The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (3 page)

Indeed, none of those crucial questions about recent American history can be answered in isolation; all, in varying degrees, require each other’s answers for their own to come into view. No one can reckon whether Mitchell “politicized” Justice, served the greater good or acted as a conscious malefactor in a criminal regime, deserved his fate in Watergate or fell prey to cruel and cynical antagonists, without understanding the man’s personality, the way his mind worked. This, in turn, can only be attained through a look at his background and rise to prominence, and a thorough examination of his exercise of power and unparalleled fall from it. At the end of this process lies: truth and judgment.

Arriving there involved a personal journey that endured through two decades of research, synthesis, and writing. It began with the relevant secondary sources: the five hundred books published on Watergate, the Nixon presidency, and the convulsions of the sixties, as well as the voluminous, if necessarily imperfect, record established by the era’s many fine daily-deadline journalists. Fresh interviews were conducted with 250 people, including two presidents, a vice president, two chief justices, three secretaries of state, three secretaries of defense, four attorneys general, two CIA directors, and a great many staff members of the Nixon White House and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President: individuals alternately central, peripheral, and wholly unrelated to Watergate. Also questioned were party officials and secretaries employed at Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972. These sessions included the only extensive interviews ever conducted with the woman whose telephone was wiretapped in the Watergate break-in and surveillance operation, and more than eight hours of interviews with the only man who monitored that wiretap.

Aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act, pursued over several years’ time, pried loose hundreds of thousands of previously undisclosed documents and tape recordings. Most of these were located at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, the branch of the National Archives that houses the ex-president’s papers and tapes and those of his staff aides. Of especial value was the long march, on microfiche, through every sheet of Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s 200,000 pages of yellow-pad notes from their meetings with President Nixon; since there was no taping system for the president’s first two years in office, these notes constitute the best evidence of Nixon’s thoughts and statements, on a whole range of issues, during that critical period. In Haldeman’s case, the notes formed the raw material for
The Haldeman Diaries
, which proved, in several instances, less candid than the underlying scribbles.

Surprisingly, some invaluable sources of Watergate evidence—whole archives of contemporaneous documents—had never before been mined, or even requested for inspection, by the armies of earlier scholars. These included the internal files of the staff lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) and the sworn testimony taken by the Senate Watergate committee in closed-door executive session. The former archive revealed what the WSPF lawyers knew about Watergate and when they knew it: their reliance on, and active role in reshaping, the deeply flawed testimony of their star witnesses, Dean and Magruder. The latter collection contained more than five thousand pages of testimony from the major witnesses before the Senate Watergate committee: Dean, Magruder, McCord, Hunt. Like the WSPF records, the executive session interrogations had never been examined by any researcher and revealed witnesses consciously changing their stories, both to implicate Mitchell more deeply and to conceal their own culpability. These were major factors in the outcome of Watergate and have never been exposed; taking account of them enabled
The Strong Man
to resolve the questions that bedeviled Mitchell to his grave, including the central mystery of who authorized the break-in.

Rounding out the picture were intimate letters written by Mitchell in his own hand, from prison; his federal tax returns from the years 1950 to 1973; the complete transcripts of his two criminal trials; documents compiled during his bitter divorce from Martha Mitchell; court filings and fresh depositions generated by recent Watergate-related civil suits; and many other relevant documents. In sum, no previous study has encompassed so comprehensive a research effort, mounted over two decades’ time, nor benefited from the wealth of newly declassified evidence now available.

Americans may fairly wonder after all these years, after all the hearings, articles, trials, books, documentaries, films, and plays, after the seemingly endless releases of new Nixon tapes and the “revelations” in 2005 about the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s shadowy (and highly suspect) source, whether there is, at this late date, anything
new
to say about Watergate. The answer extracted from these mountains of new evidence, and discernible as much from the source notes as from the narrative text, is both unmistakable and unassailable: Assuredly, the scandal presented in
The Strong Man
is not your father’s Watergate.

At all points, the research
task was made incalculably more complicated by a subject notorious for his inscrutability, one who left behind no large cache of personal or official papers and whose most memorable remark advised listeners to observe what he did rather than what he said. If taciturnity and sleights of hand served some perceived interest during Mitchell’s lifetime—and the stay at Maxwell suggests the opposite—they certainly serve none now that he, and Nixon, are long gone. For only through the establishment of an accurate record of those tumultuous times, their passions cooled by the passage of almost four decades, can America hope to avoid destructive repetitions of what President Ford called “our long national nightmare,” an experience no one lived more personally and fully than John N. Mitchell.

INTO THE FIRE

I don’t think anyone ever really knew him. He lived within himself very much.

—Robert Mitchell to the author, 1998
¹

“DO YOU REALLY
want to hear about this?”

John Mitchell was, in his lawyerly way, questioning his questioner, gently needling a young reporter who came to the Department of Justice in the spring of 1970 to interview the attorney general about, of all things, his childhood. On that sunny day in May, the reporter found Mitchell—currently embroiled in searing controversies over the killings at Kent State, two failed Supreme Court nominees, and the potentially explosive desegregation of Southern school systems—utterly at ease in his dark, thickly carpeted office, absently tilting his large frame back and forth in his swivel chair, lighting and relighting his pipe, tossing the still-burning matches into his wastebasket.

Yes, replied the reporter from Long Island’s
Newsday
, he did indeed want to know about Mitchell’s childhood; the subject would interest readers in Mitchell’s hometown of Blue Point, New York, and there was, for all the attorney general’s fame in those days, little known or written about Mitchell’s formative years.

Reluctantly, his pale blue eyes becoming distant as his mind conjured the sights and sounds of coastal Long Island in the 1920s, the attorney general remembered a “normal” childhood spent, he said, “like Huck Finn,” immersed in the twin pastimes of sports—“I played them all,” he boasted, including baseball, hockey, golf, hunting, fishing, and sailing—and mischief. At one particular memory, Mitchell began to chuckle, softly at first, then uncontrollably, until he was “half-bent” in laughter and brought back into the moment only by a coughing fit.

“I’ll tell you, there was one thing, there was one incident,” Mitchell began. He described his old wooden school by the railroad tracks, at the intersection of Blue Point’s Main Street and River Road, on which his family lived for a time. One night, he said, a fire burned the school clear down to the ground. “Whole damned school went,” he said. Again now, Mitchell was laughing hard, and took a few moments to collect himself. “My brother and I were there,” the attorney general continued. “We watched it. We were so damned glad to see that thing burn down. We watched it! We threw our books into the fire. We were so glad. We just threw our books in. My father gave us a good whack. I’ll always remember that. Whew!”

The memory prompted Mitchell to tell the
Newsday
reporter another, similar anecdote from his youth, about an equally destructive fire. “You know, I burned down the house in Blue Point,” Mitchell said. “It was one Fourth of July. We had sparklers and it was daylight and, you know, we were supposed to wait until dark. Well, I was a kid who didn’t want to wait, so I took some of those sparklers down under the porch and—well, it burned down the house.”
You didn’t have anything to do with the school fire?
the reporter asked. “No,” Mitchell assured him. “That was in the middle of the night. This was during the day. Of course not.”
²

With these beguiling stories, in which the stern-faced monument to law and order allowed a glimpse into a younger, more reckless self, one never permitted to emerge in his public appearances as attorney general, there was only one thing wrong: They weren’t true. Mitchell’s younger brother, Robert, who supposedly heaved his books into the schoolhouse fire along with Mitchell, told the first reporter ever to interview him, in 1998, that the story was complete fiction.

“Nothing happened!” Robert proclaimed. One night, he explained, he and young John Mitchell, or Jack, as his family called him, were awakened by whistles and sirens screaming past their house. “[W]e knew there was a fire somewhere, but didn’t know anything about it. Next morning we went to school, and we got up there, and the school was an old frame school. They had just bought fire escapes for it, metal fire escapes. And they were laying in the yard. And we went up there, and the school—it was burnt to the ground, and the nice, new fire escapes were laying all around the edges of it, unused…But that’s all…We never heard how the fire started or anything else.”

It was much the same with the attorney general’s sparkler story, which Robert laughingly dismissed as “another slight exaggeration.” Yes, there was an Independence Day celebration at the Mitchells’ home in Blue Point, where the boys, looking to escape a stiff wind, lit some sparklers under their back porch. “We went under that [porch] to try and light [the sparklers],” Robert remembered. “And I guess we—a couple of the leaves caught fire there, and we went scrambling out. And one of the adults there, I don’t know who it was, took a pail of water and threw it on the leaves, and that was the end of it. The house never burned down. The porch didn’t even burn down.”

The falsity of the attorney general’s childhood tall tales might be easily written off as inconsequential, an Irishman’s love of lore, were it not for his multiple perjury convictions in Watergate, and for the recurring theme of factual dispute that accompanies all accounts, and every phase, of his life. That John Newton Mitchell was born in Detroit on September 5, 1913, the fourth of five children, the first three of whom died young, are incontestable facts.
³
Yet little else in Mitchell’s early biography is so invulnerable to challenge.

Mitchell’s paternal lineage is usually traced to Scotland, but exactly when his forefathers came to America varies in the telling. The attorney general’s daughter, Jill Mitchell-Reed, believed her family got its start in the States with a stonecutter from Edinburgh who settled in Rutland, Vermont, before moving to Chicago and ending up in Rockport, Maine.
⁴
Perhaps the most reliable authority—Robert, sole surviving member of the attorney general’s boyhood family—said their grandfather, James A. Mitchell, a stonecutter seeking proximity to New Hampshire’s granite quarries, emigrated from Aberdeen, Scotland, in the mid-1800s to Rock
land
, Maine.
⁵

After meeting and marrying Margaret Porter, an immigrant from Newfoundland “of English extraction,” James A. Mitchell fathered three sons. The youngest of them, Joseph Charles, born around 1882 in Rockland, Maine, was to become the attorney general’s father.
⁶
Skillfully exploiting his family’s limited connections, Joseph, when still a young man, joined the trading stamp business owned by an uncle, Esden Porter. Itching to start his own firm, but unwilling to compete directly against his uncle, Joseph left New York for the Midwest, initially eyeing Columbus, Ohio, before settling on Detroit. There he began the People’s Legal Stamp Company.
⁷

But before that, on an evening in 1906 or 1907, at the East Flatbush home of an older brother, Joseph met his future wife, Margaret Agnes McMahon.
⁸
Margaret’s family was “very well off,” her granddaughter Jill Mitchell-Reed recalled.
⁹
Peter McMahon, Margaret’s father, died in his early fifties, but left behind a considerable fortune from his stake in Peter’s Chop House, a Greenwich Village steakhouse he owned.
¹⁰

Joseph and Margaret’s first two children, a boy and girl, they named after themselves—though with typical Mitchell inscrutability in the matter of names, the boy was addressed as Scranton. The couple’s third child, John Newton, died at birth.
¹¹
The name was given anew to their fourth child, the future attorney general, in 1913.

John Mitchell’s mother was
unusual for her time: a Hunter College graduate
¹²
and an indomitable presence at home. “She was quiet but her force was felt in the family, no question about that,” her last child, Robert, born a little more than a year after John, remembered.
¹³
Countless times, her husband, Joseph, recounted for the family how he had asked Margaret, in 1907, to marry him: “I would call her up on the phone and say, ‘Margaret, will you marry me?’ And she said, ‘Yes—who is this?’” Seventy-five years later, this line still made Robert laugh. “That’s Yankee humor,” he chuckled.
¹⁴

Humor was in need in the earliest years of the twentieth century, when the Mitchell family was wracked by wild fluctuations in its financial fortunes. “[H]e was successful,” Robert said of his father, “up until World War I came along.” Wartime rationing of consumer goods left little need for trading stamps—goods were valuable enough without stamps as a purchasing incentive—and one day, as Robert remembered sadly, “[M]y father was without a business.”
¹⁵

By 1918, the family had moved from Detroit back to Blue Point, where Peter McMahon, Mitchell’s restaurant-owning grandfather, had spent summers away from his swank Harlem apartment. Desperate for work, Joseph took a sales job with the Cudahey meatpacking firm, switching shortly thereafter to Cudahey’s main competitor, Wilson. He traversed Long Island’s butcher shops and groceries, peddling Wilson’s meats. Though it was a big step down from owning his own business, Mitchell’s “lovably stern” father had, by 1920, secured the job that would keep his family afloat throughout the Great Depression.
¹⁶