The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (63 page)

Mitchell waived his opening
statement and awaited Dash’s onslaught. The chief counsel started with a brief recap of Mitchell’s years in government, stressing the Nixon administration’s efforts to combat leaks; the idea was to tie Mitchell first to covert projects in general, then to Liddy, specifically. “During 1971,” asked Dash, “were you aware of an intelligence operation that had been set up in the White House under Mr. Ehrlichman and Mr. Krogh which has become known as the Plumbers operation?” No, Mitchell answered; not until after the Watergate arrests had he learned of it. Dash moved to Mitchell’s Achilles’ heel: the Gemstone meetings. After the witness described the “complete horror story” of Liddy’s first presentation, Dash asked why Mitchell hadn’t thrown Liddy out of his office. “In hindsight,” Mitchell said, “I should have thrown him out of the window.” Dash’s retort—“Since you did neither”—brought the house down.

Mitchell recounted how he rejected the Gemstone plan for the third time at Key Biscayne. “Then how do you explain, Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Magruder’s sworn testimony that you, however reluctantly, approved the quarter-million-dollar Liddy plan at Key Biscayne?” Here Mitchell schooled the professor in the art of cross-examination: “Mr. Dash, I can’t explain anybody’s testimony up here except my own.” It was the first of many times Mitchell used Dash’s ill-conceived questions against him.

But Dash did not close his first round of questioning, a full morning’s worth, empty-handed. He extracted two key admissions: that Mitchell knew Magruder was going to commit perjury at the grand jury in September 1972 and that Mitchell knew about the Watergate cover-up and “White House horrors” but alerted neither the president nor the prosecutors for fear of jeopardizing Nixon’s reelection. Dash also elicited from Mitchell one of two responses that later formed the basis for perjury charges—and convictions—against the former attorney general. The prized moment came during Dash’s questioning about the meeting in Mitchell’s Watergate apartment on the evening of June 19, 1972, when he supposedly ordered Magruder to burn the Gemstone logs. “I had not heard of the Gemstone files as of that meeting,” Mitchell testified, “and as of that date, I had not heard that anybody there at that particular meeting knew of the wiretapping aspects of that, or had any connection with it.” Though true—as Liddy could have attested—these words later resurfaced as Count Six in the
U.S. v. Mitchell
indictment.
¹³

Fred Thompson used his questioning mostly to summarize the conflicts between Mitchell’s testimony and that of his accusers, Magruder and Dean. No, Mitchell said, he had never ordered Dean to enlist Herb Kalmbach or CIA in paying hush money, and no, he had never urged Dean to drain the $350,000 White House fund for like purposes. Then Thompson challenged Mitchell’s rationale for doing nothing to stop the cover-up. The key was the briefing Mitchell had gotten from Mardian and LaRue on June 20, 1972, in which, for the first time, Mitchell had learned about the “White House horrors.”

THOMPSON:
As I understand your testimony this morning, the knowledge you got from that debriefing was really the reason why you, in effect, stood by while Magruder was preparing a story which, according to what you knew…was going to be a false story, to present to the grand jury.

MITCHELL:
Along, Mr. Thompson, with some of the other stories that Mr. Dean later brought forward…the Diem papers and the suspected extra-curricular wiretapping, and a few of the others.

THOMPSON:
Okay. That caused you to take that position with regard to Magruder. And also, I assume that those factors were the reasons why you, in effect, acquiesced, anyway, in the payments to the [defendants’] families of support money and lawyers’ fees and that sort of thing, which I am sure you realize could have been pretty embarrassing, to say the least, if not illegal, at that time. Would that be correct so far as your motivations are concerned?

MITCHELL:
That is a correct summary of my motivation and rationale for the actions that I did take.
¹⁴

Mitchell’s first day of testimony was coming to a close—but more brushes with perjury lay ahead. Herman Talmadge of Georgia, a hawkish Democrat who had been his state’s governor and served sixteen years in the Senate, asked if, prior to resigning as attorney general, Mitchell had played an active supervisory role in the Nixon reelection campaign. “What I did,” said Mitchell, “was succumb to the president’s request to keep an eye on what was going on over there,” adding that he had held “frequent” meetings with campaign officials on “matters of policy.”
So you did play an active supervisory role?
The word “supervisory” bothered Mitchell; he preferred “consulting.”
And it never moved beyond consulting?
No, Mitchell said with a wink—although he sometimes volunteered his opinions “forcefully and strongly.”

Now Talmadge, a lawyer with four decades’ experience, moved in on his prey. He brandished the transcript of Mitchell’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 14, 1972—the Kleindienst-ITT hearings—and wondered if Mitchell remembered what he’d said then, to Senator Kennedy, about his role in the reelection campaign while at Justice. Mitchell read aloud his year-old exchange with Kennedy.

KENNEDY:
Do you remember what party responsibilities you had prior to March 1 [1972]?

MITCHELL:
Party responsibilities?

KENNEDY:
Yes. Republican Party.

MITCHELL:
I do not have and did not have any responsibilities. I have no party responsibilities now, senator.

“If I can read the English language correctly,” Talmadge said mockingly, “one or the other of your statements is in error.” Trapped by a lawyer whose skills equaled his own, Mitchell resorted to semantics. “Senator Kennedy…referred to the Republican Party,” he explained, “and that was the context in which I took it.” Again, Talmadge drew laughter from the crowd: “‘No re-election campaign responsibilities?’ I ask you who was running? Mr. Nixon? And is he a Republican?”

MITCHELL:
There is no illegality about any presidential appointee engaging in the carrying out of political functions.

TALMADGE:
I am not arguing that point, Mr. Mitchell…. If I can read the English language in two places, they are the opposite of each other. You state that they aren’t. If I understand English, and I learned it in a small country school, in Telfair County—

MITCHELL:
So did I, senator, a very small one.

TALMADGE:
We both studied the same English, I assume. [Laughter]

MITCHELL:
That is why I am surprised you don’t agree with my interpretation. [Laughter]

Despite the laughter, and Mitchell’s success in getting the last word, Talmadge had given the former attorney general a serious scare. To hammer home his point, the senator introduced into the record two memoranda Jeb Magruder had sent the attorney general, dated December 1971 and January 1972, requesting decisions, respectively, on funding for the RNC and a $45,000 phone bank for the Florida primary. Talmadge marveled at the witness’s agility. “You are a good lawyer, Mr. Mitchell,” he said—then added, “testifying under oath to a lie is commonly referred to as perjury, is it not?”

The senator wasn’t finished. He ran scattershot through Watergate, from Burning Tree to Howard Hunt’s final payment, and closed with an angry peroration on the duties of government men. “If they see anything going wrong involving their superior that needs immediate corrective action, they report it instantly,” he said. “When you found out all these crimes and conspiracies and cover-ups were being committed, why on earth didn’t you walk into the president’s office and tell him the truth?” It wasn’t a question of telling him the truth, Mitchell replied; it was a question of shielding him from it. “Knowing Richard Nixon, the president, as I do, he would just lower the boom on all of this matter and it would come back to hurt him, and it would affect him in his re-election.” The next exchange offered the definitive statement of Mitchell’s worldview.

TALMADGE:
Am I to understand from your response that you placed the expediency of the next election above your responsibilities as an intimate to advise the president of the peril that surrounded him?…

MITCHELL:
Senator, I think you have put it exactly correct. In my mind, the re-election of Richard Nixon, compared with what was available on the other side, was so much more important that I put it in just that context.

Mitchell had spent five hours in the witness chair. He was ordered to return the following day to face off against Chairman Ervin.
¹⁵

The North Carolinian began
by reminding Mitchell of his exchange with Talmadge, in which Mitchell had argued it was no crime for a presidential adviser to carry out political functions. Wasn’t it “rather inexpedient,” Ervin asked, for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to have been engaged in political activities? Mitchell agreed it was. Then Ervin dusted off the transcript of Mitchell’s 1969 confirmation hearing, at which, in response to Ervin’s own questions, the nominee had promised: “Henceforward my duties and functions will be related to the Justice Department, and as the legal and not the political adviser of the president.” “I am very sorry that you didn’t carry out the purpose you announced on that occasion,” Ervin declared. “Mr. Chairman, that would have been my fondest wish,” replied Mitchell. “Unfortunately, it is very, very difficult to turn down a request by the president of the United States.”

“Wouldn’t the evidence justify the inference,” Ervin asked, “that you did not communicate your disapproval in such an emphatic enough manner [as] to prevent the bugging and the break-in?” It was a question that undermined Ervin’s claim to impartiality and, too, his cherished reputation as the Senate’s leading expert on the Constitution. Not only was he ignoring, as an investigator, the exculpatory testimony of Fred LaRue; he was also pressing the dubious legal argument, on the basis of an “inference,” that individuals should be held accountable even for crimes they refused to sanction! Mitchell did his best to wade through the muddle, explaining patiently that he had asked Liddy only to devise a counterdemonstration plan, nothing more; but Ervin wouldn’t hear it.

The remainder of Ervin’s questioning was aimed not at eliciting new information, but at forcing the witness to perform, as the villain, in a ponderous morality play. Accordingly he dragged Mitchell through a rehash of things he’d already admitted he had known about, or learned, but never raised with Nixon: the White House horrors; Hunt’s and Liddy’s roles in Watergate; Magruder’s perjury; the efforts—by others—to silence the defendants with cash. Had Nixon ever asked Mitchell to tell everything he knew about Watergate? No, Mitchell answered, not after their brief chat on the evening of June 20, 1972, in which Mitchell had apologized for not keeping a tighter rein on his men. “Well, if the cat hadn’t any more curiosity than that, it would still be enjoying its nine lives,” Ervin said to the room’s delight, “all of them!” “Well, I hope the president enjoys eight more,” Mitchell shot back.

Of the panel’s three Republicans, Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut emerged as the most opportunistic, transparently hostile to Mitchell and Nixon. After a few preliminaries, he focused on Liddy’s Gemstone pitches, especially the first and most fantastical, presented in Mitchell’s Justice Department office on January 27, 1972:

WEICKER:
The life of every American is, or to a great degree, his liberty, protection of all his rights, sits in the hands of the attorney general of the United States. And do you mean to tell me that you sat there through that meeting and, in fact, actually had the same man come back into your office for a second meeting without in any way alerting appropriate authorities, in this particular case, the president of the United States?

MITCHELL:
That is exactly what happened, senator. And as I say, in hindsight, it was a grievous error.

WEICKER:
…Well, the fact is, forget, for one minute, politics; let’s just talk about your position as attorney general of the United States. I find it inconceivable…the mentality that you didn’t go ahead and have the fellow [Liddy] arrested for even suggesting this to the attorney general of the United States.

MITCHELL:
Senator, I doubt if you can get people arrested for suggesting such things, but as I said—

Here Weicker, a graduate of University of Virginia Law School, foolishly cut off the witness, the more accomplished lawyer, to challenge him on statutory interpretation.

WEICKER:
For suggesting illegal acts to the attorney general of the United States? I think that probably is grounds for arrest.

MITCHELL:
Do you really, senator?

WEICKER:
I do, I do.

MITCHELL:
I would have some doubts. I don’t know what part of Title XVIII [of the U.S. Code] would cover that…

Bested on the law, Weicker engaged in theatrics, incredulously asking why Mitchell, speaking with Nixon a few hours after Liddy’s first pitch, made no mention of “what had transpired in the office of the attorney general that morning.” “I do not know how often you get to talk to the president of the United States,” Mitchell jabbed back, “but he is the one that normally initiates the conversation and the subject matters that are discussed.” “This is fantasy, this is incredible!” Weicker thundered. “You have the option of talking to the president hours after this idiot is in your office and you say nothing!” By the end of Weicker’s questioning, Mitchell’s air of unruffled calm appeared to have gotten under the senator’s skin. After Mitchell explained why it wouldn’t have been unusual for Nixon to keep to himself the contents of his March 21 “cancer on the presidency” meeting with Dean, Weicker, like Dash before him, resorted to rudeness, setting himself up for a classic Mitchell one-liner.