The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (44 page)

Magruder’s testimony was demonstrably false. Although Larry O’Brien did effectively exploit the “hot issue” of ITT, that scandal did not erupt until Jack Anderson first broke the explosive antitrust allegations in his column on February 29, 1972—twenty-five days after the February 4 meeting. Equally false was Magruder’s claim that Mitchell, at the February 4 session, ordered Liddy to explore the feasibility of cracking the safe of a Las Vegas newspaper editor—a subject only Magruder, in vacillating testimony, remembered arising. Incredibly, in its final report, the Senate Watergate committee failed even to mention Mitchell’s denial that any targets were discussed.
¹⁴

John Dean, granted immunity by the Senate Watergate committee, evidently struggled with his testimony on this question of whether specific targets were discussed. “When I got there,” Dean said in executive session testimony before the Senate, previously unpublished, “they were talking about the same sort of thing [as in the first meeting], but [with] more specific focus into the electronic surveillance area; and that is the first time I heard about Mr. Larry O’Brien and the Fontainebleau Hotel.” Several days later, testifying on live television, Dean changed his story, saying he could not recall “for certain” whether targets were discussed during the first or second meeting in Mitchell’s office. Thus on the one hand, Dean testified that when he entered the February 4 session, the talk had turned to “electronic surveillance” of O’Brien and the Fontainebleau; yet when committee Democrats sought to nail down that O’Brien and the Fontainebleau were discussed as “targets,” Dean grew vague, saying there “may have been something as to potential targets.” Later he returned to certainty, saying flatly of targets: “None were named.” By the fall of 1974, when he spent nine days on the stand in
U.S. v. Mitchell
, Dean had apparently overcome the internal conflicts he exhibited before the Senate. Recounting the February 4 meeting in response to questions from chief Watergate prosecutor James F. Neal, Dean said that within a “few moments” of his entrance into the attorney general’s office, the others began “talking about targets, possible targets of electronic surveillance.”
¹⁵

Dean always maintained that he abruptly terminated the February 4 meeting because he wanted to spare the attorney general further discomfort. In his 1976 memoir,
Blind Ambition
, Dean recalled how he cleared his throat and announced to the assembled that he didn’t think this kind of conversation should take place in the office of the attorney general, a pronouncement that had the effect of clearing the room. Yet both Mitchell and Magruder recalled that it was the objections of Mitchell, not Dean, that brought the meeting to a halt, and that Dean had simply chimed in.
¹⁶

Finally, there was Gordon Liddy’s account, which unflinching devotion to the soldier’s code of honor kept him from sharing with investigators during the endless hearings and trials of the seventies, at the personal cost of serving Watergate’s longest prison sentence: four years. Liddy’s recollection of the February 4 meeting did not always accord with Mitchell’s; but on the major points in dispute, he supported Mitchell. It was the attorney general, Liddy recalled, who effectively ended the meeting, saying he would think about Liddy’s proposals and get back to him. Only then, according to Liddy, did Dean offer his famous objection, spoken not to the room at large, as Dean claimed, but to Mitchell directly, and not as a matter of moral propriety, but one of plausible deniability: “Sir, I don’t think a decision of this kind should come from the attorney general’s office. I think he should get it from somewhere else—completely unofficial channels.” Most crucially, Liddy’s memoir made no mention of wiretap or burglary targets having been discussed during the February 4 meeting. “The Watergate was never, ever,
ever
mentioned at any of those meetings,” Liddy stated emphatically.
¹⁷

Had Liddy forsaken the code of
omertà
, the testimony of Dean and Magruder against Mitchell would have crumbled. As it was, the tales told by Mitchell’s two chief accusers brimmed with internal illogic and frequently contradicted one another; but in the fevered climate of Watergate, none of that seemed to matter. On one overarching point, however, the four men present at the creation of the great scandal all agreed: Gordon Liddy left the attorney general’s office on February 4, 1972, without approval of his intelligence plan, and without any orders to wiretap DNC headquarters at the Watergate.

Persistence was one of
Gordon Liddy’s strong points; patience was not. In the weeks that followed the February 4 meeting, he relentlessly hounded Magruder to secure approval of Gemstone from John Mitchell. The attorney general had announced his resignation on February 15, 1972, and left Justice for CRP on March 1. To keep their chops sharp in the meantime, Liddy and Hunt performed an odd assortment of investigative jobs, including an examination of Jack Anderson’s finances and a review of the best options for murdering the columnist, none of which panned out. Hunt also flew to Denver to conduct his bizarre interview of Dita Beard, the ITT witness.

Anxious to move forward on his master plan, Liddy began looking to others in the Nixon orbit who might help him get Gemstone up and running. In this he knew John Dean would be of limited value. After the February 4 meeting, the White House counsel had airily told Liddy they should never again discuss such subjects, and Liddy had said he understood. In the months that followed, however, Dean asked Liddy, in writing, to develop “more info” on the Democratic convention kickback scheme; intervened with Magruder when the latter moved, unsuccessfully, to get Liddy fired (“Jeb, you don’t want to let your personal feelings get in the way of an important operation,” Dean said); and worked with the covert operator, newly released tapes suggest, well into the 1972 primary season.
¹⁸

If Dean was careful to keep his support for Liddy on the down low, no such qualms afflicted Charles Colson. The special counsel to the president was a rising star in the Nixon White House—much to Mitchell’s consternation. A former Marine Corps captain and lawyer, Colson possessed a sharp mind and even sharper instincts for the jugular. He read
Six Crises
, President Nixon’s 1962 memoir, fourteen times, and said famously he would walk over his own grandmother to reelect Richard Nixon. In the White House, Colson earned a reputation as an “evil genius,” Nixon’s “hatchet man,” a canny and ruthless political operator whose official function was to build grassroots, union, and special interest support, but whose duties soon grew to include a wide range of sub rosa, and sometimes illegal, projects. More than any other individual, Colson was the moving force behind the White House “enemies list.” He brought Howard Hunt on board, supervising his efforts to dredge up derogatory information about Daniel Ellsberg and forge State Department cables implicating President Kennedy in the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam. It was Colson whom Haldeman cited when he told the president, in a taped Oval Office conversation in May 1971, of arrangements having been made for Teamster “murderers” to maim antiwar protesters. All of this appalled the attorney general. Asked once to identify Colson’s constituency, Mitchell snapped: “The president’s worst instincts.” When Haldeman contended that Colson wouldn’t have taken part in a dirty trick against Ted Kennedy, Mitchell laughed derisively and said: “Colson did nothing
but
that kind of thing.” To Len Garment, Mitchell most bluntly expressed his view: “That fucking Colson is going to kill us all.”
¹⁹

Liddy didn’t see Colson that way. He knew from Hunt that Colson had a taste for the covert, and suspected the former marine might make a better rabbi than either Dean, who feared overt association with Liddy, or Magruder, who feared Liddy himself. Accordingly, on March 8, 1972, his beloved Gemstone having languished for more than a month without gaining Mitchell’s approval, Liddy, escorted by Hunt, paid a visit to Colson’s office. It was late in the afternoon, and Hunt, happy to let Liddy cultivate his own relationship with Colson, sat on a couch at the far end of the office, smoking his pipe and reading a magazine. “We are now over at the [reelection] committee working,” Liddy told Colson, “and we are anxious to get started, but can’t find anyone who can make a decision or give us a green light.”
²⁰

Liddy did not spell out the specifics of Gemstone; there was no need. Colson knew exactly what kind of program Liddy and Hunt had in mind. Now, with Liddy before him, Colson decided to take action himself. He picked up the phone, called Magruder, and laid into the younger, more timid man. “Jeb, these guys are in my office and they have got some plan they want to present, and it is time to fish or cut bait,” Colson recalled telling Magruder. “What’s the matter with you guys over there? You can never decide anything.” Magruder remembered the call slightly differently, telling the Senate: “Colson called me one evening and asked, in a sense, would we get off the stick and get the budget approved for Mr. Liddy’s plans, that we needed information,
particularly on Mr. O’Brien
.”
²¹

Yet Colson’s importuning did not prompt Magruder to approve Gemstone himself; that was a greater risk than the CRP deputy was willing to accept. As he later told the Senate Watergate committee, “I certainly was aware of the legality, or illegality” of Liddy’s plan. But Colson’s urgings did have an effect: They prodded Magruder to make one last stab at getting Gemstone approved by John Mitchell.
²²

The former attorney general
was worn out. The month of March 1972, his first in the private sector in three years, should have been consumed with congratulatory parties and overdue calls to old chums in New York. Instead, Mitchell spent it grappling with the ITT scandal, a labyrinth of antitrust meetings and memoranda. His testimony at the Kleindienst confirmation hearings had been a testy, nerve-racking affair, fraught with the perils of perjury. Worst of all, he had to contend with Martha Mitchell, whom, unlike his other problems, he had no prospect of controlling.

So as March came to a close, Mitchell took his high-strung wife and their ten-year-old daughter to Key Biscayne, Florida, where they stayed in a villa known as the Florida House, owned by the president’s close friend, Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, and located just a few doors down from where the president himself vacationed. The relaxed climate there offered Mitchell some peace and quiet, a chance to catch up on the many aspects of the reelection campaign that awaited his decision. At 4:00 p.m. on March 30, he sat down to review twenty-nine decision memos compiled by Magruder and the third man present for their meeting, Fred Cheney LaRue.

Bald, sinewy, steely-eyed, and tight-lipped, the forty-four-year-old LaRue had cut his teeth enlarging his Mississippi family’s formidable oil and gas fortune; however, his life was touched by tragedy when he killed his own father in a hunting accident. LaRue rebounded and entered politics, working the South for Goldwater; four years later, Mitchell deputized him to lure white voters away from George Wallace’s segregationist flock. Impressed with LaRue’s savvy and discretion—attributes Mitchell prized above all others—the attorney general brought the taciturn millionaire to Washington, and installed him in the White House for the token salary of a dollar a year. “My official title was special consultant to the president,” LaRue recalled years later. “I basically reported to no one.” In meetings, he said nothing; but others around the table recognized that he was, as Ehrlichman put it, “Mitchell’s eyes and ears.” When Mitchell sent a photograph of himself to LaRue, it was inscribed: “To the best friend the president and I ever had.”
²³

Now, in Key Biscayne, LaRue sat alongside Magruder as Mitchell methodically disposed of the matters put to him, the minutia of direct mail and advertising campaigns, slogans and state chairmen. Finally, Magruder brought up an old subject: Gemstone. Of what happened next, all three men later offered sharply conflicting accounts—Magruder alone, in the years that followed, contradicted his own version of events multiple times on multiple points—with devastating consequences for the Nixon presidency and the nation.