The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (61 page)

EHRLICHMAN:
No, I didn’t know that.

MITCHELL:
And Gordon—well, Gordon Liddy and John Dean—well, it, it goes back, I think, even further than that. But I’ve never been able to put the pieces together. Bob Haldeman and I were talking about this Sandwedge operation.

EHRLICHMAN:
I do—I remember the name.

MITCHELL:
Yeah, and it turned out that that was to be an entirely different operation, of course. And then it turned out that we just couldn’t get enough [inaudible] players. Caulfield couldn’t do it…. The next order of events for the sequence was when Dean and Magruder and Liddy show up in my office with this presentation about a million-dollar intelligence operation, which we, of course, laughed at.

EHRLICHMAN:
Yeah.

MITCHELL:
We threw him the hell out of there. And of course, Jeb blames John Dean on that. One of the problems that—

EHRLICHMAN:
Blames him for what? Turning down?

MITCHELL:
No, for authorizing Liddy to prepare the—

EHRLICHMAN:
Oh, oh, I see.

MITCHELL:
—the million-dollar [plan]. One of the problems is, is to what if Jeb goes public. Good God, he’s got a, an imagination which is incredible.

EHRLICHMAN:
He’s got twenty different stories.

MITCHELL:
I know. Well, that was the last time I ever saw Liddy or ever talked to him until—what?—the fifteenth of June [1972], when [CRP spokesman] Van Shumway dragged him into my office with a letter to the
Washington Post
to sign about a campaign finance file. So I have had no contact with Liddy. I’ve never seen Hunt. And as far as Jeb and all of the dirty tricks department, I never knew a goddamn thing about it.

EHRLICHMAN:
Uh-huh.

MITCHELL:
So as far as my having made all these public statements [denying foreknowledge of the break-in], I’m just going to go ahead with it.

EHRLICHMAN:
Just go ahead, and just, just let them come to you, in effect.

MITCHELL:
Oh, yeah.

EHRLICHMAN:
Yeah.

MITCHELL:
Yeah, I’m going to have to do that. There is no other course…. I really don’t have a guilty conscience. I didn’t authorize these bastards.

Convinced the former attorney general had ordered the break-in, Ehrlichman needed time to regroup from Mitchell’s forceful denials. Late in the match and behind on points, Ehrlichman pressed his boldest thrust yet. “They say that they’ve got you made here,” he said, in the style of Jimmy Cagney. “You mean the U.S. attorney’s office?” Mitchell asked. Yes, Ehrlichman said. Did they say how? Mitchell asked. “No. And this was before anybody knew that Magruder was going to go in.” “I just don’t believe it,” Mitchell replied. Finally, as much for Nixon’s ears, he reaffirmed: “There’s certainly no possibility that I would ever turn around and say, ‘Yes, I was part and parcel of this.’”

With that, Ehrlichman asked his secretary to book their guests return flights to New York (“American Airlines, first class,” Mitchell snapped). But Mitchell wasn’t done. He wanted updates on the grand jury: “I would like to be kept advised, within propriety, as to what the hell is going on down here.” Ehrlichman mumbled about the poor intelligence flow. When Mitchell inquired again about the case being built against him, Ehrlichman replied: “The way the story is supposed to go, Magruder brought you a memorandum that said on it, ‘We are now ready to go with this operation. We will need such and such amount of money. Here are the targets that are possible. Please pick the targets that you want.’” Are you serious? Mitchell asked. “Yes, sir. And, that you,” Ehrlichman continued, “by some designation, circles or checks or something, picked the targets and authorized the operation.” “That’s about as far from the truth as it’s possible to get,” Mitchell replied.

Ehrlichman asked if Mitchell still wished to see the man in whose name he had been summoned to Washington in the first place. “He’d be happy to see you,” lied Ehrlichman. “No,” Mitchell shrugged. “I don’t want to embarrass him.” Ehrlichman then urged Mitchell, as Dean had, to retain a criminal lawyer. Before leaving, Mitchell pressed once more for some scrap of information about the extent of his jeopardy: Who were the damaging witnesses on the post–June 17 period? Ehrlichman mentioned Dean and O’Brien.

MITCHELL:
Now what do they say is my involvement in it, other than knowing about it?

EHRLICHMAN:
Not much. Just that. Knowing and acquiescing, and, uh, calling on Dean for help. And uh, uh, that’s about it.

MITCHELL:
How did I call on him for help?

EHRLICHMAN:
Just saying, uh, “Can you, can you get those fellows over there to help us raise some money,” and, uh, uh, not for what, or anything of that kind. I’ve not found anybody, as I said before, who could be identified as an actor in the process of inducing anybody to perjury or silence, or anything of that kind.

“Is anybody debriefing these witnesses after the grand jury?” Mitchell asked. No, Ehrlichman said; that would be “a violation of some section or another.” “Sure in hell was done before the election, I assure you of that,” Mitchell snapped.
³

As Ehrlichman and Mitchell
fenced to their bloody draw, the president sat in the Oval Office, getting an update from Haldeman on his depressing chat with Magruder. The news that Magruder was soon to testify against Mitchell, Dean, and Strachan dealt the White House a crushing blow. “Mike Wallace will get [Magruder] on ‘60 Minutes,’” Ehrlichman had warned, “and he will come across as the All-American Boy who was…serving his president, his attorney general, and they misled him.”

Now Ehrlichman returned from his tête-à-tête with Mitchell. “All finished?” the president asked airily, as if inquiring about the disposal of an insect. “Yes, sir,” Ehrlichman answered: “[Mitchell] is an innocent man in his heart and in his mind, and he does not intend to move off that position.” “Give us a little chapter and verse,” Nixon clamored, eager to know, after so many hours of rehearsal, how the play had gone. Ehrlichman complied, unreliably: The tapes invariably captured individuals recalling Watergate conversations far differently than they actually transpired. He emphasized how Mitchell, as Nixon had predicted, “lobbed mud balls at the White House at every opportunity,” and portrayed his own timidity as a virtue. “I tried to play him with kid gloves…. I never asked him to tell me anything. He just told me all this stuff.” Ehrlichman then reported on a subject he and Mitchell had
not
covered: the subornation of perjury in September 1972, after Magruder’s desk diary was subpoenaed.

EHRLICHMAN:
[Mitchell] says Dean talked Magruder into saying the wrong things at the grand jury, and so Magruder’s got a problem.

NIXON:
My God…. Mitchell was there when Dean talked him into saying the wrong things?

EHRLICHMAN:
That’s what he says. That is what Mitchell says.

NIXON:
What does Dean say about it?

EHRLICHMAN:
Dean says it was Mitchell and Magruder. It must have been the quietest meeting in history. Everybody’s version is that the other two guys talked.

Nixon grew angry at his old friend. “Throwing off on the White House won’t help him one damn bit…. The White House wasn’t running the campaign committee.” They talked about Mitchell’s trembling hands, the likelihood of his conviction at trial. Haldeman said Dean was going to depict himself as “merely a messenger, a conduit, an agent” in the cover-up. “Boy, Mitchell sure doesn’t agree with that,” said Ehrlichman.

“I guess we’re not surprised at Mitchell are we?” Nixon asked. No, Haldeman said. “What he is saying is partly true. I don’t think he did put [the break-in] together.” Though he had predicted as much, it still bothered Nixon that Mitchell’s defense would pit him against the White House: “He shouldn’t throw the burden over here.” Nixon conceded Mitchell was right all along about Charles Colson, the special counsel who had brought Howard Hunt into the White House. Above all, it bothered the president that John N. Mitchell, the strong man, symbol of law and order in the age of radical chic, now stood poised to enter the criminal justice system—as a
defendant
. “This damn case!”
⁴

Two days later, Mitchell
got a call from Magruder. The younger man announced what both already knew—that he was copping a plea—and bade Mitchell goodbye. Magruder wrote in his memoir that the talk was brief and difficult, but not unpleasant; he tried to convey his “great affection” for Mitchell, even as he made clear his intention to testify in ways sure to result in Mitchell’s incarceration. According to previously unpublished testimony, Magruder began the talk with the simple, almost childlike admission: “I talked.” “If you are going the other way,” Mitchell supposedly replied, “I am going to have to hold, because there is no other choice for me…. You and I will be at loggerheads, do you understand?” “I understand,” Magruder said. The next, and last, time the two men saw each other was when Magruder took the oath at
U.S. v. Mitchell
.
⁵

Fred LaRue was not far behind. The most loyal of Mitchell’s lieutenants still had dinner with Mitchell every night (“I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that much Chinese food in my life”) but worried about his condition. Who wouldn’t crack under the strain of Watergate and Vesco, or the even crueler agonies of Martha Mitchell? “LaRue said he thinks Mitchell is on the verge of breaking, by which he means suicide,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. Mitchell was said to be drinking heavily. “It became a problem in the latter stages of Watergate,” LaRue recalled. “I put him to bed a few times.” The cover-up was unraveling rapidly. On April 16 LaRue surrendered to the U.S. attorney’s office; within seventy-two hours, Mitchell was subpoenaed by the grand jury and Seymour Hersh reported in the
New York Times
that prior witnesses had lodged “serious allegations” against Mitchell, with new indictments expected “within the week.”
⁶

At last, Mitchell retained a lawyer: forty-seven-year-old William G. Hundley Jr., an old-school Irishman from Brooklyn and former federal prosecutor described as “a pioneer of the government’s assault on organized crime.” As had been his practice with Peter Fleming in the Vesco case, Mitchell barely discussed with Hundley the origins or trajectory of Watergate; in this case, the silence owed both to the swiftness with which events were moving and Mitchell’s demeanor. He supplied his lawyer only a rough outline of the Gemstone meetings, and reaffirmed his distance from the hush-money scheme. “He didn’t particularly like to talk about the case,” Hundley recalled. “He was very fatalistic about what was going to happen. I didn’t get a story telling me how innocent he was or anything like that.”
⁷

April 20, 1973, was the day of reckoning. Assistant U.S. Attorney Seymour Glanzer, who was to examine Mitchell in the grand jury room, was reputed to be “fire-eating,” “a bludgeon,” “a very bad operator.” He swiftly warned Mitchell he was a potential target, then went straight for the jugular: the Gemstone meetings.

GLANZER:
I am asking you whether or not you had an obligation to come down to the grand jury and inform them what you knew about the January-February meetings?

MITCHELL:
I did not.

GLANZER:
You felt you had no obligation?

MITCHELL:
I had no obligation.

GLANZER:
You had no obligation to advance the interest of justice?

MITCHELL:
I had no obligation to come down and inform the grand jury voluntarily of anything.

Glanzer turned to the date of June 20, 1972, three days after the Watergate arrests, when LaRue and Mardian shared with Mitchell the contents of their debriefing of Liddy.

GLANZER:
Mr. Mardian did not report to you that Mr. Liddy had confessed to him?

MITCHELL:
Not to my recollection, Mr. Glanzer.

GLANZER:
That would be something you remembered, if it happened, wouldn’t it?

MITCHELL:
Yes, I would.