The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (6 page)

By the early fifties, Mitchell “had no peer” on Wall Street. It was perhaps inevitable that he attracted the attention of the undersecretary of Housing, Education, and Welfare, a wealthy New Yorker only five years older than Mitchell named Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. The precocious heir to the Rockefeller fortune had already served, thirteen years earlier, as a senior State Department official setting Latin American policy. In late 1952, President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower tapped him to chair an advisory panel on government reorganization—a vehicle Rockefeller seized upon to create HEW, the very agency he now, as undersecretary, effectively ran. The future New York governor shared Mitchell’s passion for cities and took note of the accomplishments of the nation’s leading municipal finance lawyer.
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“Perhaps Nelson’s greatest genius,” said Roswell B. Perkins, assistant secretary at HEW, “was to identify a problem and get the best minds to work on it that he could find. He harnessed good minds probably as well as anyone in political history.” With that charge, Rockefeller’s aide, Frank Moore, a former lieutenant governor and state comptroller, approached the young Wall Street wizard and asked if his alchemy could be brought to bear on an intractable problem: financing school construction nationwide. Mitchell “twirled the problem around in his supple mind,” then devised a plan. Once again, semi-autonomous state agencies would be created to issue bonds, build the needed facilities, lease them to local districts, and pay off the bonds with the revenues. Once the bonds were paid off, the school districts would own the schools. And once again, authorities would maintain a special “reserve fund,” backing up the bonds in the event of a revenue shortage. Half the fund’s money was to be contributed by the states, the other half, an estimated $150 million, by the federal government. The states themselves, though not legally obligated to make good on the bonds’ default, nevertheless acknowledged a “moral obligation” to do so.
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Rockefeller loved it. When Eisenhower unveiled his massive education plan, vowing to bankroll $6 billion in school construction over three years, Mitchell’s concept lay at its core. Yet the reaction was muted: Politicians and educators found the scheme convoluted; the teachers’ unions favored outright grants. The plan never made it out of committee. Still, for Mitchell the experiment proved a boon: His salary in the years 1955 and 1956, when he worked on it, exceeded his 1954 earnings by an average of $51,000 (roughly $352,000 in current figures). He had also made an important new friend.
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As his practice prospered,
so did Mitchell’s net worth. In later years, after he became attorney general, published estimates of his private sector earnings varied wildly, some citing an annual salary of $2 million. In fact, a review of Mitchell’s tax returns from 1950 through 1973 shows his best year was 1968, when, as Richard Nixon’s law partner, he listed a gross income of slightly more than $495,000.
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When the navy interrupted Mitchell’s career, he, Bette, and their two kids—Jack and Jill, born in 1941 and 1943, respectively—were living with Mitchell’s parents in a large old house in St. Albans, Queens. By 1950, with Mitchell’s parents deceased, he moved his family northward, to Port Washington in Long Island’s Nassau County. But by all available accounts, Mitchell himself spent little time there. As his stock on Wall Street rose, he traveled more frequently. “[M]y practice took me into, I think, all of the fifty states,” he testified in 1975.

Accomplished, articulate, and often alone, Mitchell appears to have looked outside his marriage for companionship. Tales told by law partners and others who knew him in these years suggested he was prone to affairs; the dangerous combination of physical estrangement and susceptibility to temptation took its toll. In later years, Mitchell’s decision to separate from Bette, when he was in his early forties, would have been called a midlife crisis; at the time, he kept his feelings, characteristically, to himself, and reportedly sprung his decision on his wife with stunning suddenness. In the only published quote ever attributed to her, Bette Mitchell said, in 1973: “John just walked in one morning and asked for a divorce.” However, Jill Mitchell-Reed regarded the quote with suspicion, and others close to Mitchell depicted the dissolution of his first marriage as far more complex. “I think what killed their marriage is what kills a lot of marriages,” said Susie Morrison, Mitchell’s secretary from 1963 to 1971. “It’s the distance. It’s that John was up and coming. He was ambitious. He wasn’t home, and she was lonely.”

Still others, including Mitchell-Reed and longtime friends Ken and Peggy Ebbitt, confirmed Morrison’s assessment. Mitchell’s punishing travel schedule left Bette alone too often; nor did it help that he had gone to sea during the war and grown accustomed to a foot-loose existence incompatible with family life. In those years, American women were less likely to protest inequities in their marriages, and Mitchell lived, enthusiastically and without recrimination, by the norms of his day. “Maybe he watched too many John Wayne movies,” Mitchell-Reed mused decades later.

Bette moved to Reno’s Biltmore Ranch in November 1957. Within six weeks, she established residency in Nevada and filed a complaint charging Mitchell with extreme cruelty, a charge he denied. In granting their divorce, the court ruled for joint custody of Jack and Jill, and for the couple’s house, furniture, and boat to be awarded to Bette. A published report from 1973 described the breakup as “amicable.” “I said I would take care of you forever,” John told Bette when they parted, “and that’s what I am going to do.” The terms of the divorce transformed Mitchell’s moral obligation into a legal one: He agreed to pay Bette 35 percent of his gross annual income
regardless
of whether she remarried.
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Mitchell was single again—but hardly alone. Eleven days after his divorce from Bette, at an elopement center in Elkton, Maryland, he remarried.

History records multiple versions
of how Mitchell first met Martha Elizabeth Beall, the vivacious, buxom blonde from Arkansas, five years his junior, who became his second wife. Newspapers and magazines, friends and strangers all proffered stories of the lovers’ first meeting, said to have occurred at various points between 1953 and August 1957—when Martha’s divorce from her first husband, Clyde J. Jennings Jr., was granted in Dade County, Florida—and cast, alternately, as a chance dinner-party encounter, a blind date in Greenwich Village, and a night of sin in Little Rock. The truth is irretrievable.
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Daughter of a cotton broker and elocution teacher, Martha Mitchell was born in Pine Bluff on September 2, 1918, and raised primarily by her African American “mammy.” Though dyslexic and hamstrung by a stuttering problem, Martha developed a Southern belle’s charm and an aversion to silence, attributes that sometimes complemented one another but more often clashed to her disfavor. Her father, estranged from her mother, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in 1943, when Martha was twenty-five. By then, Martha had graduated from the University of Miami, where, after transfers from two other schools, she earned, in between serial dates and sorority capers, a history degree. She taught grade school in Mobile before returning to Pine Bluff to work at an arsenal. When her commander was transferred to Washington, Martha tagged along, serving as a research analyst in the office that later became the Army Chemical Corps.

In October 1946, she married Clyde J. Jennings Jr., an army captain and businessman from Virginia. A year later the couple’s only child, Jay, was born. Later, during her divorce, Martha hired a private detective to document Jennings’s alleged physical abuse; instead the gumshoe testified it was Martha who was “neurotic…sick and all mixed up.” “I was so happy to get out of that situation,” Jennings recalled decades later, “I just left with nothing.” At the height of Martha’s notoriety in the early seventies, a reporter sought out Jennings’s insights into her personality before she met John Mitchell and attracted nationwide publicity. “She would have a few drinks,” Jennings recalled, “and then talk down to people. She gave a bad time to head-waiters, taxi drivers, doormen, anyone who was menial. It was an insecurity problem.”
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After Watergate, critics of the Nixon administration depicted Martha Mitchell as a brave lady surrounded by evil but determined to tell the truth, an ordinary woman driven insane by her husband’s unholy alliance with Richard Nixon. Yet friends of John Mitchell who got to know Martha in the late 1950s and 1960s, long before her husband formed any association with Nixon, painted a much different portrait. “Everybody said, ‘What in God’s name did he see in her?’” recalled Bill Madison. “They despised her! She could breed instant hate! Oh God, she was awful, an awful woman.”

Brent Harries, a Wall Street publishing executive who worked with Mitchell in the fifties and sixties, first met Martha when Mitchell was dating her and still married to Bette. Harries remembered with undiminished horror the time his pal brought Martha to a cocktail party at the home of Roald Morton, Harries’s boss. “It was a beautifully done party,” Harries remembered thirty years later. “If you wanted a drink there would be a nudge at your arm and there would be a waiter standing there with a tray.”

Martha showed up with John. John was smoking his pipe, Martha—in a bouffant hairdo that went all over the place, this mini-pleated skirt that was very gaily colored, with her high-heels, very stiletto-type heels. And it was a very refined cocktail party, very quiet; I think there was music, maybe a harpist or a violinist. All of a sudden, Martha for some reason either thought she wasn’t getting enough attention, or people weren’t paying enough attention to her…All of a sudden, she jumped up on a couch to sing or do something…. And John just kind of looked at her, had his pipe in his mouth and kind of smiled like, “Isn’t she cute?” type of thing. I assume he was very much in love with her, and he just overlooked this kind of stuff.
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So what
did
Mitchell see in Martha? No love letters have surfaced, but Martha needed little coaxing to explain her side of the attraction. “John is the most intelligent man in the world,” she would beam. “John stimulates me. He’s soft, warm, sweet and cuddly.” Mitchell, not surprisingly, never expounded on what drew the buttoned-down Wall Street bond expert to his zany Southern belle. But a story told by Thomas W. Evans Jr., one of Mitchell’s law partners, shed some light on the Mitchells’ relationship, notwithstanding the fact that the story recounted events from the 1968 New Hampshire primary season—more than a decade into their marriage.

“He and I shared a room at the Concord Motor Inn,” Evans recalled. “When we were just about to retire for the night, I called my wife to see how everything was and the conversation took about a minute or two. John Mitchell then called Martha, and proceeded—I was right there. I mean, I was about five feet away, seated on my bed. And baby talk? The most—sweetest—I mean, it was a
very
romantic interlude. I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I could still hear it. And it went on for a long time. I’m mentioning that because John Mitchell was head over heels in love with Martha Mitchell.”
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