THURSDAY, MARCH 22 | DAY 61
Mitchell was well aware of his importance to Nixon. During the 1968 campaign, he boasted that he was the only man who could say no to the candidate. “I’ve made more money in the practice of law than Nixon,” he told a group of Republican congressmen, “brought more clients into the firm, can hold my own in argument with him, and, as far as I’m concerned, I can deal with him as an equal.” After the election, Nixon had to persuade an initially reluctant Mitchell to move to Washington to become his attorney general. He needed Mitchell more than Mitchell needed him. At cabinet meetings, the president would often glance across the table, seeking the approval of the stone-faced Mitchell. They communicated by subtle gestures. If Mitchell was unhappy with the way a discussion was going, an aide recalled, “he would jiggle or puff on his pipe with some vigor. Nixon would get the signal and switch subjects or terminate that line of conversation. If Mitchell looked serene—and that was really the only word for it—Nixon would go on.”
Attorney General John Mitchell with his wife, Martha, nicknamed “the Mouth of the South” because of her outspoken comments to reporters.
For all his power and influence, Mitchell had an Achilles’ heel in the form of his exuberant wife, Martha. A former grade school teacher from Arkansas who had transformed herself into a southern belle, Martha was as impulsive as Mitchell was circumspect. It was the attraction of opposites. “John is the most intelligent man in the world,” Martha explained. “He’s soft, warm, sweet and cuddly.” For his part, Mitchell seemed to find in Martha an outlet for all his repressed desires. She horrified his buttoned-down friends with her outrageous behavior and constant demands for attention. Mitchell, however, was amused by her and “head over heels in love.” When he traveled on business, he would telephone her prior to going to bed for long rounds of romantic pillow talk. “The two made an odd couple,” his biographer, James Rosen, would later write. “He in pinstripes, pipe, and wingtips; she in bouffant wigs, costume jewelry, and stilettos.” Their relationship brought to mind Katharine Hepburn’s classic remark about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: “He gave her class, she gave him sex appeal.”
The move to Washington sent the already unstable Martha into a downward spiral. Ensconced in her luxurious duplex in Watergate East, she drank heavily. Media attention became another addiction. Society reporters viewed her as a welcome splash of color in an otherwise gray administration. She gave a reporter from Women’s Wear Daily a peek inside her dressing room closets—one for evening wear, another for “short cocktail things,” a third for handbags and a hundred pairs of shoes, and a fourth for fur coats. She attacked senators and Supreme Court justices as Communist stooges and compared the antiwar protests to the Russian Revolution. Her willingness to blurt out whatever was on her mind on national TV won her an enthusiastic following in Middle America. A November 1970 Gallup poll reported that the woman known as “the mouth of the South” had 76 percent nationwide name recognition. Nixon jokingly called her “the soothsayer” because of her propensity for dramatic predictions.
The political scandal surrounding the Watergate break-in caused Martha to become even more erratic. She had traveled to California with her husband for some campaign fund-raising events, staying on for a few days with their daughter after Mitchell returned to Washington to deal with the crisis. Learning that her former security man, James McCord, was one of the burglars, she wondered if he might have also bugged her private apartment in the Watergate. With the crazed wisdom of a Shakespeare fool, she prophesied, “This could land my husband in jail.” Over the next few hours, she became increasingly abusive and hysterical, downing several bottles of gin and whiskey. Her new bodyguard was under instructions from Mitchell to ensure she did not call any reporters. She nevertheless locked herself into her bedroom and made a call to Helen Thomas of United Press International. Hearing her on the phone, the bodyguard broke open the door and ripped the telephone line out of the wall in the middle of the conversation. He later pinned Martha down while a doctor forcibly removed her pants and plunged a needle into her thigh to administer tranquilizers. Martha fought back, smashing a glass door with her hand. She was taken to the local hospital, where she received six stitches. When Thomas attempted to call her back, she was informed, “Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk.”
“That little sweetheart,” said Mitchell, when asked about the incident. “She gets a little upset about politics, but she loves me and I love her and that’s what counts.”
Mitchell arranged for friends to escort his wife back across the continent on a red-eye flight. Confined to a country club in upstate New York, Martha found a way to complete her interrupted phone call with the reporter two days later. “If you could see me, you wouldn’t believe it,” she told Thomas tearfully. “I’m black and blue. I’m a political prisoner.” She threatened to leave Mitchell unless he quit his job with the Nixon campaign. “I love my husband very much but I’m not going to stand for all those dirty things that go on.” Nixon aides privately spread the word that she was mentally disturbed.
Martha’s antics were a major distraction for Mitchell. Nixon came to believe that “the Watergate thing would never have happened” without Martha. “We have had a slip-up due to the fact that Mitchell was so obsessed with the problems he had with Martha,” Nixon noted in his diary a few days after the scandal first erupted. “We just didn’t have the discipline we should have had, and that we would have had, had he been able to pay attention to business.” He accepted Mitchell’s resignation as director of CREEP on June 30, 1972, two weeks after the break-in. Nixon recognized that Mitchell was likely to become a political liability to him, but this was not the official reason given for his departure. Instead, the White House released a letter from Mitchell explaining that he needed to “devote more time” to his wife and family. It was a line that still seemed original to Nixon, in addition to alluding gently to the Martha drama. “Excellent,” he said appreciatively. “Very subtle.”
The precise nature of Mitchell’s involvement in the plan to bug the Democratic National Committee would remain mysterious. The case against him rested chiefly on the testimony of a perjurer, Jeb Magruder. Mitchell never put anything in writing. It seems unlikely, however, that the pliant, paper-pushing deputy CREEP director acted entirely on his own initiative. At the very least, he required a green light from his boss to disburse funds to the burglars. Four days after the break-in, Nixon himself speculated that Mitchell might well have said something along the lines of “Don’t tell me about it, but you go ahead and do what you want.” After Magruder returned from his meeting with Mitchell in Key Biscayne in March 1972, he authorized campaign finance officials to make an initial $83,000 cash payment to Liddy. The payment request was sufficiently unusual for the finance chairman, Maurice Stans, to check with Mitchell to make sure everything was in order.
“What’s it all about?” Stans asked.
“I don’t know,” Mitchell replied, according to Stans. “Magruder is in charge of the campaign and he directs the spending.”
Stans asked Mitchell if the campaign should honor all future requests from Magruder for cash payments to Liddy.
“That’s right.”
Whether or not Mitchell formally approved the break-in, he was savvy enough to distance himself from the decision by delegating financial authority to his deputy. After the arrest of the burglars, he authorized a series of cash payments to keep them quiet.
As the Watergate scandal deepened in early 1973, and the president and his aides looked around for someone to blame, Mitchell seemed like an obvious candidate. At a meeting with Nixon on the morning of March 22, Dean suggested a strategy of “putting the wagons around the White House.” By this he meant drawing a sharp line between the White House and the reelection committee. Anyone inside the stockade—including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, and above all the president himself—would be protected. The top officials at CREEP—Mitchell and Magruder—would be abandoned. Dean’s proposal was endorsed enthusiastically by Haldeman and Ehrlichman. With luck, the whole nightmare might go away if a sufficiently impressive sacrifice was offered to the marauding Indians.
There were several problems with the “circling the wagons” idea. First, lines of responsibility were blurred. People like Hunt and Liddy had ties to both CREEP and the White House. It seemed unlikely that the political and legal fallout from the rapidly expanding scandal could be contained within the now disbanded Committee to Re-elect the President. Second, Nixon was not prepared for a confrontation with Mitchell. He believed that he owed his election in 1968 largely to Mitchell’s “strength as a counselor and his skill as a manager.” The thought of abandoning “one of my very few personal friends” was particularly painful. The furthest Nixon was willing to go at this stage was to summon the former CREEP director to the White House for a discussion of the options. Mitchell was back at his old law firm in New York. He flew down to Washington later that same day to meet with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean, followed by a session with the president in his EOB hideaway. As was often the case with Watergate, the conversation led nowhere. It quickly became clear that Mitchell was unwilling to fall on his sword. Instead, he proposed a limited waiver of executive privilege that would allow White House officials to testify behind closed doors to the Senate select committee.
“What words of wisdom do we have from this august body?” asked Nixon, when everyone assembled after lunch.
“Our brother Mitchell brought us some wisdom on executive privilege,” said Ehrlichman sarcastically.
Once again, they discussed how they might placate the Senate with a Dean report admitting to some “dirty tricks” during the election campaign while exonerating Nixon and his closest aides.
“Let it hang out, so to speak?” asked Nixon.
“It’s a limited hangout,” said Haldeman.
“A modified limited hangout,” corrected Ehrlichman, with his flair for the memorable phrase.
They began fantasizing about what the Dean report might say.
“We went down every alley,” proposed Ehrlichman. Emboldened by the chortles that greeted this remark, he made a joke that was, simultaneously, a suggestion. He said out loud, in front of Mitchell, what he had been urging in private for months. “John [Mitchell] says that he’s sorry he sent those burglars in there, and that helps a lot.”
“That’s right,” said the president.
“You are very welcome, sir,” said Mitchell. He removed the pipe from his mouth and made a little bow, to nervous titters.
Nixon waited until the others had left the room before addressing Mitchell’s personal situation. He did so in a roundabout fashion, mentioning a scandal that had shaken the Eisenhower administration when Nixon was vice president. By Watergate standards, it was a trivial affair. Eisenhower’s powerful chief of staff, Sherman Adams, had accepted a vicuña coat, made from the fur of a llama-like animal living high in the Andes, and several other expensive gifts from a longtime friend. In exchange for these gifts, he was accused of making helpful inquiries on behalf of his friend with two government agencies. Although he denied any quid pro quo, it created an impression of impropriety. Eisenhower sent a message to Adams through Nixon that he should resign.
“It was a very, very cruel thing,” Nixon reminisced. “I don’t want it to happen with Watergate. I think [Adams] made a mistake, but he shouldn’t have been sacked.”
He made clear he was not going to abandon Mitchell the way Eisenhower had abandoned Adams. “I don’t give a shit what happens,” he said, referring to the upcoming Senate hearings. “I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or anything else if it’ll save it—save the plan. That’s the whole point.”
There was, however, an alternative scenario that Nixon asked Mitchell to consider. It was one that he had been discussing with Haldeman earlier that week. There was always the possibility that the wolves were going to gobble up Mitchell and Magruder whatever the White House did. In this case, it would be better for them to preempt the opposition attacks and sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Afraid to speak as plainly as Ehrlichman, Nixon resorted to a tortuous circumlocution, the implications of which were left unsaid.
“On the other hand, I would prefer, as I said to you, that you do it the other way. And I would particularly prefer to do it that other way if it’s going to come out that way anyway.”
Nixon later wrote that this was his “oblique way” of persuading Mitchell of the need for “a painful shift in our Watergate strategy, a strategy that so far had been a dismal and damaging failure.” Despite the indirect manner in which the message was delivered, Mitchell could hardly fail to pick up the hint. He would make an excellent scapegoat.
Nixon had a very good reason for his reluctance to abandon Mitchell, quite apart from his loyalty toward a friend. For Eisenhower, getting rid of Adams had been a simple matter. The accusations of impropriety had begun and ended with the chief of staff. Because the president was in no way involved, the crisis was resolved as soon as Adams was removed. The Watergate scandal was very different. To use John Dean’s analogy, it was a malignant tumor that had spread far and wide. From tiny cells, the cancer grew until it consumed, and ultimately destroyed, the Nixon presidency. It was impossible to eradicate the cancer by surgically targeting just a few of the diseased cells: Nixon himself had created the culture in which the cancer metastasized. “I do not believe that Nixon did order the break-in,” Bob Haldeman observed many years later. “Nor that he even knew about it. But I do believe that he caused it.”
The mindset that spawned Watergate can be traced back to Nixon’s war with the establishment, a stew of personal resentments, and a no-holds-barred style of political campaigning. He was particularly aggrieved by his narrow loss to Jack Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, which turned on a few thousand votes in Texas and Illinois. Nixon was in “no doubt” that substantial voter fraud had been committed. He blamed his defeat on the dirty tricks of “the most ruthless group of political operators ever mobilized for a presidential campaign” and the “slanted reporting” of brazenly pro-Kennedy journalists. He did not contest the results of the election for fear of being labeled a sore loser. Nevertheless, from that moment on, he wrote later, “I had the wisdom and wariness of someone who had been burned by the power of the Kennedys and their money and by the license they were given by the media. I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them—or anyone—on the level of political tactics.”
Under any president, the White House functions as a machine for fulfilling the wishes of its occupant. Foremost among Nixon’s needs was more intelligence about his political opponents. The demands for intelligence became imperatives for action. Some of these actions were legal, some illegal. Some were in response to specific presidential directives; some were dreamed up by underlings determined to please him. Nixon’s desires were often shrouded in ambiguity, making it difficult to distinguish between a specific instruction and a vaguely expressed wish. The attempts to divine exactly what he wanted were reminiscent of the prelude to the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in medieval England. “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” Henry II had asked in exasperation, after Becket opposed him once too often. The king spoke in a fit of anger, but four of his knights took his words literally and slayed the archbishop with their swords in Canterbury Cathedral. White House courtiers behaved in similar fashion. “We wanted to make the president happy,” was the way Jeb Magruder put it. “We knew that the president wanted as much information as we could get. The more information we got, the happier he was.”
Nixon made plain early that he had no objection in principle to wiretaps, however obtained. “I want, Bob, more use of wiretapping,” he told Haldeman more than a year before the Watergate break-in as they discussed plans for the 1972 election campaign. Rebuffed by J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, he was willing to resort to illegal methods to gather dirt on his likely opponents, beginning with Ted Kennedy and Ed Muskie. “Maybe we can get a real scandal on any one of the leading Democrats,” he mused.
Nixon’s campaign to get even with his political enemies moved into higher gear in June 1971 following the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, first to The New York Times and then The Washington Post. For weeks, he lashed out against anyone perceived to have crossed him, from disloyal officials to partisan reporters to Kennedy supporters of all descriptions. Even though the Vietnam War history mainly dealt with the actions of his predecessors, particularly LBJ, Nixon regarded the leak as a threat to good government. “We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy,” he told Haldeman and Kissinger on July 1, the day after the Supreme Court upheld the right of newspapers to publish the leaked documents. “They’re using any means. We are going to use any means.” An eye for an eye, a leak for a leak was Nixon’s philosophy. His enemies, at the Times and elsewhere, had “thrown the sword down.” But they had made a fatal error. “Never strike a king unless you kill him. They struck and did not kill. And now we’re going to kill them. That is what I will do, if it’s the last thing I do in this office. I don’t care what it costs. They’re going to be killed.”
He urged his aides to gather compromising information on the presumed leaker of the papers, Daniel Ellsberg, that could be used to smear him. “Convict the son of a bitch in the press,” he told them. “That’s how it’s done.” He also raged against the number of Jews and “Harvard people” in the government. “Most Jews are disloyal,” he told Haldeman. He exempted Kissinger and several other members of his staff from this blanket critique but added, “Generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.” The fact that Ellsberg was Jewish only confirmed his suspicions.
Another target of Nixon’s anger was the Brookings Institution. He had heard that classified government documents relating to LBJ’s secret Vietnam diplomacy might be stored in a safe in the think tank on Massachusetts Avenue less than a mile from the White House. He wanted the files, thinking he could use them to “blackmail” the former president. “I want it implemented on a thievery basis,” he instructed his aides. “Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” Nixon’s wishes were transmitted via Colson to the Plumbers and the ever-eager Gordon Liddy. Liddy devised a plan to firebomb the building at night “so as not to endanger lives needlessly.” Hunt’s Cuban collaborators would enter the Brookings offices disguised as firefighters, “hit the vault,” and make their escape with the documents amid the general confusion. For the plan to proceed, it would be necessary to purchase “a used but late-model fire engine.” To Liddy’s disgust, his superiors objected to the expense. The scheme was dropped because “the White House wouldn’t spring for a fire engine.”
It is symptomatic of the dysfunction within the White House that a break-in Nixon explicitly ordered was shelved while one that he never authorized became a mortal threat to his presidency. Haldeman was proud of his highly disciplined staffing system and paper trail for implementing presidential instructions. But the system broke down when it came to waging war on Nixon’s political enemies. In these cases, orders were issued verbally or in code. Sometimes his instructions were ignored; at other times they were exaggerated. People down the chain of command interpreted his wishes according to their own priorities or pressure from third parties. This is what appears to have happened with Watergate. Nixon’s push for actionable intelligence on the Democrats was transmitted through Haldeman to Magruder (via Haldeman’s aide Gordon Strachan) and from Magruder to Liddy. Another line of communication ran from Nixon to Colson to Hunt, back up to Colson, and down to Magruder and Liddy. A third ran upward from Liddy to Magruder to Mitchell. The result of these competing channels of authority was that a man described by Nixon as “a little nuts” was able to build his own fantasies around the supposed wishes of his superiors.
“I mean he just isn’t well screwed on, is he?” Nixon said of Liddy, after learning of his activities in the Watergate.
“No, but he was under pressure, apparently, to get more information,” replied Haldeman. “As he got more pressure, he pushed the people harder.”
The arrests of the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972, posed a painful dilemma for Nixon. The smart option, at this point, would have been to cut his losses and blame the bungled break-in on overzealous subordinates at the Committee to Re-elect the President. Such a move, however, would risk the exposure of other crimes and dirty tricks committed by the White House Plumbers. “The problem is that there are all kinds of other involvements,” Haldeman informed the president on June 21. If the FBI, the press, and other investigators began “a fishing thing on this,” they would soon “start picking up tracks.” It would be difficult to control whatever they might discover. With presidential elections less than five months away, Nixon and his aides instinctively opted for a cover-up. The FBI would have to be “turned off.”
Two days later, on June 23, Nixon made the fateful decision to instruct the CIA to tell the FBI to steer clear of the Watergate investigation because it was a “national security” matter. “They should call the FBI in and say…don’t go further into this case, period!” he told Haldeman. “And that destroys the case.” If the spooks balked, they should be reminded of Howard Hunt’s involvement in the Bay of Pigs. The agency would not want to reopen “that scab” or be reminded of the “hanky-panky” with the Cubans. “Play it tough,” Nixon instructed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we’re going to play it.” Unfortunately for Nixon, CIA officials refused to play the game by his rules. Instead of warning the FBI to back away from the investigation, they documented his demands in memos “for the file” that eventually became part of the public record.
With the CIA and FBI refusing to play ball, the president became even more entangled in the cover-up. He approved the decision to encourage Magruder to commit perjury to keep the investigation away from Mitchell and the White House. Once he was safely reelected, the Watergate defendants could be freed from jail, along with antiwar protesters. “We’ll just basically pardon the whole kit and caboodle after the election,” he told Colson on July 19. That night, he was haunted by a “strange dream” about Watergate. Who knew where the nightmare would end? “We are whistling in the dark,” he confessed to Haldeman, “but I can’t believe they can tie the thing to me.”
By the beginning of August, Nixon was approving payoffs to Hunt and the other Watergate burglars.
“Hunt’s happy,” reported Haldeman, following initial payments of $83,000 to his wife and $25,000 to his lawyer.
“At considerable cost, I guess?” said Nixon.
“Yes.”
“It’s worth it.”
“It’s very expensive.”
“That’s what the money is for,” said Nixon. “They have to be paid.”
By authorizing the payments to the Watergate defendants, Nixon forgot his own injunction about the cover-up being more damaging than the original crime, a mantra he repeated constantly when referring to the Alger Hiss case. During the nine months that followed the break-in, he presided over the construction of an edifice of lies, evasions, and half-truths incapable of sustaining serious challenge. The world was about to discover what would happen if one of the pillars supporting this ramshackle structure was suddenly removed.