The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (62 page)

GLANZER:
…Were you told by either Mr. LaRue or anybody else at the Committee [to Re-Elect the President] prior to June 28, 1972, that Mr. Liddy had told them that he was involved in the Watergate break-in?

MITCHELL:
I have no such recollection.

Glanzer’s grilling went on for three hours. “And when he came out,” reported CBS News’ Daniel Schorr, Mitchell “was no longer smiling, but grim.” Indeed, Glanzer had scored a direct hit. His exchange with Mitchell about the briefing he got from LaRue and Mardian later formed the basis for a perjury charge, Count Five in the
U.S. v. Mitchell
indictment, on which the former attorney general was convicted and incarcerated.
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The scandal was also
taking its toll on the Mitchells as a couple. When a family friend called one morning, indignant about a White House plot to “lay it all on Mitchell,” Martha, eavesdropping on a separate line, started screaming: “I told you! That Goddamned son-of-a-bitch president!” On the night of May 6, Mrs. Mitchell dialed her old partner in crime, UPI’s Helen Thomas, and declared: “Mr. President should resign immediately. I think he let the country down. It’s going to take a hell of a lot to get him out…. He’s been compromised.”

It marked the first demand by a prominent figure for Nixon to resign; others soon followed suit. But the atmosphere that Martha’s remarks helped create scarcely improved her husband’s chances of finding an unbiased jury of his peers. Realizing as much, his patience drained, Mitchell finally turned the tables, picking up an extension during one of his wife’s calls to Thomas. “Martha’s late night telephone calls have been good fun and games in the past,” he growled. “However, this is a serious issue. I’m surprised and disappointed that United Press International would take advantage of a personal phone call made under the stress of the current situation and treat it as a sensational public statement…. Any thought of the president resigning is ridiculous.”

Speculation swirled, too, about Mitchell’s condition. “He was never out of control, or unconscious, or staggering, or weak,” said a lawyer who represented Mitchell at the time. “But he was a steady drinker…. He would be steadily drinking Scotch every night.”
Time
magazine called him the Prisoner of Fifth Avenue.

If he is depressed, Mitchell reportedly does not talk about it to friends, though they find him looking grayer and older. He has assured them that he has an adequate amount of money for his defense and his family’s needs, though he is no millionaire. But not even his friends can say what happens when they are not around and John and Martha alone must confront his besmirched reputation and his shattered career.

What else could the old boy do, but kick back in his Manhattan duplex, put away another bottle of Dewar’s, and take notes in front of the television set? Like the rest of the country, Mitchell sat glued to the Senate hearings, which had begun May 17 and, like every newspaper and magazine in America, showcased a daily thrashing of his once-good name.
Watergate! Vesco! ITT! The milk lobby! The Kissinger wiretaps! The Ellsberg break-in! Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters cash! Howard Hughes and the Vegas casinos! FBI black bag jobs! CIA assassination plots!
There was, it seemed, no scandal of the era, the “decade of shocks” from 1963 to 1974, in which Mitchell’s name did not figure.

And the news media, drunk with power and waist deep at what Kissinger called the “orgy of recrimination,” seldom took care to distinguish leaks from plants, hearsay from eyewitness testimony, fact from fiction. When Mitchell was formally charged in the Vesco case, on May 10,
Newsweek
gleefully enlarged his unsmiling face so readers could see the pores on his nose, and slapped a single word across his bald head: Indicted.
Time
, with equal gaiety, declared: The Inquest Begins.
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For the 80 million
Americans who watched the televised hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, and the millions more who tuned in on radio, 1973 was the Summer of Watergate. The hearings proved, to Nixon’s fatal detriment, enormously popular; his approval rating fell, according to the Harris Poll, from 57 percent at the hearings’ start to 32 percent at their end. By early August, three-quarters of Americans believed Nixon either planned the break-in, knew about it in advance, or helped cover it up.

The wily Southerner banging the gavel, jowly seventy-six-year-old committee chairman Sam J. Ervin Jr. of North Carolina, was, in Nixon’s eyes, a “sharp, resourceful, and intensely partisan political animal.” Challenging Nixon gave Ervin a populist persona that belied his retrograde Southern Democrat record: He had opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, Medicare, and consumer legislation; supported the Vietnam War and the draft; and lobbied in behalf of the infamous segregationist manifesto, the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, which encouraged Southern states to defy the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education
. Blinded by hatred of Nixon and Mitchell, the national press corps was eager to forget all that and was led, as in much else, by Walter Cronkite, the era’s most trusted anchorman, who fawned over Ervin as “this Renaissance man of Washington.” Mitchell thought him “a little senile.”

Ervin’s selection of Sam Dash as majority counsel underscored the intense partisanship that animated the work of the committee. A wiretapping expert, former Philadelphia district attorney, and Georgetown University law professor, the balding, diminutive Dash, with his Buddy Holly eyeglasses and benign Jewish mien, was actually an imperious, intellectually incurious (“I think we all know what happened on the early morning of June 17,” he once dismissively cut off a witness), and fiercely partisan character. As a cross-examiner, he was both unpardonably sloppy, given to multiple, ponderous, often unintelligible queries—Tom Wolfe, watching the hearings, bemusedly hailed the dawn of “a semiliterate variety of solecism known as Dashism”—and anything but impartial, a rabbit-puncher known to use unfaithful paraphrases of prior testimony to frame his follow-ups. The year before, in
Samuel Dash v. John N. Mitchell et al.
, he had sued, in vain, to block the enactment of the Nixon administration’s anticrime proposals, and endorsed George McGovern for president.

And the committee Republicans, his natural allies—what could Mitchell expect from them? Howard Baker Jr., a Tennessee lawyer first elected to the Senate in 1966, was the committee’s ranking GOP member. Handsome and lively, Baker was thrust into a singularly thankless position, torn between his inclination, as a party man, to defend the president and his instincts, as a smart politician, to ride the televised wave of the fin de siècle, which demanded the president’s head. His famous question—“What did the president know, and when did he know it?”—signaled the decision he reached. As minority counsel, Baker chose his thirty-year-old protégé, Fred Thompson. An assistant U.S. attorney whose experience was in bootlegging and bank robbery cases, Thompson offered little promise of protection for the pro-administration witnesses. “Oh, shit,” Nixon moaned, upon hearing Thompson’s name. “Dash is too smart for that kid.”
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At ten o’clock on Tuesday morning, July 10, 1973, Mitchell, dressed in Wall Street suit and tie, strode into the hallowed Senate Caucus Room and took the oath, his right hand raised limply before the battalion of photographers. By this point, Mitchell stood formally indicted in the Vesco case and informally accused, on television, of numerous crimes in Watergate: approving the DNC wiretaps; reviewing logs of the illegally intercepted conversations and sending Liddy back into Democratic headquarters; launching the cover-up by ordering McCord sprung from jail; urging Magruder to destroy the Gemstone logs and commit perjury; and instructing Dean in a broad array of black arts, from obtaining FBI reports to paying hush money and extending offers of executive clemency. Of all these alleged acts, Mitchell was in fact guilty of only one: the subornation of Magruder’s perjury. To keep the original Gemstone meetings a secret, he had taken extraordinary pains—and still failed.

How the former attorney general proposed to scale the awesome edifice of allegation erected around him became a subject of consuming media interest. A two-week delay in the testimony, occasioned by the visit of Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and July Fourth recess, only heightened the anticipation.
Time
reported Mitchell had spent the last month riveted to his TV set, “analyzing every word of testimony, closely watching for weaknesses on the part of each witness and planning to shape an air-tight position.” The
London Observer
merely had him “sequestered in his New York apartment and drinking heavily.” “He’s become somewhat of a mystery man, an unknown force,” remarked CBS News’ Lesley Stahl. “Sources say not even the White House knows what he will testify to when he takes the stand.”

Also of great interest to the press was Martha, whose sanity and marriage were coming unglued in the cruelest, most painfully public way. Every day brought more outlandish behavior. On the evening of June 19, Mrs. Mitchell repeatedly stormed downstairs to rebuke the press camped outside her building, growing more bellicose with each encounter. At ten o’clock she flung a doorman’s cap at Associated Press reporter Judy Yablonsky, then cursed and slapped Yablonsky twice. “You are a part of the Communists, every one of you!” she raved at the assembled. “If you dare come on this side of the street I’ll call Governor Rockefeller!” The awfulness ended only when little Marty Mitchell, arriving home in a chauffeured car at 10:50 p.m., took her mother by the hand and led her inside. What transpired behind closed doors was equally discouraging. “Martha and John now were communicating only when one of them hurled insults or accusations at the other,” Martha’s biographer wrote of this period.
¹¹

The morning after her assault on the press, Martha packed her things and piled into the car with Marty, personal assistant Sandy Hobbs, and the Mitchells’ Hungarian chauffeur, Zolton Komadi. The group’s first stop was an overnight stay in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “[Martha] spent the whole night drinking out of bottles that she smuggled on, because we didn’t know she had packed them,” Hobbs recalled in 1992. “She got mad at the driver, Zolton, fired him. She fired people when she got mad at them. So I drove Zolton to the airport, put him on a plane, and I drove the rest of the way.” Their next destination was Greenwood, Mississippi, and the antebellum mansion belonging to longtime friends Alleta and Charlie Saunders. There they stayed during Mitchell’s three-day stint in the witness chair at the Senate hearings.

At first, Martha took to her new surroundings, relaxing at poolside, finding refuge in the soft breeze and gentle sounds of her native South. Then her husband appeared on television—swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God—and Martha fell to pieces. “She started drinking Bloody Marys,” her biographer reported, and “as far as is known, she didn’t draw a sober breath during the rest of the Mississippi visit.” “You’re a Goddamn liar!” she shouted at her husband’s televised image. “Tell the truth!” Convinced Mitchell was inexplicably covering up for Nixon, Martha even dialed Fred Thompson and instructed him to “get John so mad…he will blurt it all out.” She fought with Marty. She threatened to commit suicide.
Was Mrs. Mitchell in the South?
a reporter asked the former attorney general as he arrived on Capitol Hill. “With that accent,” he quipped, “she’ll always be in the South.”
Were you afraid she’d upstage you?
“This is one occasion where you don’t mind being upstaged.”
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