The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (41 page)

With the jurors embroiled in screaming matches, the panel’s wealthiest and best-educated member, investment banker Andrew Choa, a late substitute for an ailing juror, encouraged them to skip ahead to the perjury counts, and to consider the witnesses’ credibility. “The overall perception of Mitchell by the jury was that he was a man of integrity,” Choa recalled two decades later. Soon, the jurors were asking for copies of the indictment and documentary evidence presented at trial. They asked Gagliardi to reread portions of the election laws and his instructions about what constituted conspiracy and perjury. Later—showing they were again proceeding meticulously through the indictment—the jurors asked for the testimony of Mitchell and Hofgren, and that of Sears on his efforts to enlist Mitchell in quashing the SEC subpoena against Vesco.
⁷⁴

Finally, at 12:50 on Sunday, April 28, jury foreman Kucharski sent Judge Gagliardi a note saying the verdict was in. “How do you find the defendant Mitchell on Count One?” asked Court Clerk James E. Matarese. “Not guilty,” Kucharski announced, provoking gasps in the courtroom. The process was repeated fourteen more times. Stans collapsed in nervous exhaustion and tears. Fleming bolted up and began to cry. Mitchell, “seemingly the coolest man in the courtroom,” told Fleming to “take it easy, you worked hard.”
⁷⁵

Holding court at an impromptu press conference, Mitchell lauded the jurors as “a cross-section of America” embodying the genius of the nation’s legal system. “If there is a place you can get justice, it is from the American people,” Mitchell waxed. “That’s why I have great faith in America, and why I love the American people.” Suddenly, a long-haired youth started shouting: “It is the fascist ruling class like you—” before marshals dragged him from the room. “It’s all right,” quipped an unfazed Mitchell. “He wasn’t on the jury.”
Do you think the verdict will affect your Watergate trial?
“You are off bounds with your question,” Mitchell growled.
Had the Nixon administration been exonerated by the verdict?
“I don’t believe the Nixon administration was involved.”
Do you know if President Nixon has been informed of the verdicts?
a female reporter asked. “Honey,” Mitchell smiled, “I guess you never covered the White House.”
⁷⁶

That evening, Suite 555 of the Essex House erupted in laughter, liquor, and song. “Within an hour, I’ll have my first drink,” Mitchell joked, downing his second Dewar’s. Soon he was launching into “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Someone turned on the local news, which led with the verdict and interviews with the jurors. The room fell silent. “Great people,” Mitchell shook his head. “Real Americans. Honest people.”

A reporter asked if Nixon had telephoned Mitchell to congratulate him. “I wouldn’t tell you that one way or the other,” Mitchell snapped. As revelers began filing out, a doctor, unknown to Mitchell, shook his hand. “If you ever need a psychiatrist,” the man said, “I’d be glad to help.” “If I ever need a psychiatrist,” Mitchell shot back, “I’ll plead guilty first.”
⁷⁷

GEMSTONE

Mitchell’s an honest man. He just wasn’t tending the shop—he had problems with his wife—these jackass kids and other fools around did this thing, and John should have stepped up to it. That’s what happened, in my opinion.

—Richard Nixon, 1973
¹

MITCHELL STOOD AT
the brink of ruin. From the Vesco scandal he had escaped with his freedom—but not for long. His indictment in the Watergate case was handed down the very day the jury was selected in the Vesco trial. Unable to practice law, his fortune drained, Mitchell now faced war on a second front, a
todeskampf
against the unlimited resources of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and the news media.

Vilified from coast to coast, his name and image demonized on every newsstand and broadcast outlet, the former attorney general was now a professional defendant, the highest-ranking in American history. Rumors abounded that regardless of the outcome in the Watergate trial, Mitchell would also be indicted in the ITT scandal and the milk fund case (an investigation into whether the Nixon administration illegally exchanged milk price supports for large campaign contributions from dairy lobbyists). Who could withstand such an onslaught? “One of these days,” Peter Fleming told Judge Gagliardi, “we are going to find that we reach a due process point where, by the sheer proliferation of charges, a government can force a man either to admit a guilt which he does not feel or to bankrupt himself…. The economics of this thing are overwhelming.”
²

How had it come to this? How had the nation’s top law enforcement official become Public Enemy Number One? Mitchell’s woes originated in the fact that his confederates, in and out of government, were too often beneath him. If Mitchell grasped this, he likely regarded it as part of the devil’s pact he made when, at Nixon’s insistence, he left Wall Street for the grimier councils of government. Indeed, the attorney general was surrounded by men who would never have made it into his office at Mudge Rose.

If there was one single moment where Mitchell could have changed the course of his life, intervened to avert his rendezvous with ignominy, it was shortly after eleven on the morning of January 27, 1972, and the arrival in his office at the Department of Justice of three men: John Wesley Dean III, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and George Gordon Liddy.

Trim and mustachioed, self-assured
to the point of cockiness, Gordon Liddy was general counsel to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President—CRP to insiders, CREEP to detractors. He cut an odd figure. A graduate, like Mitchell, of Fordham and its law school, and an ardent anticommunist, Liddy joined the army in 1957 and later served for five years as an FBI agent. By the mid-1960s, he was an assistant district attorney in Dutchess County, New York, where he led a celebrated raid on Timothy Leary’s LSD-drenched compound. He also pulled odd stunts, like firing a live pistol in a courtroom to impress a jury, and lost a bid for Congress. In 1969, GOP connections landed him a job in the Treasury Department. Two years later, he sought a transfer to the White House, but met resistance. For reasons never explained—perhaps the Fordham connection—Mitchell went to bat for him. At the White House, Liddy’s curious persona again set him apart. He harbored a weird fascination with Germany, and the Third Reich in particular, peppering his speech with Nazi-specific terms like
Einsatzgruppen
and arranging a White House screening of
Triumph of the Will
, the landmark Nazi propaganda film. “Adolf Hitler incarnate!” a colleague muttered.
³

In September 1971, along with E. Howard Hunt, Liddy conceived and supervised the break-in at the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. By year’s end, however, the Nixon White House was shifting focus from Ellsberg to the task of reelecting the president, and to attendant fears that antiwar radicals would disrupt the Republican convention. Liddy wanted to be near the action. Bud Krogh, an aide to John Ehrlichman, arranged a meeting between Liddy and John Dean.

Callow and slight of build, his “ferretlike” face framed by light blond hair that hung shaggily over his suit collar, Dean was hardly Liddy’s kind of man. But the youthful lawyer had an intriguing proposal: How did Liddy feel about coming over to CRP as general counsel and running a “first-class intelligence operation”? According to Liddy, he told Dean such an operation, supporting professional clandestine missions of an offensive and defensive nature, would cost a hell of a lot of money, and Dean shot back: “How’s a half a million for openers?” Liddy, impressed, told Dean that was “just about right”—for openers—but that when all was said and done, the figure would likely double. “No problem,” Dean replied.
⁴

COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED

COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED

COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED

Born in Detroit on September 5, 1913, the future attorney general moved with his family to Long Island when he was five years old. He excelled at many sports, especially golf and ice hockey, and industriously sold fishing bait and muskrat hides. At Jamaica High School, from which he graduated in 1930, Mitchell was a B+ student and president of his senior class—his only bid for elective office.

COURTESY JILL MITCHELL-REED

“There were three sons,” held a Mitchell family saying, “and they were guns.” Top: From left, James Robert Mitchell, John N. “Jack” Mitchell, Joseph “Scranton” Mitchell, and their parents, Joseph C. Mitchell and Margaret Agnes McMahon (partially obscured), circa 1930. Both Scranton and an older sister, Margaret, not pictured here, died young.