The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (33 page)

Hume’s article appeared,
under Jack Anderson’s Washington Merry-Go-Round byline, on February 29, 1972—Mitchell’s last day as attorney general. The headline in the
Washington Post
, one of seven hundred papers that carried Anderson’s column, read: “Secret Memo Bares Mitchell-ITT Move.” “We now have evidence,” the column began,

that the settlement of the Nixon administration’s biggest antitrust case was privately arranged between Attorney General John Mitchell and the top lobbyist for the company involved. We have this on the word of the lobbyist herself, crusty, capable Dita Beard of the International Telephone and Telegraph Co. She acknowledged the secret deal after we obtained a highly incriminating memo, written by her, from ITT’s files.

The memo, which was intended to be destroyed after it was read, not only indicates that the antitrust case had been fixed but that the fix was a payoff for ITT’s pledge of up to $400,000 for the upcoming Republican convention in San Diego. Confronted with the memo, Mrs. Beard acknowledged its authenticity…. She said she met with Mitchell at the governor’s mansion in Kentucky during a dinner reception given by Republican Gov. Louie Nunn last May after the Kentucky Derby.
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Waking up on his final day in office, Mitchell likely chuckled at the Anderson column. The account of his Kentucky Derby encounter with Dita Beard was so fanciful as to merit little concern. Alerted to the column’s content the day before it ran, the attorney general’s press secretary, Jack Hushen, had rushed out a press release in which Mitchell summarized his own version of the Derby encounter, then added a final flourish: “With respect to allegations that the president discussed the matter with me, there would be no occasion for him to do so and he did not.”
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This was, of course, disingenuous at best, a blatant lie at worst: Mitchell and Nixon had indeed discussed the ITT case. Whether Mitchell believed his discussion with the president, in which he persuaded Nixon to reverse his order to Kleindienst to drop the litigation, was divorced from the merits of the case—technically true—was immaterial to the broad denial contained in Mitchell’s statement. As Nixon had told Haldeman:
P. now into ITT case—shldn’t have to be
. Mitchell would have stood on surer ground had he limited his denial to the specifics of Beard’s tale: Nixon had never instructed Mitchell to “lay-off ITT” or “make a reasonable settlement.” But Mitchell had no idea the Oval Office was bugged, and no reason to believe the matter would gain any traction. The next two columns by Anderson and Hume, and the “ripple effect” they caused, quickly disabused Mitchell of that notion.

“Kleindienst Accused in ITT Case” screamed the headline over Anderson’s column of March 1. It charged the attorney general-designate, still awaiting a full Senate vote, had told “an outright lie” in his letter to Larry O’Brien. “We have now learned that Kleindienst himself held roughly a half-dozen secret meetings on the ITT case with a director of the company before the settlement was reached,” wrote Anderson and Hume. Their implication of Kleindienst was based solely on Hume’s interview with Rohatyn; the leaked ITT memo, after all, hadn’t even mentioned Kleindienst. “Kleindienst’s duplicity is further evidence that the administration has much to hide in the ITT affair,” Anderson thundered, “which looks more suspicious the more we investigate it.”
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The final installment in Anderson’s troika of ITT columns, published March 3, charged Mitchell and the conglomerate were “trying to lie their way out of a scandal over the suspicious, sudden settlement of a landmark antitrust suit against ITT.” The columnist seized on Hushen’s press release, which featured Mitchell saying he had “no knowledge of anyone from the [Republican National] committee or elsewhere dealing with International Telephone and Telegraph.” “This is false,” Anderson charged.

In mid-May last year, California Lt. Gov. Ed Reinecke and an aide, Edgar Gillenwaters, met with Mitchell in his Washington office to discuss efforts to hold the convention in San Diego. We could not reach Reinecke, but Gillenwaters told us he and Reinecke personally informed Mitchell that ITT had offered to put up as much as $400,000 to support a GOP convention in San Diego. “He liked the idea of [having the convention in] San Diego,” Gillenwaters said of Mitchell. “He didn’t need any persuading. He said, ‘If you can do it, more power to you.’”
⁴²

In fact, this was false: Reinecke and Gillenwaters had
not
met with Mitchell in May 1971. Having confirmed as much through his office logs—which recorded meetings with the California duo on April 26 and September 17, 1971
⁴³
—Mitchell might have expected to extinguish the matter with the cooperation of Reinecke, his fellow Republican. But the lieutenant governor, then a leading candidate to succeed Reagan, was busy giving interviews to seemingly every reporter who called to follow up on the Anderson column, expertly sticking his foot, with every question and answer, in Mitchell’s mouth. To the
Washington Star
’s Bob Walters, who asked if it was true that he and Gillenwaters had informed Mitchell of the ITT pledge, contrary to Mitchell’s denials, Reinecke blithely answered: “Yes, we discussed it. That was part of the package we were offering to the party.” The Californian unthinkingly described the attorney general as “my input to the political arm of the administration,” and told Walters he had the impression Mitchell already knew of ITT’s pledge from Congressman Wilson. “It was widely known then that it was [Mitchell] who was making the political decisions,” Reinecke foolishly added to a reporter the following day.
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Without checking his own records or consulting Mitchell, one of the most powerful and respected figures in their party, Reinecke had blindly gone on record with a version of events that was both wrong, at least as to the dates involved, and highly damaging to men whose fortunes bore significantly on Reinecke’s own. From Mitchell’s point of view, it was difficult to tell which of Reinecke’s implications was worse: that contrary to his own denials, Mitchell knew about ITT’s convention pledge while the antitrust cases were being settled, or that he was, while serving as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, “making the political decisions.”

Before the day was out, according to later testimony, Reinecke received a call from Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian in Washington. Shortly thereafter, the lieutenant governor commenced one of the most pronounced about-faces in American history, beginning with a written statement “clarifying” his earlier remarks. “After checking and verifying our records,” Reinecke said of himself and Gillenwaters, “we learned that our meeting with…Mitchell was on April 26, 1971. At this time we did not discuss the Republican convention because the idea had not developed at that date….[W]enever discussed or thought of any connection between the Sheraton Hotel and ITT.” His earlier statements had been in error, Reinecke said, because he had been “trying to recall the purpose and dates of several trips to Washington at a time when I was out of town and did not have access to my files or records.”
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In fact, even had Reinecke and Gillenwaters drowned Mitchell in details about the ITT pledge in their April 26 meeting, it would not have left the attorney general “pleased” or “delighted,” as Reinecke at one point claimed. Previously unpublished documents show that Mitchell—a full two months
after
the April 26 meeting—was urging Haldeman to “slow down” on preparations for San Diego as the host city “until the president has had an opportunity to give serious thought to San Diego.” Surely Mitchell would not have egged Reinecke on if Nixon had not yet settled on San Diego.
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Reinecke’s witless responses to the swirling charges would have occasioned little long-term concern but for the equally unwise intervention, at this juncture, of Kleindienst. Incensed by Anderson’s allegations, the attorney general designate demanded the Senate Judiciary Committee reopen its hearings into his nomination, a move that was, Kleindienst admitted years later, “rather impetuous.” “I did not want to live the rest of my life under a cloud of suspicion,” he said. He tracked Mitchell down at the White House and told him the plan. Mitchell counseled against it.
What did he need that for? Who cared what Jack Anderson wrote?
Kleindienst was adamant. “John, if the record isn’t made straight at once, this matter will make the Teapot Dome scandal look like a tea party.”
⁴⁷

What had, until Kleindienst’s display of haste, been a Washington hullabaloo, of scant interest to the electorate, was now far graver: a congressional hearing, a legal matter, the wood from which perjury indictments are carved. It was also an election year, with a Democratic Congress eager to embarrass the Republican president seeking reelection. The nightmare Mitchell had warned Nixon about—“you will have a Senate investigation…these bastards up there [will] burden us with it”—was now upon them.

Presided over by Judiciary Committee
chairman James O. Eastland, a conservative Mississippi Democrat and regular ally of Mitchell’s, the Kleindienst nomination hearings became the longest in American history, running twenty-two days and consuming 1,751 pages in testimony and exhibits. The committee heard sworn testimony from Mitchell, Kleindienst, and McLaren; Reinecke and Gillenwaters; Louie Nunn, Jack Anderson, and Brit Hume; Harold Geneen and a half dozen other ITT officials, and—under the most unusual circumstances—Dita Beard.

Democrats used the hearings to exhume the ITT settlement and assail the administration’s antitrust policy. The Nixon White House, under siege as never before, threw its full array of resources into the fight: lawyers, PR men, congressional arm twisters—even covert operatives. Indeed, the administration’s working group on the ITT controversy fielded a roster of future Watergate veterans: John Dean, Charles Colson, Robert Mardian, Richard Moore, E. Howard Hunt. The last, a former CIA officer hired by the White House to declassify sensitive documents and conduct covert operations, like the Ellsberg break-in, played a singular role in debriefing the affair’s central witness.

Distraught and teetering on the verge of mental collapse, Beard followed the orders of ITT executives and fled the capital. She boarded a United Airlines flight for Denver on March 2, just before the third Anderson column. An hour before touchdown, she told a stewardess she felt faint. The flight attendant returned with an ammonia inhaler, whereupon Beard, according to the plane’s passenger illness report, “started turning gray and blue around the mouth.” Within hours of landing, Beard checked into the Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital, where a doctor retained by the Judiciary Committee later determined she was suffering from “coronary artery disease with angina pectoris.”

Under orders from Colson aide Wally Johnson, Hunt flew to Denver to interview the elusive witness. Sporting an arresting wig and fake credentials acquired, like all his other tools of the trade, from old comrades at CIA, Hunt appeared at Beard’s bedside one night around 11:00 p.m. Initially “very suspicious” of Hunt, the sedated patient agreed to talk with him on her daughter’s assurances. Beard told Hunt she had fled the “hostile environment” of Washington because she felt there was “nobody she could trust.” On the prime question—
was the memo implicating Mitchell authentic or not?
—the stricken lobbyist yielded little of value. “She was quite sure that she had not written it,” Hunt later told the Senate Watergate committee, in previously unpublished testimony; but he also added that she “left it up in the air” and was responding “under heavy sedation.”
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With the aid of David Fleming, Beard’s ITT-paid attorney, and Robert F. Bennett, a shadowy power broker and CIA operative in Washington (later U.S. senator from Utah), a sworn statement was drawn up and issued in Beard’s name. In it she called the original memo a “forgery” and a “hoax.” “I did not prepare it and could not have,” Beard swore, “since to my knowledge, the assertions in it regarding the antitrust cases and former Attorney General Mitchell are untrue.” Beard also sharply challenged Brit Hume’s account of their talk in her kitchen on the night of February 24. “Who in their right mind would write something like this?” she claimed she told Hume. “This isn’t mine.” “I don’t care what you say,” she quoted Hume as replying, “I’m going to prove a connection between San Diego and the settlement, and I’m going to use you to prove it.” She remembered discussing the Kentucky Derby encounter, but added: “I had had several drinks. I was suffering intense chest pains at that time…I can in no way recall what I said to Mr. Hume.”