The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (50 page)

Magruder later told prosecutors the evening session had chiefly been a discussion “about alternatives.” But he also claimed the talk turned to the subject of destroying documents. Notes taken by the prosecutors, previously unpublished, read: “Jeb said he better get rid of stuff and they concurred.” Later that night, Magruder took his Gemstone documents—Liddy’s proposals, the wiretap synopses prepared by Baldwin and heavily edited by McCord, the spurious photos of Democratic documents (purportedly taken near O’Brien’s file cabinets but set against a shag rug found only in the Howard Johnson’s motel)—and burned them in his home. He later wrote of sitting cross-legged before his fireplace, chuckling one last time over the “graphic details” that the wiretaps had captured about the personal lives of DNC staff members.
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In his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, Magruder shifted blame for the document destruction from himself (
Jeb said he better get rid of stuff and they concurred
) to the room at large: “It was agreed generally, and
I can’t get specific as to who said what at this meeting exactly
, but get rid of the files.” Magruder’s story changed still more dramatically when he retold it in
An American Life
. Now he suddenly remembered the scene with precision, how Dean had arrived a few minutes before himself, and the men, drinking freely, grew dour and self-pitying. Before leaving for a tennis date with Vice President Agnew, Magruder wrote, he asked Mitchell what should be done with the Gemstone file; Mitchell supposedly replied by saying maybe Magruder “ought to have a little fire” at his house that night.

The idea that he should “get rid of stuff” had been Magruder’s own, in his early talks with prosecutors; it became a “general” consensus when the witness testified before the Senate; and then, in Magruder’s book, the idea had become Mitchell’s.
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On the witness stand at
U.S. v. Mitchell
, Magruder stuck with this story, adding only the detail that he reported back to Mitchell the following morning that the deed had been done. Under cross-examination by Plato Cacheris, however, Magruder was forced to admit that the first time he recalled Mitchell ending the June 19 meeting with the “little fire” suggestion was in December 1973, during an office interview with WSPF prosecutor Jill Volner. In all previous forums, the witness agreed—his confession to federal prosecutors in April 1973, his grand jury appearance in May 1973, and his Senate testimony in June 1973—Magruder had
never once
mentioned Mitchell ordering the destruction of documents. Moreover, Magruder admitted he had already made plans to destroy all incriminating documents—with the ubiquitous Gordon Strachan—on the morning of June 19, some seven hours before the meeting in Mitchell’s apartment.
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The indictment in
U.S. v. Mitchell
listed the order to destroy the Gemstone documents as the fifth “overt act” in the Watergate cover-up conspiracy, the third ascribed to Mitchell. The former attorney general, of course, always denied the charge: “There was no suggestion by me or anybody else at that time that Mr. Magruder would actually, in June, start a fire in his fireplace.” Most other witnesses agreed. Even John Dean, who was present for the entirety of Magruder’s visit to the Mitchell apartment and whose own testimony would, in time, create equal trouble for the former attorney general, never heard the damning order that Magruder attributed to Mitchell. Nor did Mardian.

But on this point, LaRue, for once, supported Magruder’s version of events, and Mitchell was accordingly convicted of ordering the destruction of evidence. The decision to testify against Mitchell was not one LaRue arrived at lightly; the strain of betrayal, of bearing false witness, pained him like none of Mitchell’s other protégés. “LaRue broke down and cried like a baby yesterday,” Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen reported to Nixon on April 17, 1973, as the tapes rolled, after LaRue’s first appearance before the grand jury. “He was not so bad on admitting the obstruction of justice and subornation. Resigned, said he’d probably plead…but when it came to testifying about John Mitchell he just broke down and started to cry. It is a terrible thing.”
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The day after that
session at Mitchell’s Watergate apartment, Fred LaRue and Bob Mardian finally did what Dean had been smart enough to do a day earlier: Pick Gordon Liddy’s brain.
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The setting was LaRue’s apartment at Watergate West. “My recollection is pretty vivid,” Mardian later testified. “The first thing [Liddy] asked Mr. LaRue was whether or not he had a radio.” Liddy cranked up the volume and motioned Mardian to sit beside the radio. “It is not that I don’t trust you,” Liddy apologized over the din, “but this conversation cannot be recorded.” Next Liddy insisted Mardian agree they were covered by attorney-client privilege. Mardian agreed, but asserted a right to report everything to Mitchell, manager of the campaign that employed Mardian as counsel; Liddy consented.

Now Liddy unfurled his astounding story for the first time, telling the wide-eyed LaRue and Mardian all about his partnership with Howard Hunt: the hiring of the Cubans, with their CIA and Bay of Pigs backgrounds; the earlier break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist; Hunt’s bedside visit to Dita Beard, the ITT witness; and the three-week wiretapping operation at DNC. Since the arrests, Liddy said, he had shredded his files and believed the burglars themselves would keep mum; he also volunteered, as he had to Dean, to be told “what corner to stand on and he was ready to be assassinated.” That evening, LaRue and Mardian briefed Mitchell on the wild contents of their debriefing of Liddy. Asked Mitchell’s reaction, Mardian testified the former attorney general “appeared to be as sincerely shocked as I was when I got this information.”
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Here Mitchell approached a great fork in his life’s road. He knew now, for the first time, the full range of the Plumbers’ activities in the Nixon White House, the dark portfolio of cloak-and-dagger ventures he later pointedly dubbed “the White House horrors.” And it was here the former attorney general, absorbing this information, made his fateful decision to withhold what he knew from his client, the president of the United States. “To this day, I believe that I was right in not involving the president,” Mitchell told the Senate, calling the horrors “a great deal more damaging” than Watergate.

Watergate was already out. Watergate was the issue. It was the subject of a suit by the Democratic National Committee. It was constantly in the newspapers. The White House horror stories were not out. They were not under discussion. And these were the things that would have more impact upon the election, in my opinion, than the Watergate matter.

Duly informed, Nixon would have “lowered the boom” on the guilty, a move Mitchell argued would have cost the ’72 election. “I still believe that the most important thing to this country was the reelection of Richard Nixon,” Mitchell testified, “and I was not about to countenance anything that would stand in the way of that reelection.”
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Nixon, of course, knew far more about the Plumbers than Mitchell did. Nixon was also privately willing, as his tapes later made painfully clear, to entertain dark thoughts about his dear friend, Mitchell, and his role in Watergate. As his White House burned, Nixon returned frequently, both in his mind and aloud, to The Question—
Did Mitchell do it?
—and came, over time, to believe the worst. Nixon’s first known recorded conversation about Watergate was a late afternoon talk with Haldeman on June 20, 1972.

NIXON:
Have you gotten any further word on that Mitchell operation?

HALDEMAN:
No, I don’t think he did [know].

NIXON:
I think he was surprised.
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That night, Nixon and Mitchell held their only known talk about the substance of Watergate. Their brief telephone call, initiated by the president, was not taped; but into his beloved DictaBelt machine Nixon later recorded his recollection of the exchange. The president said he “tried to cheer [Mitchell] up a bit” he thought the former attorney general sounded “completely tired and worn out.” Mitchell said he was “terribly chagrined that the activities of anybody attached to his committee should have been handled in such a manner” and expressed regret he had “not policed all the people more effectively in his own organization.” There was no talk of complicity: Nixon couldn’t bring himself to ask, and Mitchell wrongly presumed his innocence was assumed.
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Three days later, on June 23, 1972, unbeknownst to Mitchell, the president, seated at his Oval Office desk, enthusiastically approved a proposal—spelled out by Haldeman but conceived by John Dean, along with the false claim that Mitchell “concurred” in it—calling for the White House to apply pressure to the CIA to compel the spy agency to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation on national security grounds. “All right, fine, I understand it all,” Nixon sighed after giving the order. “We won’t second-guess Mitchell and the rest.” Prosecutors later dubbed the tape of this damning conversation the “smoking gun” its disclosure, in August 1974, triggered Nixon’s resignation three days later.
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On Saturday, June 24, 1972,
one week after the arrests, Mitchell arrived at his law office to find “a hell of a knock-down drag-out donnybrook” under way between Jeb Magruder and Hugh Sloan. At issue was the exact sum Sloan had disbursed to Gordon Liddy prior to June 17. Magruder wanted a figure he could feed the grand jury; Sloan wasn’t talking. “When the going gets tough,” Mitchell famously sneered, “the tough get going.” Mitchell later claimed he was not suborning perjury, only consoling Sloan, who seemed “pretty low.”
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Mardian wandered in and clapped Sloan on the back. Then, after Sloan and Magruder skulked out, Dean entered; later LaRue joined them. According to the special prosecutors, the first of several plans to raise “hush money” for the burglars was conceived at this meeting, with Mitchell and Mardian supposedly instructing Dean to petition the Central Intelligence Agency to provide the arrested men with “covert funds.” Of this, too, the seventh “overt act” in his indictment, Mitchell was convicted. On the hush-money charges, Mitchell’s chief accuser was not Magruder but the far smarter Dean, who cleverly portrayed himself to the prosecutors, the press, and the public as a mere messenger between two sets of amoral masters: Haldeman and Ehrlichman at the White House, and Mitchell, Mardian, and LaRue at CRP. In time the prosecutors, at least, saw through Dean’s ruse—but still built their case on his deeply flawed testimony.

The first time the idea of payments to the burglars had been broached with Mitchell was on June 21, when Mardian and LaRue briefed the former attorney general on their interrogation of Liddy. Mitchell had immediately rejected the idea of CRP providing any funds, Mardian said. Now, three days later, in Mitchell’s law office, Dean testified, Mitchell “suggested that the CIA might be of assistance because these people were obviously CIA operatives, or had been at some point in time, [and] might compromise the CIA.”

Both Mardian and Mitchell denied this. Dean, moreover, needed no nudging to view CIA as a potential savior. It had been Dean’s idea the day before, as captured on the “smoking gun” tape, to try to get CIA to run interference with the FBI, a bold gambit that Dean also knew had failed. If the Agency was unwilling to force an end to the FBI probe by applying political pressure from the top down, perhaps Langley would be more comfortable resolving the matter from the bottom up, silencing the burglars with untraceable cash? It was a logical progression of thought, but one for which Dean, naturally, never took credit, instead casting Mitchell and Mardian as its authors.
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That week the calculating White House counsel met three times with a top CIA official to request covert cash, to no avail. All three times, the Agency’s deputy director, taken aback at how the young lawyer “kept pressing” the issue, turned him down cold. “He was almost pleadingly asking me for some theory, for something that would help him out in this,” the official, Vernon Walters, later told the House Armed Services Committee. Dean left “looking glum.” A House intelligence subcommittee that investigated the Dean-Walters meetings later concluded it was “not clear…whether other top White House aides were aware of Dean’s activities.”
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