The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (23 page)

By 1986, when he was last asked to explain his cryptic words, Mitchell—long removed from public life—candidly acknowledged to author Len Colodny the electoral importance of the South and his own impatience with black leaders at the time.

It was very simple. I made it to Coretta King and [Ralph] Abernathy and a lot of the rest of ’em that were screaming about the Nixon civil rights policies. We had [a] double problem, as you know. One was to keep the South happy and the second was to desegregate the schools and carry out the civil rights requirements of the statutes and the court decisions and so forth. And so that was the meaning of it.
¹⁷

The most thoughtful meditation on Mitchell’s statement came, ironically, from Daniel Moynihan, who was no fan of Mitchell’s—he once wrote privately that he wished Mitchell “acted a bit more lawyer-like”—and who himself had been pilloried by liberals and the news media for suggesting, in a leaked memo to Nixon, that the whole issue of race relations in America might benefit from a bit of “benign neglect.” “How much more explicit can one be?” Moynihan asked. “[Mitchell] was saying that the rhetoric of the national government would now change, would now begin to reward other groups, but that the actual conduct of the administration would not change. This is about what happened. If, however, Mitchell expected blacks to see this as an improved, or even as an acceptable, situation he was, of course, asking for disappointment.”

“Few grasped,” Moynihan concluded, “that Nixon was putting forth a set of administrative and legislative proposals designed fundamentally—and deliberately—to fulfill the promises of the 1960s.”
¹⁸

As children prepared to
return to school in the summer of 1969, educators in thirty-three Mississippi districts faced especial anxiety. At DOJ’s request, the courts had ordered twenty-nine of the districts to be completely desegregated by September 11, the other four by 1970. Mississippi senator John Stennis, the hawkish sixty-seven-year-old Democrat who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, lobbied Mitchell for more time, citing the prospect for “public unrest” if desegregation measures were pushed too fast. When Mitchell demurred, Stennis went to the top. He sent President Nixon a handwritten letter containing an implied, but unmistakable, threat: If the desegregation issue required his presence in his home state, Stennis would have to skip the critical vote on the antiballistic missile (ABM) system, a cornerstone in Nixon’s national security strategy. Teletyped out to Nixon in San Clemente, Stennis’s proposal was clear: If Nixon wanted his ABM system, the Mississippi districts had to have more time.

Mitchell, Finch, and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird all put in calls to Stennis, who was unmoved. Ultimately Nixon exalted cold war missile defense over the complaints of liberal bureaucrats, and made sure Bob Finch understood as much. Under pressure from his own aides, Finch shrugged that he would “call the attorney general and see what can be done.” Once again, however, Mitchell, operating behind the scenes, emerged triumphant. Accordingly, the HEW secretary—in a humiliating public repudiation of his own aides’ work—wrote to the appellate court on August 19, requesting the Mississippi schools be given until December 1 to submit new plans. The current timetables, Finch said, had been devised “under great stress in approximately three weeks,” and would “produce chaos, confusion and a catastrophic educational setback to the 135,700 children, black and white alike, [in] the 222 schools of these Mississippi districts.” The Fifth Circuit set a district court hearing in Jackson the following week.

Outraged civil rights groups immediately sued the government, leading to an unprecedented courtroom showdown. On Monday, August 25, Jerris Leonard, representing the federal government, conceded he was “somewhat embarrassed” at having to argue against the administration’s previously submitted plans. Roy Reed, the
New York Times
’ veteran civil rights reporter, marveled that “the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Justice Department for the first time were on opposite sides of a desegregation case.” Yet the Court granted Mississippi the delay. Despite all the symbolic rewards Nixon and Mitchell had accorded the white South, this marked the only time the Nixon administration actually intervened to delay school desegregation. The Senate approved the ABM system by a vote of 51 to 50.
¹⁹

At the White House, a reporter asked Nixon whether, in light of the actions in Mississippi, the administration wasn’t in “retreat” from
Brown v. Board of Education
. Nixon replied that twice as many schools were desegregated as a year earlier and cast himself as a levelheaded centrist. “There are those who want instant integration and those who want segregation forever,” Nixon said. “I believe that we need to have a middle course between those two extremes.”
²⁰

The Supreme Court demanded more. On October 26, 1969, six days after hearing oral arguments from Jerris Leonard and lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the High Court issued its historic ruling in
Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education
, in which the justices struck down the Fifth Circuit’s decision to grant a deadline extension to the thirty-three Mississippi school districts. Calling the case “of paramount importance,” Justice Hugo Black, who wrote for the unanimous Court, held public schools could no longer desegregate with “all deliberate speed”—the standard the Court had adopted in
Brown
—but must do so “immediately.”

Publicly, Mitchell appeared stunned, telling an interviewer he had believed “the Court would respect the administration’s wishes” for more time.
Holmes
now made “instant integration”—a position Nixon had cast as extreme—the law of the land, and ostensibly put the president and the attorney general on the spot: How could they end segregation “immediately” in the 156 dual-system school districts that remained? Some wondered whether Nixon and Mitchell would even honor the Court’s decision. In fact, the decision was a gift to Nixon and Mitchell: It focused Southern resentment on the judiciary, not the executive, and allowed the president and attorney general to pose as reluctant executioners of a policy their constituency regarded as hostile. Thus Mitchell assured the nation he would “bring every available resource to bear…[to] enforce the mandates issued by the courts pursuant to the Supreme Court decisions.”
²¹

Now Mitchell had to take action. “Psychological acceptance [is] the key,” Nixon told Mitchell, Finch, and Ehrlichman in early 1970, before asking: “Can we get the orders to be more reasonable?” According to Ehrlichman’s previously unpublished notes, Mitchell replied: “We can hang our hat on the fact that there were ‘plans’ before the court in past cases.” As Nixon recognized,
Holmes
rendered the Mitchell-Finch compact obsolete; a new comprehensive statement of administration policy was needed. As Haldeman’s notes show, the president, to his credit, grasped at once the gravity of the “historic crisis” he faced; the need to cool, rather than inflame, the nation’s passions; and the political advantage that could be won if he could, with his statement, reassure the Supreme Court that no more stringent rulings like
Holmes
were necessary.

can’t go on fuzzing the issue

need to give P. the options—not a single solution

prob. is no one has sat down + done this

we have just reacted—never got ahead of it
[…]

re: race—no speech before live audience…

don’t want an emotional response—shld be

sound, reasoned approach—probly wld rather write than

speak
[…]

this is a very historic crisis—country must not move

in wrong direction—must hit it effectively

in a way that will affect the Court

there’s only mileage in this for demagogue—for a man

who
wants
to be Gov.—
not
man who has to be P.

have to say in way that doesn’t throw down gauntlet to

Court too directly
[…]

On black issue—just want to take a position

can’t be on both sides—get hit both ways
²²

A forceful act would be better than issuing a statement, Nixon thought. He ordered Mitchell to “move fast” on the development of a constitutional amendment banning compulsory busing as a desegregation tool. “We should bite the bullet and bite it soon,” Nixon said. “If it’s racism, so be it.” Mitchell’s performance on busing had actually displeased the president. The issue was coming to a head in Charlotte, North Carolina, where a federal judge had ordered an extensive program of busing, at a cost of $4 million, to combat de facto segregation in the nation’s forty-third largest school system. Even Finch found the plan “unusually harsh.” In a previously unpublished memorandum to the president, White House congressional liaison Bryce Harlow complained that Mitchell’s Justice had argued in court in favor of busing as a valid means of attacking de jure segregation. “Perhaps you were aware of this,” Harlow wrote Nixon. “I was not.” Morever, Mitchell had expressed “doubt…that [DOJ] can make a case against the district court order” in Charlotte. “Therefore,” Harlow wrote, “it appears more likely that we will get action indicating administration displeasure and concern from HEW than from Justice.”
²³

Ultimately, Nixon decided—for the moment—to abandon the constitutional amendment. Instead, on March 24, 1970, he released an 8,000-word statement whose central thrust, as Evans and Novak reported, was “just as John Mitchell had planned it all the time.” On one hand, the manifesto vowed the Nixon administration was “not backing away” from enforcing
Brown
, that it would “disappoint” those who “wish the clock of progress would stop or be turned back to 1953.” At the same time, it ordered federal officials “not go beyond the requirements of law in attempting to impose their own judgment on the local school district,” and pledged to leave de facto segregation, a product of unregulated housing patterns, in place. The statement’s main purpose lay between its thousands of lines: persuading the Supreme Court the Nixon administration was addressing the issue without need for further rulings. “We should not provoke any court,” the statement read, “to push a constitutional principle beyond its ultimate limit in order to compel compliance with the court’s essential, but more modest, mandate.”
²⁴

To enforce the mandate in
Holmes
—immediate desegregation—Nixon established a cabinet-level committee, chaired by Vice President Agnew, which in turn created regional panels whose members were expected to sell desegregation to the most intransigent members of their communities. As executive director of the committee, the White House named Robert Mardian, the Mitchell loyalist who had, as HEW’s general counsel, kept an eye on Finch. “We accomplished in eight months [what] the Democrats couldn’t do in fifteen years,” Mardian later boasted. He ascribed this success to the regional panels, which included “everybody from some Ku Klux Klanners to the chairman of the NAACP in the state, to work together to get the job done. And we got it done.”
²⁵

Less than ninety days later, Spiro Agnew, perhaps fearful that involvement in race issues could damage his presidential ambitions, asked to be relieved of the assignment. Disgusted, Nixon turned to the most pleasant surprise of his first term: George P. Shultz, the secretary of labor and vice chairman of the desegregation committee. A Princeton-educated former Marine who had taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as dean of the University of Chicago business school, Shultz possessed the intellectual furniture to grapple with any complex public policy issue; what he lacked was a certain intimidating quality that could be useful with intractable bigots. For this Shultz turned to the attorney general. Years later Shultz recalled Mitchell’s belief that desegregation “was going to have to proceed as a legal matter.”

John Mitchell was opposed to busing. He didn’t like the big busing businesses, although we had to take those cases. And, I think there’s good reason to worry about all that busing. I thought that he proceeded with great integrity as far as [desegregation] was concerned. Nixon did, Mitchell did. Although they were capable of devious things, my experience with most people in politics is that they do a lot of political calculating. It’s not unusual.
²⁶

The first of the seven regional panels to visit the White House came from Mississippi. Shultz convened the group in the Roosevelt Room, then watched in silence as the black and white members quarreled ferociously. After two hours, Shultz intervened. By prearrangement, he had the attorney general enter the room, since Mitchell was, in Shultz’s words, “known in the South as a tough guy, and on the whole was regarded by whites as sympathetic to their cause.”

I asked Mitchell what he planned to do about the schools. “I am attorney general, and I will enforce the law,” he growled in his gruff, pipe-smoking way. He offered no judgments about whether this was good, bad or indifferent. “I will enforce the law,” he repeated. With that, he left. No nonsense. Both the blacks and whites were impressed.