John Mitchell Takes the Stand

The penetrating glare of Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate committee focuses this week on the President's closest political confidant -and most devoted loyalist -former Attorney General John Newton Mitchell. Mitchell was a Manhattan law partner of Richard Nixon, his campaign manager in 1968, and headed Nixon's re-election drive in 1972 until two weeks after the Watergate arrests. Even after that Mitchell continued to talk with the President almost daily throughout Nixon's triumphant re-election year. If the President is truly as innocent in the scandal as he claims, no one is in a better position to know and proclaim it than Mitchell. On the other hand, if Nixon is guilty, no one is less likely to admit it than the same John Mitchell.

New Challenge. In the five weeks of public testimony thus far, the basic allegations of Watergate wrongdoing on the part of President Nixon's closest former associates have been laboriously detailed by subordinates, most of whom willingly admitted their own illegal or improper acts. Now, beginning with Mitchell, the Senate Select Committee faces a new and more difficult challenge: how to assess the testimony of more important witnesses who sharply deny the accumulated accusations against them.

Terse and taciturn, Mitchell was expected to present no opening statement to the committee. It will be up to the Senators and the counsels to elicit whatever information Mitchell possesses. Yet countless questions should come readily to mind, since Mitchell has been repeatedly cited by other witnesses as a key figure in both the illegal political espionage at the Democratic National Headquarters and the multiple law-breaking involved in its concealment.

Although he was the nation's highest law-enforcement officer in a self-proclaimed law-and-order Administration, Mitchell has been accused of sitting calmly in his office through two meetings at which plans for such crimes as kidnaping, prostitution, mugging, burglary and wiretapping were presented -and objecting only that they were not what he had in mind and would cost too much. He was accused by Jeb Stuart Magruder, former deputy director of the Nixon re-election committee, of having approved the Watergate wiretapping plans at a third meeting in Key Biscayne, Fla., after he became Nixon's campaign director. Magruder, moreover, contended that Mitchell saw the wiretapping summaries, as well as some photographs of Democratic documents taken by the burglars, and was so angry at the poor results that the wiretappers made their second -and bungled -break-in on June 17, 1972.

After the arrests at the Watergate, according to the testimony of former Presidential Counsel John Dean, Mitchell took part in frequent discussions on how the involvement of officials ranking higher than the seven arrested conspirators could be kept secret. These discussions included 1) plans for Magruder to give perjured testimony to prosecutors and the grand jury; 2) efforts to get the CIA to provide covert funds to keep the arrested burglars quiet; and when that failed, 3) using Nixon campaign funds for that same silencing purpose. Dean claimed that it was at Mitchell's direction that he successfully sought the approval of Nixon Aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to get the President's personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, to raise and deliver the hush money.

TIME has learned how Mitchell intended to handle these and other questions when, as seems certain, they are asked. His major points:

>> He did indeed attend the two celebrated meetings at which G. Gordon Liddy, the former White House "plumber" and Nixon committee counsel, presented his fantastic and illegal political-intelligence-gathering plans. But Mitchell was prepared to deny flatly that he approved the plans at a third meeting, as claimed by Magruder. In this he will be backed by one of his former assistants, Frederick La-Rue, who attended that controversial meeting.

>> Mitchell was set to argue that since he had rejected Liddy's plans, he thought they had been killed, and therefore he saw no obligation to take any action as Attorney General against Liddy. He will make a dubious distinction between discussing an illegal plan and committing a criminal act -even though the Justice Department, under Mitchell, conducted several conspiracy prosecutions against antiwar advocates, including the Rev. Philip Berrigan, for crimes that were never carried out, such as the kidnaping of Henry Kissinger.

>> He was ready to deny stoutly that he ever saw any of the "Gemstone" reports on the intercepted conversations at Democratic headquarters and thus had nothing to do with inspiring the June 17 breakin, which was designed to improve the operation of the illegal eavesdropping equipment.

>> He intended to contend, as did John Dean, that he still does not know who finally did approve the wiretapping plans, but would claim that it must have been someone in the White House. Privately, Mitchell has told friends that he suspects that it was either Ehrlichman or former Special Counsel Charles W. Colson.

>> As for Nixon, Mitchell was ready to insist adamantly that the President knew nothing about the intelligence-gathering plans in advance and nothing about the elaborate cover-up activities until last March 21, when Nixon claims to have initiated a new investigation of his own. Mitchell based this contention, which directly contradicts testimony by his former protege Dean, on his numerous conversations with the President. Mitchell concedes that he apologized to Nixon for not having supervised the re-election committee more closely when the two discussed his resignation from the committee two weeks after the Watergate arrests, but he insists that his main reason for resigning was personal. His wife Martha wanted him to leave politics.

Will Mitchell's story -and his credibility -hold up? A private man who tends to shun public forums, Mitchell is unpredictable as a witness. His hands often tremble, and under pressure his voice quavers. His attorney, William G. Hundley, had asked the Ervin committee to excuse Mitchell from testifying, not only because he is a prime target of the Watergate criminal prosecutors, but because he might not be emotionally fit for the ordeal.

It is conceivable that Magruder could have been wrong in claiming that Mitchell approved the Liddy wiretapping plans. He could have misunderstood Mitchell's always succinct but often enigmatic language ("When the going gets tough, the tough get going"). Or Magruder, an admitted perjurer, could have been lying to protect someone in the White House by pinpointing Mitchell.

The most difficult part of Mitchell's testimony to accept may be his insistence that in all of his conversations with the President throughout 1972, the two never candidly discussed Watergate. If Mitchell was aware of many of the cover-up activities, as he admits, it seems incredible that he did not tell Nixon about them.

The testimonies of Mitchell and Dean on Nixon's knowledge about Watergate are thus expected to be in direct conflict. Dean claims that Nixon was fully aware of the cover-up conspiracy at least as early as Sept. 15.

While the Ervin committee had sought to find some way to question the President about this and many other conflicts in testimony, those hopes were dashed last week. Nixon sent a letter to Ervin claiming that it was his "constitutional responsibility" to decline to appear personally before the Senate committee "under any circumstances" or to provide various White House documents requested by the committee. To do so, Nixon claimed, "would move us from proper presidential cooperation with a Senate committee to jeopardizing the fundamental constitutional role of the presidency." Nixon, in short, was selectively reasserting claims of Executive privilege that he had seemed to abandon earlier when he lifted his self-proclaimed ban on any Senate testimony by his top aides. This renewed insulation of documents could be designed to protect such aides as Haldeman and Ehrlichman against possibly incriminating papers in the files of future, cooperative White House witnesses. Nixon did say, however, that he will "at an appropriate time during the hearings, address publicly" the Watergate charges.

The committee hopes to wind up the present phase of its investigation by Aug. 4, when the congressional summer recess begins. Yet it still has a list of some 20 witnesses to be heard, including such key figures as Ehrlichman, Haldeman and Kalmbach. The latter, who is mysterious and publicity-shy, is scheduled to follow Mitchell in the televised testimony. He can presumably link Ehrlichman and Haldeman with the hush-money payments. He will undoubtedly be asked by the Senators about any Watergate conversations he may have had with his client Nixon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.