The Empire Strikes Back

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"You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say."

John Mitchell
July 1969

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John Dean had wrapped up his testimony about a week and a half earlier, and Congress had adjourned for its July 4 recess.

When the Senate Watergate Committee resumed its business 40 years ago today, the former attorney general of the United States and former manager of Richard Nixon's re–election campaign, John Mitchell, was scheduled to testify. He testified for three days.

Mitchell and Nixon were friends before Nixon became president. They had been friends since 1946, and they were colleagues on the same law firm before Nixon launched his second campaign for the presidency. Mitchell managed Nixon's successful 1968 bid and Nixon's re–election campaign in 1972 as well.

For whatever reason, Mitchell had Nixon's full confidence. Many Americans did not realize this 40 years ago, but Mitchell seemed to understand Nixon's personality — and, as a result, occupied a unique role among Nixon confidantes.

He might have been better suited to be Nixon's chief of staff, but I suppose Nixon was drawn to Mitchell's accomplishments in the legal field.

When Mitchell joined Nixon's New York law firm in 1967, he occupied the office adjacent to Nixon's, Theodore White wrote in "Breach of Faith." The men had several things in common, White wrote — born only eight months apart, they were of the same generation, and both had been veterans of World War II.

"Nixon was lonely in New York," White wrote. "[H]e enjoyed visits to Mitchell's country home ... where he could pound the piano. Tart–tongued, bald–headed, Mitchell had an almost roguish charm — and an air of tough, unruffled calm. Smoking his pipe, he would sit at a conference table, almost always speak last, then speak with apparent good sense."

In his book about the 1972 campaign, White wrote that Mitchell was the "[h]ardest of all the hard men around the president, by far," and that truly was something in the Nixon White House. "[H]e was as charming a conversationalist as one could meet," White wrote, "and at the same time as cold a personality as one ever encounters in politics."

I didn't see Mitchell's testimony when it happened, but I saw clips from it many times after. And I would agree with White's assessment. Mitchell's cold public persona came across loud and clear.

When Mitchell began his testimony 40 years ago today, he was almost surely the most well–known representative of the Nixon administration to appear. Dean had made an instant splash because he was the first to point the finger at Richard Nixon. For that reason, more than any other, there had been much anticipation of his appearance. But he was virtually unknown before his testimony.

Two big names who would follow Mitchell into the witness chair in July 1973 — Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman — were highly placed Nixon loyalists, too, but they were not as well known. Like so many other things that summer, the relative anonymity of Haldeman and Ehrlichman would soon be things of the past, but, on this day in 1973, Mitchell was probably the most effective witness to make the case for Nixon in the aftermath of Dean's testimony.

And he took a bullet for Nixon 40 years ago today. He accused Magruder of lying in his testimony, and he disputed what Dean had said.

(Mitchell had a way with words. He was the one who labeled administration activities "White House horrors." It was a phrase members of the committee used when questioning Mitchell — sometimes incorrectly, in Mitchell's view. When Sam Dash, counsel for the majority, used the phrase in a reference to the Watergate break–in, Mitchell corrected him: "Those are not the White House horrors, Mr. Dash." The distinction? The planning of such an operation was a "White House horror;" the actual carrying out of the plan was not.)

But Mitchell's smug, often arrogant attitude, which may have been appropriate for a courtroom, made it hard for anyone, even Nixon's defenders on the Senate committee, to like him.

Dash asked Mitchell at one point about a meeting he had with G. Gordon Liddy at which illegal activities were discussed, "[W]hy didn't you throw Mr. Liddy out of your office?"

"Well, I think, Mr. Dash," Mitchell replied, "in hindsight I not only should have thrown him out of the office, I should have thrown him out of the window."

The remark drew a smattering of apparently sympathetic — and somewhat nervous — laughter.

"Well, since you did neither ..." Dash said as the committee room erupted in loud laughter, refusing to be diverted from his point, " why didn't you at least recommend that Mr. Liddy be fired from his responsible position at the [president's re–election] committee since obviously he was presenting to you an irresponsible program?"

To which Mitchell replied, "Well, in hindsight I probably should have done that, too."

Folks became more familiar with Haldeman and Ehrlichman when Mitchell testified for a second day.

After he returned to the stand, Mitchell said that Haldeman and Ehrlichman did participate in a coverup, but they did so to protect Nixon.

But first, he had to answer a question from Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, who observed that Mitchell had testified that he regarded Nixon's re–election to be so important that he was "willing to engage in activities which have been well described as being irregular."

"To what length are you now willing to go to deceive in an effort to avoid further implication of the president in the activities under investigation by this panel?" Inouye asked. "More specifically, are you willing to lie to protect the president?"

"I do not have to make that choice," Mitchell answered, "because, to my knowledge, the president was not knowledgeable."

After being grilled by the committee chairman, Sen. Sam Ervin, on decisions he had made following the Watergate break‐in, Mitchell remarked, "It is a great trial being conducted up here, isn't it?"

On his third day of testimony, Mitchell was questioned about conflicts in his testimony and vigorously defended his credibility.

I have often wished that I could have seen Mitchell's testimony when it was happening because I get the feeling, from seeing brief video clips and reading transcripts of his testimony, that he wasn't persuasive.

If anything, he struck me as being evasive. I always thought he was a weaselly sort.

"[Y]ou enjoy the distinction ... that it was your purpose not to volunteer anything," Dash said at one point. "Is there a distinction between your not volunteering anything and lying? If you do not volunteer an answer to a direct question, you might say you do not volunteer anything, but actually you are lying."

Mitchell's reply? "I think we would have to find out what the specifics are, what the particular occasion and ..."

See what I mean?

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The Peaks in a Scandal Investigation

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"Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass."

Jeb Magruder

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More than a quarter of a century passed between our births, and I was still a boy when he appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee 40 years ago today.

It's fair to say I didn't completely understand what was happening. Nevertheless, I understood enough that I must say I kind of empathized with Jeb Magruder. I couldn't really help it.

He had had a meteoric rise. He started out as a salesman, then, when he was 34, he was appointed to the White House staff. For one so young, it must have been mind–boggling.

It also led him to do things in his service to Richard Nixon that he almost certainly never imagined he would do. But I always admired the fact that he never tried to pass the buck.

After informing the senators of his work for the Committee to Re–Elect the President (in which he participated in Nixon's 49–state triumph, at the time the second–largest electoral vote margin in history), he said, "Unfortunately, we made some mistakes in the campaign ... For those errors in judgment that I made, I take full responsibility. I am, after all, a mature man, and I am willing to face the consequences of my own acts."

In hindsight — and even at the time — most people would say they were more than errors. But perhaps that is semantic quibbling. Magruder did confess to his own guilt when he testified before the Senate Watergate Committee — which is more than can be said of Nixon.

Magruder's testimony was the first, really, to put the coverup conspiracy inside the walls of the White House, but he was careful not to implicate Nixon when he did so. (He reversed that in a PBS documentary in 2003, nearly a decade after Nixon's death.)

"These mistakes were made by only a few participants in the campaign," Magruder insisted 40 years ago today. "Thousands ... assisted in the campaign to re–elect the president, and they did nothing illegal or unethical. [A]t no point ... did the president have any knowledge of our errors in this matter."

Magruder did assert, however, that John Mitchell, John Dean and Bob Haldeman were involved. That wasn't exactly news in June 1973 — but now it was on the record. That was an important legal step.

In his book "Breach of Faith," Theodore H. White wrote of how the committee's investigation had moved slowly at first and likened its progress to hiking up a trail and reaching peaks along the way.

With his testimony, White wrote, "Magruder made the first peak — publicly, under oath, he said the authority to burglarize Democratic headquarters had been given him directly by the former attorney general, John Mitchell."

Magruder went on to write a book titled "An American Life: One Man's Road to Watergate," but he followed a rather different path to his testimony before the Watergate Committee.

In "All the President's Men," Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote that Magruder, initially reluctant to say anything, had been regarded as a "super–loyalist" — but he went to the prosecutors in April of 1973 when the house of cards that was the coverup was collapsing around him.

One of Woodward's sources within Nixon's re–election campaign organization told him Magruder would be "the next McCord" — a reference to Watergate burglar James McCord's letter to Judge John Sirica in early 1973 just before the burglars were to be sentenced. It prevented the sentencing from being that last act in the Watergate drama — and was, in White's words, a "peak" in the Watergate scandal.

Much like Magruder's testimony 40 years ago today — although I don't think I would call it a game changer.

The Nixon White House had kept the Watergate scandal under wraps for nearly a year — until McCord began talking about things like perjury and hush money — and they managed to keep a lid on things for awhile longer.

But the peaks in the investigation were coming more frequently now. The next one would come within two weeks when John Dean took the stand.

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A Simple Twist of Fate

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This day in 1973 was a pivotal one in the story of the Watergate scandal.

By March 23, 1973, the scandal had mostly stalled. The Washington Post, TIME magazine and The New York Times continued to publish stories, but the public's general interest in the investigation was way down. Supporters of President Nixon protested that there was a media bias against the president, and many people in the political center were beginning to agree.

(One of the things that the Watergate scandal made clear to me was the fact that, no matter how much Americans may dislike their president, they will give him more than the benefit of the doubt. Nixon was about as loathsome as they come, but, although many of his supporters had misgivings about him, they always wanted to think well of whoever was president, and they refused to convict him in their minds until the constantly mounting evidence of his complicity left them no choice.)

To be sure, there have been times in America's history when the press acted not so much as a watchdog but as a lapdog. But the Watergate scandal was not one of them. Forty years later, I take pride, as a journalist, in noting that the reporting of that scandal was mostly accurate — astonishingly so, considering how many attempts were made by the administration to throw the reporters off the scent.

But in the early spring of 1973, the story really hadn't gained a lot of traction.

That changed 40 years ago today. James McCord and E. Howard Hunt, the last of the Watergate burglars, had been convicted in January, and John Sirica, the judge who presided over their trial, was slated to hand down the burglars' sentences in March. Prior to doing so, he received a letter from McCord, alleging that the burglars had entered guilty pleas under duress, the defendants had perjured themselves, and other, unnamed individuals had been involved in the conspiracy and its coverup.

McCord asked Sirica — who was known as "Maximum John" for his tendency to hand down the most severe penalties allowed by law — for leniency. Sirica handed down some stiff penalties — Hunt, for example, was sentenced to 35 years — but Sirica made it clear the sentences were "provisionary," depending on their cooperation with investigators.

McCord's sentence, however, was postponed, and Sirica revealed in court the existence of the letter. McCord also asked to meet privately with Sirica after sentencing. When the request was granted, he told the judge that he and the other defendants had lied at the bidding of former Attorney General John Mitchell and then–White House counsel John Dean.

It was a game changer.

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As McCord had anticipated in his letter to Sirica, he was called to testify before the Senate committee that was investigating the Watergate break–in and coverup.

He probably didn't foresee the public's reaction — with the exception of Dean's testimony about a month later, McCord's testimony on the first full day of witness questioning may have been the most heavily anticipated.

But it seems likely that, if not for the letter McCord wrote to Sirica, his testimony could have been quite different — if it had happened at all.

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The Short, Unhappy Candidacy of Tom Eagleton

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We've reached the point in the presidential campaign when challengers select their running mates and incumbents (presumably) decide whether to keep theirs.

As I have said before, I don't expect Barack Obama to drop Joe Biden from his ticket — even though, as always, there are those in the president's party who advocate that — so there is probably little for Democrats to gain from this.

But Mitt Romney would be well advised to pay attention.

Forty years ago, only two weeks had passed since the McGovern–Eagleton ticket had been nominated by the Democrats to challenge the Nixon–Agnew ticket in the fall.

Things had gotten a little out of hand at the convention, and the presidential nominee wasn't able to give his acceptance speech until well after most people on the American mainland had gone to bed.

Most people, even the most optimistic of the Democrats, probably did not think that McGovern had much of a chance of defeating Richard Nixon. Nixon's approval ratings that summer ranged from the upper 50s to the low 60s.

When a president enjoys that kind of popularity about four months before the election, it usually suggests that a landslide is on the horizon — and Nixon's approval numbers in the summer of 1972 exceeded Reagan's in the summer of 1984 and were roughly the same as Clinton's in 1996.

(Both Reagan and Clinton were re–elected.)

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Nevertheless, while Democrats might have been resigned to the idea that they were going to lose, they had reason to believe, as they left their convention in Miami, that they could win eight or 10 states — not just the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, which is all the Democrats won that fall.

There was reason, in other words, for Democrats to believe that the nation would not tune them out before Labor Day, that their presidential ticket could at least keep up the pretense of being competitive long enough for their congressional candidates to get a foothold.

But that was before the train wreck of the Eagleton candidacy.

I guess the potential for the train wreck was there all along. The day after he clinched the presidential nomination, McGovern approached just about every big–name Democrat about the second spot on his ticket, and all turned him down. Time was running short so McGovern took the advice of Sen. Gaylord Nelson and offered it to Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton.

Nelson wasn't the first to suggest Eagleton, only the latest. As McGovern observed in an op–ed piece he wrote for the New York Times four years ago, Eagleton clearly wanted the spot. He had been lobbying for it, but McGovern was hesitant to offer it because "I didn't know Eagleton very well."

His first choice had been Sen. Edward Kennedy, but Kennedy turned him down and recommended Eagleton. McGovern's next choice was Sargent Shriver, who also turned him down and also recommended Eagleton. Similar stories unfolded with almost every person who was offered the spot on the ticket.

For awhile, the possibility of offering the spot to TV news anchor Walter Cronkite was discussed. Cronkite, as McGovern observed, had been named the most admired man in America, and the idea of having him on the ticket was "intriguing."

Eventually, McGovern and his staff dismissed the idea as "too unrealistic."

"I later learned from Walter that he would have accepted," McGovern wrote. "I wish we had chosen him."

Of that, there can be no doubt.

Despite whatever misgivings he may have had, McGovern offered the spot to Eagleton, who had assured the nominee's political director that "there was nothing in [Eagleton's] background that would be considered troublesome." He offered the spot to Eagleton 15 minutes before his deadline for announcing his choice.

But haste makes waste, the old saying says, and Eagleton had concealed a few things.

• It turned out that Eagleton had been treated for exhaustion and depression — including electroshock therapy.
• He had been taking strong anti–psychotic drugs.
• When McGovern saw a copy of Eagleton's medical records, he noted words like depression and suicidal tendencies.

Times have changed. In 2012, Americans are more tolerant of many things than they were in 1972.

And the revelation of a history of depression might not carry the same stigma today that it did then.

But the reaction that Eagleton encountered was hostile, fearful. In hindsight, it was inevitable that McGovern would have to drop his running mate.

But it wasn't that simple. There were complications.

He was hesitant, McGovern said later, to remove Eagleton from the ticket immediately because his daughter had suffered from depression, and he was concerned about how she would react.

That has a noble sound to it, but it was hard to reconcile with public actions — not unlike when Nixon's former attorney general and Watergate co–conspirator, John Mitchell, announced he was stepping down as director of Nixon's re–election campaign to spend more time with his wife.

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[Bob] Woodward asked several members of the [Washington] Post's staff ... if they believed the resignation was unconnected to Watergate. They did.

The next day, metropolitan editor Harry Rosenfeld frowned and told Woodward, "A man like John Mitchell doesn't give up all that power for his wife."

Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein

All the President's Men (1974)

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Similarly, I suppose, a man doesn't give up a major party's vice presidential nomination unless the rattling from the skeletons in his closet becomes too noisy.

In late July 1972, McGovern infamously announced that he was supporting his running mate "1000 percent," but, by the end of the month, Eagleton was off the ticket, and Shriver agreed to replace him.

In military parlance, McGovern had surrendered the high ground to Nixon — and virtually without a fight.

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