The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (4 page)

A resort town, Blue Point
came alive in the summertime, but winters were often severe. The water would freeze over and the town became, as Robert recalled, “a dead place.”
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To wring excitement from the deadness, the brothers rode ice floes down the Great South Bay, refusing to return home until wet clothing and freezing temperatures left them no alternative. As the seasons changed, they hunted ducks, rabbit, and geese with shotguns, and caught and ate snapper. An undated photograph, circa 1925, captures two skinny boys seated on a decaying wooden pier, bamboo fishing poles in hand, alone together on a deserted marshy inlet along the bay. Robert smiled rakishly at the camera; his older brother, Jack, the future attorney general, stared into the water below.
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The oldest and handsomest of the children, Scranton led his brothers in their outdoors exploits, and, like many an older brother, occasionally grew domineering in dealing with his siblings. Mitchell’s older sister, Margaret, was a good-looking, athletic woman who inherited her mother’s strong-willed nature. By the time she turned seventeen, a modeling dream led her to abandon high school for Manhattan, touching off a furious row with her father, Joseph. “I guess my father was probably too strict on her hours,” Robert remembered. “And she was a little headstrong, and she just took off on her own.” A persistent illness, later diagnosed as pneumonia, landed her in a Manhattan hospital. Within a few weeks, Margaret was gone, dead at twenty-three.
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In another ten years, Scranton, too, would be gone, victim of a heart attack he suffered when, during World War II, he responded to an air raid alert in his Long Island community.

Like Richard Nixon, then, John Mitchell had, by his early thirties, experienced the agony of seeing
two
siblings die young. Whether Nixon realized this is unknown, but it is unlikely that Mitchell, as Nixon’s campaign manager, somehow remained ignorant of so potent and widely disseminated an element of his candidate’s personal biography as the deaths of Harold and Arthur Nixon.

As a student at the
Blue Point School from 1919 to 1921, Mitchell, “smaller and slighter than most boys his age,” demonstrated both native intelligence and uncommon discipline, amassing, according to one assessment, “a handsome sprinkling of As and Bs.”
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As he went further in school, he developed a winning, if somewhat withheld, personality as well. At Jamaica High School, the future attorney general launched his only campaign for elective office, a successful bid for the presidency of his senior class. A B+ student and popular athlete, Mitchell was the handpicked candidate of a group of students already running the student organization. It was Mitchell’s first involvement with machine politics.
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Mitchell rapidly developed into a formidable athlete, excelling at several different sports. Unlike the young Richard Nixon—who persisted at football, a sport for which his diminutive frame left him ill-suited, and who accordingly absorbed “a vast amount of brutal punishment”—the young John Mitchell played to his strengths. In hockey, for example, he became adept at skating around bigger players and avoiding their brutal body checks. Ken Agnew, who practiced with Mitchell on Long Island’s ponds and played with him on the Jamaica High School team, later remembered Mitchell as intensely competitive. “He had a lot of drive and incentive,” Agnew told the
New York Post
in 1970. “He wanted to win. He played the game the way it should be played.”
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The Jamaica team won the city hockey championship thirteen years in a row, and the 1927 squad, on which Mitchell played, was rewarded with a visit the following February to the White House—Mitchell’s first—and an audience with President Calvin Coolidge.
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Mitchell was so skilled that he played (for “blade sharpening money,” he said, twenty-five dollars a Saturday) for the Jamaica Hawks in the Metropolitan League. Some league games were played at Madison Square Garden, giving rise to a myth—persisting even into Mitchell’s Associated Press obituary—that he skated for the New York Rangers.

At golf, too, Mitchell excelled, becoming captain of his high school team and tying for New York’s coveted Police School Athletic League title. When Mitchell went on to Fordham University, his captain was Malcolm Wilson—later the governor of New York—who remembered Mitchell giving golf lessons on the side for money.
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During a joint appearance with Mitchell on
The Dick Cavett Show
in 1970, White House communications director Herb Klein told the host, “John was once a professional golfer.” “Is that so?” Cavett asked. “Yes,” replied Mitchell, “but that was a long time ago. You can’t imagine what happens to your handicap when you’re in the Justice Department. You have other handicaps,” Mitchell said, to the audience’s laughter.
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As a young man, Mitchell showed no interest in two vices that later became his trademarks: alcohol and tobacco. Tales of Mitchell’s love affair with Dewar’s Scotch abound in the literature of the Nixon presidency; and so ever-present in Mitchell’s hands and mouth did tobacco pipes become that the Watergate conspirators, speaking in cryptic terms over the telephone, adopted “The Pipe” as their code name for Mitchell (“What a great cover name,” he snapped sarcastically, six months before his death).
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According to his daughter,
Jill Mitchell-Reed, when Mitchell first saw Elizabeth “Bette” Shine, a pretty member of the girl’s basketball team, on a bicycle one day in 1936, he proclaimed to his friend Doug Giorgio: “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.”
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The prophecy became a reality. The pair deferred their wedding until Mitchell earned his law degree. One photograph shows Bette—an entrancing blonde with a trim, athletic figure, sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a glamorous smile, Faye Dunaway before the fact—beaming in a new fur coat; on the reverse, she recorded in pencil that Mitchell bought her the coat after passing his bar exams in 1938.

Bette was “kooky, like
I Love Lucy
,” recalled Susie Morrison, Mitchell’s secretary from 1963 to 1971 and a close friend of the family. Once, Bette found herself locked out of her house; an hour later, she realized the doorknob was in her pocket. “Little things like that happened on a daily basis with Bette,” laughed Morrison. “She was cute, and I think down to earth…maybe a little flaky, but a lovable kind of flake. Not the kook Martha was…She wasn’t harsh, brassy. She was fun, but in a more subdued way.”
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On stationery bearing the gothic imprint of Fordham’s legal fraternity, Gamma Eta Gamma, Mitchell composed whimsical love letters to his future bride. “Bette darling,” he wrote on May 6, 1937, “your two letters…have broken the spell of inactive distemper caused by the lack of seeing One Miss Shine and lack of work to keep me from thinking about that One Miss Shine, the dream.” Three months later, in response to the girl’s demand for more letters, Mitchell indulged in playful, pun-ridden verse, then roguishly suggested he could more effectively demonstrate his love in person, where he could “make gestures.” “Night my love,” Mitchell signed off, withholding his name. “If you [are] thinking I’m signing this so that you have something on me, another guess.”
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After two years as
an undergraduate at Jesuit-run Fordham University in the Bronx, Mitchell entered the school’s nighttime law school program. By day he worked as an “office boy” at the law firm of Caldwell and Raymond, founded in 1887 by “Judge” James H. Caldwell (a title, Mitchell once quipped, recognized only in the court of public opinion). As new railroad lines were branching across America in the second half of the nineteenth century, the firm had developed a legal specialty refereeing disputes between the small western towns that had floated bond issues to pay for new lines and the railroad companies that often reneged on their bond debts.

Mitchell worked hard to make himself indispensable. Just before he graduated from law school, Judge Caldwell handed him a thankless task. “See if you can make anything out of this mess,” he told Mitchell.
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The “mess” was the paperwork supporting the bond program for one of the nation’s earliest federal public housing initiatives. The concept of the federal government supplying grants, low-interest loans, and other incentives for developers to build new housing units for low-income citizens was a product of the Great Depression, part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to combat the intertwined problems of rising unemployment and the spread of slums. A series of bold federal initiatives—including the passage by Congress, in 1933, of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the creation of the Public Works Administration and its Housing Division, and Congress’s enactment, four years later, of the United States Housing Act, with its accompanying Housing Authority—empowered local governmental and banking institutions across the country to construct more than 370 projects, housing some 120,000 families at a cost of $540 million ($7.2 billion in current figures).
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The conservative Caldwell regarded the Roosevelt initiative, whose first test was planned for Syracuse, New York, as a boondoggle. “Take this damn fool New Deal idea and work it out,” he dismissively told Mitchell. Soon after, a delegation from Syracuse arrived, seeking Mitchell’s counsel on how to develop a pilot program to finance low-income housing; although the rest of the conservative municipal bond bar greeted the endeavor “coolly,” the young lawyer from Long Island leapt at the challenge.
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Mitchell’s interest in housing, an ingredient in what one business associate later termed his “passion for cities,” likely stemmed from the fact that he had come of age during the Depression. Mitchell’s father and uncles, like most Americans at the time, struggled to get by. “The brothers were either all the way up or all the way down,” Jill Mitchell-Reed said. “I mean, they amassed fortunes and lost them.” Jack, the older brother of the attorney general’s father, had only recently alighted on Wall Street, trading stocks and bonds and making a killing—until Black Tuesday. “The Depression came along and then he went broke,” Mitchell’s brother Robert said, seventy years later. “[H]e lost everything. He was actually a pauper. And he had three young daughters from his second marriage and a wife to support. I know my father helped support him for several years…. He never really recovered.” Asked if the family history offered any prologue, or analogue, to Mitchell’s own fall in Watergate, Robert thought back to Black Tuesday, and mused: “[M]aybe John remembered the glory days of Uncle Jack…”
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Though susceptible to the allure of Wall Street, with its soaring potential and palpable peril, Mitchell also recognized the investment community was “pretty sour” on low-income-housing subsidies. Few financial analysts imagined the revenues generated, principally through rent payments, could ever match the sums paid out in start-up loans, a calculation that usually saddled low-income-housing bonds with exorbitantly high interest rates; after all, if the projects went south, who would repay the loans? Yet Mitchell was determined to make the concept work. The disarmingly simple idea he took back to Judge Caldwell—the tax-exempt municipal housing bond—later revolutionized public finance, and set Wall Street on fire. What if the federal housing authorities, while not legally bound to make good on loan defaults,
pledged their intention
to do so? And what if, as a good-faith measure, the agencies maintained verifiable reserves for just such a rainy day? “In other words, this was not a guarantee by the government, but they would
promise
to make annual contributions,” recalled William A. Madison, a colleague and law partner of Mitchell’s for nearly two decades. “It was a—sort of like a gimmick.”
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