The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (52 page)

The president, meanwhile, wrestled
with doubts about the complicity of his old friend, and whether his old friend’s batty wife could ever be kept quiet. Perched in his “hideaway” quarters in the Old Executive Office Building on June 26—the day Dean held the first of his secret meetings with General Walters—Nixon plotted with Haldeman about how to ease the campaign manager out of the campaign. Media coverage of Mrs. Mitchell’s meltdown in California was “blowing now…getting pretty big,” Nixon fretted. “Well, yeah,” Haldeman replied, “this stuff about throwing her on the bed and sticking a needle in her behind…” The chief of staff assured his boss they were “nowhere near” such a point, but it was possible—
possible
—Martha’s situation could raise “potential problems on the other thing, Watergate.”

“You could use this as a basis for Mitchell pulling out,” Haldeman proposed. At this early stage, however, Nixon, secure in the power and trappings of the presidency, viewed so naked a sacrifice of his former law partner as unfathomable, and loftily rejected it out of hand: “I can’t do that. I won’t do that to him. I’d rather, shit, lose the election. I really would.” This sentiment did not last long. Two days later, the same men returned to the same subject in the same room. “I think,” said Haldeman, “lurking way down behind there is the question of [Mitchell’s] involvement in the Watergate caper.” If Mitchell left CRP, it might be a good move, the chief of staff reckoned. Nixon added his own touch: “And we would leak out the fact that [Martha’s] not well.”

Still, the nagging Question—
Did Mitchell do it?
—lingered. The next day, June 29, brought more rumination. Nixon clung to the idea that Mitchell had approved Liddy’s operation without knowing specifically about the DNC wiretapping: “I think John said, ‘Well, we’re trying to get the information…don’t tell me anything about it.’ You know, that’s the way you do it, thinking probably they were going to do it the way you always do, planting a person on the other side, which everybody does.” Unlike Nixon, Haldeman was still talking daily with Mitchell, and brought from their discussions the welcome news that he was not opposed to resigning from the campaign. “If this thing escalates,” Haldeman quoted Mitchell as saying, “I think it would be very good if I’m out of the place and you could say, ‘Well, there’s a whole new team over there.’”

Yet Haldeman remained convinced Mitchell’s resignation would be useless without an accompanying mea culpa: “The thing that bothers me is that it’s a time bomb.” Aghast at Haldeman’s (prescient) nightmarish vision—an endless stream of investigative discovery and media disclosure—Nixon concluded at last that Mitchell had to go. Haldeman assured him the story would prove a net plus for the White House. “It’ll hang totally on Martha,” he stressed. The president gave the final order: “Call the press.” Ever attentive to protocol, Haldeman suggested Mitchell receive a private audience with the president, if only for appearance’s sake. “Do it,” Nixon ordered.
⁴⁵

Mitchell, for his part, was willing to go, but for the ill-starred adventure at the Watergate, he had no intention of shouldering the blame. He was, to be sure, “terribly chagrined” over the incident, as he told Nixon on June 20—but
guilty
? No. Meeting with Haldeman on June 29, the day after the Mitchells returned from Westchester, the former attorney general acknowledged his wife was unable to cope with the strain of Watergate and expressed fear she might “harm herself.” “He feels she’s suicidal as well as a little cracked, plus drinking very heavily, and that there’s nothing he can do to cure it,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. Mitchell’s desire to resign was thus cast in purely personal terms.
⁴⁶

When he arrived at the Executive Office Building the next day for lunch with the president and Haldeman, it was not Mitchell but the others who repeatedly linked his resignation to Watergate. In so doing, Nixon and Haldeman tried—subtly, gingerly—to probe the strong man, to see whether some admission of culpability might be forthcoming. Haldeman, the former advertising executive, spoke of how “surprised” the public would be to see the gruff John Mitchell “taking this route,” heeding the demands of his eccentric but lovable wife. Nixon joined in the lathering, adding that if Mitchell waited to resign “it will be tied right to Watergate.” Here, however, Nixon realized he had gone too far; in Mitchell’s departure, the president wanted his friend to believe personal considerations, not politics, were paramount. He needed to throw a bone in that direction. “I just want it to be handled in a way that Martha’s not hurt,” Nixon said. “Yeah, okay,” Mitchell grunted; as usual, he understood the most and said the least.
⁴⁷

In his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, Haldeman remembered Mitchell arriving “reluctantly” at the decision to resign, and worrying that it might appear as though he were using Martha to deflect attention from Watergate. In fact, as the tape of the meeting shows, it was Nixon and Haldeman who expressed concerns about Watergate, not Mitchell. Testifying before the Senate a month before Haldeman—but without his knowledge that the luncheon had been recorded—Mitchell depicted Nixon as the reluctant one. “The president asked me to—urged me to stay on,” Mitchell testified. “I said I could not under the circumstances…. Finally…[Nixon] reluctantly consented to the fact that I was going to leave, and we discussed a successor.”

By July 1974, when Mitchell testified at the House impeachment hearings, the tape of the luncheon had surfaced. Asked about the divergence between his Senate testimony, which maintained Watergate was never discussed, and the tape, which prominently featured Haldeman’s warning about “more stuff…surfacing on the Watergate,” Mitchell pleaded ignorance. “I don’t remember that being said at all,” he testified, “and I was surprised when you gentlemen showed it to me.” Conscious of a possible perjury charge, he pleaded for committee members to place the remarks about Watergate in their “total context,” pitifully invoking Martha Mitchell’s mental problems.

Most of the discussion at the luncheon, Mitchell argued, was focused on who would succeed him at CRP. “It had nothing whatsoever to do with the Watergate,” he said, “and I am surprised the word is even in here.” At
U.S. v. Mitchell
, the former attorney general clung to his story, testifying his exit from CRP stemmed from “purely personal” considerations; asked if he resigned for any other reason, he replied: “None whatsoever.” No charges were filed against Mitchell in connection with his testimony about the luncheon, but the scare he received, amid all his other legal woes, offered the starkest reminder of the supreme discourtesy his friend, the president, had shown in recording all their conversations and never telling him.
⁴⁸

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Antiwar demonstrators clash with police outside the Justice Department during the May Day riots, May 4, 1971.

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WASHINGTON POST
; REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE DC PUBLIC LIBRARY

Mitchell and his aides observe the day’s chaos from his office balcony. Protesters seemed to sense Mitchell’s uniquely powerful place in the Nixon cabinet, and accordingly trained their antiwar fury more on the Justice Department than the Pentagon during the Nixon years.

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Riding aboard Air Force One en route from Washington to Florida on November 9, 1969, Mitchell holds court as national security adviser Henry Kissinger, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Nixon, and Secretary of State William Rogers listen. Mitchell played a pivotal, though deliberately unheralded, role in the formation of Nixon’s foreign policy. “Henry had his ideas,” Mitchell later said of Kissinger, “but what could he do? He had no feel for politics.”

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Nixon makes a point to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer aboard the U.S.S.
Saratoga
in the Atlantic Ocean on May 17, 1969. Later, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Moorer received classified documents illegally obtained by a yeoman who served on Kissinger’s National Security Council staff. John Ehrlichman, seen here peering over Nixon’s shoulder, led the investigation into the JCS spying case, but it was Mitchell who was sent to confront the admiral. “Boy,” Nixon said at the time, “you couldn’t have a better man than Mitchell over to talk to Moorer.”

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Vice President Agnew, Nixon, and Mitchell receive California governor Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office on January 23, 1971. “Have to have Mitchell handle…contact with Reagan,” Nixon had decreed. As the preeminent symbol of law and order in the age of “radical chic,” Mitchell’s voice was equally, if not more, prominent than Reagan’s in the advocacy of conservatism during the Nixon era.