The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (78 page)

Mitchell—no prosecutions whatever re Mafia or any Italians until Nov.

Mitchell was one of the few men, perhaps the only one, who had the standing and guts to tell the president he was wrong. This happened in the ITT case, when Nixon ordered the Justice Department to drop its appeal of a court decision favorable to the conglomerate and demanded the immediate firing of Richard McLaren, the intractable chief of the antitrust division. It happened again in the Moorer-Radford affair, when Nixon, more justifiably, wanted to prosecute the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top uniformed military commander, for espionage; it was Mitchell who dissuaded the president from this course of action, which would have done incalculable damage to the nation and its armed forces. Mitchell’s appeals on such occasions may have been couched in the language of raw political calculus, not on the basis of good governance, but Mitchell knew his man and served the greater good with the approach most likely to steer Nixon on the responsible path.

ITT and Moorer-Radford might have been Mitchell’s finest hours as a public servant were it not for an even earlier episode in which the attorney general once again intervened to save Nixon, and the country, from Nixon. This was in the summer of 1970, when the interagency discord between the FBI and CIA had reached its nadir, and J. Edgar Hoover, the aged and crotchety FBI director, had imposed a total freeze on cooperation between the two agencies. The enthusiasm Hoover had previously shown for illegal entries and wiretaps, dating back to 1938, had suddenly been replaced by overriding caution and an insistence on written approval for such missions from either President Nixon or Attorney General Mitchell.

Among those irritated by Hoover’s newfound priggishness was a twenty-eight-year-old White House aide named Tom Charles Huston. Imperious, abrasive, staunchly conservative, and mousy—an unsmiling executive-branch version of Woody Allen—Huston had monitored the activities of Yippie and SDS leaders in the fall of 1969, sending intelligence reports up the White House chain that encouraged aggressive action against violent student factions. Now, in the supercharged period following the killings at Kent State, with campus strikes spreading across the country, Huston reckoned the time had come to act decisively. Working in secret with William C. Sullivan, the devious assistant FBI director in charge of the Bureau’s intelligence division, and with like-minded representatives from CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other offices, Huston devised a set of recommendations for the president that would effectively overturn Hoover’s recent restrictions on domestic covert operations. The resultant document, later dubbed the Huston Plan, was sent in memorandum form to H. R. Haldeman in July 1970—over the footnoted objections of Hoover, who was kept in the dark about the formation and conclusions of Huston’s interagency group until the last possible moment.

Perhaps the most infamous government document of the postwar era, Huston’s Domestic Intelligence Gathering Plan advocated the wholesale removal of “operational restraints” on internal intelligence collection. It called for expanded surveillance powers for NSA; “intensification” of FBI break-ins and bugging missions; increases in the number of persons whose mail could be opened surreptitiously; wider infiltration of campus groups; greater use of undercover military agents on domestic soil; and major budget increases for such operations. Huston warned his plan was both “clearly illegal” and “highly risky,” but could produce, if properly implemented, “the type of intelligence which cannot be obtained in any other fashion.”

Nixon never approved the plan in writing, but verbally instructed Haldeman to do so, which the chief of staff did in a July 14, 1970, memorandum to Huston, captioned “Domestic Intelligence Review.” “The recommendations you have proposed as a result of the review have been approved by the president,” Haldeman wrote. But, Haldeman added, the president did not want to implement the plan in the way Huston suggested: a joint session with the heads of the intelligence agencies—and Hoover—in which Nixon would lay down the law and leave no doubt the Huston Plan had the backing of the highest authority. Instead, Haldeman wrote, Nixon “would prefer that the thing simply be put into motion on the basis of this approval.”

Even at an advanced age, his faculties in evident decline, Hoover was a force to be reckoned with, a supremely canny bureaucrat who knew there was only one man who could get Nixon to rescind his approval of the Huston Plan. Accordingly, he and his deputy, Cartha DeLoach, brought the toxic document to Attorney General Mitchell and protested its implementation as both illegal and unwise. “I quite agreed with them,” Mitchell testified at the Watergate cover-up trial, adding the plan “was not something we in the Justice Department would certainly want to participate in…. It had, I think, to put it mildly, some illegal activities involved…. I called Mr. Haldeman and the president and objected to it.”

CIA director Richard Helms, who had attended the meetings that led to the new recommendations, agreed that Mitchell “derailed” the Huston Plan with the opposition he expressed to Nixon. “The president was strongly in favor of it, was constantly stating that the FBI was not giving sufficient support to these matters, and that this was something that ought to be done,” Helms recalled. “But once Mitchell got to him, that was pretty much the end of it.”

The time would come again when Mitchell would be presented with a proposal from some gung ho junior aide for an illegal and unwise domestic intelligence project—and Mitchell would do unto Gemstone as he had done unto the Huston Plan. The only difference was that in the later episode, the “little IBM salesmen,” as Susie Morrison derisively referred to Dean, Magruder, and the other Haldeman protégés scurrying through the White House, wouldn’t take Mitchell’s rejection as the final word.
³

Attorney General Mitchell often
referred to himself as “the president’s lawyer” and spoke of President Nixon as his “client.” This led many, friend and critic alike, to say Mitchell’s “great defect…what ultimately brought him down” was a failure to recognize the responsibilities of high office. This in turn gave rise to the frequent charge, long before Watergate, that Mitchell “politicized” the Department of Justice. Yet many career employees at Justice attested otherwise: that Mitchell seldom interfered with the day-to-day running of the department, a claim borne out by Mitchell’s actions—or inaction—in critical moments, like the ITT case and Nixon’s order to lay off the Mafia. One political scientist at the time recognized the spuriousness of the politicization charge. “Mitchell seems not to have cared much what the people thought of him one way or the other,” wrote Professor William F. Mullen, of Washington State University, in 1976. “In this sense he was what some critics want an ‘independent’ attorney general to be—oblivious to his own political career.”

Indeed, Mitchell’s achievements at Justice were momentous. With his political vision and force of personality, he presided over the nonviolent desegregation of the Southern elementary school system and, too, over a subtle—but significant and necessary—shift in public attitudes toward law and order at the close of the sixties. Chief Justice Rehnquist, interviewed in 1993, considered this one of his old boss’s signature accomplishments. “I think the Mitchell Justice Department restored the idea that it’s the courts who decide what should happen to people who are charged with crimes…. I think he felt that very strongly. I think that was very much different from the Justice Department philosophy that existed in the preceding administration.”

The crimes of John Mitchell fell into three categories. First, there were at least three he got away with. Of these the first was his illegal intervention in the 1968 Paris peace talks: when Nixon and Mitchell, with the aid of Anna Chennault, violated the laws of international diplomacy, directly contacting South Vietnamese officials to urge them not to be swayed by Lyndon Johnson’s last-minute bombing halt. The second unpunished crime was Mitchell’s false testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Kleindienst confirmation hearings, when Mitchell, to protect the president, concealed his own heroic role in the ITT case. The third was the set of false statements Mitchell gave, equally unnecessarily, to FBI agents investigating the 1969–71 Kissinger wiretaps, installations later termed legal by the Justice Department.

There was only one crime Mitchell committed and for which he was caught. This was his subornation of Jeb Magruder’s perjury about the incriminating desk diary before the Watergate grand jury in September 1972. It was included as one of the overt acts in
U.S. v. Mitchell
, and the former attorney general served nineteen months in prison for his convictions in that case.

Finally, there were multiple “crimes” for which, largely on the strength of perjured testimony, Mitchell was prosecuted, but which he never committed. These included all his other convictions in
Mitchell
and the charges filed against him, and of which he was fully acquitted, in
U.S. v. Mitchell-Stans
, the Vesco case. This complicated box score was, perhaps, what Mitchell had in mind when, as legend has it, a woman once approached him on the street and said, “Oh, Mr. Mitchell, I’m so sorry,” and he replied: “No more than I deserved, my dear.”

“I don’t think that John Mitchell would have ever said that he was an innocent man that went to jail,” Debbie Dean said. “I believe he was very honest about what he did do, and what he did not do…. I don’t think that John would have wanted to [be] absolutely, totally vindicated, as though he were somehow an innocent lamb that [was] set up…. I mean, he did something that he considered to be honorable, but that he knew in the end was not right. And he admitted that.”

Yet it must also be kept in mind that
none
of the crimes Mitchell committed, and none of those for which he was wrongly prosecuted, occurred while he was entrusted with public office. His involvement in the Anna Chennault intrigues came while he was a private lawyer running the 1968 campaign; the rest of it—the Kleindienst hearings, the FBI’s investigation of the Kissinger wiretaps, and Watergate—all came after Mitchell had resigned as attorney general.

Thus if Mitchell’s case is a parable of power, its acquisition, uses, and abuses, the key to the story lay in the Chennault affair, which was the means Nixon and Mitchell used to acquire power.
Those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same
. Top officials in the intelligence community, where the suspicious movements of Mrs. Chennault and her friends in the Nixon campaign were detected early on, determined even before Nixon and his strong man assumed office that the two did not feel bound by the (loose) norms under which that community acted; they would have to be watched, and, when the opportunity presented itself, neutralized. Thus the enlistment of Yeoman Radford as a thief of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s documents—selectively leaked by generals and admirals unsympathetic to the administration’s foreign policy—and the deployment of Messrs. Hunt and McCord as spies, respectively, inside the Nixon White House and Mitchell’s Committee for the Re-election of the President. These are best seen as institutional responses to the intrigues of 1968, products of the warped political atmosphere created by the protracted war in Vietnam.

More broadly, Mitchell’s friends and family members pondered the related question: What was his great mistake in life? Why did so brilliant and accomplished a lawyer, such a warm and witty drinking companion, wind up so disgraced? The answers tended to split along a clear fault line. There were those who believed Mitchell’s great mistake was marrying Martha Mitchell and those who believed it was allying himself with Richard Nixon. Perhaps the two best-known proponents for each case were, of course, Martha and Nixon themselves, each of whom blamed the other for the downfall of the man they both considered the bedrock of their lives. Of course, the answer was that both were to blame, that it was the twin pressures of Martha and Nixon that brought the strong man down.

But what did Mitchell himself think? The best evidence on that question came from Mitchell’s former press secretary, Jack Landau, who considered his boss a widely misunderstood, underappreciated figure. “He was not just a flinty-eyed, one-dimensional conservative who got caught in a crime and went to jail,” Landau said in 1993. “He really was an actor in American political life.” Accordingly, Landau wanted to do something nice for Mitchell when he got out of prison; so he took the old man to lunch. On that occasion Landau asked point-blank: “If you had it to do all over again, what would you do differently?”

Mitchell paused for a moment. His mind reeled, and finally alighted on an incident he used to recount to his children. The year was 1960, and Mitchell was enjoying the good life in Rye, New York, with his eccentric but still sociable second wife, the former Martha Beall Jennings. He was seated in his law office at Caldwell, Trimble, and Mitchell when a secretary said he had a visitor, a man named Bobby Kennedy. Mitchell was busy at the moment and finished what he was doing while keeping the younger man waiting. Kennedy didn’t like that. When Mitchell finally saw him, Kennedy said he understood Mitchell was an important man, with contacts in nearly all fifty states.
How did he feel about helping to run his brother Jack’s presidential campaign?
Mitchell demurred. Kennedy was undeterred. He started waving around documents, suggesting it would be in Mitchell’s interests—and those of his clients—if he reconsidered. With that, Mitchell threw the younger man out of his office.