The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (43 page)

COURTESY NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

Standing in the Rose Garden at the White House on June 20, 1970, the attorney general addresses winners of an essay contest about the perils of drug abuse as wife Martha and daughter Marty look on.

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WASHINGTON POST
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Donald Rumsfeld, then the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, busts up HEW secretary Robert Finch (left), Martha Mitchell, and the attorney general, during a black-tie party in the Mitchells’ Watergate duplex, January 29, 1970.

After Ehrlichman sanctioned Liddy’s transfer to CRP, Dean arranged for Liddy to meet his new boss: Jeb Magruder, CRP’s campaign director until Mitchell could leave Justice and assume the reins. Young, slender, and handsome, his jet-black hair and sad brown eyes offset by smartly patterned shirts and ties, Magruder was a protégé of H. R. Haldeman, who had installed Magruder at CRP over Mitchell’s objections. Born on Staten Island, Magruder came from a financially comfortable family. Foundering at Williams College, he volunteered for the army and served as a guard along the Korean demilitarized zone. By 1963, he had attended IBM training school and earned a master’s in business administration from the University of Chicago. A romance with politics formed in 1962, with impressive Chicago ward work for a first-time congressional candidate named Donald Rumsfeld. After a stint in the Goldwater campaign, Magruder managed Southern California for Nixon in ’68. The following year, Haldeman brought him to Washington to streamline the White House’s sprawling communications apparatus. Magruder later wrote that he tried to get along with everyone he met, as a matter of instinct; his eagerness to please made him vulnerable to pressure.
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Liddy disliked Magruder even more than he did Dean. Magruder admitted he knew nothing about intelligence and balked at Liddy’s salary and title demands. “I knew that I had to resist him from the onset,” Liddy wrote later, “in what I knew would be a prolonged conflict.” The dispute over job terms required a decision from Mitchell. Accordingly, on November 24, 1971, John Dean escorted Liddy into the attorney general’s office for the first meeting between the two men. Mitchell wasted few words: Liddy could have the title and salary he wanted. To Liddy’s surprise, there was no discussion of intelligence, which, from his talks with Dean, Liddy understood to be his primary function. “I didn’t spend a hell of a lot of time with Liddy,” Mitchell recalled. “[I] left the matter to Dean.”
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After the meeting, Dean instructed Liddy to prepare a proposal for a comprehensive campaign intelligence plan that could be presented to Mitchell. Excited, Liddy shared the good news with his old partner in crime, E. Howard Hunt, and took up residence at CRP in December 1971.

It was to John Dean’s
everlasting regret, and the nation’s, that at his own moment of decision, he didn’t take Mitchell’s advice. When Dean came to the attorney general in July 1970 and said he had been offered the job of counsel to the president, Mitchell, in between puffs on his pipe, advised him not to take it. Dean was better off staying at Justice, Mitchell argued, where the young man had a bright future; but Dean, ambitious and status conscious, ignored this wise counsel and opted for the White House job.
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Now, at 11:00 a.m. on January 27, 1972, Dean once again found himself seated in one of the faded red leather chairs in the attorney general’s office, alongside Magruder and Liddy. The lawyer–cum–covert operator was finally going to present his master plan for a “first-class” campaign intelligence operation to Mitchell. Liddy strode into the attorney general’s office carrying an easel and, under his arm in a brown paper wrapper, a set of large, professionally printed charts. Mitchell lit his pipe and began gently rocking in his big black chair. After preliminary talk about campaign finance laws, Liddy summarized his qualifications for the covert mission at hand, the many experts he had consulted, and the tight security precautions surrounding the entire operation. Next, he distributed sheets of paper with dollar figures on them.

Then came the charts. There were half a dozen, all multicolored and prepared—in Liddy’s first breach of security—by Howard Hunt’s friends at CIA. Each chart was three feet tall and four feet long, “artistically composed,” as Mitchell later recalled, and bore the name of a precious stone or mineral. Each stone or mineral, in turn, comprised a component in the overall plan, which Liddy code-named Gemstone.
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First came Operation Diamond, aimed at neutralizing the unruly hordes of antiwar radicals expected to disrupt the ’72 convention. Liddy explained that the most effective riot-control techniques ever developed originated with the Texas Rangers, who, despite vastly inferior numbers, penetrated a given mob, “beat the hell out of” its leaders, then easily dispersed the stunned remainder. Indulging his fondness for all things Germanic, Liddy proposed a similar program for the ’72 convention, under which, as he put it, “special action groups”—a mordant reference to the Nazi
Einsatzgruppen
units that liquidated 1.5 million Jews—would kidnap and drug antiwar leaders and remove them to Mexico until the convention ended.

Liddy paused to extol the caliber of his agents, “professional killers who have accounted between them for twenty-two dead so far,” Liddy said, “including two hanged from a beam in a garage.” Mitchell gazed unblinkingly, puffed on his pipe, and posed his first interjection. “And where did you find men like that?” “I understand they’re members of organized crime,” Liddy said. “And how much will
their
services cost?” Mitchell asked. Liddy pointed to a hefty figure on the chart: “Like top professionals everywhere, sir, they don’t come cheap.” “Well,” Mitchell said dryly, returning to his pipe, “let’s not contribute any more than we have to to the coffers of organized crime.”
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Liddy sensed his pitch was not going over well. What’s more, he was getting no help from his
confreres
, Magruder and Dean, who stared motionless at Mitchell “like two rabbits in front of a cobra.” In slow succession, the charts came off the easel, Liddy explaining how each component fit into his overall plan. Ruby entailed the placement of spies in the Democratic contenders’ campaigns. Coal called for the covert funneling of cash to Shirley Chisholm, a black female congresswoman whose quest for the Democratic nomination stood to divide the party along racial and gender lines. Emerald outlined how Liddy could intercept airborne and wireless communications from the planes and buses of opposing candidates by using a “chase plane” outfitted with state-of-the-art electronics gear. Quartz, an explication of how the Soviet embassy intercepted telephone signals using microwave systems, proved nearly incomprehensible. Crystal envisioned the rental in Miami, where both parties were holding their conventions, of a luxury houseboat, from which Liddy’s men would monitor wiretaps and bugs. The bedroom of the houseboat, wired for sound, would also serve the purposes of Sapphire, wherein sophisticated call girls would seduce and debrief Democratic politicos. “Mitchell listened to that impassively, as did Dean,” Liddy later recalled. “Magruder, however, wore a look of eager interest.”

On it went. Opal’s points I through IV set aside funds for four illegal break-ins, in which the aforementioned wiretaps and bugs would be installed. As targets, Liddy specified the Washington campaign headquarters of Senators Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; the Democratic Party’s convention headquarters in Miami; and one target to be chosen by Mitchell, who kept silent when Liddy paused for suggestions. Next came Topaz, the illicit photography of documents; followed by Garnet, the clandestine recruitment of unappealing hippies to endorse opposition candidates; and Turquoise, a plot for Hunt’s Cuban mercenaries to sabotage the air-conditioning system at the Democrats’ convention. Two final charts, Brick and Gemstone, broke down the costs by mission and projected dates of expenditure.

When Liddy was finished, the room was silent. All power emanated from Mitchell, and it was to him the other three looked for direction. The attorney general was dumbfounded. “Mr. Liddy put on his performance,” he later testified, “and everybody just sat there with their mouths open.” What to say? Calmly, Mitchell repacked and relit his pipe, puffed a bit, then delivered one of his classic understatements: “Gordon, that’s not quite what I had in mind.” Contrary to later claims, Mitchell’s primary basis for objection to Liddy’s proposal was not its cost, but its criminality. As Magruder told the Senate Watergate committee, in previously unpublished testimony, Mitchell “indicated that [Liddy’s plan] was not acceptable both in its scope and its budget.” The attorney general, according to Magruder, stated “the type of activity discussed here” was “way out of line.” Likewise, Dean told the Senate that Mitchell had furtively winked at him, indicating Liddy’s proposal was “out of the question.”

Liddy was furious. Why the hell had he gone to all this trouble? He had operatives standing by, awaiting orders, on the basis of a million-dollar budget that—supposedly—had already been approved! As Liddy restacked the charts, preparing to retreat, red-faced and blood boiling, from Mitchell’s office, the attorney general piped up. “And Gordon?” he said. “Yes, sir?” “Burn those charts; do it personally.”
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One week later,
on February 4, 1972, at 4:00 p.m., the same cast of characters reassembled in the attorney general’s office. Dean arrived late, slipping into the room to find Mitchell, Magruder, and Liddy poring over sheets of paper that Liddy, having burned his charts, as ordered, distributed instead.

The revised Gemstone, Magruder later testified, was “less spectacular and therefore more acceptable.” Liddy had “eliminated most of the activities, particularly the kind of reprehensible activity…The call girl thing was out, the kidnapping was out. That just didn’t go over with Mr. Mitchell.” What remained, Magruder said, was “primarily oriented to the wiretapping and photographing of documents.”
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Contrary to Dean’s later assertions that he joined the February 4 meeting “very late,” he did not miss the bulk of it. Mitchell testified Dean arrived “shortly” after the session started; Magruder recalled Dean being present for “most” of it. When the counsel came in, Liddy had just finished explaining which precious stones and minerals he had chucked; his discussion of what remained
in
the plan Dean heard in full. Dean’s later testimony on what he heard became crucial, in view of Mitchell’s and Magruder’s sharply divergent recollections, and Liddy’s decision to withhold his account, the most reliable of all, until the publication of his autobiography,
Will
, in 1980.
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In testimony before the Senate Watergate committee in June 1973, Magruder asserted that he, Mitchell, and Dean “discussed possible targets” for wiretapping during this second meeting with Liddy. The first name that arose, Magruder claimed, was that of Lawrence F. O’Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a longtime Democratic operative and intimate of the Kennedys. Magruder said he shared with the others a rumor that the DNC was accepting kickbacks from convention vendors. This supposedly led to a discussion of Liddy and his men placing wiretaps inside the headquarters of the Democratic presidential nominee; inside Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel, where O’Brien was to stay during the convention; and inside DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex, where O’Brien kept his Washington office. Magruder testified that O’Brien made an especially attractive target because he was “very effective in his attacks…relating to the ITT case. At this time, that was the hot issue.”
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