The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (12 page)

Nixon and Mitchell realized they could ill afford to make Chennault angry—or talkative, especially with reporters starting to sniff about. “You’re going to get me in a lot of trouble,” she coquettishly told one journalist. “I know so much and I can say so little.” “Whatever I did during the campaign,” she told another, “the Republicans, including Mr. Nixon, knew about.” She wrote later that Mitchell remained “concerned even after he was confirmed” as attorney general that she would go public.
⁶⁰

Concern at the White House also reached high levels. Peter Flanigan, Mitchell’s deputy during the campaign and now the White House liaison to the Business Roundtable, wrote Mitchell to say he had heard “indirectly that Anna Chenault [
sic
] is unhappy because she has not been recognized by the Administration.”

Since you had the liaison (if it can be called that) with this good lady I’d like your suggestions as to whether we should take some action to recognize her. If the answer is “yes” should this be in terms of an invitation to dinner at the White House or something more important…[?]
⁶¹

Flanigan was not alone in his anxiety. In previously unpublished notes, H. R. Haldeman recorded with alarm that
Boston Globe
reporter Tom Ottenad was

running intensive invest of Mrs. Chennault episode

[talking to]
people in Austin + around country

asked to see LBJ + Tom
[Corcoran, a Democratic lawyer

and friend of Chennault]
—both refused…

Jan. ’69 they published first stories

re Repub. efforts to sabotage
[the Paris talks]

reason for renewed interest—have recently

obtained new info

Repub ldrs approved activity—have exact names

feel this is an impt. footnote on Am History

wants to see LBJ—no quotes—just info

also
[LBJ aides Walt]
Rostow,
[George]
Christian,
[Arthur]

Temple, all told to avoid seeing + if so—say not
one
word

they are not playing ball w/ them at all

but someone may

could cause a problem…
⁶²

Presumably Mitchell and even Nixon himself were among the “Republican leaders” whose “exact names” were in the
Globe
’s possession—a state of affairs that indeed “could cause a problem” for the White House. Fortunately for Nixon and Mitchell, the
Globe
, for reasons unknown, dropped the story.

But the two men took their cue. They started periodically inviting Chennault to White House and Justice Department functions, and the president, according to Haldeman’s unpublished notes, ordered his aides to give the Dragon Lady a “high-level title”—with the added admonition that it “can’t be in government.” “We have to finesse her,” Nixon privately told Henry Kissinger.
⁶³

Amazingly, despite all the investigations, hearings, and trials that marked the collapse of the Nixon presidency, Mitchell seems never to have been questioned on the record, or under oath, about the Chennault affair. More than three decades later, its significance remained a point of sharp dispute. Richard Holbrooke, who served in 1968 on the American delegation at Paris and later became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, charged Nixon and Mitchell with having “massively, directly, and covertly interfered in a major diplomatic negotiation.”
⁶⁴
Former defense secretary Robert McNamara was more direct: “It was a criminal act.”

Nixon speechwriter William Safire saw nothing “criminal” in the affair, but conceded it was “was not one of American politics’ finest hours.” John Lehman, an aide to Kissinger on the National Security Council and later secretary of the navy, simply shrugged. “That sort of thing goes on all the time,” Lehman said in 2001. “There are October Surprises and back-channels…[Nixon and Mitchell] knew that Johnson was rubber-hosing Thieu and the South Vietnamese government. And basically they just sent the message: ‘Hang on’…And so it didn’t seem to me that it was particularly unusual. I mean it was the way the game is always played.”
⁶⁵

A source close to the affair—who demanded anonymity—strongly challenged the veracity of the prime witness. “Simply do not trust what Anna Chennault says about this incident,” said the source, a senior policy adviser to Nixon and other GOP politicians in later years. “She manufactured the incident, then magnified her self-importance.”

She caused untold problems with her perpetual self-promotion and, actually, self-aggrandizement, because she was ultimately interested only in the money. I do not put it in the realm of fantasy that she was being paid by the SVs [South Vietnamese]; she had them bamboozled, believing she was an authentic and important “channel” to the campaign. John Mitchell…did not have the bullocks to kiss her off, a tough and persistent woman who could grind you down…. Anna thought of herself as a puppet master. She had no assignment, no tasks, and was an over-the-transom type that can never be suppressed in a campaign.
⁶⁶

Yet the Chennault affair continued to haunt Nixon’s presidency. His infamous orders to burglarize the Brookings Institution, issued in the summer of 1971 following publication of the Pentagon Papers and never carried out, stemmed from the president’s concern that the Washington think tank possessed documents related to “the bombing halt”—a euphemism for Nixon’s and Mitchell’s own back-channel machinations to counter it.

Later still, when Watergate raised the specter of wide-ranging congressional probes into wiretapping by the Nixon administration, the president asked Mitchell, by then out of government, to marshal evidence showing that LBJ had ordered the bugging of Nixon’s own campaign plane in 1968. The plan was abandoned when former president Johnson threatened anew to expose the Dragon Lady’s activities. Mitchell’s fitful attempt at gathering this evidence, including calls to old chums in and out of the FBI in early 1973, was likely driven by a wish to help Nixon survive Watergate—but also by Mitchell’s desire to examine the archival record for evidence of his own involvement in the Chennault affair.

At a minimum, the episode served notice on high-level Washington, as early as the spring of 1968, that Richard Nixon and John Mitchell were men to be watched carefully. And when they assumed office, as president and attorney general of the United States, respectively, few of their peers in the intelligence community—at the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency, especially—forgot that lesson.

Richard Nixon had finally
won the presidency—but what, exactly, had John Mitchell contributed? Did he mastermind the candidate’s remarkable comeback from the debacle of ’62—or had Mitchell’s rigidity and inexperience almost cost Nixon the election? Syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak faulted Mitchell for missing “a golden opportunity” to enlist blacks and liberals, a mistake that “very nearly proved fatal” to Nixon’s candidacy. They even bestowed a derisive name on the Wall Streeter’s supposedly divisive and overly cautious approach: “Mitchellism.”
⁶⁷

By contrast, Richard Kleindienst called Mitchell the most politically astute operative he ever saw—and nothing argued more strongly in Mitchell’s favor than victory itself. Republicans accounted for only 26 percent of all registered voters that year, yet Nixon carried thirty-two states (302 electoral votes) compared to Humphrey’s thirteen (191) and Wallace’s five (45). Mitchell’s machine captured Florida, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia; turnout in each, save for Kentucky, exceeded 1960 and 1964 levels. “[W]hat Mitchell accomplished in 1968 was incredible,” Dwight Chapin marveled.
⁶⁸

Operating with “complete autonomy,” Mitchell took few risks—and made few mistakes. He ensured his candidate stuck to the themes of Miami: honorable peace in Vietnam, law and order at home. Where Nixon considered televised debates with Humphrey, if only to redeem his ashen performance against JFK, Mitchell knew better and, as he put it, “turned off any debates.” The
New York Times
reported that Mitchell “kept the staff lean and on its toes…. Even during the toughest moments of the campaign, Mitchell apparently never lost his self-possession or his temper.”
BusinessWeek
agreed:

A key and possibly crucial difference between Nixon’s 1960 and 1968 presidential campaigns was organization, and it was Mitchell who provided the administrative hand that made the Nixon machine a textbook operation. Even under the pressures of the tightening campaign, Mitchell is not recorded to have ever lost his temper, blamed anyone else for a mistake or even stalled a decision.
⁶⁹

Mitchell felt his work was done. He could now return to Wall Street and resume his bond practice, buoyed by his nationwide stature and ready to reap the benefits of his law partner’s ascension to the presidency. Martha Mitchell could also resume her old, quieter life, as a mother and the lovably eccentric, perpetually inebriated housewife of a rich lawyer in Rye. It all sounded idyllic—but Richard Nixon had other plans.

LAW AND ORDER

Of all the public officials I ever met in my life, [John Mitchell] cared less about what people thought about him than anybody.

—William D. Ruckelshaus, 1994
¹

IN MIAMI, MITCHELL
boasted he was “invulnerable” to any appeal to join the new administration. But Nixon insisted. “Even as John Mitchell was helping me develop a list of candidates for attorney general,” Nixon wrote in 1978, “I decided that I would try to persuade him to accept the position himself. I wanted someone who shared my concern about permissiveness in the courts and even in many law enforcement agencies. Mitchell was tough, intelligent, and fair. Moreover, I counted him my most trusted friend and adviser and I wanted to have his advice available, not just on legal matters but on the whole range of presidential decision-making.”
²

The day after the election, Nixon asked Mitchell to take the job; but as John Ehrlichman remembered, “Martha Mitchell was in a sanatorium, drying out, and Mitchell declined Nixon’s offer.” “I spent a day with him, workin’ on him,” Nixon told David Frost in 1977. “I didn’t know why he wouldn’t do it. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even want to come down for the election night business, and all that sort of thing. And he told me a little about Martha’s problem, but only saying, you know, ‘She’s, she’s not really up to it emotionally.’”
³

Mitchell, who privately referred to Washington as “Disneyland East,” made no secret of his reluctance to serve. “I did decline this post repeatedly—twenty-six times, I think,” he told an interviewer in August 1969. “This was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I’ve got all the things I’ve ever wanted. I’m a fat and prosperous Wall Street lawyer, which is just what I always wanted to be.”
⁴

Nixon sensed the real obstacle. Had she remained in Rye, Martha Mitchell could have continued on in her blissfully intoxicated way, another rich eccentric; but in the glare of the Washington spotlight, the aging belle’s fragile psyche would be placed in the cruel hands of opportunistic partisans and dowdy society columnists. “[N]umber one [problem in Mitchell’s mind] would be Martha Mitchell,” recalled Len Garment, “who had very real psychological problems that pre-existed the presidency.”

[T]hey were discernible to everyone. I mean, she was—whatever she was clinically, she manifested very profound characteristics that were, I mean, that were—that were
aberrant
. I mean, that were
uncontrollable.
…So [Mitchell] knew that and he knew that would present a problem, bringing her down to this heady hothouse atmosphere of Washington. Sort of like carrying an explosive substance into a very hot area.

So what convinced Mitchell his wife could survive Washington? For one thing, Nixon was unrelenting, disrupting the Mitchells’ stay in Beacon with a steady stream of plaintive calls, pleading for Mitchell to change his mind. Nixon told Frost he rebuffed Mitchell’s assertion that Martha was “not really up to it emotionally” by contending, against all reason, that public life might actually
help
her: “Being an amateur psychiatrist—we all are, aren’t we?—I said, ‘If you move her to Washington, she may be better.’” Susie Morrison, Mitchell’s secretary, said Martha’s psychiatrist had agreed: “It was her doctor’s decision it might be good for her.”

But there was another reason behind the change of heart. Mitchell simply could not turn down a direct request from the president-elect of the United States, even if it came from a man he felt could not “piss straight in the shower” without his help—or perhaps
especially
if it came from such a man. “John Mitchell, I believe, was an intense patriot. He loved his country more than God,” said Brent Harries. “He was guided by ethics and morals that transcended common sense…. I do remember Mitchell saying, ‘When the president of the United States asks you to do something, it isn’t just a request.’”

Decision made, Mitchell now aimed to sell it to his wife. According to Martha, he used a lot of “sweet talk and patriotic speeches” and claimed he needed her, “with her superior insight into human nature,” to help him choose the new cabinet. Flush with visions of power, Martha practically leapt out of bed. As she checked out of Craig House, she implored the hospital staff to hurry; their delays were “holding up the selection of Nixon’s Cabinet.” In later years, when he looked back on Martha’s tragic trajectory, her ex-husband, according to an intimate, felt “very responsible for having brought her to Washington, and having gotten her into [this] kind of life…”
⁵

Nixon got his man,
but Mitchell imposed a price. Richard Kleindienst, the hard-nosed Goldwater operative who proved instrumental in Nixon’s victory, had returned to Phoenix to resume his own law practice. Mitchell called him a week after the election. “Dick, the president-elect wants me to be the attorney general.” “Super, John, and congratulations,” Kleindienst replied, elated. “I really don’t want the job,” Mitchell shot back. “I’d much rather stay in New York and practice law. However, [Nixon] is adamant. To come to the point, I’ve just informed him I would do it if I could have you as my deputy. How about it?” Kleindienst begged off; he had kids in school and needed to make money. Within forty-eight hours, Nixon was on the line. “Dick, I need John as the attorney general. He’s agreed to do it if you come back and help him.” To this direct appeal from the president-elect, Kleindienst also proved helpless to resist.
⁶

On December 11, 1968, Nixon introduced Mitchell and the rest of his cabinet on nationwide television. The next day, the
New York Times
quoted an unnamed source as saying Mitchell was “very pragmatic and has no hard-cut ideological viewpoint. Some would classify him as a liberal, some see him as a conservative.” The
Washington Post
called Mitchell a “take-charge man” who had switched his registration from independent to Republican less than two years earlier.
⁷

Mitchell granted his first interview to Lyle Denniston of the
Washington Evening Star
, which ran a scowling photograph of the attorney general-designate beneath the headline: “He’s No ‘Gang-Buster’ Type.” Denniston neatly captured the attitude and mannerisms that became hallmarks of Mitchell’s strained relationship with reporters: the “frayed elegance,” his “jealous worry that his privacy may be fading,” and his “sometimes caustic way of putting off a question he considers to be an inanity.” Thus when Denniston asked where Mitchell stood on crime and law and order, Mitchell replied tersely, “I am against crime and in favor of law and order.” He also fretted: “I’ve somehow got to dispel the notion that I’m a tough cop and an arch-conservative.”
⁸

Perhaps Mitchell, following the attacks on Ramsey Clark, was trying to smooth the way for his own confirmation hearing, which came to order before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 14. Having prevailed by the slimmest of pluralities, Richard Nixon entered office facing opposition control in both houses of Congress, the first chief executive so disadvantaged in 120 years. The Senate’s advice and consent on the Mitchell nomination afforded Democrats their first theater of revenge. “[S]ome liberal Democrats on the committee who resented the Republicans’ attacks on Clark intended to rough up the man who devised them,” the
New Yorker
reported.
⁹

The senators focused heavily on civil liberties, a response to Nixon’s disparagement of Clark and accompanying vow to combat more aggressively the surge in street crime that marked the sixties. According to FBI statistics, crime between 1961 and 1969 rose nearly 150 percent, with violent crimes soaring by 130 percent, murders more than 60 percent, and robberies 180 percent. Organized crime, then a $50 billion industry ($260 billion in current figures), formed a large part of the problem; yet Clark, on philosophical grounds, had prohibited federal prosecutors from wiretapping organized crime figures. Such measures, Clark argued, were warranted only in national security cases, a stance that made him Nixon’s campaign whipping boy.
¹⁰

Taking his seat before the Judiciary Committee, Mitchell opened with the chummy collegiality of the legal fraternity, praising Clark as “an outstanding individual of great legal capacity” who had done “a fine job” as attorney general. Then Mitchell redeemed Nixon’s campaign pledge, testifying that the wiretapping provisions in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, passed by Congress the previous year, “should be used…not only in national security cases but against organized crime.”

Reporters covering the two-hour session thought Mitchell had an “easy time of it,” demonstrating he “isn’t likely to talk his way into trouble when representing the Nixon administration on Capitol Hill.” Only one senator gave Mitchell a hard time: Samuel J. Ervin, the disarmingly folksy, seventy-two-year-old North Carolina Democrat who, despite a decade of opposition to racial integration, considered himself the Senate’s leading constitutional conscience. Ervin grumbled there was “something incompatible with marrying the function of the chief political adviser and chief agitator with that of prosecutor of government crimes.” Mitchell told Ervin he would run the Justice Department as “the legal, and not the political, adviser of the president.” The ’68 campaign, he said, was “my first entry” into politics, and added: “I trust it will be my last.” “I commend your answer,” Ervin replied. With that, the committee voted unanimously to recommend Mitchell’s confirmation to the full Senate.
¹¹