The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (5 page)

After researching constitutions and bylaws in states where bonds were to be issued, Mitchell would draft legislation for the states’ legislatures to enact, and, upon that foundation, issue his firm’s legal opinion on the validity and tax-exempt nature of those bonds. Francis X. Maloney, another longtime law partner, agreed the “requisition agreements” Mitchell designed did not bind the federal government to backstop locally issued bonds, but served nevertheless to secure them, to Wall Street’s satisfaction, with the force of the federal government. “[W]hen the bonds were issued,” Maloney explained, “you knew damn well that they were going to get paid, and of course, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s felt that way because they rated the bonds Triple-A.”
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“They sold like hotcakes,” Mitchell himself recalled, with other municipalities rushing to duplicate Syracuse’s success. Even before graduating from law school, Mitchell was drawing new clients to the firm on the strength of his name. On a straight commission basis, he later remembered, he was “making more money than most partners on Wall Street”—more, in fact, than the astonished partners at Caldwell and Raymond. As Mitchell told a reporter years later, the firm soon recognized, after Judge Caldwell’s death, that it “became cheaper to make me a partner.”
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He had created a money machine—but it was more than that. Jill remembered her father working away at a card table at home on weekends. The little girl learned what municipal bonds were and did through small demonstrations by her bemused, pipe-smoking father. On drives to Manhattan, they would pass a shantytown in Manhasset, where the less fortunate—bums then, the homeless today—took shelter in crates and discarded refrigerator boxes. “No water, no nothing,” Jill recalled. “And I can always remember how sad I felt for those people, particularly with the naïveté and innocence of young children: Someone should give them a home. That was my solution.” One day, they drove past the same spot to find the shantytown replaced by a gleaming public housing project. “And that’s how I understood what municipal bonds did when I was very, very young: They built houses so that people like that could live in houses.”

I can remember him showing them to me, and he was very proud…“You see, now the people have a home and everything. They cleaned it up, brought in the bulldozers, cleaned it up, and put grass on it.” And it’s a beautiful place still today.

On another occasion, Jill remembered asking her father what he was working on, and him peering up from the card table to say he was helping a small town acquire a fire engine. “This is not what we usually do,” he chuckled, returning to his papers. With a child’s naïve indignation, Jill replied that it was terrible for someone to make money if a town needed a fire engine. Her father “took his pipe out of his mouth, and said, ‘We’re not making money off of this one,’ or something like that. And I know he was particularly proud of doing things like that.” A decade later, Mitchell’s stepson witnessed the same passion. “He thought as a lawyer all the time, not just when he was in the office,” said Jay Jennings. “He was in love with what he did…. It wasn’t just writing bonds…. There were beneficial public outcomes that affected people’s lives.”
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These were good years
for John Mitchell. He was in his early thirties, married to his high school sweetheart, father of a healthy baby daughter, living in suburban Long Island with his parents close by, a partner in a prestigious Manhattan law firm with money, as he put it, “tumbling in.” Less than a year after his admission to the bar, he was helping to draft the federal Housing Act of 1939. Already a nationally renowned expert in housing finance issues, Mitchell, a Scotch-Irish kid from the South Shore, had catapulted himself in a phenomenally short time into the top tier of the municipal bond bar, a notoriously stodgy bastion of old boys’ school attitude.

On May 4, 1942, the
Daily Bond Buyer
heralded the young man’s arrival: “Caldwell and Raymond, Esqs., of New York City, announce the change of the firm name to Caldwell Marshall Trimble and Mitchell…. Partners in the firm are Charles C. Marshall, John T. Trimble, and John N. Mitchell.” Not surprisingly, the hotshot lawyer came to exhibit a sense of self-confidence that in some eyes “verged on arrogance.” “He is a very hard-nosed guy,” said one former New York State official who dealt frequently with Mitchell. “And like all bond lawyers he is three steps above the archangels.”
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MORAL OBLIGATIONS

Through all his years in bonds, no one knew what Mitchell’s politics were or, indeed, whether he had any. One old associate has said that in thousands of conversations with Mitchell he couldn’t recall a single mention of a political position or preference.

—New York Post,
1973
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ON NOVEMBER 12, 1988,
as the U.S. Navy Band played the Navy Hymn at Arlington National Cemetery, six white horses clip-clopped slowly forward, tugging a caisson that bore a bronze coffin, draped by the American flag, inside of which lay the body of the former attorney general. Four days earlier, he had succumbed to a massive heart attack. When the caisson came to rest, seven sailors fired three volleys. A bugler played taps. Because of his naval service—but more likely in deference to his cabinet rank, his Watergate convictions, here only, set mercifully aside—John Mitchell was interred in storied Section 7-A, hallowed ground just downhill from the Tomb of the Unknowns, the final resting place for the likes of former heavyweight champion Joe Louis; Lee Marvin, the combat veteran and tough-guy actor; and Air Force colonel Stuart Roosa, pilot of the command ship on Apollo 14’s mission to the moon.

Delivering the eulogy was Richard A. Moore, a lifelong friend who first met Mitchell on a high school hockey rink in 1930, later served as his consigliere at Justice, then followed him to the witness chair at the Senate Watergate hearings.
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Moore told the mourners: “You all know, of course, that [Mitchell] served in the Navy in World War II.”

But the only thing that most people know about his war record is that John F. Kennedy served under him. I don’t know whether John was annoyed or pleased about that—probably a little of both; [but it was] because John never talked about it. I knew he had served in combat in the Pacific but I never knew until yesterday that he received the Navy’s treasured award for gallantry in combat—the Silver Star. Nor did I know that he had been twice wounded, receiving two Purple Hearts.

Amazing tales, but—as with the childhood fires—wholly untrue. The JFK story first surfaced in a September 1968
New York Times Magazine
article in which Richard Reeves, observing Mitchell’s “intelligent, dignified…and unexciting” demeanor, found it “hard to believe that Mitchell commanded squadrons of PT boats during World War II.” When Reeves asked about Kennedy, the most famous PT boater, Mitchell replied: “I hardly knew him. He was just one of the dozens of junior officers I had to deal with every day.” The
New York Daily News
recycled these remarks two months later, followed by Milton Viorst in the
Times Magazine
the following August.
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In fact, there is no evidence Mitchell ever encountered, let alone commanded, Kennedy or his unit. Mitchell’s squadron, “Ron” 37, was not commissioned until March 1944—seven months after the Japanese destroyer
Amagiri
had already sunk Kennedy’s PT 109. According to Alyce N. Guthrie, executive director of a Memphis-based company that operates a PT boat archives and museum: “The idea that Mitchell served with Kennedy may have come from the fact there was another Mitchell who served under JFK on PT 59. From reading various clippings it looks like an error could have been made in linking the two, an error which Mitchell could have let be perpetuated.”
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And what of the medals—the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts? Asked once by an acquaintance of what he was proudest, Mitchell cited his war injuries. “When you spill blood for America,” he said, “that’s the highest sacrifice you can make.” Pressed on the nature of his wounds, Mitchell replied tersely: “When I go to the beach, I wear long pants.” Jill Mitchell-Reed once asked her father about a scar on his leg; he said it came from a Japanese machine gun. The medals and citations are long gone; according to numerous accounts, Martha Mitchell, suffering a psychotic fit in 1974, set them on fire. Yet available Navy records show no evidence Mitchell was ever decorated at all.
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Ensign “J. N. Mitchell” reported
for duty at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on June 14, 1944. Years later, he would tell an interviewer the navy wanted him to do legal work, but he refused, insisting on a combat role. That July, Mitchell and the crew of PT boat 536, commanded by Lieutenant Thomas R. Wardell of Phoenix, began leaving New York for frequent, twelve-hour trips to the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Camp at Melville, Rhode Island. There the men received extensive training in the firing of small arms, antiaircraft guns, mortar rounds, underwater depth charges, and torpedoes. They were also schooled in radar tracking, night navigation, and covert troop deployments.

As the second in command of PT boat 536, Mitchell was required to record and sign, in his own hand, the daily log of the vessel’s operations and movements. These logs show he spent the summer and fall of 1944 navigating the shores of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, overseeing repairs, conducting simulated attacks, and ferrying around superior officers. A monthlong stay at Tulagi Harbor reportedly included pleasantries with a man he never saw again, but who would later cause him considerable grief: E. Howard Hunt, then with the Office of Strategic Services.
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The day after Christmas, Ron 37 launched its first offensive operation. Allied planes bombed and strafed coastal Japanese installations along Bougainville Island for fifteen minutes; then the PT boats, stationed 200 yards offshore, spent the next eight minutes firing 37,000 rounds at the enemy. If Mitchell’s logs offer the best evidence of his military service, his life was never in danger; however, he likely saw many Japanese soldiers shot and killed, and may even have killed some himself. Over ten days in February 1945, Mitchell’s boat took part in several more strikes at “enemy bivouac and supply areas” in the Solomons. His commander later testified to murky theater conditions and significant enemy casualties.

After these operations, Mitchell’s navy tenure was uneventful. On February 7, he was promoted from ensign to lieutenant junior-grade, two weeks before his boat arrived at Espiritu Santo in New Hebrides. There, on April 18, he was named commander of his own boat, PT 541, also part of Ron 37. The next two months saw intensive training for the expected invasion of mainland Japan. But after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, combat in the Pacific was finished. By November, with the war over, Lieutenant Mitchell was relieved, reassigned, and sent home to New York.
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If much of Mitchell’s
war record seems exaggerated, even fabricated—as with the Kennedy myth, the unverifiable injuries and decorations, and numerous other tall tales—the personal portrait of Mitchell as a young man of thirty, developed in interviews with half a dozen World War II veterans who served with him, proves equally conflicted.

Some of the men, or their descendants, told admiring tales of a benevolent lawyer-statesman who loaned money to broke sailors on shore leave, freely shared his liquor, and casually continued advising law clients back home. Russell Addeo, a mechanic aboard PT 536, remembered a “hell of a nice fellow” who’d always “rather be with the enlisted people than the officers.” Yet radioman Adam Mancino, with whom Mitchell was said once nearly to have come to blows, recalled an “aloof” elitist who “wouldn’t even stick his head in the crew’s quarters.” The sharpest words came from Lieutenant Wardell, the one man on the boat who outranked Mitchell. “The crew hated his guts…. He was an arrogant son of a bitch…. I got along with him because I had to, but I really didn’t like him…. Everybody thought he was a son of a bitch, that’s about the short of it.”

Other veterans disputed Wardell’s harsh memory. Yet all except Wardell and Mancino, the most hardened in their views, seemed to agree with Addeo, the mechanic, who confessed: “I can’t visualize him doing what they claim when he was attorney general. He wasn’t that kind of person.”
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While Mitchell was away
at sea, Caldwell Marshall Trimble and Mitchell hit hard times. The war had largely frozen municipal bond sales, and Trimble was the only partner still working. Then, as staff attorney Bill Madison recalled, “Mitchell came back—and
voom!
The firm took off.”
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The postwar ad pages of the
Daily Bond Buyer
show Mitchell picked up right where he had left off. In 1949, the federal housing laws were overhauled, extending low-income initiatives and plunging the federal government into a new era of urban renewal. Mitchell recalled spending “a great deal of my time helping to draft those pieces of legislation and also to perfect their financial documents.”
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