The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (18 page)

Mitchell was the first administration official to state publicly that both students and Guardsmen committed “apparent violations of federal law” at Kent State. In his preferred scenario, a federal grand jury would have been fruitlessly convened—for appearances’ sake, since Mitchell, having read the DOJ summary, knew no Guardsman could be tied to a specific death—leaving authorities in Ohio to file whatever state charges they thought appropriate. Acting through Jerris Leonard, the attorney general ordered DOJ lawyers to share investigative data with Ohio prosecutors. Indeed, even before the shootings, Mitchell had ordered the FBI to investigate whether the torching of the Kent State ROTC building on May 2, an oft-forgotten prelude to the bloodshed, involved violations of “sabotage, sedition and civil rights laws.”
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Nixon wanted no prosecutions of Guardsmen at all. Three days after the shootings, he ordered Mitchell to summarize for him the “nature and scope” of the FBI’s investigation. The president also decreed that John Ehrlichman should receive copies of the Bureau’s raw investigative files so the White House could monitor the probe on a daily basis. When the
Akron Beacon Journal
obtained an internal DOJ memorandum outlining the case that could be made against six of the Guardsmen, Nixon angrily called J. Edgar Hoover and ordered him to “knock down” the story. In October 1970, previously unpublished notes show, Nixon laid down the law to his attorney general.

Mitch. re Kent State—

there must be
no
action on K. State

no Federal grand jury—or anything else
here
[at the federal level]

Hoover swears FBI did
not
find guilt
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Mitchell acceded—for the moment. That same month, an aide informed Nixon by memorandum that Mitchell had agreed to “your request” to defer any indictments in “the Kent State situation” until after the 1970 midterm elections. Mitchell “has assured us that nothing will take place from a federal standpoint…until after the election,” the aide wrote.
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Behind the scenes, however, Mitchell continued pushing for a federal grand jury, a show of stubbornness that irritated Nixon. On November 18, one day after the
Washington Evening Star
carried comments by Jerris Leonard suggesting a federal grand jury was still under consideration, Ehrlichman fired off an “Eyes Only” memo to the attorney general conveying the president’s displeasure.

In your office the other afternoon I showed you the president’s memorandum on this subject and it was my understanding that you understood that the president had decided that no such grand jury would be sought. Will you please ask Mr. Leonard to advise the president by letter or memorandum that he fully understands the president’s instruction in this regard?
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More than two months after Ehrlichman’s menacing memorandum, however, Mitchell continued to press his case internally, and even seized on Nixon’s own remarks to try to nudge him in the right direction. “The president indicated this morning that the attorney general still feels we should have a Kent State grand jury,” Haldeman reported to Ehrlichman, in a previously unpublished memo dated January 28, 1971, “but the president’s feeling is very strongly against this.”

Apparently the attorney general feels that because the president mentioned his sorrow about Kent State in the TV conversation, it is now necessary to follow that up with a grand jury. The president doesn’t agree and wants you to work this out with the attorney general…. The president’s view is that this should be left where it is at this point.
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Nixon also talked that day with Ohio senator Robert Taft, a Republican who shared the president’s aversion to further investigation, and asked Taft to contact Ehrlichman. The latter’s notes from that call, also previously unpublished, read:

Kent Grand Jury—

Let’s don’t do it—

Stone-wall—
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At last, begrudgingly, Mitchell did as told. Two months later, a source at Justice passed word to a
Washington Post
reporter that no grand jury would be convened. “Only final approval by Attorney General John N. Mitchell is needed to ratify [the] decision,” the
Post
reported; in fact, the decision had already been made, and by an authority higher than Mitchell. The days before Mitchell’s infamous announcement of August 13 were spent biding time, waiting out a series of public events related to Kent State—the shootings’ first anniversary, the publication of a bestselling exposé by novelist James Michener, the release of an independent report—so as not to appear a reaction to them.
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Uniquely among the dramatic
events that marked his tenure as attorney general, Kent State took a toll on Mitchell. Although he began meeting regularly with student groups and could sometimes disarm them with the old Irish charm, the attorney general was neither impressed by what he saw nor able, in most cases, to soften the young in their attitudes toward him. The contempt Mitchell had long harbored for academia only deepened. Ironically, his turn of mood came just as Nixon began entertaining suspicions that his attorney general had gone soft on campus militants. “AG—turn off your campus visits—stay on right side of social issue,” Haldeman recorded Nixon warning.

The president need not have worried. At a dinner hosted by the Women’s National Press Club, Mitchell was overheard discussing Nixon’s reading habits. “I’ll tell you who’s not informed,” Mitchell said next, veering off topic. “It’s these stupid kids.”

Why, they don’t know the issues. They pick the rhetoric that they want to hear right off the top of an issue and never finish reading to the bottom. Why, I talked to the kids from the Harvard Law School in my office and I was flabbergasted at how uninformed they are about what’s going on inside government. And the professors are just as bad if not worse. They don’t know anything. Nor do these
stupid bastards
who are ruining our educational institutions.

Mitchell closed his soliloquy with a prediction: “Listen, there is no such thing as the New Left. This country is going so far right you are not even going to recognize it.” For all the controversy that greeted the attorney general’s “bastards” remark, his prophecy of America’s rightward political drift proved far more enduring. Few in the fall of 1970 understood, as Mitchell did, that the New Left was already dead, an illusory construct of its own members and handmaidens in the media. As Hunter S. Thompson,
Rolling Stone
’s fiendish national affairs correspondent, later conceded, only after election night 1972, and Nixon’s forty-nine-state landslide, did it become “fashionable to go around calling ex-Attorney General John Mitchell a ‘prophet.’”

Widespread support for the National Guard in the wake of Kent State proved that Americans were indeed “fed up to the teeth” with student rioters, as Nixon had said. The killings also served to discourage younger students from pursuing radical activism. “At Kent State, the country seemed to announce that whoever among the young felt deeply enough to continue the practices of the 1960s had to be ready to die for them,” observed Milton Viorst. “Few were ready to die, and so the decade reached its end.”
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As the fall of 1970
approached, Mitchell predicted a “much calmer” semester on American campuses. He saw coolness replacing “the emotions of last spring” as the charge of government repression “just fades into the background.”
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So it went. The New Left’s last gasp came almost exactly a year after Kent State. It began with a four-day protest in Washington in mid-April 1971, staged by more than a thousand members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Not since the Bonus March of 1932, when President Herbert Hoover ordered the forcible eviction of 20,000 veterans seeking back pay, had so large a group of discontented war veterans stormed the nation’s capital.

Encamped on the Mall in fatigues and pup tents, the Vietnam vets were a disheveled lot, prone to public fornication and open drug and alcohol abuse. “Unemployable scum,” Henry Kissinger spat. Nixon faced a delicate task: how to neutralize the veterans without appearing the ogre Herbert Hoover had. On April 19, according to previously unpublished White House tapes, Haldeman mused aloud it would “great if…all the hardhats could go in and bust ’em up.” Haldeman’s fantasy evoked a scene that erupted four days after Kent State, when construction workers on Wall Street had attacked a group of antiwar protesters, injuring seventy. “We’re gonna beat the shit out of some of those veterans,” Haldeman decided. Nixon recoiled. “Well, beating veterans,” he demurred. “I think I’d let them go.”
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Mitchell, as usual, chose the sanest route: He obtained a court injunction banning the veterans from camping out on the Mall. Only after they refused to budge did Mitchell argue they should be forcibly evicted; but Nixon remained haunted by the ghost of Herbert Hoover. “I don’t wanna, uh, you know—like the Bonus March and all that stuff,” he fretted to Mitchell and Haldeman. “You recollect poor old Hoover…. They never forgave him.”
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Previously unpublished tapes show the impasse touched off a furious row between the president and the attorney general. As Nixon later told Haldeman and Kissinger: “Mitchell was arguing strenuously about the law this morning, and I said, ‘God damn it, forget the law.’”

NIXON:
I had to raise hell with Mitchell today. He wanted to go out ’n’ clean ’em out, and I said, “Not on your life. Leave’em there. Leave ’em there.”

HALDEMAN:
Mitchell was gonna clean ’em out?

NIXON:
Well, he’s—there’s a court order.

HALDEMAN:
I know…

NIXON:
I said, “Just delay it…. I don’t want a hand laid on ’em.” I said, “You can go in and hand ’em the order and say, ‘Gentlemen, you’re asked to leave,’ and—but then just leave ’em alone. Let the sons o’ bitches [stay] there.” And I want them up there at the Capitol. I’d like a few scruffy people up there, grabbing congressmen when they come through [after] screwing their secretaries.
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Mitchell was already looking past the Vietnam vets to a far larger protest, scheduled for early May, by the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ). Its leader was Rennie Davis, the cerebral Chicago Seven defendant whom Spiro Agnew once crowned “the most dangerous man in America.” Slight of build and bespectacled, Davis held enormous influence in revolutionary circles. The Yippies regarded him as “the most inspiring speaker in the New Left, a humanitarian evangelist on acid.” A champion of Gandhian nonviolence, Davis was also capable of inciting followers to join him in “closing down that mother-fucking Pentagon,” and, too, of declaring that the seventies “will be the time for burning banks.” The FBI warned Mitchell that PCPJ was “heavily infiltrated” by communists and “self-avowed Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries.”
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The high concept of the May Day protests, envisaged as “the boldest and costliest antiwar demonstration in history,” lay in a slogan advertised prominently in PCPJ’s tabloid, the
Quicksilver Times
: “If the government won’t stop the war, the people will stop the government.” The plan called for hordes of protesters to fan out across Washington on Monday morning, May 3, and, using only their bodies, obstruct the rush-hour traffic flow into the city. By choking off key bridges, traffic circles, and intersections, the demonstrators aimed to shut down the capital and—at least temporarily—the bureaucratic machinery vital to the conduct of the war. As the May Day Tribe stated explicitly in its “tactical manual,” the overall goal was “to raise the social cost of the war to a level unacceptable to America’s rulers…to create the specter of social chaos.”
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In preparing for May Day, Mitchell drew on the lessons learned in the New Mobe insurrection of 1969. Now, as then, he heard the professions of pacifism and saw visions of violence. On April 24, after more than 200,000 antiwar protesters filed past the White House without incident, Mitchell expressed relief—but still predicted the worst for May Day. “There is nothing that I have seen today that would change that,” he told reporters. This prediction proved accurate, as did another: Mitchell rightly reckoned that the very publicity Rennie Davis needed to succeed—drawing Gandhian throngs to the capital, after all, always requires advance notice—would enable police to neutralize it. “In order to get the sheep to follow these
terrorists
,” Mitchell said, using a word not yet in vogue, “they have to talk about what they’re planning to do.”
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