The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (70 page)

On December 19, Neal began his closing argument, a four-hour affair replete with Shakespearean recitals from the tapes and laughter-provoking sarcasm. Here was the official history of the scandal, “the first real telling of the Watergate story from start to finish,” in which John Mitchell naturally played the central, and most culpable, role. While noting the case was not about who authorized the break-in, Neal still charged Mitchell with having done so at Key Biscayne. When it came to the hush money, Neal relied on a form of guilt by hierarchical association. “Dean, Hunt, and LaRue all admitted this money was hush money,” the prosecutor said. “These people don’t have the capacity to understand [the larger picture] that a Mitchell, Haldeman, or Ehrlichman have. If they knew it was hush money, so did Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman.”

A week later, on December 30, after the conclusion of closing arguments and Neal’s rebuttal—as well as two and a half hours of instruction from Judge Sirica, who reminded them “neither the pardon of President Nixon nor any other cases or extraneous matters” should affect them—the jurors were sent to deliberate. Most of the defense lawyers objected to another element in Sirica’s jury instruction: his concluding statement to the jury that its duty was “to ascertain what the truth is.” This reflected the inflated vision of the court, and of himself, that had long pervaded Sirica’s work on Watergate; the job of the jury, the defense pointed out, was not to ascertain the truth of Watergate but merely to decide the guilt or innocence of the defendants based on the evidence and testimony presented. It was no use; Sirica overruled them. At that point, when the case went to the jury, Ken Parkinson placed his hands on the shoulders of his fifteen-year-old son, Tony, and said: “It’s in the hands of the gods now, son.”
¹²

On New Year’s Day 1975,
as a dewy rain fell in Washington, Judge Sirica received word at 4:25 p.m. that the jury had reached a verdict. Marshals entered the small waiting room off the court where Mitchell had been watching a football game and hustled him and the other defendants and their lawyers into the courtroom. Next came the press and the seven spectators who would witness the historic event, followed, at last, by Neal and Henry Ruth, the special prosecutor who had succeeded Jaworski. Finally Sirica took the bench and summoned the jury. Slowly shuffling in, the jurors averted their eyes. They had taken fifteen hours and five minutes, over three days, to decide the fate of Nixon’s elite.

Have the jurors reached a verdict?
asked Court Clerk James Capitanio. “Yes, they have,” said foreman John Hoffar, his voice quavering. He produced a manila envelope and handed it to a marshal, who gave it to Capitanio, who turned it over to Sirica. “Absolute silence” blanketed the courtroom while the judge reviewed the contents. Then he returned the envelope to Capitanio and ordered him to read the verdicts aloud. Mitchell and the others rose at their adjoining tables, the scraping of their chairs the courtroom’s only sound.

For the Watergate cover-up defendants, the moment of reckoning had finally come, and it had to be a surreal one, most especially for Mitchell. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mardian, and Parkinson were, to be sure, men of prominence and power, upright Christians for whom the present circumstance represented a reversal of fortune simply too fantastical to fathom. This was certainly true for Mitchell as well, but among the men now standing before judge and jury, only he had enjoyed unparalleled standing before the bar, both in the private practice of law and as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Now Clerk Capitanio began reading:
As to defendant Mitchell, Count One: Guilty. As to Count Two: Guilty.
…It continued on like that, five times in all for Mitchell, and likewise on all counts for the others—except for Parkinson, at whose acquittal the courtroom let out an audible gasp. Mitchell’s face flushed, and he exhaled loudly. Then he turned to his crestfallen lawyer, Bill Hundley, and said: “Don’t take it so hard.” Next Mitchell reached over to shake the hand of the jubilant Parkinson—whose entire strategy had rested on vilification of Mitchell—and whispered, with a smile: “Congratulations. Good, Ken.”

Haldeman’s face stiffened. His daughter, Susan, a law student who had attended every day of the proceedings, burst into tears. Ehrlichman sat impassively while his wife draped her arms around him. Mardian took it hardest. He slumped forward, head in hands, shoulders atremble. “He appeared stunned and unable to move,” the
Times
reported. Mitchell walked over and said quietly: “Come on, Robert,” but to no avail. Even his wife’s touch failed to budge Mardian from his paralysis. After he finally stood up and trudged back to his hotel room, dogged the entire way by an unfeeling reporter, Mardian exploded in rage, lashing out at the reporter with a torrent of four-letter words not even heard on the Nixon tapes. It fell to Mitchell to calm his former aide and send the reporter away.

“Mitchell was the trial’s mystery man,” said CBS News’ Fred Graham that night, “puffing his pipe, cracking occasional jokes, refusing to attack Richard Nixon—even after the tapes proved that Mr. Nixon betrayed him—and saying little else. Tonight, after the verdict, his style hadn’t changed much.” Asked if he had any reaction, Mitchell kept walking and, smiling faintly, mocked his questioners: “Can’t you guesstimate? Do I have to tell you?”
Do you plan to appeal?
“You’d better believe it.”
Are there strong grounds for an appeal?
“I have about fifty.”
What are you going to do now? Are you going to take a vacation?
“I’m going to the moon, I think. That’s the best place.” With that, the convicted men scattered: Haldeman back to Los Angeles, Ehrlichman to Seattle, Mardian to Arizona, and Mitchell to parts unknown. The media missed his departure, likely to New York. In their absence, official Washington returned to the drearier business of budgets and arms control, stagflation and the Middle East. After a few days, there was, for the first time in years, no more talk of Watergate.

CBS News’ John Hart delivered the most insightful postmortem. “Haldeman, the public relations man, is not in the habit of self-examination; he will simply examine his greatest ad campaign over and over, looking for reasons why it failed,” Hart said. “John Ehrlichman will never understand why a pious man may have to spend many of his declining years in prison. John Mitchell will understand; it was a big game for him, played by rules he understood, and he lost it.”
¹³

MAXWELL

Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.

—Franz Kafka, 1920
¹

SHORTLY AFTER THE
verdicts in
U.S. v. Mitchell
were handed down, the
New York Times
carried a brief item buried on The Heavyweight, beneath a small, inconspicuous headline: “Magruder Says Prisoners Might Try to Kill Mitchell.” This dark premonition came within days after Magruder and two other Watergate felons—John Dean and Herb Kalmbach—won early release from prison. In rewarding the men for their cooperation at trial, Judge Sirica commuted their sentences to time served: For Magruder that meant seven months; for Kalmbach, six; Dean, only four. “I think there is no question that…as far as many convicts are concerned, he is the one that put them away,” Magruder said of Mitchell; he added some inmates “might feel very comfortable in becoming famous by eliminating the ex–attorney general.”

Such fears, along with the desire to clear his name and resume the practice of law, gave Mitchell ample incentive to pursue the appeals process to overturn his conviction. But it was a process in which the former attorney general never placed much faith. The first measure of the mercy Mitchell was to receive, now that he belonged to the criminal justice system he once headed, was to come with his sentencing by Sirica. Asked if the clemency given Dean, Magruder, and Kalmbach was a sign the cover-up convicts would receive like leniency, Sirica said no. “I don’t think it has any bearing,” he snapped.

On February 21, 1975, a large crowd of spectators gathered for the sentencing, many of them camping out the night before to ensure their admission. At 9:29 a.m., Sirica took the bench. He asked the convicted men and their lawyers to rise and form a line before him. Once again, the sound of scraping chairs filled the room. Then the judge began reading a short statement explaining how he had arrived at the sentences he was imposing—before pausing in recognition of his breach of protocol: “The defendants and their counsel will first be given the opportunity to make any statements they wish for the record.” The convicts returned to their seats.

Each of the lawyers said a few words. Ehrlichman’s attorney asked that his client be permitted, in lieu of prison, to perform legal work for a tribe of Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, leading Mitchell to stage-whisper to Hundley: “If they offer us Indians, turn ’em down!” Sirica, not amused, returned to his prepared statement. The judge professed to have spent “many days” giving “careful and serious thought” to the question of “proper” sentences for the men. Now it was time for the grim business at hand.
Mr. Mitchell, would you mind stepping in front of the lectern?
The former attorney general rose and approached the bench, alone. “In Criminal Case Number 74-110,” Sirica read, “the Court sentences the defendant John N. Mitchell on each of Counts One and Two to be incarcerated for a period of not less than twenty months and not more than five years.”

Sirica droned on about Counts Four, Five, and Six, sentencing the defendant to “not less than ten months and not more than three years” on each charge, terms to be served concurrently with each other, but
consecutive
to those for Counts One and Two—meaning a minimum punishment of two and a half years. “Just one further thing,” Sirica said. “The Court recommends to the director of the Bureau of Prisons that he study this case”—meaning Mitchell’s—“from the standpoint of a suitable place of confinement in a federal institution.” Clearly Sirica shared in the fears about Mitchell’s fate behind bars.

The rest of the “brief, somber, and tense proceeding,” fifty minutes in all, must have been a blur for Mitchell. Haldeman got the same sentence, and so did Ehrlichman. Each of the Big Three now faced a maximum of eight years in prison. Mardian got ten months to three years. Afterward, Mitchell was the only one of the four to comment. On the elevator ride down, he cracked to reporters: “It could have been a hell of a lot worse. They could have sentenced me to spend the rest of my life with Martha.”
²

A few months earlier,
a fifty-five-year-old widow named Mary Gore Dean was relaxing at Marwood, her family’s lush estate in Potomac, Maryland, reading a newspaper article about Watergate. The article reminded her of how long it had been since she had laid eyes on John Mitchell: fifteen years, at least, sometime before the summer of 1958, when her husband, Gordon E. Dean, the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, died in an airplane crash off Nantucket. The Deans adored Mitchell. The late Gordon Dean—in between his stints as a reporter, professor, Nuremberg prosecutor, senior vice president at General Dynamics, and head of the AEC—had worked at Lehman Brothers and retained Mitchell for a bond deal in Florida. Now, her eyes fixed on the newspaper, Mrs. Dean grew increasingly disturbed by the “character assassination” to which she saw Mitchell being subjected. Impulsively, she reached for the phone. “I just told him that…my husband would certainly want me to be his friend if he needed a friend right now,” she recalled in 1992. “And of course, he said he did, so that was it.”

From that phone call blossomed the long-dormant friendship that would see Mitchell through the worst, and last, of his days. In press accounts, Mary Gore Dean was usually described as Mitchell’s “companion,” but this failed to describe the depth of the bond the two established and the extraordinary support she provided him. Mrs. Dean was, a friend observed in 1977, “the light of John’s life.” She gave Mitchell a home, a large and comfortable town house in Georgetown that he kept till the day he died and, equally important, the sense of having a large family in Washington, where, at this point, Mitchell had only his teenage daughter, Marty.

Mrs. Dean’s three children, toddlers at the time of their father’s plane crash, came to view Mitchell as a kind of second father—so much so that Debbie, the youngest child, eventually started calling Mitchell “Daddy.” Mary’s son, Gordon, once told her: “You know, Mother, the two things that have happened to me in my life that have meant the most to me is the birth of [my] little boy and the time when John came into my life.” Mrs. Dean recalled Mitchell in similar terms—more of a savior to her than vice versa. “You just dream after you have lost your husband, as I did…that someone this wonderful could come into your life and be a substitute father,” she said. “It was absolutely wonderful how he brought so much happiness and light into our family.”

Whether Mitchell’s relationship with Mary was solely platonic was always difficult to discern. Both were of advanced age and intensely private people. To the
Washington Post
in 1975, Mrs. Dean “denied any ‘romance’ is involved in her friendship with Mitchell.” Bill Hundley recalled that every time he and his wife lunched with the couple, Hundley’s wife would whisper: “Are they married?” “I don’t know,” Hundley would say. “Why didn’t you ask?” Mrs. Hundley would persist. “Well, if you knew John,” Hundley laughed, “you just
don’t
.”
³

Baruch Korff, a retired
Orthodox rabbi from New England and die-hard Nixon supporter, also struck up a friendship with the Pres-byterian former attorney general. “As he struggled to come to grips with his fall,” the rabbi later wrote of Mitchell, “his attitude was more disbelief than self-pity.”
A man destroyed by his own explosive devices!
Mitchell would mutter. These conversations with Rabbi Korff, undisclosed until 1995, were significant, for they made clear that Mitchell understood the machinations that produced his conviction, the acts of patricide at the heart of Watergate.
Men I treated like my own children conspired against me
, he marveled of Dean and Magruder. “They wrote their own scenario, interpreting every nod, downwards, upwards, sideways. I was their scapegoat.”

Over coffee one day, the rabbi, a scholar of the Talmud but not of Watergate, audaciously suggested Mitchell was equally guilty, but Mitchell held fast. “Aren’t you also on tape?” Korff asked. “Nothing incriminating,” Mitchell replied. “I usually met with the president in his living quarters or talked to him on a secure line.” Meaning what? the rabbi pressed. “Nothing that you don’t already know,” Mitchell shot back, adding:
My mistake was in men, not in law
.

Remedying that mistake proved impossible. Mitchell spent the years 1975–77 struggling unsuccessfully to stave off disbarment in various jurisdictions and the prison sentence imposed by Judge Sirica. The first body to move against the former attorney general was the U.S. Supreme Court, the venerated institution that Mitchell—with his primacy over the judicial selection process during Nixon’s first term, which saw the placement of four justices on the High Court—had reshaped for a generation to come. In March 1975, less than a month after the verdicts came down in the cover-up trial, the Court suspended Mitchell from practicing within its marbled halls. The lower federal were courts not far behind. But perhaps the moment of greatest shame for the man once hailed as “the lawyer’s lawyer,” worse even than incarceration, which at least conjured some romanticized notions of manliness, was his disbarment in New York State, where Mitchell had been a member of the bar since 1939.