, or some other sane person, Martha wandered back to the press cabin of the plane “looking for action.” Helen Thomas opened with some harmless questions about miniskirts. “Oh, Helen,” Martha sneered, “why don’t you ask me something important?” “Okay,” Thomas replied, “what do you think of the Vietnam War?” “It stinks, and if it weren’t for Fulbright we’d be out of it,” Martha shot back, renewing her attacks on the Democratic senator she had earlier demanded be “crucified” for his vote on a judicial nominee. She kept on talking, saying national disunity over the war made her so mad she couldn’t see straight. By now Secretary of State William Rogers had showed up, gingerly trying to rein her in: “Martha, why don’t you stick to the Justice Department and I’ll take care of foreign affairs?”

Thomas and her colleagues scribbled away, the fun just begun, when the attorney general finally strode in, no doubt alerted to the disaster movie unfolding in the back cabin, starring his wife and the White House press corps. Would you like to know what your wife just said? Thomas asked, all coquettish. “Heavens no,” Mitchell said, “I might jump out of the window.” When the plane touched down, the reporters all rushed to file; the next day’s
Washington Post
exulted: “Martha: ‘The War Stinks.’”
⁶

Part of Martha’s problem with the war stemmed from the fact that her son was fighting it. In March 1971, she received a mud-stained letter from Jay Jennings mailed from Vietnam. It disturbed her terribly. Within hours of reading it, she unburdened herself to two ambassadors’ wives—total strangers—at a dinner party. “I just seem to have more trouble than anyone else I know,” she groaned within earshot of a
Post
reporter, unmindful of the far greater sacrifices many Americans were then bearing. “I wonder if Senator Fulbright could have had my son sent there just to get even with me for the things I have said about him. I’m going to find out!”
⁷

What Martha failed to mention was that she’d never bothered to contact her son, a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute at the time the Mitchells moved to Washington, in two years: no letters, no phone calls, no visits.

Two weeks after the letter arrived, Martha rose before seven, casually walked over to her television set, pulled the button that turned it on, and flipped the dial to the
CBS Morning News
. “Martha Mitchell, the attorney general’s wife,” anchor John Hart began, “said a couple of weeks ago she got a letter from her son in Vietnam. He was in the fighting near the Laotian border, she said, and hadn’t had a bath for ten days….[Reporter] Ed Rabel visited her son at LangVei.” Martha watched in astonishment, as her son—no longer a cadet, but Lieutenant Clyde Jay Jennings, commander of the Second Armored Cavalry Platoon, “A” Troop, First Squadron, First Cavalry, Americal Division—appeared before her very eyes. His superior officer, Sergeant Bob Barbour of Raleigh, said Jennings was doing “a real good job” for the unit. Finally, Rabel interviewed Jay himself. Do you hear much from your mother? Yes, Jay said, adding she was “a little on the shocked side” to learn he was in combat. The other soldiers had no idea who his mother was and that was fine with him; despite prodding from Rabel, the son steered clear of controversy as assiduously as his mother courted it.

RABEL:
Your mother’s been critical of the Vietnamization process. Do you share her views on that?

JENNINGS:
I really don’t feel I’m in a position to have a view on that…. In my current occupation, I just—I have to be apolitical. If I tried to impress these views on any of these men—and I’m sure they share different views than myself—it would tend to alienate people. And in a situation like this, you’ve got to work together.

Martha’s prayers had been answered: Jay was alive and in seemingly good spirits. But hadn’t the man on the television said Jay’s unit was “attacked often” by the enemy? Martha resolved at once to use her proximity to power to get her son out of Vietnam. She turned—where else?—to the telephone, ringing the White House, and asking, of all people, for John Ehrlichman, her husband’s most determined antagonist. Undoubtedly astonished to hear from her, Ehrlichman surreptitiously recorded the call, which, as the previously unpublished transcript shows, got off to a bad start.

EHRLICHMAN:
Hi, Martha, how are you?

MRS. MITCHELL:
Well, I’m not very good.

EHRLICHMAN:
What’s the matter?

MRS. MITCHELL:
Well, my old son’s over in Vietnam.

EHRLICHMAN:
Your son?

MRS. MITCHELL:
Yes.

EHRLICHMAN:
Oh, I read about that…Has he got a problem?

MRS. MITCHELL:
Well, no—