The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (16 page)

With the Days of Rage
over, Nixon and Mitchell steeled themselves next for a massive march on Washington over the long weekend of November 13–16, 1969. The organizing group, the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, or “New Mobe,” estimated more than 250,000 people would participate, a record turnout for the first major antiwar action against the administration. Peaceful and radical groups were both expected to attend. An ad hoc crisis group, including top officials from Justice and the Pentagon, concluded the potential for calamitous damage to the capital, even casualties, was “extremely high,” with the disorder likely to exceed anything seen in the 1967 encircling of the Pentagon, the 1968 Democratic convention, or the Days of Rage.
²⁰

At the White House, a young aide named Tom Charles Huston—later infamous as the author of the Huston Plan, a broad menu of domestic spying programs made public during the Watergate hearings—circulated a series of “intelligence memos” assessing the likelihood of violence at the New Mobe march. Previously unpublished, the Huston memos show Mitchell was a primary target of the protesters. Relying on information supplied by undercover informants, Huston reported that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were organizing a mob to “break into the Justice Department [by] breaking windows and possibly using Molotov cocktails” then, while police raced to Justice, the group would “blow up” the Vietnamese embassy. Another informant claimed the Revolutionary Youth Movement and SDS’ “Mad Dog” and “Running Dog” factions were planning “action tactics” at DOJ and the embassy.
²¹

Mitchell sounded the alarm. Playing off of Spiro Agnew’s recent denunciation of antiwar activists as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” the attorney general told
Meet the Press
some New Mobe leaders were “more than snobs…active militants” eager to “destroy…the institutions of our government.” Marchers were to include the Weathermen, the Yippies, a lesser-known outfit called the Crazies, and the New Mobe’s own steering committee, “dominated,” according to one account, by members of the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party. Indeed, North Vietnam’s prime minister cabled the group: “I wish your ‘fall offensive’ a brilliant success.”
²²

When DOJ denied the New Mobe’s request to march up Pennsylvania Avenue, the left lambasted Mitchell. Senator George McGovern, the liberal Democrat from South Dakota who would become the Democrats’ standard-bearer in 1972, harrumphed that Pennsylvania Avenue “belongs to the people of America—not to Attorney General Mitchell.” McGovern also denounced Mitchell’s “inflammatory” predictions of violence. Columnist Clayton Fritchey likewise accused the attorney general of conjuring a “faceless enemy” to justify repression: “The Justice Department foresees violence. But from whom? From peace leaders like Mrs. Martin Luther King, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin?”
²³

During the testy negotiations that followed, a new figure from the administration held his first news conference: a handsome, blond-haired thirty-one-year-old aide to Kleindienst named John W. Dean III. To Dean, the attorney general privately exhibited a “blasé” attitude about the marchers and their demands: “What a nuisance this all is,” Mitchell would say. “He’d attend the meetings at Justice,” Dean recalled in 1977, “and sit there puffing away at his pipe, annoyed by the whole thing.” Unlike Mitchell and Kleindienst, Dean felt the marchers’ demand for Pennsylvania Avenue should be granted and admittedly worked, in tandem with another young aide, “behind the backs of our superiors” to reverse DOJ’s ruling. Even so, the New Mobe was vowing to march up Pennsylvania Avenue no matter what. Kleindienst nervously asked how they could be stopped. “Concertina wire, several rolls of it,” a general replied. Aghast at the vision of Coretta Scott King ensnared in barbed wire, Kleindienst called Mitchell. “This is absurd,” he said. Mitchell also heard from the president. Soon after, the New Mobe’s request was approved.
²⁴

Knowing Mitchell was a target of the demonstrators, the FBI urged him to bolster security around his office. The attorney general waved off these warnings—but acted swiftly to fortify the capital. If violence erupted on a mass scale, the decision of whether to deploy federal troops—as well as the specific units called up and the timing and duration of their deployment—would be the attorney general’s to make. So stated a secret memorandum drafted by Mitchell and the Pentagon, entitled “Interdepartmental Action Plan for Civil Disturbances,” and approved by Nixon the previous spring.
²⁵

Some 28,000 troops in the Washington area were available for deployment. The Defense Department also ordered several units outside the city’s 100-mile radius to a “state of readiness.” As the demonstration neared, the Pentagon moved an additional 9,000 troops, all “thoroughly trained in civil disturbance control,” DOD officials said, to special posts across the city’s network of military installations. Unless Mitchell called for the troops’ active deployment, however, primary law enforcement responsibility during the action lay with a special 2,000-man detail of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department. Backing up the cops would be 1,500 members of the National Guard; 400 park police; 300 reserve officers on desk duty; and 2,500 self-policing “marshals” supplied by the New Mobe.
²⁶

Mitchell yielded no quarter. On the eve of the march, he spoke at a GOP fund-raiser in Milwaukee, striking what the
Washington Post
called “the most partisan notes of his ten months in office.” The antiwar protests were part of a larger “disease of cynicism” that Mitchell attributed to the “deception” of the previous administration. LBJ had tried to solve problems through an “illusion of words,” Mitchell argued, the nourishment of “impossible dreams” as a result, “the poor and the black who had relied on Utopian promises…now distrust the government’s ability to act on their behalf.” Middle-class families who trusted Washington to manage the economy were now “caught in increasing inflation,” and the young, dispirited by the dashed hopes of the sixties, felt driven to “reject the established political process and…turn to violence and confrontation.”

That last route, Mitchell warned, was a dead end; confidence in the law and “civil tranquility” would be restored. “The foreign policy of this government cannot—and will not—be formulated in the streets of Washington,” he declared.
²⁷

At 6:00 p.m. on
Thursday, November 13, an icy rain dampening their clothes but not their spirits, the first of 45,000 Americans began the March Against Death, parading solemnly from the gates of Arlington National Cemetery to the White House four miles away. Each marcher carried a candle and a sign that bore the name of a fallen soldier or a flattened South Vietnamese village; drummers kept up a steady, funereal beat.
²⁸

The real action was yet to come. Along with speeches and marches, conferences on “United States Imperialism” and “The Transition to a Peacetime Economy,” and orderly demonstrations by groups like the Radical Social Workers and Psychologists for a Democratic Society, the following afternoon called for a rally at the Justice Department by the Yippies, who had secured a three-hour picketing permit to protest the trial of their leader, Abbie Hoffman, and the other members of the Chicago Eight.

A large crowd—estimates ranged from one to three thousand people—converged on a park across the street from Justice. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the left-wing obstetrician prosecuted by Ramsey Clark for aiding and abetting draft resisters, condemned Attorney General Mitchell’s “disgraceful” and “unconstitutional” prosecution of the “eight brave men” standing trial in Chicago. Now the Yippies swarmed toward Justice and demanded an audience with Mitchell. “We want to see the Wizard!” three hippies shouted, pounding on the bolted doors. Soon the crowd was chanting: “One, two, stop the trial! Three, four, stop the war! Five, six, kill the pigs! Seven, eight, smash the state!”

Jack Landau, Mitchell’s press secretary, braved the crowd. He told Spock that Mitchell was busy preparing for Saturday’s action and promised an appointment with “someone” at a later date. The crowd handed Landau a stack of petitions demanding freedom for the Chicago Eight. Fearing an explosion, New Mobe lawyer Phil Hirschkop stepped in and urged Spock to lead the crowd away. The doctor heeded the lawyer, and marched the Yippies back to the Mall, blaming their retreat on “insoluble tensions.”
²⁹

Finally, Saturday came. The sky was sunny, the air crisp, temperatures in the low thirties: a fine day for the largest protest in the capital’s history. More than a quarter of a million citizens, “nearly all of them young, white and apparently middle-class,” surrounded the Washington Monument to register their peaceful opposition to the war in Vietnam. “Official estimate was 250,000,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. “By our photo count, it was 325,000. Anyway, it was really huge.”

After speeches by Senator McGovern and others, all “largely ignored” by the restive crowd, the New Mobe introduced the final speaker: David Dellinger, the oldest, and putative leader, of the Chicago Eight. After introducing codefendants Hoffman and Rubin, Dellinger urged the enormous crowd, after the march up Pennsylvania Avenue, to join the Yippies and Weathermen in an unsanctioned march on Justice. Richard Kleindienst later identified this moment as a “breach of faith” that all but ensured chaos. “The New Mobe leaders deliberately planned mob violence,” Kleindienst maintained years later. “Dellinger delivered one of the most fiery revolutionary speeches ever given to such a large gathering…a call to arms against America and its institutions of government.”
³⁰

Mrs. King led a peaceful march up Pennsylvania Avenue, joined by Senators McGovern and Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the antiwar Democrat who had helped drive LBJ from office, united in refrains of John Lennon’s antiwar anthem, “Give Peace a Chance.” Then came the march on Justice. At first, Mitchell and his aides only heard the chanting in the distance: “Free Bobby Seale!” “As long as I live,” Kleindienst wrote in 1985, “I will never forget watching from John Mitchell’s office as some ten thousand revolutionaries began their march down Constitution Avenue toward us.”

In the front ranks, protesters carried a giant papier-mâché effigy of Mitchell’s face. More chanting: “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is gonna win!” A clutch of militants rushed toward the flagpole outside the attorney general’s office, lowered the American flag, and replaced it with the Viet Cong’s. White House aide Egil Krogh, assigned to Mitchell’s office for the day, told Haldeman the sight of the enemy banner being hoisted above Justice and a “very strange emotional impact” on him. “Whole business is sort of unreal,” agreed Haldeman. Police struggled to restore Old Glory while the protesters set a small fire.

What happened next no Weatherman could have forecast: John Mitchell himself, the object of all this fury, emerged from his fifth-floor office to watch the fracas from his balcony. In a breach of security protocol unimaginable in later times, Mitchell leaned far over the railing to point at a close-knit section of the crowd, telling an aide: “That’s the hard-core, linked arm to arm.” The revolutionaries below could scarcely believe their eyes. Caleb Rossiter, a student activist from the University of Chicago, stood under the balcony that day.

With unbridled delight at getting a chance to communicate with one of the enemy—Nixon was spending a restful afternoon in the White House watching football—we screamed “Fuck you Mitchell, fuck you Mitchell,” and threw at him whatever debris we could find. He looked down calmly from the railing, which was far too high for our missiles, holding his pipe, and with great deliberation gave us the finger right back.

Suddenly, a series of pops: firecrackers exploding. D.C. police chief Jerry V. Wilson’s walkie-talkie crackled with the sound of an officer asking if help was needed. Just keep your men on standby, Wilson replied. I’ll tell you when we need you. The moment came sooner than he wished. “The situation was rapidly getting out of control,” an eyewitness observed. One to squad, Wilson called out. Teams of riot cops swarmed in. Wilson threw the first tear gas canister himself. Mitchell would later tell his wife: “It looked like the Russian Revolution.”
³¹

With tear gas choking the air, the protesters scattered. “To the White House!” someone yelled, but no one listened. Hubcaps flew, fistfights broke out. Random gangs roamed downtown, smashing bank windows—but the gas was inescapable. “Within minutes,” the
Evening Star
reported, “the air conditioning system inside [Justice] distributed the fumes throughout the building, including the office of Attorney General John Mitchell.” Krogh reported to Haldeman: “Tear gas bad in Mitchell’s office.” Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus found he could “hardly speak.” In the lobby of the Washington Hotel, several blocks away, protesters lay strewn about, struggling to recover. Strong winds carried the toxic agent for miles, dousing innocent shoppers and even police headquarters on Indiana Avenue.
³²