The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (9 page)

On April 29, Mitchell
had called a staff meeting in New York to announce the addition to the campaign of two men whose services he said would ensure “the best and most effective use of Richard Nixon’s time and energy.”
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These two men were to play a decisive role in the history of the nation—and in unraveling the good life Mitchell enjoyed that day.

Harry Robbins (Bob) Haldeman was new to the ’68 campaign, but not to the candidate. In the vast literature chronicling the Nixon presidency, most commonly noted of Haldeman’s background was his long service—twenty years—as an executive in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York offices of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Mistaking this management career in advertising for a creative one later enabled hostile reporters to cast Haldeman, inventor of the term “news cycle,”
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as a leading villain in the creation of a corrupt Information Age presidency. By contrast, few have noted Haldeman’s intelligence, described as “near-genius” level, his World War II service record, his directorship of California’s Better Business Bureau, or his membership on the University of California board of regents and the Salvation Army board of directors. With his tanned, lantern-jawed good looks and trademark crew cut, Haldeman was the kind of hopelessly square, community-minded
uber
-citizen who made America what it was, or is popularly remembered as having been, in the fifties.
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Somewhere along the line, though, Haldeman’s commitment to Nixon, developed as the former studied business at UCLA and the latter pursued Alger Hiss, became all-consuming. Starting as an advance man, Haldeman worked his way up to campaign tour manager in 1960, and overall manager of Nixon’s ill-fated California gubernatorial bid. In ’68, Haldeman returned with a clear role. He would run the candidate—Nixon’s schedule, staff, travel—while Mitchell ran the campaign: relations with party and political organizations, volunteers and fund-raisers, “everything other than the candidate himself.” The two generally got along fine. “I have always found Bob Haldeman to be an honest, straight-forward individual,” Mitchell recalled in 1988.
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Of the second man he introduced that day, however, Mitchell could scarcely say the same; indeed, he soon came to view John Ehrlichman as “a conniving little S.O.B.” A native of Tacoma, Washington, John Ehrlichman enlisted in the Army Air Corps and flew twenty-six missions over Europe as a B-24 navigator in World War II. Portly and balding, a UCLA classmate of Haldeman’s and fellow Christian Scientist, Ehrlichman was recruited by Haldeman to serve as an advance man for Nixon in 1960. He continued helping Nixon, both in the ’62 debacle and again two years later, at the Goldwater convention. But Ehrlichman frowned on Nixon’s drinking, which had fueled the self-destructive “last press conference” and an equally ugly occasion at the ’64 convention, during which Nixon, according to Ehrlichman, “made some clumsy passes” at a young woman. Asked four years later to manage scheduling and credentials at the GOP convention, Ehrlichman insisted on a tête-à-tête with Nixon, in which he audaciously bartered his support for a promise that the candidate would forswear alcohol; Nixon agreed.
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In his 1982 memoir,
Witness to Power
, Ehrlichman recalled his first meeting with Mitchell. “His picture was all over the papers and magazines then,” Ehrlichman wrote, “smoking his pipe, taciturn, aloof, a sort of Wall Street Gary Cooper.”

In his pictures he looked better than he did in person, however; the day I first met him, at the headquarters…he said a few cordial words to me about the convention, named some Seattle bond lawyer we both knew and in a minute sent me on my way…. [Later] I began to see that he wasn’t as gruff and remote as he appeared…. [H]e was withdrawn and quiet, but hardly forbidding.

Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s arrival on the scene dramatically changed the campaign’s internal dynamics; one key player felt its “happy, carefree environment came to a screeching halt.” Where the inner circle was previously divided between California and New York men—Nixon’s past and present—the fault lines were now drawn along personal, not geographic, lines. “There was a lot of talk about the Haldeman crowd and the Mitchell crowd,” Robert Mardian recalled. “Kleindienst and I, we were all the Mitchell crowd.” These fault lines would persist through the Watergate cover-up trial.
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The electoral waters of
1968 were unusually rough. Within four months, the nation witnessed the Democratic primary insurgency of antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota; LBJ’s stunning abdication; the entrance into the race of Robert F. Kennedy (who, as late as October 1966, had sworn against running); the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and RFK; and fiery, bloody riots in dozens of American cities. It all played out against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam, and, too, the great social upheavals occurring at home: the civil rights movement; the sexual revolution; the emergence of a “generation gap” and middle-class drug culture; mind-boggling advances in science, medicine, space exploration, communications and data retrieval systems, mass-marketing. America and the world around it were changing rapidly, hurtling toward the twenty-first century through enormous leaps and scarring convulsions.

Nowhere in the United States did this change come more slowly, and exact greater human cost, than in the South, where Reconstruction-era electoral constellations had begun shifting amid the new realities of integration and two-party politics. Once solidly Democratic, the Deep South had seen Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi depart from one hundred years’ tradition by awarding their electoral votes, in 1964, to Goldwater. Mitchell and Nixon saw the South as integral to the construction of a new GOP electoral majority—a theme soon to be enshrined by a twenty-seven-year-old political analyst working for Mitchell that year, Kevin Phillips, in his political science classic,
The Emerging Republican Majority
. To capture the nomination, Nixon needed 667 convention delegates; his primary victories had locked up 112, while the Mitchell-Kleindienst delegate operation had garnered another 108 from the Rocky Mountains region. Next came the pivotal South, which required special handling.
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On May 31, Mitchell and Nixon flew to Georgia to meet with thirteen Southern Republican state chairmen at Atlanta’s Marriott Motor Hotel. The chairmen demanded a promise: If Nixon won the White House, he had to steer patronage jobs to Southern party workers. They had long memories of Eisenhower’s failure to deliver on this score. Nixon’s inclination was to refuse—he knew a Democratic Congress could frustrate any patronage plan—but Mitchell nudged him to mollify the chairmen, and Nixon followed this counsel. In exchange, Nixon asked the Southerners not to commit their convention delegates to anyone else—especially Reagan—until Nixon had exhausted his prospects for victory. The Southerners agreed.

From Atlanta, Nixon headed to Key Biscayne to take stock. Ten aides accompanied him, including Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. “It was here finally,” a reporter later observed, “that Mitchell emerged, in the phrase of one of the participants, as ‘El Supremo.’” The following night, Mitchell sat out a torrential downpour in his Key Biscayne villa, puffing on his pipe. His companions included Haldeman, who quietly sipped a beer, and campaign press secretary Herb Klein, a veteran of Nixon’s California days just joining the campaign. Mitchell and Haldeman dissected the Atlanta summit while Klein took Mitchell’s measure. “I suspected initially,” Klein wrote later, “that the real manager would be Haldeman…. I soon found that Mitchell was stronger and understood more of the realities of national politics than I had anticipated.”
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On the eve of
the Miami convention, rattled by Ronald Reagan’s attempts to poach Southern delegates, Nixon dialed Mitchell from Montauk, Long Island, where the candidate was resting. “Is there anything I need to know before I come down there?” “No,” Mitchell replied tersely, and hung up. The next day, as the convention gaveled to order, Reagan, with a showman’s timing, officially declared his candidacy just as Nixon arrived. From his Hilton Plaza suite, Nixon again nervously called Mitchell, looking to assess Reagan’s impact. “John, what’s the count?” he asked. “I told you that you didn’t need to worry, Dick,” replied Mitchell. “We’ve got everything under control.”
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Mitchell’s confidence bespoke the breadth and depth of the delegate tracking mechanism he and Kleindienst had devised, an elaborate system of files and charts laying out delegates’ names, contact information, philosophies, hobbies, friends, enemies. A ten-year veteran of GOP campaigns called Mitchell’s system “the most thorough I had seen…aimed at taking a constant political pulse on the feelings of each delegate.” Nothing less would have sufficed, for delegate preferences, especially in the South, proved more fluid than anyone anticipated. Alabama’s Nixon captain, Jim Martin, worried aloud he would “get lynched when we get home” if his delegation did not cast some votes for Reagan; Congressman James Gardner, of North Carolina’s delegation, declared flatly: “I’m for Ronnie.” A CBS News count, conducted at 9:30 p.m. that night, found Reagan still 434 delegates shy of Nixon, but rapidly gaining steam.
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Something had to be done. Mitchell turned immediately to South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. A Democrat until 1964, the sixty-six-year-old Thurmond was emerging as a pivotal figure in the transformation of Southern politics, and in these desperate hours of the ’68 convention, he anointed himself chief arbiter of the greater Southern interest. Under that guise, he demanded Nixon and Mitchell reassure him, and Dixie, on two central points: school desegregation and the vice presidential nominee. On the former, Nixon reaffirmed his support of state autonomy, and his opposition to forced busing—but not his opposition to desegregation per se. This was code the South well understood. Thurmond agreed to tend his flock, shepherding delegates into Nixon’s welcoming arms—
if
Nixon agreed to repeat the same reassurances to the delegates themselves the following morning. “Okay, I’ll do it,” Nixon said.

The next day, two Southern delegations trekked to Nixon’s hotel for private meetings, at which they would judge his sincerity for themselves. The first session, which included delegates from Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, was secretly recorded by a delegate whom the
Miami Herald
had outfitted with a tape recorder. After breaking the ice with a few quips, Nixon emphasized he would neither “forget the South” nor treat it “as a whipping boy.” Forced busing of a child, he said, will “destroy that child.” He could be counted on to appoint judges who would interpret the law, not make it. On open housing—which Nixon had already supported on record—he cast the issue as settled, something he embraced to “get it out of the way.” Finally, on the matter of his running mate, he dismissed “cockeyed stories that Nixon has made a deal with this one or that one.” While reserving the right to decide for himself, Nixon assured the delegates he would not “divide this party.”
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Those who later claimed Mitchell and Nixon pursued a “Southern strategy” to capture the presidency, selling their souls to Strom Thurmond for Southern delegates, often cited the
Miami Herald
transcript as the receipt for the transaction; in fact, a close reading reveals Nixon gave the South nothing substantial. Even the
New York Times
acknowledged most of what Nixon said was consistent with previous public pledges. As a Georgia historian has noted, Nixon emphasized themes appealing to conservatives, but always remained “cautious enough not to make any kind of blatant regional, much less racist, appeals…no unreasonable commitments.”
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While Nixon emerged from the affair unscathed, it gave him and Mitchell a foretaste of what it would be like to see their private remarks surreptitiously recorded and splashed, in transcript form, across the nation’s front pages.