The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (54 page)

OFF THE RESERVATION

DAVID FROST:
Which in general is easier to do as attorney general: hide [a mistake] or change it?

MITCHELL:
Well, over the long haul it’s probably easier to change it. In the short haul it’s probably easier to hide it.

—The David Frost Show,
1971
¹

IT ALL WENT
exactly as Haldeman planned. The newspapers improbably cast Mitchell as a modern-day Duke of Windsor—an incurable romantic who surrendered political power for the woman he loved. Suggestions that Watergate prompted Mitchell’s abdication were muted. “Investigation today turned up no evidence that any pressure had been applied to Mr. Mitchell to resign,” reported the
New York Times
; the
Washington Post
quoted a CRP spokesman who insisted Mitchell had “absolutely no knowledge” of the break-in, and resigned solely “for the reason stated.”
²

In the Oval Office, the president sighed with relief, marveling to Haldeman how “the Mitchell thing couldn’t have come at a better time from our standpoint.”
Our standpoint
: That Mitchell’s interests diverged from his own the president now assumed as fact. Nixon also believed, wrongly, that Mitchell planned to accept full blame for Watergate. “He goes in and he takes responsibility for it. He understands that, doesn’t he?” “He mentioned that himself,” Haldeman replied, equally erroneously.

Even more amazing, they still expected Mitchell, in addition to confessing, to obstruct the ongoing FBI investigation. “I want [Mitchell] to call Kleindienst and [Acting FBI Director L. Patrick] Gray in,” Haldeman fantasized, “and say: ‘Look, this happened. I used to sit on the National Security Council…. Your people are investigating stuff that must not be investigated. That’s the signal you’ve gotten from the CIA. For Christ’s sake, smarten up. Smarten up and turn this off. Go ahead and toss your cards to the grand jury on the open-and-shut case [of the arrested men], and let it go at that.’”
³

Throughout the summer of
1972, as a trickle of minor disclosures kept Watergate in the news, Mitchell repeatedly denied his resignation from CRP had had anything to do with the “caper” that was growing, slowly but surely, into a scandal. Seated next to Mrs. Mitchell on an Amtrak Metroliner to New York, joined by a reporter, Mitchell smiled at the mere suggestion and jabbed his pipe in Martha’s direction. “She spent a million dollars last year, and now I have to earn it!”
⁴

The means to that end was a return to the old Nixon-Mitchell law firm, which, after the ascension of two partners to the presidency and attorney generalship, had been renamed Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander, and had cultivated, in legal and governmental circles, a reputation the
Times
described as “
the
firm to see.” But of the fourteen new partners hired during Mitchell’s stint in government, eleven were in their thirties, the rest in their forties; they were far less likely than lawyers who had been with the firm prior to 1969 to applaud the administration’s conduct of the Vietnam War, and they proved, upon Mitchell’s return, less than welcoming. When he returned full-time, under an agreement that his name would rejoin the firm’s shingle effective January 2, 1973, the short lapse between the Watergate arrests and Mitchell’s sudden return to the full-time practice of law—and, too, the ugliness of the Martha Mitchell incident in Newport Beach—lent an uneasy air to Mitchell’s homecoming.
⁵

And, as Haldeman predicted, Mitchell’s departure did nothing to slow the Watergate investigation. On July 5, 1972, two FBI agents appeared at the Mudge Rose offices to interrogate the former attorney general. After several parries—including a few answers at slight variance with his later testimony—Mitchell joked he hoped the interview would end soon “so that we could get some work done.” But the session didn’t end without a serious misstep. Asked what he knew about the origins of the break-in, Mitchell replied he had “no knowledge…other than what he has read in newspaper accounts” of the incident—a remark that later formed the basis of Count Three in his indictment.
⁶

The agents’ questions showed the FBI was on to Gordon Liddy. There Nixon’s men hoped, in vain, the investigation would rest; the moment authorities ascended up the next rung of the CRP ladder, to Jeb Magruder, spelled real trouble, for it was Magruder who represented, as an observer later described him, “the key link between the political figures such as Haldeman and Mitchell and the operational types, notably G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt.” Within a month of the arrests, John Dean had privately begun clamoring for Magruder to be served up to the U.S. attorney. “Dean feels that [the authorities] are going to move on Magruder and that the only thing we can do is have him take the rap that they’ll hit him with,” Haldeman recorded in his diary July 18.
⁷

Around this time, Magruder later claimed, he approached Mitchell and offered to “take the heat”—tell the prosecutors the whole thing had been his idea—but Mitchell supposedly rejected the idea. Magruder recognized that if investigators ascended any higher than Liddy, they would scarcely pause to dwell on Magruder before moving to Mitchell himself—a development that would leave the scandal at the doorstep of the president himself. The same day the FBI quizzed Mitchell, Magruder made his first appearance before the grand jury. “Don’t volunteer,” the former attorney general counseled Magruder. The session proved brief and harmless: Neither the prosecutors nor the grand jurors had a firm grasp of the case, and they excused the witness after a short series of questions about CRP’s organizational structure. The picture changed considerably by mid-August, when Earl Silbert officially informed Magruder he was a “target” of the investigation, and summoned him for a second grand jury appearance on August 16.
⁸

On August 14 Mitchell returned to the Oval Office for the first time since the Watergate arrests, attending a meeting with the president, Haldeman, and Mitchell’s successor at CRP, former congressman Clark MacGregor. Nixon shrewdly reckoned that if the imminent indictments in the burglary and wiretapping of the DNC did not extend beyond the five arrested men to “others like Magruder, Sloan and so forth,” the scandal would live on. “There will be immediately an outcry for: ‘What are the facts with regard to the others? What are they covering up?’” “I think we have to be very careful to know what the facts are going to be and what’s going to come out of that grand jury,” Mitchell advised. This was not what Nixon had in mind at all. He proposed “to say Mitchell has hired this high-powered firm of investigators…. These grand jury proceedings take a long time. We want to know what the facts are.”
A Mitchell Report!
This would ensure they “cut the losses on the damn thing,” as Nixon put it.
⁹

Given his recurring doubts about Mitchell’s culpability, the president’s proposal for a Mitchell Report served only one purpose: To set Mitchell up to take ultimate blame in the likely event his “report” was contradicted by the grand jury. To agree to this idea Mitchell was far too smart; and he cannot have left this meeting—his last in the Oval Office—under any delusion that his friend, the president, still had his best interests at heart.

At 4:30 that afternoon,
Mitchell welcomed Magruder into his office at Mudge Rose. Two weeks earlier, when Mitchell had resigned from CRP, the younger man was moved to tears, and volunteered to leave, too. Now Magruder had a story to share: the false one he had been concocting for the grand jury. He later wrote that the basic ingredients of the cover story were cooked up in a series of meetings in Mitchell’s law office in the month following the arrests. Magruder’s descriptions of these meetings—unlike his accounts of most other points in the Watergate saga—rang true, for they comported with what the Nixon tapes later showed about the cover-up sessions in the Oval Office and elsewhere. In all cases, the conspirators maintained a refined, outwardly cool posture, speaking in vague, distinctly bureaucratic, even corporate, terms, unable to admit, even to each other, that they were engaged in a criminal conspiracy.
¹⁰

Now, Magruder sat in Mitchell’s office for a half hour and rehearsed his false story about Sloan giving Liddy $250,000 for convention security expenses. Though no reference to this meeting appeared in Mitchell’s indictment, the prosecutors cross-examined him harshly on it, and the quiet encouragement he gave Magruder during his recitation of planned perjury bespoke Mitchell’s complicity in the cover-up. In his Senate testimony, Mitchell effectively admitted guilt on this count.

SENATOR ERVIN:
You were also informed by Magruder that he, Magruder, was prepared to commit perjury when he went before the grand jury in August [1972] rather than to reveal what he knew about these matters?

MITCHELL:
That was correct, sir.

ERVIN:
Now did you agree that that was the proper course of action to take?

MITCHELL:
It was a very expedient one, senator. At that time in the campaign, so close to the election, we certainly were not volunteering any information.
¹¹