The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (22 page)

Mitchell was “a proponent of civil rights,” recalled Jerris Leonard, DOJ’s top civil rights officer, years later. “I brought a
lot
of lawsuits into John Mitchell’s office, put ’em on his desk. I never heard him say, ‘Why are we favoring these niggers?’…Our object wasn’t to try to press the envelope. Our object was to try to get kids into desegregated school systems, [get] black people jobs…[get] black people housing…. The liberals didn’t like it, because they didn’t give a damn about whether or not we got black people into schools and got [them] jobs. What they wanted to do was to reformulate the whole system and turn it over to the government.”
¹⁰

In the friction between
Mitchell and Finch the press found an irresistible story line: the cabinet-level policy dispute that turns personal. The
New York Times
reported Mitchell “hard-pressed to conceal his disdain for Robert Finch.”

Nixon wanted his administration to speak with one voice. A meeting was accordingly called to bring together Mitchell, Finch, and their top aides; tellingly, the meeting was held in Mitchell’s office. Finch’s young deputy, Leon Panetta—later a nine-term Democratic congressman and the Clinton White House’s last chief of staff—found the attorney general hardly the ogre he’d imagined. “Like all such meetings with notorious public figures,” Panetta later wrote, “the actual character is never quite so villainous as you had pictured him to be. Mitchell, with his pipe, was no exception. He came on more as a fatherly figure than Machiavellian.”

Finch handed Mitchell one of Panetta’s statistical breakdowns. “Well, look at this,” Mitchell said. “No wonder the Southerners scream about enforcement in the North. There’s some justification to that criticism, isn’t there?” “That’s right,” Finch answered, “there are few cases in the North.” “Why is that?” Mitchell asked. “It seems to me that if we are after segregation, it’s bad wherever it exists.” Mitchell knew the administration was not about to tackle de facto housing patterns, but he deliberately invoked the North to aggravate Panetta. Mitchell’s aide, Jerris Leonard, vowed to “move on some key Northern systems to help establish some needed law.” The meeting was yielding exactly what Nixon had ordered in February 1969:
Find a Northern school district to hit, too
. “Good, let’s do that,” Mitchell replied. When Panetta tried to argue against extensions for dilatory districts, Mitchell turned the discussion to recent Supreme Court decisions, then brought the meeting to a close. Panetta realized the matter had already been decided in the Oval Office. Mitchell, the winner, had lain down no cards because he didn’t need to; Finch, the loser, because he had none.
¹¹

The president ordered the two cabinet officers to sign a joint statement outlining administration policy. Scribbling on an early draft, Mitchell called for a “PR statement” that would contrast Nixon’s “evenhanded” and “equitable” enforcement with Kennedy’s and Johnson’s hostile, anti-Southern approach.
¹²
Perhaps because all of Washington knew that “Mitchell won and Finch lost,” as Ehrlichman put it, Nixon worried that Finch would disown the final product. He told Haldeman:

When stmt goes out F
[inch]
must
stand up

+ support it

don’t give appearance we rolled him…

The Mitchell-Finch compact was finally released on July 3, 1969. Southern segregationists were disappointed to see no extension of timetables beyond the 1969–70 deadlines the Johnson administration had set. The statement also shifted major enforcement responsibility from Finch’s HEW to Mitchell’s Justice; by that fall, a record number of children sat in desegregated classrooms.
¹³

So convulsive were the
sixties in American race relations that school desegregation represented only one of several fronts on which African Americans were waging their battle for equality. Nor was it the only race controversy in which Attorney General Mitchell played a decisive role. Another landmark law from the Kennedy-Johnson era, the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), was set to expire in August 1970. It would be Mitchell who decided the Nixon administration’s response: whether to extend the act, with or without amendment, or simply let it expire.

Letting VRA lapse was never a viable option. Its enforcement helped enfranchise an estimated 800,000 black Americans. The only advocates for letting the law expire were staunch segregationists like Senator Sam Ervin, the North Carolina Democrat who decried the original law as “repressive” and “contrary to the Constitution”—and who later presided, with great piety, over the Senate Watergate committee. That left reenactment as the only option, the only question whether to amend it or not. Once again, as analyst Michael Barone has written, Nixon “tailored his policies to left-leaning opinion leaders while crafting his rhetoric to propitiate the right-leaning ‘silent majority.’”

House Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler, the feisty Brooklyn Democrat, had introduced legislation extending VRA, without amendment, until 1975. That the new administration despaired of addressing this extraordinarily sensitive issue became clear when the attorney general canceled five scheduled appearances before Celler’s committee in six weeks. Southern whites lobbied Mitchell to apply VRA to all fifty states—currently, it applied only to seven, all below the Mason-Dixon Line—and warned the administration it would be breaking faith if it allowed a simple extension.

Privately, Mitchell predicted to the president and GOP leaders that the House “likely will pass a simple five-year extension of the act” but he agreed, once more, to don the heavy mask Nixon assigned him. Thus, when Mitchell finally took the witness chair before a Judiciary subcommittee, on June 26, he stunned Celler, and even fellow Republicans, by announcing that the Nixon administration opposed the extension of VRA. “I cannot support what amounts to regional legislation,” Mitchell testified. “While Congress may have had sufficient reason to pass regional legislation in the 1965 act, I do not believe that this justification exists any longer.”

Under the modified extension Mitchell proposed, bans on literacy tests and state residency requirements for presidential elections would be extended nationwide, and a panel would be formed to study voting discrimination. The Nixon-Mitchell plan also authorized the attorney general to dispatch election monitors and file voter-discrimination lawsuits anywhere in America, not just in the seven Southern states covered by the original legislation. Most controversially, it shifted the burden of proof for the validity of new election laws from the states to DOJ. When Celler objected, Mitchell explained that more than 50 percent of eligible black voters in every Southern state were already registered. More voting-age blacks in the Deep South had cast ballots in 1968 than in Watts, Los Angeles; and as the attorney general noted dryly, in his coup de grace, only one-third of those in Celler’s beloved Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx had done so.

Celler harrumphed that the Nixon-Mitchell plan “bristles with complications.” But the chairman had a problem: His usual allies—the ACLU, the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights—had all endorsed Mitchell’s proposal for a nationwide ban on literacy tests. Celler likened the Nixon-Mitchell bill to the suggestion that “because you have a flood in Mississippi, you have to build a dam in Idaho.” In fact, the eighty-one-year-old Celler simply resented being outfoxed. As leading civil rights historian Hugh Davis Graham has noted, Mitchell, “seizing the reformer’s initiative…cast Celler and his liberal majority on Judiciary in a conservative role as defenders of the status quo.”

In the end, the extended VRA contained Mitchell’s nationwide ban on literacy tests, a weakened ban on residency requirements, and, thanks to the intervention of Democratic senators Birch Bayh and Edward M. Kennedy—against Nixon’s wishes—full voting rights for eighteen-year-olds. The president signed the Voting Rights Act of 1970 into law on June 22. But as he did so, Nixon announced he was instructing Attorney General Mitchell to launch a swift court challenge against the eighteen-year-old voting provision. On December 21, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the measure’s constitutionality, in the ruling of
Oregon v. Mitchell
.
¹⁴

John Mitchell’s signature statement
on civil rights turned out to be one of the most memorable pronouncements on the relationship between politics and government ever uttered by an American official. On the morning of July 1, 1969, before Mitchell left for testimony on Capitol Hill, thirty African Americans, joined by one white friend, politely opened the door to Mitchell’s outer office, sat down on the available chairs and couches, and—when those filled up—the floor.
We’d like to see the attorney general
, announced the group’s leader, Mrs. James Hadnott of Prattville, Alabama. Mitchell’s secretary told Mrs. Hadnott the attorney general was busy; Mrs. Hadnott replied that the group members were staging a sit-in to protest Mitchell’s desegregation policies and, until he came to see them, they would wait patiently right where they were.

And there they sat—for the next two and a half hours, as news photographers, alerted to the commotion on Justice’s fifth floor, clicked away. Finally, Jerris Leonard told the group Mitchell would see them in the Department’s auditorium. At the appointed hour, Mitchell heard out the group’s grievances, artfully deflating the tension and deploying, as in similar encounters with students and hippies, the old-school Irish charm. But he left the group’s members with something to think about. “You will be better advised,” he told them, “to watch what we do instead of what we say.”
¹⁵

This tantalizing proverb Mitchell later repeated to a group of prominent black leaders, who leaked it to the press. Nothing could have proven Mitchell more correct—that blacks and liberals would
not
pay greater attention to deeds than words—than the furor the attorney general’s words created as they reverberated across the country and down through the ages. Where
Fortune
magazine wondered if Mitchell hadn’t suffered an “unintentional burst of candor,” the
New Yorker
scornfully hailed “the most astonishing admission of high-level duplicity in government history.”
¹⁶

Mitchell’s own explanations of his famous maxim—boiled down to “watch what we do, not what we say”—changed somewhat over time. PBS’ Paul Niven was the first reporter to press him on it, in a December 1969 interview.

NIVEN:
When you met with a group of Negroes who had come to your office, you said on one occasion, “Judge us not by what we say but by what we do.” What did you mean by that?

MITCHELL:
Very simple: that our accomplishments during our administration in the enforcement of the statutes relating to civil rights would speak for themselves and that they would be recognized as such. And there was no sense carrying on large dialogues about what might have been done, or what might
be
done, that we would rather stand on the record than carry on this dialogue that might be presumptuous on our part.