The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (59 page)

Previously unpublished documents show that McCord gave Dash a rather muddled account of the origins and execution of the Watergate operation, hampered both by the inherent limitations of McCord’s testimony—mostly hearsay derived from Liddy, and even then severely garbled in the retelling—and, too, by McCord’s dishonesty. He omitted the fact that he had begun wiretapping Spencer Oliver’s DNC telephone a full three days before Liddy’s men gained first entry; that he had directed Baldwin to focus “primarily” on sex talk; that he had censored and withheld the wiretap data from Liddy; and so on. What McCord did tell Dash was sometimes preposterous. “Liddy got Mitchell to change [the target] from O’Brien’s apartment to O’Brien’s office at the DNC,” McCord charged, adding Liddy “also got permission from Mitchell to delay the project.” In no other account of Watergate was O’Brien’s apartment mentioned as a target, nor had Liddy secured Mitchell’s sanction for delay; rather Liddy had chafed at Mitchell’s
slowness
to approve the project.

The news media feasted like never before. Mitchell had told reporters he didn’t have “the faintest idea what McCord intends to reveal,” but his blissful ignorance would not last long. On March 26, the
Times
led with a story headlined: “McCord Reported to Link Mitchell to Bugging Plot.” Similar stories ran in the
Washington Post
and
Los Angeles Times
. Roiled by the commotion, Martha Mitchell dialed the
New York Times
office and declared, with characteristic delicacy, that somebody was trying to make John Mitchell “the goat” in Watergate. “I fear for my husband,” she said. “I’m really scared. I have a definite reason. I can’t tell you why. But they’re not going to pin anything on him. I won’t let them, and I don’t give a damn who gets hurt. I can name names.”

Struggling to keep his alcoholic wife in check, the former attorney general missed an appointment with the president. “You saw the paper, so you know why I didn’t come by yesterday,” he told Haldeman on March 28. No, Haldeman said, he hadn’t seen the paper; what was Mitchell talking about? “Martha told me she called the
Times
,” Mitchell said. “Good Lord, what did she say?” “Just what you’d expect someone full of whiskey to say,” Mitchell snapped.
⁵

In fact, Martha had anticipated the scandal’s next phase, wherein each of Mitchell’s former protégés, certain
he
was being made the scapegoat, sought reassurance from his former mentor. The first to arrive at Mitchell’s door—always a step ahead—was Dean, who was mulling fleeing the country. “Mitchell could arrange it,” he fantasized. “He, too, might consider going to some country where we’d be safe from prosecution.” When Dean asked if he was “being set up,” Mitchell, surely knowing better, assured him the White House would never do that to him.
⁶

Next was Magruder, who visited Mitchell in New York on March 27. Fearing for his future, Magruder foraged for assurances that if he went to prison he would receive family and legal support, executive clemency, employment assistance. Mitchell supposedly advised him to “continue to hold with the cover story…and the conditions would be met.” “I can’t accept [assurances] from you,” Magruder replied, calling into question his purpose in visiting Mitchell in the first place, “because you are here in New York.” If similar promises could be extracted from Haldeman—the preeminent symbol, outside of the president himself, of White House power—Magruder would “feel better.” The two agreed to meet with Haldeman at the White House the next day.
⁷

Seated in Haldeman’s office on the morning of March 28, Mitchell later recalled, Magruder returned to “this perjury question.” The trio embarked on what Mitchell described as “a quick run-through” of the improvisations Mitchell, Dean, and Magruder had spun back in September 1972, shortly before Magruder’s third appearance before the grand jury, when they needed to come up with an explanation for the two pencil entries in Magruder’s desk diary recording the Liddy presentations in the attorney general’s office. It was, in short, Mitchell’s recurring nightmare, triggered anew by McCord’s defection: how to explain the Gemstone meetings. Haldeman icily told Magruder he had better iron out the differing stories with Dean and Mitchell directly.

The ensuing showdown took place that afternoon, in a vacated West Wing office. Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean—the three Gemstone veterans—approached this session, their last together, warily; Magruder, who had borne the heaviest burden of perjury at the grand jury and break-in trial, was wariest of all. He trusted Mitchell, but not Dean, who had begun sending signals he was not going to stick with the story all three had agreed upon when Magruder’s diary was subpoenaed. Mitchell and Dean, meanwhile, had also spoken the day before, and the message the former attorney general sternly delivered to the younger man boiled down to:
Stiffen up
. According to Haldeman, who recounted Dean’s side of the discussion to the president, Mitchell also warned Dean that if his recollection of the Gemstone meetings differed from Mitchell’s, Dean would have “a problem because you won’t be believed.”

Magruder sought common ground. “I said to Mr. Dean that…he had to be able to agree there was only one meeting [in Mitchell’s office], because that was [our] agreement…. Mr. Mitchell indicated, I think, his willingness to work on that problem with me; but Mr. Dean said that he hoped he would not have to testify. And I said, ‘Fine, if you don’t have to testify, there is no problem. But,’ I said, ‘what happens if you
do
testify?’ [Dean] said, ‘I can’t give you any assurances as to what I would do.’” Now Magruder became desperate. “If you go back and say, ‘Actually we discussed intelligence,’ I am two feet in the grave!” Mitchell, according to Magruder, tried to play “conciliator,” saying he was sure Dean would step up when the time came. Magruder left the meeting scarcely reassured—and “furious” at Dean.

Dean, for his part, recalled Magruder nervously clasping his hands, Mitchell gripping his pipe, gaze averted, face “long and gray.” “I was very evasive with them,” Dean testified. “They were getting the message that I wasn’t going to perjure myself…. I liked Jeb as a friend, and I wanted to let him down very easily. He had a problem with my testimony, as did Mitchell, and I wasn’t going to budge an inch.” Then Dean recalled that the former attorney general, responding to Dean’s speculation about ultimate culpability in Watergate, suddenly and surprisingly
admitted
having ordered the break-in, under the mistaken belief that the men Liddy selected for the mission would have no connections to the campaign committee. When this passage from
Blind Ambition
was read to him one week before he died, in November 1988, Mitchell reacted incredulously. “Ridiculous,” he spat, interrupting the reading. “This conversation’s ridiculous.” At the part where he admitted guilt, Mitchell clucked: “Oh, jeez.” And when the passage was over: “Pardon me while I go out and throw up.”

Dean’s story carried great significance: the one and only time John Mitchell admitted authorizing the Watergate break-in.
But was it true?
The story first surfaced in Dean’s executive session testimony before the Senate. Here, however, Dean made no mention of Mitchell having asked for Dean’s hypothesis. Nine days later, in public session, Dean for the first time identified the fateful exchange as having come during the March 28 showdown, “at the end.” Once again, Dean made no mention of Mitchell soliciting any hypotheses. At the House impeachment hearings, none of this—the March 28 showdown, the great Mitchell admission—came up at all. At
U.S. v. Mitchell
, Dean told a story largely in accord with the version he gave in
Blind Ambition
. Each retelling was liable to differ in its account of what Mitchell actually said: whether he thought the DNC operation would be “one or two times” removed from CRP, “three or four times.” As usual, no investigator showed any interest in Dean’s discrepancies.

At no time, however, did Dean claim that Mitchell made his momentous admission when Jeb Magruder was out of the room; indeed, Dean’s accounts invariably implied that Magruder was present when Mitchell incriminated himself. Why, then, did Magruder not readily recall it? As Mitchell’s sole accuser in the Key Biscayne conflict, surely Magruder had compelling incentive to remember Mitchell confessing his ultimate responsibility for the DNC operation in front of a corroborating witness like Dean.

Yet Magruder never mentioned any such confession by Mitchell to the Senate, in either executive or public session, nor in his book,
An American Life
—all forums in which Magruder recounted the March 28 showdown at length. Not until his testimony at
U.S. v. Mitchell
, offered, like Dean’s, in exchange for leniency, did Magruder suddenly recall this unforgettable moment Dean claimed they both witnessed, and even then Magruder’s recollection clashed with Dean’s. The sharp conflicts in the three men’s recollections, characteristic of their doomed entanglement, created, at a minimum, reasonable doubt that Mitchell ever said anything of the kind.
⁸

However, even if Mitchell did not volunteer the mea culpa ascribed to him, his mere presence at the March 28 meeting, and in similar discussions around this time, belied his culpability in the scandal. He was party to these discussions because he feared disclosure of the Gemstone meetings—a prospect made inevitable by McCord’s rupture—and he wanted to learn, before the grand jury did, what the other attendees of those meetings would testify had happened in them. Mitchell never ordered the Watergate operation, never even heard a proposal targeting that site, but he’d sat at the pinnacle of American law enforcement and twice listened to Gordon Liddy propose similar crimes and never ordered Liddy arrested or fired. Never mind that Mitchell rejected Liddy’s plans; it was the same calculus, about the terrible appearance of it all, that had first thrust Mitchell into the cover-up, when Magruder faced the grand jury.

The cannibalism unleashed by
the McCord letter did not go unnoticed, or unfelt, by Richard Nixon. On March 27, the president had listened as Haldeman related the view, fast gaining adherents, that “Mitchell could cut this whole thing off, if he would just step forward…. Mitchell did sign off on it. And if that’s what it is, the empire will crack…all the people getting whacked around in order to keep the thing from focusing on John Mitchell, when inevitably it is going to end up that way, anyway.” As usual, Nixon was wracked by indecision and unsure how, or whether, to approach his old friend. He couldn’t answer The Question:
Did Mitchell do it?
“What I can’t understand,” he told Haldeman, “is how Mitchell would ever approve [the break-in]. Magruder I can understand…. He is not a very bright fellow…. Mitchell knows enough not to do something like that.”

Yet minutes later the president could be heard agreeing “the only way” forward was for him to call Mitchell onto the Oval Office carpet and demand he sacrifice himself to the national interest—a scene Nixon immediately began rehearsing. “You’ve got to tell us what the score is, John. You have to face up to where we are.” Within seconds, though, Nixon began backing off; who was he to advise Mitchell to waive his rights?

NIXON:
Well, what is Mitchell’s option, though?…Does Mitchell come in and say, “My memory was faulty, I lied”?

EHRLICHMAN:
No, he can’t say that. He says—ah.

NIXON:
“That without intending to, I may have been responsible for this, and I regret it very much but I did not realize what they were up to. They were—we were talking about apples and oranges.” That’s what I think he would say. Don’t you agree?

HALDMAN:
I think so. He authorized apples and they bought oranges. Yeah.

NIXON:
Mitchell, you see, is never going to go in and admit perjury. I mean, he may say he forgot about Hunt, Liddy and all the rest, but he is never going to do that.

HALDEMAN:
[The prosecutors] won’t give him that convenience…. He is as high up as they’ve got.

EHRLICHMAN:
He is the big enchilada.

That day, and serially over the next two weeks, Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman threw out names of men who might get Mitchell to walk the plank—upright New York lawyer types—only to reject them all. Ehrlichman thought Nixon himself should do it; the president thought Ehrlichman should. In the wake of John Dean’s disclosure to his confederates in early April that he had retained criminal counsel, and even darker intimations that he was actively cooperating with the prosecutors, Nixon had already deputized Ehrlichman, amateur sleuth in the Plumbers’ heyday, to undertake his own probe of the scandal; by Nixon’s lights, Ehrlichman was now the resident Watergate expert. “I don’t think there’s anybody that can talk to Mitchell except somebody that knows this case,” Nixon pleaded with Ehrlichman on Saturday, April 14. Nixon then rehearsed another scenario. “The president has asked me to see you,” Ehrlichman was to say, before urging Mitchell to run to the prosecutors and declare: “I assume the responsibility. Nobody in the White House is involved, et cetera and so on. We did try to help these defendants afterwards, yes.”