The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (14 page)

Offering a similar recollection was Thomas E. Kauper, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, which provides opinions on the constitutionality of an administration’s actions and policies. Since an adverse ruling from this office could potentially scuttle any presidential initiative, regardless of size or scope, any attorney general bent on “politicizing” the Department of Justice would necessarily seek to control the office’s work product; yet here again Mitchell took a hands-off approach. “Requests for opinions did not come through Mitchell, and they were never routed back through [him] unless they were quite spectacular,” Kauper recalled in 1988. “They generally were sent to the White House without the attorney general’s input.”
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One high-ranking federal official who did not share Mitchell’s hands-off approach to the career officials at Justice, his recognition of the need for institutional continuity despite political and philosophical changes at the top, was Richard Nixon. “Mitchell…didn’t want to be political,” Nixon complained in August 1972. The president had already arrived, more than a year earlier, at the depressing conclusion that John Mitchell would never be as ruthless and cynical in the manipulation of the levers of Justice as Robert Kennedy had been for his brother. “Actually, when Mitchell leaves as attorney general, we’re going to be better off in my view,” Nixon confided to H. R. Haldeman on July 1, 1971. “John is just too damn good a lawyer, you know. He’s a good, strong lawyer. It just repels him to do these horrible things, but they’ve got to be done.”
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DAYS OF RAGE

There are organizations in this country that are dedicated to the destruction of our society and our governmental institutions. If that is the description of a revolution, then a revolution is in process.

—John Mitchell, 1970
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AS A VILLAIN
of the sixties counterculture and antiwar movement, Attorney General John Mitchell attained special, almost iconic, status. Even more than the detested president he served, Mitchell represented everything against which rebellious youth were, in an age of antiheroes, rebelling. Where Richard Nixon harbored the politician’s longing for universal approval, occasionally making awkward overtures to the young, the attorney general suffered no such longings. Dutifully, Mitchell played his assigned role as the disciplinarian, imposer of law and order against radical chic, the dour authoritarian face of Nixon’s counterrevolution against hippies, pushers, and protesters.

Mitchell assumed office at a time when militant students’ faith in violence as a political instrument was reaching its apex, and when the response from the education establishment was feeblest and most misguidedly conciliatory. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964, the seizure of Columbia University in 1968, and the steady radicalization of American youth in the late sixties all disgusted Mitchell. His lawyer recalled him expressing contempt “for these kids at Columbia, who he thought had everything in the world, running around raising hell.” Mitchell’s secretary said her first glimpse into his conservatism came when they watched a “mob” of students burning the American flag on television. “
Those Goddamn bastards!
” Mitchell spat, pounding his desk.
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President Nixon felt the same way. During his first month in office, he ordered his attorney general to draft new laws cracking down on college radicals, as evidenced in H. R. Haldeman’s previously unpublished notes.

[Tell]
Mitchell…

there will be legis. very soon for action re campus

riots.

need precisely drawn plan…

have Justice draw up…

As with his war on crime, Nixon believed that appearing to crack down on campus militants mattered as much—if not more—than the reality of whether he did so. He demanded Mitchell flex some muscle, even if the problem proved intractable.

Doesn’t matter if we can do anything

must
say
something strong, though

show
no
sympathy

hit it
hard
…

Is Justice doing enough + are we publicizing enuf?

What they are doing in law enforcement

—esp. what they are doing re: campus stuff
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On cue, the attorney general announced a plan to prosecute “hard-line militants” who crossed state lines to foment riots on college campuses. “A great deal of evidence has been collected on this aspect of campus disorders,” Mitchell said, calling the involvement of professional agitators “a very serious component” of the problem. In this Mitchell followed the lead of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had told the Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in September 1968: “Communists are in the forefront of civil rights, antiwar and student demonstrations, many of which ultimately become disorderly and erupt into violence.”
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It was on May 1, 1969
—May Day to committed socialists, Law Day to the rest of the nation, which was theoretically obliged to spend it, by decree of President Eisenhower, in solemn contemplation of the law as “the heart and sinew of our Nation”—that the new attorney general took his great public stand against campus extremism, and enshrined himself forever in the student radicals’ pantheon of villainy. Speaking to the Detroit Bar Association, Mitchell declared that the time for patience with unruly demonstrators had come to an end, that “seizures of university buildings and imprisonment of university officials” were not “legitimate” acts of civil disobedience. “If there must be arrests,” Mitchell warned, “arrests there shall be.”

Testifying before a House subcommittee three weeks later, Mitchell—despite Nixon’s orders—opposed introduction of new laws to combat the problem. Such measures, he argued, might “play into the hands of the militants” better the existing laws should be enforced, Mitchell said, that moderate students should dissuade “the sheep from running with the wolves.” Putting a sharper point on these views was Mitchell’s deputy, Richard Kleindienst, who vowed “radical, revolutionary, anarchistic kids” would be “rounded up and put in a detention camp.”
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Mitchell did more than make speeches. He created a thirty-man “campus rebellion” task force and revived the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, dormant since its McCarthy-era heyday, as a potent weapon against a new generation of subversive groups advocating violent overthrow of the government. He also took the unusual step, in March 1969, of personally announcing the indictment of eight of the nation’s most prominent radicals on charges of conspiracy and incitement to riot at the 1968 Democratic convention.

The eight indicted men included a smorgasbord of leading dissenters: Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Yippie pranksters best known for media-savvy acts of civil disobedience like “levitating” the Pentagon and showering dollar bills, confetti-style, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange; Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and veteran antiwar organizers; David Dellinger, a fifty-four-year-old pacifist and principal of the “Mobe,” or National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale; and two academics, Lee Weiner and John Froines, widely seen as “acquittal bait” for fair-minded jurors.
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Mitchell’s predecessor, Ramsey Clark, had ignored “intense and growing” pressure to file charges against the rioters who had made mayhem in Chicago. The new attorney general saw the case differently, and his decision to authorize the indictments, and announce them himself, earned him everlasting enmity on the left. “Mitchell used grand juries to harry and hound dissenters,” wrote liberal historians Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan. “It was the Chicago case that taught the Nixon administration how to use the grand jury process, originally designed to protect the rights of citizens, for malicious, contrary purposes.”

That the Chicago Eight promptly turned their trial into an unruly circus—“Fascist pig liar!” Bobby Seale shouted at the judge, before being bound and gagged—was hardly unanticipated by Mitchell and Nixon, who reckoned they would profit politically whenever “the movement” advertised its extremism. And, fulfilling his confirmation pledge, Mitchell expanded the Justice Department’s wiretapping program to include domestic subversion cases. He authorized surveillance on five members of the Chicago Eight. The disclosure was made in a June 1969 legal brief in which the Justice Department asserted the government’s inherent right to wiretap, without a warrant, any group the attorney general determined a threat to “attack and subvert the government by unlawful means.”
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Rennie Davis, chief organizer, with Tom Hayden, of the Chicago protests—and the only defendant, aside from Abbie Hoffman, to testify at the conspiracy trial—also recognized the signal being sent by the prosecution of the Chicago Eight. “I saw a shift in the attitude towards leadership in the antiwar movement,” Davis recalled. “Mitchell was really the architect of it…. He was primal—fundamental—to the architecture of both [our] being on trial as well as the political response to us that could be expected from the Nixon administration.”

Indeed, to many leading radicals, John Mitchell
was
the devil. In October 1969, Hoffman showed up outside the Justice Department wearing boxing gloves, challenging Mitchell to come out and fight. It marked the first time in postwar America—but hardly the last—that the Justice Department became the prime target of antiwar wrath in the Vietnam era. Nor was the rage limited to Mitchell’s workplace. The day after convictions were handed down in the Chicago Eight case, in February 1970, a thousand angry protesters rioted outside Mitchell’s residence, Watergate East, throwing rocks and bottles and screaming “Pig! Pig!” and “Burn the fucking place down!” The six hundred riot cops ringing the building unleashed two waves of tear gas, swung nightsticks “freely,” cracking at least two skulls and a collarbone, and arrested more than 145 people.
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Under Mitchell’s leadership,
DOJ intensified its investigation and infiltration of militant left-wing groups. “One of the problem areas that I found when I got to the Department of Justice was the lack of intelligence in this area,” Mitchell told an interviewer in August 1969. “So we are putting together more of an intelligence apparatus than has existed.” This was no small feat. Twenty federal agencies collaborated on a program that one leftist historian later called “maximum surveillance, disruption, and harassment of the New Left.” The U.S. Army monitored 18 million civilians; the Civil Service Commission recorded the names of 15 million suspected “subversives” the Secret Service assembled 50,000 dossiers; the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare staffed two offices devoted to intelligence-gathering on student activists; and the Internal Revenue Service assigned seventeen men to track the finances of leading political organizations. On Capitol Hill, the House Internal Security Committee kept index cards on 754,000 alleged revolutionaries. CIA, ignoring statutory prohibitions on domestic spying, conducted surveillance on, and prepared psychological profiles of, more than three-dozen radicals. Hoover’s FBI put 2,000 agents on the case.
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