Edwin Pauley's Role in American Fascism

Excerpt (pps. 356-376) from:

The Secret War Against the Jews
by John Loftus & Mark Aarons ©1994

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New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press

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CHAPTER 16--THE MEXICAN CONNECTION

The history books say that George Bush was a war hero, a Texas entrepreneur, then a senior figure in several Republican administrations. As president, he worked for a kinder, gentler nation. Our sources in the intelligence community said that the American public knows more about Kurt Waldheim's background than they do about President Bush's. George was himself one of the "old spies."[1]

The American voters who read Bush's 1987 autobiography, Looking Forward, certainly would have had no idea about many of the seamier sides to his family background, his business and espionage activities, and his political career. It was a thoroughly sanitized version of history. But does that make him a bad man?

According to a recent history, Spider's Web, by Alan Friedman, George Bush
was certainly a devious man. The American arms sales to Egypt and Saudi Arabia begun by Carter were illegally diverted to Iraq soon after Reagan and Bush took office. Once American arms started going to the Arabs, only a few regimes, such as Gadhafi's Libya, could not obtain shipments. It was Bush himself who arranged the financing, established the policy, and created the covert arms network that backed Saddam Hussein .[2]

As discussed in the last chapter, when Bush was director of the CIA in the 1970s, the Agency published false oil data to justify the arming of the Arab nations. After Bush returned to office in the 1980s, his arms-for-oil agenda became clear. According to Friedman's analysis of CIA files, U.S. purchases of Iraqi oil increased twelvefold to over 1 million barrels a day, which helped finance Iraq's war machine .[3]
From the beginning, Bush's policy was clearly tilted toward the Arabs and away from Israel. In 1981, when the Israelis destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak, Bush was the first world leader to say that Israel needed to be punished.[4] Even after Iraq turned American weapons against Israel in the Gulf War in 1991, Bush refused to permit Israeli pilots to defend their country for fear it would irritate the other Arab nations. The Israeli intelligence officers we spoke to regard Bush as their most vicious American opponent since Allen Dulles.[5]

There is, however, no consensus among the Western intelligence community. Some of our sources agree with the Israelis that George Bush was the last, and the worst, of the Dulles clique that brought the CIA into discredit.[6] Others say that George Bush is a good man with bad friends. His only major character flaw was an excessive personal loyalty to friends and family. Bush himself was ignorant of the plotting that went on around him.[7]

Although it is true that your friends will do you more damage than your enemies, at some point Bush's defense of ignorance wears a bit thin. A joke going around during the Iran-Contra scandal said that "The two biggest lies in Washington are that Ronald Reagan was in the loop and George Bush was out of it." Because of the importance of Bush's role in the history of covert operations against Israel, we discuss his background in some detail. It is a history that has never been revealed fully before.

In this chapter we consider the following allegations:

• Bush's father and grandfather worked with Allen Dulles to finance the Third Reich and then, when war broke out, cloaked their activities under the cover of intelligence operations.
• George Bush established an oil leasing business in Texas, the biggest client of which was Edwin Pauley, Dulles's confidant, Nixon's bagman, and a front man for CIA money laundering. Bush himself played a minor role in CIA covert operations from the early 1960s.
• Through Pauley, Nixon recruited Bush to handle a variety of sensitive assignments. Bush later asked Nixon to resign for fear that the Watergate investigations might uncover further scandals.
• While not anti-Semitic, Bush was definitely anti-Israeli and pro-Arab, abias that colored American oil and arms policy in the Middle East.

The real story of George Bush starts well before he launched his own career. It goes back to the 1920s, when the Dulles brothers and the other pirates of  Wall Street were first making their deals with the Nazis. To understand Bush's role as a senior official of the Republican party, as head of the CIA, as U.S. vice president, and then, ultimately, in the White House, it is important to trace the Bush family roots right back to the beginning of the secret espionage war against the Jews.

Bush's family, say many of the former intelligence officers we interviewed for this chapter, was nothing to be proud of. The family, and especially his grandfather and father, dragged him into some dirty business, and he stayed with it too long, trying to make a bad thing good.[8]

George Bush's problems were inherited from his namesake and maternal grandfather, George Herbert "Bert" Walker, a native of St. Louis, who founded the banking and investment firm of G. H. Walker and Company in 1900. Later the company shifted from St. Louis to the prestigious address of 1 Wall Street. The obituary in The New York Times, which recorded Walker's death in 1953, mainly highlighted his sporting achievements, in both golf and horse racing, and his role in financing the "new" Madison Square Garden in the mid-1920s.[9]

Apart from disclosing that "Grandfather Walker" came from "a devout Catholic family," was named after the poet George Herbert, and formed his own investment firm, George Bush revealed practically nothing about his grandfather in his autobiography.[10] However, there was another, far seamier side to George Walker. Walker was one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States. The relationship went all the way back to 1924, when Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was financing Hitler's infant Nazi party. As mentioned in earlier chapters, there were American contributors as well.

Some Americans were just bigots and made their connections to Germany through Allen Dulles's firm of Sullivan & Cromwell because they supported fascism. The Dulles brothers, who were in it for profit more than ideology, arranged American investments in Nazi Germany in the 1930s to ensure that their clients did well out of the German economic recovery. "Dulles clearly emphasized projects for Germany ... and for Mussolini's fascist state . . .All told, these and more than a dozen similar transactions had a combined value in excess of a billion dollars."[11]

Sullivan & Cromwell was not the only firm engaged in funding Germany.  According to The Splendid Blond Beast, Christopher Simpson's seminal history of the politics of genocide and profit, Brown Brothers, Harriman was another bank that specialized in investments in Germany. The key figure in the firm was Averell Harriman, a dominating figure in the American establishment, who for almost half a century helped form many of Washington's major foreign policies. Some of his allies in this latter endeavor who also served on the firm's board included Robert Lovett [married to the daughter of the senior partner of Brown Brothers, the investment bank W.Averell Harriman and his brother merged their investment banking firms with in 1931 to form Brown Brothers Harriman], who as previously discussed worked closely with James Forrestal to lead the State Department's revolt against Truman's pro-Zionist policy during the UN debate on the partition of Palestine, and George Bush's father, Prescott, who later became a U.S. Senator.[12]

The firm originally was known as W. A. Harriman & Company. The link between Harriman & Company's American investors and Thyssen started in the 1920s, through the Union Banking Corporation, which began trading in 1924. In just one three-year period, the Harriman firm sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors.[13] "Bert" Walker was Union Banking's president, and the firm was located in the offices of Averill Harriman's company at 39 Broadway in New York.[14]

In 1926 Bert Walker did a favor for his new son-in-law, Prescott Bush. It was the sort of favor families do to help their children make a start in life, but Prescott came to regret it bitterly. Walker made Prescott vice president of W. A. Harriman. The problem was that Walker's specialty was companies that traded with Germany. As Thyssen and the other German industrialists consolidated Hitler's political power in the 1930s, an American financial connection was needed. According to our sources, Union Banking became an out-and-out Nazi money-laundering machine.[15] As we shall see, there is substantial evidence to support this charge.

While the United States languished in the Depression, Walker made millions for his clients by investing in Germany's economic revival. He decided to quit W. A. Harriman in 1931, to concentrate on his own firm, G. H. Walker, while his son-in-law stayed behind to run the show for Harriman. Some say that Walker left George Bush's father holding the bag. Others say that Bush specialized in British investors in Nazi Germany, while Walker handled the Americans.[16]

In that same year Harriman & Company merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers, Harriman. Prescott Bush became one of the senior partners of the new company, which relocated to 59 Broadway, while Union Banking remained at 39 Broadway. But in 1934 Walker arranged to put his son-in-law on the board of directors of Union Banking.

Walker also set up a deal to take over the North American operations of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, a cover for I. G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States.[17] The shipping line smuggled in German agents, propaganda, and money for bribing American politicians to see things Hitler's way. The holding company was Walker's American Shipping & Commerce, which shared the offices at 39 Broadway with Union Banking. In an elaborate corporate paper trail, Harriman's stock in American Shipping & Commerce was controlled by yet another holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, run out of Walker's office. The directors of this company were Averell Harriman, Bert Walker, and Prescott Bush.[18]

In order to understand the character of the firm, it should be recalled that
Brown Brothers, Harriman had a bad reputation, even among international
bankers, as hard-nosed capitalists who exploited every opportunity for profit
in a harsh and ruthless manner. In a November 1935 article in Common Sense,

By Gen. Smedley Butler

retired marine general Smedley D. Butler blamed Brown Brothers, Harriman for having the U.S. marines act like "racketeers" and "gangsters" in order to exploit financially the peasants of Nicaragua.[19]

At some point, Prescott Bush must have realized that his father-in-law was, to put it mildly, a very shady character. A 1934 congressional investigation alleged that Walker's "Hamburg-Amerika Line subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States."[20] Walker did not know it, but one of his American employees, Dan Harkins, had blown the whistle on the spy apparatus to Congress. Harkins, one of our best sources, became Roosevelt's first double agent. As previously mentioned, Harkins kept up the pretense of being an ardent Nazi sympathizer, while reporting to Naval Intelligence on the shipping company's deals with Nazi intelligence.[21]

To this day, we do not know if Prescott Bush stayed on board out of loyalty to his father-in-law or because the money was so good. Instead of divesting the Nazi money, Bush hired a lawyer to hide the assets. The lawyer he hired had considerable expertise in such underhanded schemes. It was Allen Dulles. According to Dulles's client list at Sullivan & Cromwell, his first relationship with Brown Brothers, Harriman was on June 18, 1936. In January 1937 Dulles listed his work for the firm as "Disposal of Stan [Standard Oil] Investing stock."
As discussed in Chapter 3, Standard Oil of New Jersey had completed a major stock transaction with Dulles's Nazi client, I. G. Farben. By the end of January 1937 Dulles had merged all his cloaking activities into one client account: "Brown Brothers Harriman-Schroeder Rock." Schroder, of course, was the Nazi bank on whose board Dulles sat. The "Rock" were the Rockefellers of Standard Oil, who were already coming under scrutiny for their Nazi deals. By May 1939 Dulles handled another problem for Brown Brothers, Harriman, their "Securities Custodian Accounts."[23]

If Dulles was trying to conceal how many Nazi holding companies Brown Brothers, Harriman was connected with, he did not do a very good job. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, word leaked from Washington that affiliates of Prescott Bush's company were under investigation for aiding the Nazis in time of war. In February 1942 George Bush's father, who was by then the senior managing partner of Brown Brothers, Harriman, tried to wrap himself in the American flag. He became the national chairman of the United Service Organization's
annual fund campaign, which raised $33 million that year to provide entertainment for Allied troops.[24]

The cover story did not work. The government investigation against Prescott Bush continued. just before the storm broke, his son, George, abandoned his plans to enter Yale and enlisted in the U.S. Army. It was, say our sources among the former intelligence officers, a valiant attempt by an eighteen-year-old boy to save the family's honor.[25]

Young George was in flight school in October 1942, when the U.S. government charged his father with running Nazi front groups in the United States. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, all the shares of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those held by Prescott Bush as being in effect held for enemy nationals. Union Banking, of course, was an affiliate of Brown Brothers, Harriman, and Bush handled the Hairrimans' investments as well.[26]

Once the government had its hands on Bush's books, the whole story of the intricate web of Nazi front corporations began to unravel. A few days later two of Union Banking's subsidiaries-the Holland American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporationalso were seized. Then the government went after the Harriman Fifteen Holding Company, which Bush shared with his father-in-law, Bert Walker, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, and the Silesian-American Corporation. The U.S. government found that huge sections of Prescott Bush's empire had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had greatly assisted the German war effort.[27]

In the midst of the patriotic fervor over the war, it must have been a crushing experience for young George to know that his father and grandfather were among the men who helped finance Hitler's war machine. Little wonder that Bush made no mention of the whole affair in his autobiography. Still, his relatives were very lucky not to have gone to jail. Like Dulles, they volunteered to become spies for the war effort. George's grandfather, Bert Walker, went to Supreme Allied Headquarters in London to advise on covert "psychological operations." Prescott Bush's clients, including the Thyssens, fled to Switzerland, where they joined Dulles's anti-Hitler underground.[28]

Prescott himself had served in Military Intelligence during World War I, liaising with the British. According to our sources, he was trained by Stewart Menzies, later head of the British secret service during World War II.[29] Menzies knew that there were too many British investors in Brown Brothers, Harriman to make an issue out of their aid to Nazi Germany. It was better to bury the scandal.

By 1945 young George was a bona fide war hero, a fact that his father later used to good advantage in his successful run for the U.S. Senate. Like another naval hero, Jack Kennedy, who was also the son of an infamous Nazi supporter, George's war experience changed him, even as it redeemed the family's good name. The man who came back from the war was very different from the boy who had left.

George had grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut, an upper-class New York bedroom community. Greenwich was such a notorious hotbed of anti-Semitism that it became the site for the film A Gentleman's Agreement, which graphically exposed the prejudice against Jews held by many members of the nation's elite.


After the war, when George returned to Yale University, the school openly acknowledged that it had a policy to restrict the number of Jewish students in each class. Prescott Bush was a trustee at the time. The 1945 Annual Report of the Board of Admissions mentions a "Jewish problem" at Yale and publicly states that "the proportion of Jews . . . has somewhat in-creased and remains too large for comfort."[30] Apparently, Jews were good enough to fight for the United States, but Jewish veterans need not apply to Yale.
Such bigotry was appalling to young George. Our sources obtained access to George Bush's private files in Yale's most exclusive secret society, the Skull and Bones Club. George was in favor of admitting both blacks and Jews to this venerable institution.[31] The sources we interviewed on George's early life say it was a dig at his father, who was not the most racially progressive member in the history of the club.[32]

In 1949 the Skull and Bones class, which George Bush helped to select, finally succeeded in voting away all racial and religious barriers to membership. George's vote in 1948 for admitting Jews to the next Skull and Bones club was not his only act of rebellion against his father's generation. After graduation he shunned a seat with Brown Brothers, Harriman and asked for a job in China, as far away from Wall Street as he could get.

His father, who was also on the board of Dresser Industries, arranged it. There have been rumors that George's trip to China was somehow connected with espionage. True, Dresser has provided cover for CIA operatives over the years, but George's trip was strictly business.[33] it should be noted, however, that among George's classmates were a number of people who left college to work on intelligence operations with his father's friend, Allen Dulles.[34]

Try as he did, George Bush could not get away from Dulles's crooked corporate network, which his grandfather and father had joined in the 1920s. Wherever he turned, George found that the influence of the Dulles brothers was already there. Even when he fled to Texas to become a successful businessman on his
own, he ran into the pirates of Wall Street.

One of Allen Dulles's secret spies inside the Democratic party later became George Bush's partner in the Mexican oil business. Edwin Pauley, a California oil man, was, like James Forrestal, one of Dulles's covert agents in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Like Forrestal, Pauley was a "big business" Democrat. The parallels didn't end there.[35]

During Roosevelt's presidency, Pauley was a major Democrat fundraiser and held a series of top posts, including treasurer of the Democratic party's National Committee.[36] He was also director of the Democratic convention in 1944 and had an unrivaled reputation as a man who could shake a great deal of money out of the oil companies, which were notoriously right-wing and pro-Republican. Pauley also had the loyalty of President Truman, especially for his role in getting him the delegate numbers to replace Henry Wallace as vice president in 1944, which ultimately took Truman to the White House when Roosevelt died in 1945.[37] Unfortu-nately, Truman's gratitude was not enough to sweep Pauley's dirt under the carpet.

The truth is that Pauley was committed to profit and, like the Dulles brothers, could not distinguish between his own interests and his public duties. During World War II he was in the perfect position to assist the Dulles clique in their Nazi oil deals. it was Pauley who recommended that Roosevelt appoint Interior Secretary Harold Ickes to the post of Petroleum Administrator for War, although Pauley later came to regret that action bitterly. Ickes, in turn, made Pauley his special adviser.[38]

Ickes Diary

Ickes's choice of Pauley, and several other top oil men, to hold key positions puzzled many liberals in the Roosevelt administration. Ickes believed that unless the oil companies were part of wartime policyrnaking,
they "would take the bit in their teeth and run away with it given any chance."[39] Pauley and Ickes made a good team, at least while the war still hung in the balance. They worked to organize the Petroleum Administration for War, and more important for Allen Dulles, Pauley also held the key position of Petroleum Coordinator of Lend-Lease Supplies for the Soviet Union and Britain.[40]

There is some evidence that Ickes used Pauley, an independent oil man, as a counterbalance to the major oil corporations. For example, during the war Pauley had several run-ins with the foreign petroleum coordinator, Max Thornburg. He just happened to be a senior executive of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which, as previously discussed, was owned by Rockefeller and I. G. Farben and was secretly sending oil to Hitler. While the war raged, Pauley and Thornburg fell to squabbling about Mexican oil, which had been nationalized in the 1930s, when the U.S. giants were thrown out.

In this particular fight, Pauley was supported by Ickes, who believed that the major companies were more interested in ensuring their profitable reentry into Mexico than they were in exploiting Mexican oil for the war effort. Pauley, then working for the Petroleum Administration while he pushed his own private interests in Mexico, could not have put it better himself.[41] Pauley's real concern, however, was not to help the war effort but to gain a share of Mexican oil profits. After the war he did so, in partnership with a young independent oil producer by the name of George Bush.

Despite the obvious conflict of interests, in April 1945 Truman appointed Pauley as the U.S. representative to the Allied Reparations Committee, with the rank of ambassador. Simultaneously, he was made industrial and commercial adviser to the Potsdam Conference, "where his chief task was to renegotiate the reparations agreements formulated at Yalta." As one historian noted, the "oil industry has always watched repa rations activities carefully."[42] There was a lot of money involved, and much of it belonged to the Dulles brothers' clients.

As previously discussed, the Dulles brothers were still shifting Nazi assets out of Europe for their clients as well as for their own profit. They didn't want the Soviets to get their hands on these assets or even know they had existed. Pauley played a significant role in solving this problem for the Dulles brothers. The major part of Nazi Germany's industrial assets was located in the zones occupied by the West's forces. As Washington's man on the ground, Pauley managed to deceive the Soviets for long enough to allow Allen Dulles to spirit much of the remaining Nazi assets out to safety. Although Pauley knew that the Soviet zone contained less than one-third of Germany's industrial assets, as official U.S. representative he insisted to his colleagues on the Reparations Committee it controlled 50 percent.[43]

Pauley, a key player in the plan to hide the Dulles brothers' Nazi assets, then moved into another post where he could help them further. After successfully keeping German assets in Fascist hands, Pauley was given the job of "surveying Japan's assets and determining the amount of its war debt."[44] Again, it was another job that was crucial to the Dulles clique's secret financial and intelligence operations.[45]

In January 1946 Truman nominated Pauley as undersecretary of the navy. The move was "intended by ... Truman as a steppingstone to his succeeding James Forrestal as [Navy] Secretary."[46] It also was designed to balance U.S. oil interests against the Zionists and their wealthy American-Jewish backers. Despite the strength of his support for the Jews, Truman was signaling that there was room for a strong oil voice in his administration. Pauley's nomination, however, ignited considerable political controversy, which eventually helped force him out of political life in 1947.[47]

Finally, the liberal Ickes had had enough of Pauley's machinations. Ickes decided that he would not lie to get Pauley's nomination endorsed by the Senate.[48] When his nomination came up before Senator Charles Tobey's Naval Affairs Committee for ratification, Pauley met his match, as evidence of his political bribes and "black bag" fund-raising operations for the Democrats began to seep out. Although the oil lobby, supported by President Truman, pulled out all stops to frustrate Tobey and make him abandon the hearings, Pauley finally had to retreat. But at least the coverup was safe for a few more years yet, as the most damaging parts of Pauley's work for the oil companies did not emerge during the hearings.[49]

The most explosive allegations about Pauley's political bribes came from Ickes himself. it cost both men their jobs, prompting Ickes's resignation and, a short while later, Pauley's withdrawal from the navy job.[50] Despite pressure from Truman, Ickes was only too eager to tell Tobey's committee exactly the sort of scandal in which Pauley had been involved.
When he testified, Ickes claimed that Pauley had promised to raise $300,000 for the Democratic party from among Californian oil men, if the federal government would drop a court case to establish that offshore oil title belonged to Washington and not to the state of California.[51]


At the time, Pauley was treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. Like Forrestal, he hated the fact that the Democrats were dependent on Jewish financial contributions. Large bribes from the oil companies, which happened also to suit their business interests, could tip the party away from the Zionists. Pauley also just happened to hold two key government oil posts at the time of his bribe offer. His arm-twisting tactics on the federal suit had been widely noted in the Washington bureaucracy. Evidence emerged at the Senate hearings that confirmed Ickes's claims and contradicted Pauley's own statement, made under oath, that he had never made such bribery attempts.[52]

Red Flag to a Bull

If the hearings went on, the whole corrupt business eventually might seep out. When Pauley denied the bribery charge, it was like a red rag to the bull called Harold Ickes. No one was going to call him a liar and get away with it. Invited to reappear at the hearings, this time Ickes gave the committee chapter and verse. But if he had hoped for Truman's backing, he miscalculated.[53]

Indeed, despite Truman's support for the Zionists, the president was playing a careful balancing game with the oil companies. This time the oil companies won. Truman strongly and publicly supported Pauley and "questioned the accuracy and loyalty of Ickes's charges." The president had Ickes's resignation a few days later and promptly accepted it, "with alacrity and delight."[54] But the damage was done, and in "the face of further embarrassment to the Administration and certain rejection by the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, Pauley reluctantly requested that his nomination be withdrawn."[55]

It may have worked out for the best for Truman, who had enough trouble in 1948 convincing the American electorate that his administration wasn't toeing the oil companies' line about Israel, without having Edwin Pauley around his neck. Yet another scandal erupted around Pauley in 1947, which finally ended his political career and forced his retirement from public life. He now strictly worked behind the scenes, although, as we shall see, he continued as a secret Republican agent inside the Democratic party.[56]

Pauley went back to the oil business and, some years later, became an important factor in the secret war against the Jews. In fact, Pauley had a significant influence on George Bush's business career in Texas. In 1958 he founded Pauley Petroleum, which:  ... teamed up with Howard Hughes to expand oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Pauley Petroleum discovered a highly productive offshore petroleum reserve and in 1959 became involved in a dispute with the Mexican Government, which considered the royalties from the wells to be too low.[57]

According to our sources in the intelligence community, the oil dispute was really a shakedown of the CIA by Mexican politicians. Hughes and Pauley were working for the CIA from time to time, while advancing their own financial interests in the lucrative Mexican oil fields. Pauley, say several of our sources, was the man who invented an intelligence money-laundering system in Mexico, which was refined in the 1970s as part of Nixon's Watergate scandal. At one point CIA agents used Pemex, the Mexican government's oil monopoly, as a business cover at the same time Pemex was being used as a money laundry for Pauley's campaign contributions;[58] As we shall see, the Mexican-CIA connection played an important part in the  development of George Bush's political and intelligence career.

There was a substantial CIA presence in Mexico since at least the 1950s. Pemex was a perfect place to recruit agents of influence inside the Mexican government. Mexico became part of the "revolving door" between the oil industry and the intelligence community. One of the famous oil men-turned-agents was William F. Buckley, Jr., like Bush, a Skull and Bones alumnus, whose boss in Mexico was [E.] Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame.[59]

According to Regardie's magazine, the CIA-Mexican oil connection lasted for many years.[60] In the early 1980s, Pemex was listed as employer for another Bill Buckley, before he returned to the Middle East as CIA station chief. This Bill Buckley was to play a major role with George Bush in the Iran-Contra scandal and became a key figure in money laundering through the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, which played an important part in the anti-Israeli intelligence operations of the 1980s.

Pauley, say the "old spies," was the man who brought all the threads of the Mexican connection together. He was Bush's business associate, a front man for Dulles's CIA, and originator of the use of Mexican oil fronts to create a slush fund for Richard Nixon's various campaigns.[61]

There is clear evidence that Pauley, the conservative Democrat, played on both sides of the political fence. In 1972, after Nixon promised "a favorable climate for oil," the Campaign to Reelect the President (CREEP), together with Attorney General John Mitchell's secret "Finance Committee," collected at least $5 million in illegal cash donations from the oil companies. Some of Nixon's political bribe money came directly from Edwin Pauley himself.[62]

Although it is not widely known, Pauley, in fact, had been a committed, if "secret," Nixon supporter since 1960. It should be recalled that Nixon tried to conceal his Mexican slush fund during the Watergate affair by pressuring the CIA into a "national security" cover-up. The CIA, to its credit, declined to participate. Unfortunately, others were so enmeshed in Pauley's work for Nixon that they could never extricate themselves. According to a number of our intelligence sources, the deals Bush cut with Pauley in Mexico catapulted him into political life. In 1960 Bush became a protege of Richard Nixon, who was then running for president of the United States.[63]

 Bush's road to Mexico had begun innocently enough. After working in the oil equipment leasing business for Dresser Industries for several years, George Bush went out on his own. He
 "packed up his red 1947 Studebaker and set off for Texas," ending up in Midland, which soon became the "oil capital of west Texas." Bush began at the bottom, as a trainee painting pumping equipment, but didn't stay there for very long. He soon "caught the fever" and "formed an independent oil company in partnership with other ambitious young men no less eager to make money."[64]

In the mid-1950s, in partnership with such friends as Hugh Liedtke, Bush established Zapata Petroleum. Bush had energy and ambition, but he also had some family connections. One such contact led to a very lucrative deal with Eugene Meyer, the Jewish publisher of The Washington Post, whom he had met
previously because Brown Brothers, Harriman "managed a lot of his accounts."[65] But Zapata had a much more powerful friend than Meyer.  George Bush's company leased oil rigs to Edwin Pauley and took a commission from all the oil Pauley pumped out of the Gulf of Mexico. Pauley was, according to a lengthy article in Barron's, George Bush's most important customer.[66] The "old spies" say Bush lost his virginity in the oil business to Edwin Pauley.[67]

In those days, Bush's business manager, Wayne H. Dean, owned a ranch extending across the international border into Mexico, thus qualifying Zapata as a "Mexican resident" corporation. In 1959 the Mexican government changed the rules and said that oil companies had to be run by Mexican nationals. It looked as if Bush's company would lose its most lucrative account, Pauley's Pan-American Petroleum Company. Instead, Bush, Pauley, and Dean met with their Mexican contact, Diaz Serrano, and worked out a deal.[68]

According to Barron's, Serrano was not above bending a few rules for his American friend George Bush, who apparently felt the same way about Serrano. Without telling his own shareholders in Zapata, Bush set up a new joint venture, Permargo, with Serrano at the helm, but with Bush associates holding secret control of a hidden 50 percent American share through a Mexican lawyer. Bush later sold Zapata's rig, the Nola 1, to Permargo, which took over the lucrative Pauley drilling contract.[69]

The only losers, said Barron's, appear to have been Bush's shareholders in Zapata. It is hard to know for sure, since the Securities Exchange Commission "inadvertently" destroyed all of the records for Permargo and Zapata for the period between 1960 and 1966. The destruction occurred shortly after Bush was
sworn in as vice president in 1981.[70]

The Zapata-Permargo deal also caught the attention of Allen Dulles, who, the "old spies" allege, was the man who recruited Bush's company as a part-time purchasing front for the CIA. Zapata provided commercial supplies for one of Dulles's most notorious operations, the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was nothing terribly dramatic: Bush's company leased a few cargo vessels and shipped some CIA cargo as oil drilling equipment.[71] Coincidentally, all of Zapata's Securities Exchange Commission files for this period were "inadvertently destroyed" as well.[72]

Mandatory Reading

Fletcher Prouty, a former U.S. intelligence official who worked on CIA support activities, says some circumstantial evidence implicates President George H. W. Bush as a contract agent supplying the CIA team for the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to Prouty, two of the CIA supply ships were named the Houston and the Barbara J., in honor of Bush's home and wife. As further evidence, Prouty asserts that the Cuban resupply mission was code named "Operation Zapata," the name of Bush's oil company in Texas. Prouty's
credibility, however, has been widely attacked because of his consultancy to Oliver Stone's film JFK.[73]

In 1988 The Nation magazine stumbled across an FBI memorandum dated November 29, 1963, reporting that "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" had been briefed about the reaction of the Cuban exile community to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Nation added that a "source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities."[74]

The Nation's allegation that Bush's oil business worked for the CIA in 1960 matches Barron's description of the timeframe for Bush's creation of Permargo. When The Nation article appeared, Bush refused to be quoted directly on the Mexican-CIA connection, although his spokesman denied that he had anything to do with the CIA until he became its head in 1975. The CIA response to the article was both prompt and deceptive: It claimed the CIA agent working with the Cuban exiles in 1963 was in fact named George William Bush, clearly not the man running for president in 1988.[75] The CIA had thrown a red herring to the press. When The Nation tracked down George William Bush, it discovered that in 1963, he was a social work trainee in Hawaii and had nothing whatsoever to do with J. Edgar Hoover's briefing of the other George Bush of the CIA on the Cuban exiles' reaction to the Kennedy assassination. Even after he joined the CIA George William didn't even know anyone involved with the Bay of Pigs.[76] On the other hand, President George Bush had a wide assortment of Bay of Pigs' veterans among his close friends and associates, among them Felix Rodriguez, who later worked for Bush and Oliver North on the Iran-Contra program.[77]

Another intelligence agent with ties to Bush was George de Mohrenschildt.[77]
He had the names of all Zapata team members in his address book, including
Pauley, Dean, and even the home address of "Bush, George H. W. (Poppy) 1412
W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum, Midland 4--6355."[79]There is some reason to suspect that de Mohrenschildt was still working on both oil and intelligence matters at the time he was dealing with George Bush and Zapata.[80]

The most intriguing of Bush's early connections was to Richard Nixon, who as vice president had supervised Allen Dulles's covert planning for the Bay of Pigs. For years it has been rumored that Dulles's client, George Bush's father, was one of the Republican leaders who recruited Nixon to run for Congress and later convinced Eisenhower to take him on as vice president.[81] There is no doubt that the two families were close. George Bush described Nixon as his "mentor." Nixon was a Bush supporter in his very first tilt at
politics, during his unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1964, and turned out again when he entered the House two years later.[82]

After Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, he ordered a general house cleaning on the basis of loyalty. "Eliminate everyone," he told John Ehrlichman about reappointments, "except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause."[83] Nixon knew what he was talking about. At the time, Bush had already been offered a senior post in the Treasury Department, under George Shultz, but Nixon wanted him elsewhere. According to Bush's account, the president told him that "the place I really need you is over at the National Committee running things."[84] So, in 1972, Nixon appointed George Bush as head of the Republican National Committee.

It was Bush who fulfilled Nixon's promise to make the "ethnic" emigres a permanent part of Republican politics. In 1972 Nixon's State Department spokesman confirmed to his Australian counterpart that the ethnic groups were very useful to get out the vote in several key states. Bush's tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor's 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party's official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush's campaign allies were the
emigre Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the United States.[85]

It seems clear that George Bush, as head of the Republican National Committee in 1972, must have known who these "ethnics" really were.[86] Columns by Jack Anderson and others had already made it clear, in 1971, that Nixon was a little too close to the Fascist groups. The Nazis for Nixon problem was one of those scandals that Bush inherited when he took over the Republican National Committee.

Although our intelligence sources are not unanimous on this point, several say that George Bush was included among the handful of people who knew about Nixon's deal to bring the Fascist groups into the Republican party in 1972.[87] Indeed, since Bush was the head of the National Committee, he was in the best position to supervise the transfer of the campaign staff's ethnic Fascists into the Republican party's own organization. A 1976 memo to Republican National Committee co-chairman Robert Carter contains an even more
damning implication.

During Bush's time as Republican National Committee chairman, he appointed
Colonel Jay Niemczyk as director of the party's ethnic Heritage Groups.
Niemczyk's memo, to Robert Carter praised Bush as having "added needed
strength and impetus" to the Republicans' ethnic recruitment effort. Niemczyk
reported that Bush "had full knowledge of" and, in the words of the memo, provided 'total support' for the party's ethnic Heritage Groups" (emphasis added).[88]

As head of the Republican National Committee, it seems likely that Bush did have "full knowledge," as did Richard Johnson of the State Department, that the ethnic Fascists were being coddled because the ethnic groups were useful to get out the vote in several key states. As previously outlined, in 1972 Johnson told the Australians that a selected group of American politicians had been briefed about the sensitivity of certain Fascist groups, such as the Croatian Ustashis.

If a lower-level State Department official like Johnson knew what was going on, it is likely that the head of the party-George Bush-would have been advised about the true background of the Croatians and the other emigres in the party. As Johnson noted, the American government was advising Republican leaders not to attend Croatian gatherings on April 10—the memorial day for Hitler's creation of the Fascist Croatian state.[89]

When taken in conjunction with the earlier Australian report, and the Washington Post revelation that Nazis were being used for U.S. campaign purposes, the Republican memo confirming Bush's "full knowledge" of the ethnic campaign looks like a "smoking gun" as far as Bush's personal complicity is concerned. Nearly twenty years later, and after exposes in several respectable newspapers, Bush continued to recruit most of the same ethnic Fascists, including Pasztor, for his own 1988 ethnic outreach program when he first ran for president.

According to a number of our sources in the intelligence community, it was Bush who told Nixon that the Watergate investigations might start uncovering the Fascist skeletons in the Republican party's closet.[90] Bush himself acknowledges that he wrote Nixon a letter asking him to step down.[91] The day after Bush did so, Nixon resigned.

Bush had hoped to become Gerald Ford's vice president upon Nixon's resignation, but he was appointed U.S. ambassador to the UN. Nelson Rockefeller became vice president and chief damage controller. He formed a special commission in an attempt to preempt the Senate's investigation of the intelligence community. The Rockefeller Commission into CIA abuses was filled with old OPC hands like Ronald Reagan, who had been the front man back in the 1950s for the money-laundering organization, the Crusade for Freedom, which was part of Dulles's Fascist "freedom fighters" program.[92]

Although Governor Reagan may have been out of the loop in 1975, Rockefeller certainly knew all about the old Nazi connection, having counter-blackmailed Ben-Gurion at the time of the UN debate about the partition of Palestine. In 1947 Rockefeller had been able to keep the Nazi scandal under control, and
except for the occasional leak, it had stood up ever since. But by 1975 his damage control operation was floundering. In December Bush was brought back to become head of the CIA. After all, he had previous experience with protecting the Agency from the Watergate investigation.

According to our sources, it was Bush who, as head of the Republican National Committee from 1972 to 1974, told Nixon that he could not shift the blame for the Mexican slush fund to the CIA without wrecking the intelligence community. The "old spies" say that legitimate CIA operations in Mexico would have been hopelessly compromised if they were tarred with the brush of Nixon's money laundering.[93]

To Bush's credit, he did not allow Nixon to trash the CIA to save himself. On the other hand, Bush may have had his own reasons for blocking any investigation of the Mexican connection; after all, it involved his own
business associate Ed Pauley.[94] In any event, Nixon resigned, and Bush became a hero for standing up for the CIA.

It was this action, and not his peripheral role in the Bay of Pigs or his company's minor role as a cover for CIA supply operations, that endeared George Bush to the Agency. His appointment as director of Central
Intelligence was a big morale boost to an institution that had been severely tarnished by Senate and media exposes of some of its more bizarre practices during the Dulles-Angleton years. Though the practices had been concealed from the employees of the CIA, they were the ones who had taken the blame instead of their political superiors.

According to our sources, the rank and file viewed George Bush as the one man who would stand up to the White House if it ever again tried to politicize the CIA.[95] What these CIA staff did not know was that George Bush was appointed precisely to fend off any more congressional investigations. The nosy investigators had come perilously close to the heart of one of the many Dulles scandals: the recruitment of Nazi money and emigres by the leading lights of the Republican party.[96]

Although many readers will not believe this, our sources insist the regular CIA staff were almost entirely ignorant of the true background of the ethnic Fascists and remain so to this day.[97] During the Eisenhower years, Allen Dulles merged the State Department's Office of Policy Coordination into the CIA, but kept the OPC's emigre operations separate from the CIA's geographical sections. The "freedom fighters" had their own files in the program branch that could be accessed only by a special set of cryptonyms. Before Allen Dulles was fired, he took the cryptonym cross-index with him. To this day, not even the director of Central Intelligence can retrieve an individual's record from the mass of files on Dulles's projects with the Fascist emigres.[98]

After Dulles left, the CIA files on Fascist emigres were a permanent shambles. Angleton remained to put out the occasional fire when someone requested a security check on a suspected Nazi. When Angleton was fired in December 1974, only a handful of people knew where the bodies were buried.[99] Then along came the new CIA director, George Bush, in December
1975, who inherited Dulles's dirty secrets.

Dulles's Nazis kept popping out of the woodwork, and it was getting harder and harder to keep the rest of the CIA in the dark. Ironically, the Vatican itself almost uncovered the story. As previously discussed, Father Robert Graham, the American-born Vatican historian, triggered Angleton's cover-up of the Vessel forgeries. In 1976 Graham had a conversation with Martin Quigley, an Irish-American Catholic from New York. Quigley had served with the Office of Strategic Services in Rome, before Angleton arrived on the scene and took over the Vatican connection. According to our intelligence source on this issue, Quigley told Father Graham an interesting but fairly minor piece of history.[100]

Monsignor Egidio Vagnozzi, from the Japanese desk of the Vatican Secretariat
of State, had given the OSS some information about Japanese peace feelers. Quigley assigned the code name Vessel to Vagnozzi, who later became apostolic delegate to Washington and one of the most powerful cardinals in Rome.

This interesting and innocent bit of trivia intrigued Father Graham, who had written extensively on the Vatican's peace-making efforts during world War II. Graham promptly filed a request for Quigley's OSS reports under the new American Freedom of Information Act. What neither Quigley nor Graham knew was
that Angleton had continued to use the "Vessel" code name after Quigley left. As previously discussed, Angleton had signed cover letters forwarding thousands of forged Vessel reports as part of Dulles's deception program against Roosevelt and Truman.

Father Graham had no idea that Vessel was only one of Angleton's covert operations in postwar Rome. During his takeover of the BritishVatican Ratline to smuggle fugitive Nazis, Angleton also had employed the very same Croatian and Eastern European Fascist organizations whose members Dulles and Nixon later brought into the Republican party in the 1950s and to which Bush had given a permanent home in the early 1970s. Vessel, the Vatican Ratlines, and the Republicans' Heritage Groups were all pieces of the same scandal. The Vatican request for documents threatened to open a very large can of worms.

When the CIA received Father Graham's request for all Vessel reports, the clerks retrieved not just Quigley's innocuous documents, but trunkfuls of highly sensitive intercepts of top-secret Vatican cables. The CIA, of course, did not know that the Vessel cables were forgeries, and Graham's request was brought to the attention of the highest levels of the Agency in 1976. According to our source the most sensitive material could not be released to Father Graham:

By this time, George Bush had become CIA director, and because of the delicate nature of Graham's "semiofficial" request-which was viewed by the CIA, that is, as "a Vatican request"—that apparently would lead him, Graham,to conclude that the OSS had "spied successfully on the pope," it was decided by Bush and others that the Vessel files would have to be carefully reviewed and sanitized.[101]

None of our sources has personal knowledge of whether Bush was aware of the extent to which the Vessel files would reveal the old Nazi smuggling scandal in the Vatican, although they wondered whether Bush's  previous campaign association gave him special knowledge of the ethnic Fascists' background. They do assert that a decision was made "at the highest levels" that the man who made the mess should clean it up.[102]

"Angleton, though publicly disgraced and officially retired on pension, was asked to do the job. He was undoubtedly the most familiar with the material and the 'most responsible'--as he had long dealt directly 'with the Vatican' for the CIA. He was, apparently, paid a fee for reviewing the files, based on his recognized 'expertise.'"[103]

 Thus Angleton, who had been fired in December 1974, was put back on the CIA payroll in 1976. He took one look at the huge pile of Vessel papers and realized it would take months to read and analyze them all. According to one source, Angleton went directly to Bush and explained just how sensitive the Vessel papers were.[104] According to another source, it is not certain that Angleton ever told Bush the whole story.[105] It seems, however, that someone in the CIA gave Angleton permission to violate the Freedom of Information Act and shred many of the Vatican files.[106] But not all the records could be destroyed:

'Eventually, some material would have to be released to Graham, but that material, [Angleton] was apparently informed, could be heavily censored. Moreover, he was given to understand that if other reports really could not be censored, they could be removed from the Vessel files and destroyed. Apparently, Angleton destroyed hundreds of such reports (as he himself reported to certain people). He seemed to have been given a completely free hand.'[107]

No matter how much censorship or shredding took place, Angleton knew that Father Graham would immediately, and correctly, identify some of the Vessel papers as Scattolini forgeries. Angleton contacted his sister Carmen in Rome and obtained Graham's phone number. Then Angleton asked Graham to drop his
Freedom of information request, but Graham refused.[108] He still thought that Vessel meant only the Quigley-Vagnozzi reports.

When, in 1978, Graham finally saw the little that had escaped the shredder, he was astounded to discover Scattolini forgeries. In 1979 Graham tried repeatedly to interview Angleton, who ducked every meeting. Angleton kept denying through intermediaries that he even knew Scattolini. While Father Graham did not know it, the lie could have been easily discredited by a number of people who served in Rome at the time.[109] Keeping the lid on the Angleton-Dulles scandals was becoming harder and harder.

Problems kept popping up for George Bush. In 1976 a militant splinter group of Croatian Fascists hijacked an American airliner, an act that sent all the other intelligence agencies scurrying for background files. As already mentioned, Croatian Ustashis operated the Vatican Ratline for Angleton and then went on to establish the Croatian Heritage Group for the Republican National Committee. The Australian report on Nixon's Nazis had mentioned this very group. Both the hijackers and the Croatian Republican group proclaimed loyalty to Ante Pavelic's Fascist government. Were there more Croatian Fascist terrorists running around in the United States? Somehow the link to the Croatian GOP had escaped the notice of the CIA.[110]

Some people in government, at least, were curious. In 1976, Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzmann specifically asked if any Nazis had ever immigrated to the United States under the CIA's "100 Persons Act," which allows the Agency to bring in up to one hundred agents a year without going through normal immigration procedures."' The true answer was a bit of a problem. Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dulles's cronies at the State Department had conned the CIA into sponsoring a handful of VIP emigres for special entry, as a favor to Dulles's Office of Policy Coordination. The CIA did not know that the "emigres" were, in fact, Nazi intelligence officers. But Bush's CIA told Holtzmann that "no war criminals, or terrorists, or persons of that ilk" had ever been admitted by the CIA.[112]

Some of our sources say that it is unfair to accuse Bush of personal knowledge of the Nazi cover-up, insisting that he was brought into the CIA precisely because he was ignorant and could plausibly deny any knowledge of some of the older, darker Dulles scandals.[113] But even if everybody in the U.S. government who knew about the Nazis conspired to keep Bush ignorant of past scandals, the "bumbling Bush" explanation does not explain why the CIA director was not aware of current ones. Somebody in the CIA had to know exactly what was going on in 1976, in order to keep the Nazi cover-up going:

As late as 1976 the agency's practices in this regard were still so blatant that the CIA actually wrote an-unclassified letter to a former CIA contract agent, Edgar Laipenieks, who was then facing deportation from the United States in connection with allegations that he had committed multiple murders, torture and other crimes against humanity at the Central Prison in Riga, Latvia, during the war. "We have been corresponding with the Immigration and Naturalization Service about your status," agency spokesman Charles Savage wrote to Laipenieks on official CIA letterhead. "It is our understanding that INS has advised their San Diego office to cease any action against you. If this does not prove [to be] the case, please let us know immediately. Thank you once again for ... your past assistance to the Agency. Sincerely,"[114]

Laipenieks promptly released this CIA letter to the press. The whole war criminal cover-up was very much a current issue while Bush was CIA director. In fact, some of the Nazis were still working on covert operations in 1976. The Ukrainian groups openly fought with each other over who was receiving the most CIA money. Dimitri Kasmovich, the Nazi police chief in Belarus during World War II, boasted to his fellow collaborators that he was running guns to a new generation of anti-Communist "freedom fighters" in Angola.[115]

But, apart from a spot of gunrunning and occasional propaganda from Kasmovich and other Fascists in the World Anti-Communist League, the old Nazis were just too elderly for covert operations. Now they were far more valuable to the Republican National Committee than they were to the CIA. Yet every time the CIA tried to get rid of the tainted emigre groups, someone kept bringing them back. Even when the CIA forced the transfer of Radio Liberty to the State Department, someone on Bush's staff agreed to bring the Dulles era
files on Radio Liberty back to the CIA, where they remain to this day.[116] As a practical matter, the CIA had no operational use for the elderly emigres in Angola. Young agents were needed to fight in the jungle. There had to be another solution. just before Congress ordered a halt to all CIA activities in Angola in 1977, the agency found the answer. Behind the back of Congress and of most of the CIA, U.S. intelligence turned to a little-known firm in London to recruit a private army for the Angolan civil war. Instead of hiring Nazi mercenaries, the CIA hired British mercenaries to evade the congressional ban.

Unfortunately, as we shall see in Chapter 17, the British mercenaries were also working with the Arabs. During Bush's twelve months as CIA director, the secret war against the Jews was entering a particularly nasty phase. British intelligence had replaced its Nazi agents with PLO terrorists. The Angolan operation would lead to a number of other scandals in the 1980s, especially Iran-Contra and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. George Bush may not have realized it, but he was acting more like Allen Dulles all the time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THANKS TO JOHN LOFTUS AND MARK AARONS for their amazing research. The remainder of the book must be read to fully appreciate their massive effort and success in explaining what really happened during this era of our history.

Order now.

Watergate through the eyes of John Mitchell

New information revealed

 

From radioblogger.townhall.com (cached)

James Rosen's eye-opening look at Watergate through the eyes of John Mitchell

Saturday, June 14, 2008

HH: A special couple of hours ahead on the Hugh Hewitt Show. An extraordinary new biography is out, and if you have a gift-buying need either for Father’s Day, or when we replay this in the fall, for Christmas or a birthday or anything else, if the person you’re thinking about buying was born before 1960, they are going to love this book. It’s called The Strong Man: John Mitchell And The Secrets Of Watergate. I’ve linked it at Hughhewitt.com. And its author, James Rosen, joins me now from Washington, D.C., where he’s of course a correspondent with the Fox News Channel. James Rosen, welcome, congratulations on an extraordinary book for reasons I’ll discuss. But I hope that impression is widely shared among people who’ve had a chance to read it thus far.
JR: Hugh, thank you for your kindness. I very much appreciate it.
HH: Let’s talk a little bit about The Strong Man: John Mitchell And The Secrets Of Watergate. But first, you. Give people a little bio on your background as a journalist, James.
JR: I’m, was born in Brooklyn, raised in Staten Island, New York. I attended the Johns Hopkins University, earned a B.A. in political science, kicked around in local politics for a little bit, went back to grad school, got a Masters in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Sometime after college, around 1991, I started work on this book, and just kept with it while I was doing other things, getting that Masters degree. I crawled my way through, up through the ranks of small market television. I did a stint in Rockford, Illinois, a stint in the Bronx, joined Fox News in 1999, covered the White House for the last year of Bill Clinton, the first four of George Bush, covered the State Department under Condoleezza Rice for about two years, and mostly, recently, I’ve been doing campaign stuff.
HH: Now James, you’ve also been a print reporter. This is one of the things that distinguishes you in your work on television, is that you have worked the print side. I think it brings a lot of depth to your reporting on television.
JR: Thank you.
HH: But I mean, you’ve been an editor for Playboy, but you’ve been writing for some of the big papers for years.
JR: I have been, I was never a daily deadline print reporter, but I have done a lot of publishing in magazines. My first article was in National Review in 1992. I want to acknowledge here a debt to the late, great William F. Buckley, Jr., who gave me my start in journalism, gave me a grant to start the John Mitchell book back in 1991, got me published in National Review for my first article the next year. And I really regret that Mr. Buckley did not live to see the official publication of The Strong Man, but I think he would have liked it.
HH: Let’s talk a little bit about the book itself, the history of the book, not the contents of it, because I find it’s kind of an extraordinary journey. I’m drawn to it, of course, because I went out to San Clemente in 1978, having graduated from Harvard, went to work for David Eisenhower, and six months later, was spending lots of time, almost every day, with Richard Nixon through the period of time in which you put John Mitchell back, by the way, at Casa Pacifica. I believe I was at that party when John Mitchell was out there.
JR: Okay.
HH: So I have a huge interest in Mitchell and in Nixon and Watergate. But I think anyone who lived through these years, young or old, is going to be drawn into this book. But you’re too young. That’s why I’m wondering how could you have said I’m going to devote, in essence, sixteen years of my life to Watergate and John Mitchell, because I could see someone my generation doing it, but you’re too young.
JR: I was born in 1968. I grew up in New York in the 1970s. I had an older brother who kept telling me you missed everything. You missed the Beatles, you missed Woodstock, you missed Muhammad Ali, you missed Watergate, the Moon landing. And I just, as a young person, found the era that immediately preceded me, or that consumed the years when I wasn’t really senescent, to be a fascinating time, and I still do. I never imagined I would spend seventeen years on the book, of course, but it turned out that way.
HH: Now I have written on Hughhewitt.com, in one of the first reviews I did of The Strong Man: John Mitchell And The Secrets Of Watergate, that perhaps the secret to its appeal is that to get the 60s and the 70s, you have to take a firm position, you have to stand somewhere in order to see the kaleidoscope going around. You chose to stand in the space that John Mitchell occupied. Why did you go there back in 1991?
JR: Once I was in college, I had already devoured the sort of secondary literature of Watergate, all the books, the memoirs. And I decided well, I want to see some primary material. So I spent two summers when I was at Johns Hopkins working as an intern in the National Archives’ Nixon Presidential Materials Project, which at that time controlled all of the ex-President’s papers and tapes. And those two summers just got me hooked on dealing with actual documents, actual tapes. And I decided I must make my own contribution to this literature, which was already sprawling by that point in the late 80s. and it dawned on me that the, of all the major and minor figures of the Nixon presidency and Watergate, the only ones who hadn’t written his own book, or had a book written about him, was John Mitchell, and he was the central guy. Let’s not forget, for benefit of younger listeners, John Mitchell was Richard Nixon’s law partner in the 60s, he ran both of Nixon’s winning presidential campaigns in ’68 and ’72. Mitchell then served as Attorney General of the United States, the country’s chief law enforcement officer, highest ranked law enforcement officer during a uniquely chaotic and scary time that saw the killings at Kent State, the rise of radical groups like the Weather Underground and Black Panthers, the May Day riots, and so on. And then by virtue of his involvement in the Watergate cover-up, not the break-in but the cover-up, Mitchell was convicted on criminal charges and sent to prison, the highest ranking United States government official ever to go to prison. Nixon didn’t do time, Agnew didn’t do time, John Mitchell, the former Attorney General of the United States, did 19 months. There were no books written by or about Mitchell. There were three about his colorful, volatile wife, Martha Mitchell, who had a knack for drinking a lot and calling reporters in the middle of the night, and saying provocative things to them, and thereby became famous. Three books about her, none by or about the guy that reshaped the modern Supreme Court, the guy that helped desegregate the modern public school system in the South, and integrate the public schools there, and who was basically a major actor on the American political scene. That’s why I chose Mitchell.
HH: As we work through these two hours, we’re going to cover many of those segments in depth. But I want to start, however, by noting you have…I’m a Watergate guy. I know this stuff. I helped build the Nixon Library for goodness sake. But there’s sources in this book previously never explored or explained or exposed. Hat’s of to you. You found stuff like the handwritten notes of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. You had lots of interviews here, and you got stuff that was only recently declassified. Give the audience a sense of the new material you put on the table in The Strong Man: John Mitchell And The Secrets Of Watergate.
JR: I conducted 250 interviews for this book, with major and minor figures from Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger and others on down. I also used the Freedom Of Information Act aggressively over many years’ time to pry loose literally hundreds of thousands of new documents and tapes that had never before been seen by any other researcher. I like to say, Hugh, if you want to blow your dad’s mind, get him this book, because this is not your father’s Watergate. I come to some very bold, revisionist conclusions about the central mysteries of that time, such as who ordered the Watergate break-in, what was the purpose, what was the role of CIA. To give your audience two examples…
HH: Well, wait. James…
JR: Yes, sir.
HH: Let’s tease them the right way. They’re going to have to earn it.
JR: (laughing) All right.
HH: (laughing) We’re not going to put it all in the first ten minutes. They’re going to have to earn it. Let me ask you, though, to set up still, did you get to sit down with Mitchell? You often refer to an interviewer sitting with Mitchell in the third person. Is that James Rosen?
JR: No. Mitchell died three years before I started work on this project. What I did want to mention was two sets of archives that no other researcher had every before asked to see, which I was quite shocked. One was the internal files of the Watergate special prosecution force.
HH: Yup.
JR: These were the special prosecutors in Watergate. What did they know about Watergate? And when did they know it? And chiefly about their star witnesses whose testimony helped bring down Nixon and Mitchell, John Dean and Jeb Magruder? The internal memos flying back and forth by the staff lawyers on the Watergate special prosecution staff, including Richard Ben Veniste, who later became famous as a member of the 9/11 Commission, showed that the Watergate special prosecutors knew very early on that their chief witnesses, Dean and Magruder, were peddling deeply flawed testimony, and that that testimony would need to be reshaped, reworked actively by the prosecutors in order to secure a conviction against the person everyone regarded as the big enchilada in the case, John Mitchell.
HH: I will foreshadow something here, James, is I put down certain chapters, I thought to myself some ethics professors in the legal academy are going to have to look here and come to a conclusion about whether prosecutorial misconduct occurred here, because you’ve laid a predicate for assuming that it has. What’s your sense of that?
JR: I think I agree with you that it deserves that kind of examination. At a minimum, exculpatory materials were withheld from John Mitchell and his defense team.
HH: That’s what I mean. That is a, that’s a huge problem for history as they look back. That is what…an innocent man, or a man presumed to be innocent, is supposed to get that from the prosecution, and they sat on it.
JR: And they sat on it. And moreover, there were smoking guns throughout the Watergate prosecutors’ own files, where in memos, they would say, and I’m paraphrasing, things like Dean’s testimony is not supported by the Nixon tapes here. We would do well simply to omit this. We shouldn’t call this fellow to the stand, because he tends to support Mitchell rather than Magruder, we will have to operate on the theory that it went down this way, or we will have to say that it happened on this date and not the date that Dean said so, because John Mitchell’s logs support him on this or that. The other set of documents, Hugh, that I was the first researcher even to ask to see, some 5,000 pages of testimony collected by the Senate Watergate Committee Investigation staff, everyone remembers seeing who lived through Watergate, the Senate Watergate hearings, in the summer of 1973, where Dean testified, Magruder testified, John Mitchell testified, Alexander Butterfield in that forum revealed that Nixon had recorded his own conversations. They riveted the nation. 80 million Americans watched. Almost every one of those witnesses, before they went on television to testify under oath, first testified under oath in what they call executive session.
HH: And you’ve got those notes. We’ll talk about them when we come back.
- -   -   -
HH: I’m a big fan of Richard Nixon, James Rosen, but I’ve got to tell you, it’s a pretty damning portrait of RN that emerges from this book, especially with regard, and I’m going to foreshadow here a little bit as well, when it became necessary to Nixon’s view, he threw his closest ally, and perhaps closest confidant in the government, overboard, John Mitchell.
JR: Yeah, it’s…I with I could have come to a better conclusion, but you know, you mentioned the party that you think you attended back in 1979, that ex-President Nixon held for John Mitchell after Mitchell got out of prison. At that party, with guests assembled poolside in San Clemente, Nixon said very simply in his toast, John Mitchell has friends, and he stands by them. And what he meant by that was, of course, that Mitchell had gone to prison, taken his punishment like a man, unlike most of the other Watergate characters, Mitchell never wrote a book, he never traded evidence, real or fabricated, against people more senior than him, which would have been Nixon in Mitchell’s case, in exchange for a more lenient sentence. He never went on the lecture tour, he never went on the Mike Douglas show, and he never found God. And what Nixon was also alluding to when he said Mitchell has friends and he stands by them, was implicitly an acknowledgement on Nixon’s part that everyone poolside knew from the publication and dissemination of the transcripts of the Nixon tapes, that in the spring of 1973, when things got hairy, as the Watergate cover-up was starting to unravel, Richard Nixon did not stand by John Mitchell, and that tucked away in the National Archives on great magnetic spools, for all of posterity to listen to, are 3,700 hours of tape that preserve Richard Nixon’s betrayal of his best friend.
HH: It’s a fascinating recounting here when he’s meeting with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon is, in the hideaway office, and he decides basically, Mitchell’s got to go, Mitchell’s got to fall on the sword to save the administration. John Mitchell knew that. He had figured it out by the time he went back to trial, and then of course out to San Clemente for the party in 1979. He sucked it up. It’s really quite an astonishing, lawyer’s lawyer display. I guess that’s why the title, The Strong Man, is so deserved here.
JR: Yes, and you know, in Nixon’s defense, somewhat, he agonized, the President did, for the better part of months, nine months, over the involvement of John Mitchell in Watergate, because as the book also makes clear, Nixon was hearing a lot of disinformation from some of the people around him about John Mitchell. And so he went back and forth, Nixon did, on the great question, did Mitchell do it? Did Mitchell order the Watergate break-in? Of course, I conclude in the book that he did not. Nixon vacillated on that question, and ultimately, it didn’t really matter. What mattered to him was that Mitchell had become a liability, and so Nixon made the decision he made to sort of throw John Mitchell to the wolves.
HH: Now I want to back up and find out what produced this kind of an individual, both his intellect, extraordinary, his accomplishment, significant, before he hooks up with Nixon in the 60s, and that means a little bit of time on early Mitchell. Can you give us the brief sort of walk-up…
JR: Thumbnail sketch?
HH: Yeah.
JR: Sure.
HH: On where he ended up in New York practicing bond law.
JR: Mitchell was born in Detroit in 1913. He was actually a little bit younger, just a few months younger than Richard Nixon, but Nixon always kind of looked up to Mitchell as a sort of older brother figure. His family moved to Long Island, New York, when he was about five. Mitchell grew up there, he attended Fordham, and Fordham Law School. He had a brilliant, legal mind. Very early on in his legal career, he developed an innovation in the field of municipal bonds, which enabled states and municipalities to exceed state constitutional debt limits without going to the voters for approval. It was called the moral obligation bond. It was John Mitchell’s baby. And in the 40s and 50s and 60s, it made him a ton of money, because the concept was used literally in all 50 states. And it was first, and most greatly popularized by Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York. And it was at that point, which Mitchell living a fabulous life out in Rye, New York, living on the 17^th fairway of the Apawamis Country Club Golf Course in Rye, that he, his law firm merged with Richard Nixon’s in 1967. And Mitchell’s contacts in all 50 states were so extensive, Democrat or Republican, he knew virtually every politician in America of any note. And Nixon, of course, preparing for his 1968 comeback run for the presidency, took note of that. And it wasn’t long before Mitchell was actually running the ’68 campaign.
HH: Let’s back up a little bit, though, and tell people one of the astonishing things I learned from The Strong Man is that Bobby Kennedy approached John Mitchell prior to Jack Kennedy’s run in 1960, with a request that he run Kennedy’s campaign.
JR: This was a story that Mitchell delighted in telling his children. But I also heard it from a former aide to John Mitchell’s, independently of Mitchell’s family, so it comes from two sources, that in 1960, Bobby Kennedy was kept waiting by Mitchell, who was then in private law practice and had no association with Richard Nixon, and Kennedy didn’t like that. And finally, when he got in to see Mitchell, he said how would you like to run my brother’s campaign, or help my brother’s campaign in 1960 for the presidency. And Mitchell said no. Kennedy then apparently produced a number of documents suggesting that it would be in the interest of Mitchell and his clients if he did, whereupon Mitchell, according to the story, threw Kennedy out of his office.

Many, many years later, after Nixon resigned and John Mitchell got out of prison, and all the dust had settled, a former aide took Mitchell out to lunch and he said Mr. Mitchell, if you had it all to do over again, what would you do differently, and he thought for a moment, and he said I’d have run Jack Kennedy’s campaign. 

HH: Now I do want to pause for a moment here, because you plant very early in the narrative, The Strong Man, a seed which flowers later, which is John Mitchell loved to exaggerate. He would tell stories of his growing up and setting fire to his schoolhouse, and throwing books into the fire. His wartime service took on a lot of barnacles that weren’t true. What was that in him?
JR: That is a very important point you’re raising, and I’m not sure I ever was truly able to get to the bottom of it. As his daughter and his brother told me, he lived very much within himself, and he would be a very hard person to get to know. And in fact, his most famous statement remains, you would be better advised to watch what we say rather than what we do about the Nixon administration. So there was a certain inscrutability about John Mitchell, which made it very hard to be his biographer. I did conclude that he perpetually exaggerated some childhood tall tales, and also that he at least at a minimum allowed to be perpetuated some false stories about his World War II service, although he served honorably, we want to point that out, in the Navy, in the South Pacific, in the latter part of the war, but stories that started to appear when he was Attorney General, to the effect that he had rescued Pappy Boyington, the Medal Of Honor winner, that Boyington thanked him once a year for the rest of his life, or that he was one of John F. Kennedy’s commanding officers in the P.T. boats service in which both men served. All of these were false. I’m not sure why Mitchell either perpetuated, or allowed to be perpetuated, these stories. One thing I was sure of, Hugh, was that Mitchell had a certain contempt for reporters, and he enjoyed seeing them made fools of. I don’t that it is smart or wise or fair, even, to draw a connection between this trait as demonstrated here, and his later convictions for perjury in Watergate.
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HH: The Decade of Shocks, James, who called it that? You mentioned him in the book, I don’t have my note right here.
JR: It’s a historian named Tom Shachtman. 
HH: It’s a beautiful description for the years ’63-’74, culminating in the resignation and the trial of John Mitchell. This segment, I want to go back to the beginning of the Nixon-Mitchell relationship. It’s unlikely because, and by the way, an aside, one of the virtues of The Strong Man is when necessary, you’ll take a moment or two to describe one of the sidebar characters, in this instance, then-New York governor, future vice president, longtime Nixon thorn, Nelson Rockefeller, Rocky. And you point out Rocky was drawn to, and perhaps better than any American politician, employed the talents of talented people. He spotted John Mitchell, and brought him in to work. But why didn’t that disqualify him in the eyes of Nixon?
JR: Well, it’s interesting, John Mitchell at that time was a Wall Street lawyer, and Nelson Rockefeller made use of Mitchell’s legal gifts to embark on an enormous construction program for the state of New York. And as I say, this was aped in almost all 50 states by other governors. The reason that this didn’t disqualify John Mitchell in Nixon’s eyes as a potential aide or supporter in the campaign of 1968, was number one, that John Mitchell was Nixon’s law partner by that time, and we should also point out that Henry Kissinger, who was a Harvard professor, and an expert on the use of nuclear weapons in the 1950s, had also been a supporter of Nelson Rockefeller’s in the ’68 campaign. And once Rockefeller’s campaign sort of died out, without blinking an eye, Kissinger found himself a supporter of Richard Nixon. And Nixon eagerly adopted Kissinger onto the campaign, perhaps because he spotted in Kissinger a fellow practitioner of realpolitik, both on the world stage and in the political arena. And so I don’t think that Nixon regarded those who had some prior relationship with Rockefeller as necessarily anathema for him.
HH: And before the merger of Nixon’s firm and Mitchell’s firm, he’s this very successful bond lawyer. And you referred to him as many people do. Bond lawyers are three steps above the archangels. What is that? Where’s the origin of that?
JR: (laughing)
HH: By the way, I have a couple of partners who are bond lawyers. They love that. But tell me what the origin of that is.
JR: That came from a book called A Question Of Judgment by Robert Shogan, who covered the Justice Department for the L.A. Times in the early ‘70s. And he was referring to the tendency among some bond lawyers to regard themselves with a certain air of superiority. The Bond Bar in the 1940s, which was where Mitchell cut his teeth, was a notoriously staunchy bastion of old-school, old boys club type of fraternal atmosphere. And I think that’s where that phrase comes from.
HH: It certainly does, but what’s interesting about the Fordham Fordham John Mitchell, is that in many respects, there’s a mirror here of Nixon, East Coast to West Coast, Nixon, Whittier and Duke, and crawling his way up, John Mitchell, Fordham, Fordham, doesn’t come from a lot of money but breaks into Wall Street. No wonder they were attracted to each other.
JR: Yes, and the difference, though, the key difference, Hugh, between the two men was that John Mitchell, while ascending the classes and earning the confidence of the Rockefeller family, and becoming a very successful lawyer and member of golf clubs and that sort of thing, retained a kind of bemused contempt for the upper classes and their ways, and never lost sight of his sort of Scotch-Irish roots. He was sort of like a tough cop, as one of his aides put it to me. Richard Nixon craved the approval of the upper classes, burned with some kind of class envy and resentment that he would never truly be accepted by the Kennedys or the Rockefellers.  Mitchell didn’t need that acceptance. He had it, and yet didn’t need it. And that was something that drew Nixon to Mitchell.
HH: Now let’s talk a little bit about the merger. One person approaches John Mitchell in your book and said why did you choose to join Nixon’s law firm, and he responded Nixon joined my law firm. What’s the truth there?
JR: The truth is that Mitchell was wrong there. Nixon’s name was already on the law firm shingle of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander when Caldwell, Trimble and Mitchell was sort of acquired by, and merged with the Nixon law firm. So the merger took place because Mitchell’s law firm, largely on the basis of his genius, had become the number one law firm in the country on the very lucrative work of municipal bonds and the financing of public works projects. Nixon, Mudge, Rose wanted to tap into that, and so that’s why that merger took place.
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HH: James Rosen, here we are at the end of a primary campaign that’s been extraordinary and rule-breaking, and at the cusp of a presidential campaign which could be as difficult and as close of that of 1968. But when you take us in The Strong Man back to the campaign of ’68, it was not about primaries. It became about primaries, but up until that time, no one really had focused that much on them. But it was John Mitchell’s strategy, with Richard Nixon’s concurrence and assistance, that Nixon had to run and win. Explain that to people.
JR: Nixon was a national figure by 1968, of many years’ standing. But he had not won an election on his own since 1950. He in fact had lost his last two elections, the presidential race against John F. Kennedy in 1960, and the gubernatorial race in California, in 1962. And that race had ended with Nixon’s shrill, self-emulating cry of just think what you’re going to be missing, he said to the press. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. Not a bad impersonation, right?
HH: Well, I don’t think so. It’s not that good, James. Those of us who worked with him a lot, we can do it pretty well, James, but go ahead.
JR: (laughing) Well, and it’s tempting. And the problem that hovered over Nixon’s ’68 campaign was the notion of Nixon as a loser.
HH: Right.
JR: And in order to dispel that notion, Mitchell as the campaign manager, simply decided we have to run our candidate in a set of primaries, and win and show that he’s a proven vote-getter, and thereby established some notion of invincibility. In that era, unlike our own, what the real central of focus was the conventions. And the conventions were often contested affairs. And so was 1968. And as fact, as I’m fond of pointing out to conservatives, Hugh, who don’t like to talk about John Mitchell or Richard Nixon or Spiro Agnew, because they like to pretend that there is a straight line between Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and maybe they throw a nod in the direction of Bill Buckley. But in fact, in the great age of radical chic, when it was least fashionable to do so, the prime exponents of law and order and conservative values were Nixon, Agnew and Mitchell. In that one occasion where Nixon, where the Republican Part had the straight-up choice between Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, they chose Dick Nixon in 1968, at that convention.
HH: Largely because of the efforts of John Mitchell to organize his 50 state contact list. I also want to pause here to tell people about Operation Eagle Eye, because I think John McCain and his staff would be well advised to read this very closely as we head into the campaign against Obama, because you know, there will be places, I wrote a book in 2004, If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat, but that was really an extraordinary anticipation by John Mitchell of what it would come down to in 1968.
JR: Yeah, one of the problems for Nixon in 1960 had been allegations, which most scholars have accepted as truth at this point, of widespread voter fraud in Texas, Virginia and Illinois, and particularly Cook County, Illinois. And so determined to avoid any recurrences of that, John Mitchell had a program called Operation Eagle Eye, where they really stayed on the people who were tending the ballot boxes in the various precincts in Cook County, Illinois, to make sure that voting returns were kept on the up and up, and also released early. This came to be a problem, I believe recently, with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in one particular primary, I think it was Lake County…
HH: Yup, Indiana.
JR:  There was a delay in the release of the returns.
HH: Right, in Indiana. And I think it’s going to happen again. Now I want to forge ahead, but there is an interregnum between Nixon’s win and the installation of his administration, which comes up again and again in the book, and it’s the Anna Chennault affair.
JR: Yeah.
HH: And it really is interesting, because I think you, at the conclusion of this book, say much more than the perceived crimes of Watergate, Mitchell was culpable for this?
JR: What we’re talking about is in the closing weeks of the 1968 campaign, Nixon and Mitchell were very fearful that the Johnson administration, which was of course at least nominally supporting the candidacy of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, would unleash on the campaigns some kind of October surprise, some last minute announcement of a bombing halt in Vietnam, in order to sway the campaign, the election, to Hubert Humphrey in the last few minutes, last few days. In order to guard against that prospect, Nixon and Mitchell used an intermediary, a Washington hostess named Anna Chennault, who had excellent contacts throughout Asia, in order to serve as an intermediary to the South Vietnamese government, to ensure that the South Vietnamese would understand, as Nixon and Mitchell wanted them to, that they would get a much better deal in any peace talks with North Vietnam if they had a strong Republican in office like Richard Nixon. And this has been described as an illegal act, persuasively to my mind. It constitutes private citizens interfering in the diplomatic business of the United States government, in wartime, no less. And I brought some new evidence about that effort to the table in this book. I should point out that there is a historian working on the same subject matter who tells me he has obtained Anna Chennault’s private notes from that time, and that I’ve got it all wrong. We’ll see about that.
HH: Now let’s move forward to the administration. John Mitchell didn’t want to be Attorney General. That’s clear.
JR: Correct.
HH: And how did Nixon persuade him? And how long did it take to persuade him?
JR: It took him the better part of a few days, and asking Mitchell, according to Mitchell, 23, 24, 25, 26 times. I’ve seen him use variants of those numbers in various forms. Mitchell was concerned about his wife. Martha Mitchell, his second wife, was an emotionally unstable person, with on top of that, a drinking problem. And he was concerned that if he brought her to the, under the klieg lights of Washington, and the Washington press corps, that it might be bad for her. Nixon spent a lot of time trying to convince Mitchell that it would in fact be good for her. There’s also evidence that Mitchell consulted one of Martha Mitchell’s psychiatric doctors, and who sort of gave the approval for it. So with that in mind, Mitchell reluctantly agreed to serve as Attorney General.
HH: Now he quickly becomes, as you say, “America’s preeminent symbol of counterrevolution.” And I’ve got to alert the audience, there’s so much in this book about Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground. Of course, Bill Ayers now linked very closely with Barack Obama. I want to go to break by reading from Page 82, “Mitchell was a symbol said Bill Ayers, a member with his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, of the infamous Weathermen.  A Marxist offshoot of the SDS, the Weathermen took their name from a line in Bob Dylan’s 1965 alienated youth anthem, Subterranean Homesick Blues. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Initially, they mounted a resistance to Amerikkan,” double K, “imperialism, and are in street clashes with police. Later, they assume clandestine identities, change their collective names to the Weather Underground, and began detonating bombs at courthouses, correctional facilities, police stations, the Capitol, Pentagon. In Mitchell’s rise to power, Ayers saw ‘one more step in a kind of impending American fascism’.” Ayers, Mitchell and the counterrevolution when we come back to the Hugh Hewitt Show.
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HH: James Rosen, you can almost whiff the tear gas coming out of the pages of this book. As we went to break, I read Bill Ayers, the radical, unrepentant terrorist who’s so close to Barack Obama. Did you realize when you…obviously, you didn’t, when your book went to press, that Bill Ayers would be back in the headlines?
JR: No, but I did interview him and Mark Rudd, and some of the other members of the Weather Underground for this book in 2004, and he was unrepentant about the Weather Underground then as well.
HH: And he and the rest of the left hated John Mitchell. And tell people why.
JR: They saw him in the words of Mark Rudd, who led the Columbia University uprising in 1968, as “a Wall Street Nazi.” They saw that Nixon and Mitchell rode to office in 1968 on a promise of restoring law and order. This was, in essence, as I say in the book, a counterrevolutionary promise. Nixon and Mitchell would be the ones who would restore law and order, would take on the hippies and the pushers and the stoners, and the anarchists, and restore a kind of Eisenhower civility to American life. And so, of course, he attracted the ire almost uniquely of the far left in American politics, during what was called “the movement.”
HH: You know, next hour, we’re going to focus primarily on Watergate, but I do want to close this hour by saying your reconstruction of the days of rage, the Mobe against the war, November 13-16 of ’69, and Kent State, I grew up, was in Warren, Ohio, about thirty miles from Kent State, and my cousin was there on the day of the shooting, it’s very evocative. You can get lost in these years, can’t you, Rosen?
JR: I did.
HH: Yeah.
JR: I spent seventeen…I’m still there.
HH: It’s an amazing period of time that I don’t know that is much appreciated now. Did you happen to tape your interview with Ayers?
JR: Yes.
HH: Have you released those tapes yet?
JR: I haven’t. I have the transcript. I’m not sure…if he becomes more of an issue in the fall campaign, perhaps there’ll be some reason to do that.
HH: Did you ask him about Barack Obama?
JR: No, this was 2004. Obama wasn’t even in the Senate yet.
HH: I know, but I’m just curious. You know, you go fishing. I still think, he is going to be a huge issue here, because he was so instrumental in launching Barack Obama’s campaign, that I think you’re sitting on a goldmine there, James Rosen. So the fact of the matter is, he also had epic battles with Nixon over the extent of something called the Huston Plan and other things, and John Mitchell, believe it or not, America, often stood for civil liberties in that period. True or not true, James Rosen?
JR: Well, he certainly stood for civil liberties for African-Americans, because John Mitchell presided over the non-violent desegregation of the Southern public school system, did more than many other executive branch officials, almost all, in order to ensure racial harmony in our schools. He also stood, Mitchell did, while he clamored for, as Attorney General, expanded wiretapping powers, even John Dean, who sent Mitchell to prison with his damning testimony, acknowledged that Mitchell was sort of a restraining influence on Nixon and some of the people around him. He was not, as Dean said, a sinister force.
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HH:  It resonates to this very day in so many ways, you will be amazed as you read through The Strong Man, and I’ve linked it, and I hope you go get to it. Part of it has to do with the paranoia that infected the Nixon administration, and we get to Watergate this hour. James Rosen, who, in your opinion, ordered the Watergate break-in? 
JR: John Mitchell was always accused of ordering the Watergate break-in. It was something that he denied until the day he died. No court of law ever, as a matter of fact, determined who ordered the Watergate break-in. John Dean, the president’s youthful White House Counsel, and the admitted leader of the Watergate cover-up, according to all of the evidence that I developed in the research that I conducted, is the most logical answer to that three decades-old mystery.
HH: And why would Dean have done it?
JR: All right, let’s work backwards. In order to understand who ordered the Watergate break-in, let us first determine what was the actual purpose of the break-in, what was the target of the break-in? The break-in was not just a break-in, Hugh, it was also a wiretapping operation. Two wiretaps were installed in Democratic National Committee headquarters in the spring of 1972. One was on the telephone belonging to the secretary of Larry O’Brien, the chairman of the Democratic Party at the time, like Howard Dean is today. That wiretap never worked. In fact, it never could have worked, as the person who installed it, James McCord, the CIA veteran who was on the wiretap team, the break-in team, as he full well knew, this wiretap required a line of sight transmission in order to be heard. And Chairman O’Brien’s office was set so far back from the exterior façade of the Watergate building that there wouldn’t be line of sight between the wiretap and the reception post set up across the street on Virginia Avenue in the Howard Johnson’s Motel where they had set up the listening gear. The other wiretap was placed on a telephone of the secretary of a mid-level, obscure DNC official named R. Spencer Oliver, that John Mitchell testified correctly that he had never heard of. R. Spencer Oliver’s office abutted the terrace that overlooked Virginia Avenue, and so his office and that telephone, and the wiretap inside of it, did indeed enjoy line of sight transmission to the reception post across the street in the Howard Johnson’s. And indeed, this wiretap on the phone of R. Spencer Oliver and his secretary was the one listening device that did work, was transmitting, was monitored by the wiretap monitor for the roughly three week lifespan of this doomed surveillance operation that ended on the morning of June 17 with the famous arrest that we’ve all seen in the movie, All The President’s Men. 

So first, if we’re going to ask what was the target of the Watergate break-in, it seems to me counterintuitive coming at it all these years later, and without the passions of the era, that it’s counterintuitive to say that the wiretap was really, the target was really Larry O’Brien, even though his wiretap never worked, couldn’t have worked, and didn’t work, and wasn’t monitored, and that the wiretap that was working, and did work, and was monitored for the whole lifespan of the operation, was somehow extraneous, Spencer Oliver.  

So now that we know the target was Oliver, why would anybody have wanted to bug Spencer Oliver? The contents of those intercepted conversations have been protected by a gag order, Hugh, and still in place, since January, 1973, because after all, the conversations will illegally intercepted. But we do have some contemporaneous evidence from that time, and also new evidence, that tells us what the contents of those conversations were, or some of the contents. 

HH: Let’s go right to it. It’s not salacious as much as it is historically fascinating these days, because we’ve grown so used to having call girls in Washington, D.C.
JR: Yeah.
HH: It’s hardly a revelation. Oh, my gosh, there’s gambling going on here.  
JR: (laughing) And the Eliot Spitzer resignation shows us that there are these high level intersections between politics and prostitution. And all of the evidence we have about the nature of those intercepted conversations on Spencer Oliver’s telephone in the DNC in 1972, suggest the conversations overheard, they involved explicit sexually graphic talk. In the 1980s was the first time someone attempted to explain this, and they explained that the phone was being used to set up dates between Democrats and a call girl ring operating out of the Columbia Plaza apartment complex about two blocks away. We do have the arrest and prostitution records that show there was a Columbia Plaza prostitution ring. In the 1990s, Hugh, for the first time, it was alleged that John Dean’s wife, Maureen Dean, had her own ties to the Columbia Plaza.
HH: Now John Dean sued to stop that allegation from being made, correct?
JR: He did, and ironically, that lawsuit produced testimony affirming those allegations. And all of my research and evidence that I developed tended to confirm these allegations. So Hugh, we have worked backwards from who is the target?  R. Spencer Oliver and his phone.  Why would he have been targeted? For some of the racy talk going on over his phone, the connection between DNC and Columbia Plaza.  Who would have been in a position to know about that? The only logical answer is John Dean, and that’s why I came to that conclusion that he ordered the break-in in my book.

HH: Has John Dean reacted to The Strong Man: John Mitchell And The Secrets Of Watergate yet?
JR: We should point out that he has, over time, always denied having ordered the break-in. He and his wife have denied that she had anything to do with prostitution or organized crime figures. They have sent me periodic legal threats of legal action, sort of like cicada season, every so often. And he got a hold of the galleys, and threatened suit at that time.
HH: Has he brought suit yet?
JR: No.

HH: You know, Stewart or Joseph Alsop, I can’t remember which of the columnists said, described John Dean as a bottom-dwelling slug. 

JR: That was Joseph Alsop.
HH: At the conclusion of your work, was Joseph Alsop wrong?
JR: (laughing) I have no grounds on which to dispute that.
HH: (laughing) I love that. I was supposed to appear with Dean at a Palm Springs book show, and he cancelled. And I was so looking forward to discussing The Strong Man with him, because I’ll tell you, the one thing you cannot put this book down and think of is that John Dean is other than a horrible human being, and the classic stool pigeon sneak who rose too fast, too far, and then did everything he could to cover his tracks and get out ahead, and took everyone down with him. I don’t know how anyone could conclude anything else after this material. And you didn’t start with a grief against Dean, did you?
JR: No, I had no dog in the fight. I just wanted to examine these allegations about the Deans and John Mitchell and the call girl angle, and just to substantiate or refute it. And my evidence led me where it did.
HH: When we come back from the break, we’re going to talk about Gemstone and how it got to the point where John Dean had the authority to do this. But I want to back up, because the roots of paranoia in the Nixon…I know Nixon, right? I worked with him since 1979. I didn’t know about the Moorer-Radford affair. I didn’t. And so I assume that most people don’t know that the Pentagon was spying on Richard Nixon in his first year in office. Explain to people about that, because it explains so much about the Nixon presidency.
JR: In 1971, the plumbers who executed the Ellsberg and Watergate break-ins, and are generally cast as a lawless group, actually did some legitimate national security work. They discovered that a young Navy yeoman, a stenographer who was attached to the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger, had been actually spying, taking documents out of Kissinger’s briefcase while he slept on foreign trips, rifling through burn bags and wastebaskets and so forth, and had taken something on the order of 5,000 documents, and given it back to his superiors, two admirals, who in turn passed it on directly to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Nixon…this went on for thirteen months in wartime. So what you have are the top uniform military commanders spying on the commander-in-chief and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. Nixon was informed of this in December, 1971, after the plumbers discovered it.
HH: December, 1970, isn’t it?
JR: 1971 is when he first found out about it.
HH: Okay.
JR: I was the first researcher to go to the National Archives and get the tapes of Nixon being informed of this, the tapes of Nixon calling the chairman of the joint chiefs for the first time, calling various other players in this bit of intrigue for the first time. And what’s interesting is how deeply John Mitchell was involved in the response, which was basically, Nixon wanted to prosecute the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, for espionage. And Mitchell basically said let me handle it quietly. In a sense, Nixon and Kissinger were like car thieves who discover one of their cars that they have stolen has been stolen itself. Are you going to go to the cops? Because they were running so many secret initiatives, the bombing of Cambodia and other things, that they really couldn’t afford a public prosecution of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
HH: Now what’s interesting in the book you write, by allowing men he distrusted, and who distrusted him, to remain in place in the White House and the Pentagon, Nixon ensured that the culture of secrecy and paranoia that infused his first term persisted until the Watergate scandal aborted his presidency. I think that’s profound, James Rosen, and I want you to expand on it a little bit.

By not removing Radford, by not rooting out and denouncing, and perhaps prosecuting this, he had to basically build himself a palace within the palace.  

JR: This is referred to, this whole episode, as the Moorer-Radford affair, Moorer being the chairman of the joint chiefs, Radford being the young Navy yeoman who was doing the actual spying. And what I was kind of describing there, really what I was alluding to was the presence of Alexander Haig in the picture. Haig was Kissinger’s deputy at the National Security Council. It was at Haig’s insistence that this specific yeoman was placed as an aide de camp to Kissinger on these foreign trips. So it was at Haig’s insistence that this young man was able to get the proximity he needed in order to do this spying. And one of the earliest questions that Nixon asked about this,  which he called a federal offense of the highest order, he was outraged about it, was did Haig know? And John Ehrlichman, who was investigating it, said yes. And they decided just keep Haig in place as well as a liaison for the joint chiefs.  

HH: Wow. 

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HH: James Rosen, before we plunge into the actual Watergate cover-up, Mitchell’s, there are three scandals running concurrent with the Watergate scandal. There’s the ITT scandal, there is the Vesco scandal, and there are the White House horrors.
JR: Right.
HH: Can you kind of…one of the things I love about The Strong Man is that you’ve organized it so that people can get their arms around these separate streams of scandal, and keep them separate, because it’s not one big lake. It’s three different, four different rivers of scandal. Can you very quickly walk through them?
JR: Sure, and I appreciate that. The ITT scandal was the allegation by columnist Jack Anderson in 1972, about six months before Watergate broke as a story, that the Justice Department under Attorney General John Mitchell had secretly conspired with, to get rid of some anti-trust suits that were pending against the massive conglomerate ITT, in exchange for ITT funding parts of the 1972 Republican convention. Brit Hume, my boss at Fox News, was at that time a researcher to Jack Anderson, and of very different political coloration than he might admit to being today, and broke that story. And it almost sent Mitchell to prison. Ultimately, there really wasn’t much at the heart of it. The Justice Department did not fix those suits. The suits just churned along against ITT, and ITT was eventually forced into one of the most massive divestitures in American history.  
HH: James, an aside, you’ve got this beery, loopy, alcoholic lobbyist for ITT who really launches this.
JR: Right.
HH: Has the culture of Washington changed significantly? It’s so unprofessional, but those were those days. Do you think this sort of stuff still goes on?
JR: It still goes on, but it has to be done much more on the QT, because there are much tighter disclosure rules, in part as a result of the Watergate era.
HH: All right, on to Vesco.
JR: The other scandal we mentioned was the scandal involving Robert Vesco, who was the original fugitive financier. Vesco was a millionaire, sort of self-made guy, with a large ego and a short fuse from New Jersey, who was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for some of his dealings. He wanted very badly for that investigation to be made to go away. He was friends with someone who was friends with John Mitchell, and used his connections to see if he couldn’t get Mitchell to give him some help. Mitchell and the Commerce Secretary, Maurice Stans, were ultimately put on trial in New York on federal charges that they interfered with the SEC investigation in exchange for a $200,000 dollar campaign contribution from Vesco. Vesco himself was separately indicted for looting a mutual fund of $224 million dollars in 1972 dollars, Hugh.
HH: Yeah.
JR: And he fled the country rather than face those charges. Mitchell and Stans were fully acquitted on all charges, and that, in a nutshell, is the Vesco scandal.
HH: Maury Stans, by the way, an old acquaintance of mine. He was the chairman of the fundraising effort for the library when I was overseeing its construction, and always talked about how his exoneration was never fully understood by the public.
JR: Correct.
HH: And I’m so glad in The Strong Man you give the time it deserves, because he was such an honorable guy. He was a prolific fundraiser, and within the rules he raised the money.
JR: And a member of the accounting hall of fame.
HH: Right. And so I’m glad…this is just a little aside here. Now I also love the part about the Vesco trial, where you talk about Peter Fleming. 
JR: Yes.
HH: And I have a question for you first. What happened to him? After getting Mitchell and Stans acquitted, and destroying John Dean on the stand in a wonderfully recreated series of pages here, why didn’t Fleming defend Mitchell down the road?
JR: Perhaps Mitchell’s fate would have been very different if he has used Fleming as his counsel. I think that had to do with the fact that the Vesco trial, as it was called, was held in New York, and Mitchell wanted Washington counsel for the cover-up, Watergate cover-up trial, which took place in Washington.
HH: Is Peter Fleming still alive?
JR: He is alive, and since…before, during and after his association with Mitchell, he is one of the most highly sought after criminal defense attorneys in New York. He’s in semi-retirement at this point. He has read this portion of the book, and affirms it to be a very good reconstruction of the events of the Vesco scandal.
HH: I quote here, “Peter Fleming got John Dean on the witness stand and destroyed him, Mitchell exulted to an interviewer in August, 1988, 90 days before his death, absolutely destroyed him.” I had erroneously assumed that you were that interviewer, James Rosen. Who was it?
JR: That was a man named Len Colodny, who wrote a book, co-authored a book called Silent Coup: The Removal Of The President, and it was the book that made the allegations about Maureen Dean. It’s a very important book in Watergate literature.
HH: When did it come out?
JR: It came out in 1991…
HH: Okay.
JR: …and for which, he conducted something on the order of 80 hours of telephone conversations and interviews with John Mitchell. And Colodny was very kind to allow me access to them.
HH: Now you also write in here, “That’s all a jury wants to hear, is a defendant’s testimony.” John Mitchell took the stand in his trial.
JR: Both of them, yes.
HH: …and destroyed Dean as well. My question is after that, basically it doesn’t make a dent on the Washington press corps, does it?
JR: No, and Mitchell stands trial. The Vesco trial was significant for a number of reasons. First, the defendants were acquitted at the height of the Watergate frenzy. Number two, and it remains the only trial of two Cabinet members, it was the first time that the Nixon tapes were played in any public setting, in the courtroom there for the jury. And it was also the first sustained cross-examination in a courtroom of John Dean, who later became the chief witness at U.S. V. Mitchell, in the trial of Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He fared much better down in Washington in the Watergate trial than he did against Peter Fleming in the Vesco trial in New York.
HH: Now the White House Horrors as well, I want to make sure we segregate those off from John Mitchell. They went on, they’re Chuck Colson’s responsibility, but describe what they were and who ran them.
JR: This was a term, the White House Horrors, that Mitchell himself coined, pointedly, to refer to the fact that they took place, and they had their origin, in the White House, not in the Justice Department or the Committee To Re-Elect The President, which were the two institutions that Mitchell had run. The White House Horrors referred to the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to get, presumably, secrets about the mental state of the man who leaked the Pentagon papers to the New York Times. They included the forging of fake cables, State Department cables, that would implicate the Kennedy administration in the assassination of the South Vietnamese president, Ngô Ðình Diem, in 1963, and other like operations. They weren’t all Colson’s responsibility. Some of them were, but ultimately, in some sense, they were Richard Nixon’s responsibility.
HH: Oh, sure, and they’re also Dean’s responsibility in some sense. But Colson had the war, as he wrote pretty obviously in his book about his conversion, that he took full responsibility at the conclusion of this for the terrible things that went on in the White House regarding that. I want to go to Page 259 to set up the next segment. “If there was one single moment where John Mitchell could have changed the course of his life, intervened to avert his rendezvous with ignominy, it was shortly after Eleven on the morning of January 27, 1972, in the arrival in his office at the DOJ of three men: John Wesley Dean III, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and George Gordon Liddy,” G. Gordon Liddy we know him as. And he didn’t take advantage of it, did he, James Rosen?
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HH: This is the, these are the three segments that we have left, James. I think we bring Watergate right to the present. John Mitchell gets a visit from John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and they unveil Gemstone. Tell people what Gemstone was, and Mitchell’s, well, inept response.
JR: Gemstone was the codename that G. Gordon Liddy assigned to his proposal for a massive campaign of covert intelligence that the Committee To Re-Elect The President, the 1972 campaign committee for Richard Nixon, could undertake in order to make sure that radicals wouldn’t disrupt the 1972 Republican Convention, for example. And he had the chance to show John Mitchell his plans for this while Mitchell was still Attorney General, and about to head over, to leave the Justice Department, to go run the campaign. So in the Attorney General’s office on January 27, 1972, Dean, Magruder and Gordon Liddy show up so that he can present Gemstone to Mitchell for his approval. And it involves this series of colorful charts on an easel, and really wild plans that Liddy had developed, in part through Dean’s encouragement, under the notion that Dean propagated to Liddy, that Liddy could have at least $500,000 dollars as a budget, which was huge amounts of money in 1972. And Mitchell sits there and puffs on his pipe while Liddy outlines these plans for chase planes to shadow the planes of presidential candidates and pick up their internal communications, using hardened criminals to disrupt anti-war demonstrations and kidnap the leaders of them to Mexico, the use of houseboats and prostitutes in order to pry out secrets from supine and prostrate Democrats. It was just wild stuff, and Mitchell finally, when it was all over, everyone turned to him for his response, and he said, as he relit his pipe, Gordon, I’m not quite sure that’s what I had in mind.
HH: I love that quote.
JR: He said that’s not quite what I had in mind.
HH: It’s on Page 264. But of course, the lesson is, and it came back to him time and time again. Why didn’t you throw them out of your office? Why didn’t you call the authorities? Well, he was the authority, and they didn’t propose anything, well, they did propose illegal things, but they hadn’t committed a crime. But in retrospect, he ought to have fired them all.
JR: Well, the best explanation of that, actually, was by William F. Buckley, who wrote in 1974, that that’s not the way things happen in government and in polite society. And he said if someone had come to me, William F. Buckley, Jr., and proposed that I should be made director of the Gulag Archipelago, I would simply thank them, and say I’ll think about it, and send them on their way, you know. In essence, he recognized that Liddy was a talented lawyer, and someone who could run a legitimate covert program that would guard against a radical disruptions at the convention and so forth. And all he wanted was for the guy to go back to the drawing board and develop a legitimate program. The same cast of characters trudged into Mitchell’s office at the Justice Department a week later with a scaled-down program, and once again, its scope and its cost was considered beyond the pale, as Mitchell put it, and it was rejected again. Gemstone came back to John Mitchell a third time, on March 30, 1972, in Key Biscayne, Florida, by which point, Mitchell had left the Justice Department, was no longer Attorney General, and was now just the head of the Nixon re-election campaign. And about all of these meetings, Hugh, I should point out, that the various characters, their testimonies conflict with each other about what actually happened. But all, at the third meeting, there were three people present. Liddy was no longer there, his latest, most scaled-down version of Gemstone was presented on his behalf by Magruder. There were three people present at the fateful Key Biscayne meeting – Mitchell, Magruder and a guy named Fred LaRue, that worked for John Mitchell. And by all accounts, there was a split in the testimony here. Mitchell said I turned it down a third time, flat out turned it down. Magruder said in various iterations of his testimony, that Mitchell approved the Watergate break-in at that meeting. Fred LaRue said Mitchell told Magruder, and LaRue was consistent on this over thirty years’ time, that Mitchell said this is not something that has to be decided right now. So what you have, by all accounts, and the Senate ignored this, the House Impeachment Committee ignored this, Woodward and Bernstein ignored this, everyone’s been content to ignore this, but it’s plain as day, that you had two or three people at this meeting saying that Magruder walked away without approval. And yet history records that at this meeting, somehow, John Mitchell approved the break-in.
HH: And what’s amazing, and what we talk about after the break, from March 30, 1972, through June 17, 1972, occur the ten weeks of events that really shape American history for the next thirty years, because they lead to the downfall of Richard Nixon, they lead to the collapse of Vietnam, they lead to the election of Jimmy Carter, they lead to the mullahs’ ascension in Iran, and they lead to the presidency of Ronald Reagan as well, in ten weeks, from March of 1972, to mid-June.
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HH: James Rosen, I just said ten weeks that changed the country. They begin on March 30^th, they end on June 17^th, really, when John Mitchell gets a phone call that the Watergate burglars have been arrested and are in jail. He’s at the Beverly Hills Hilton hotel. What happened in between those ten weeks? Who gave the break-in…we go back to…we think it’s Dean. You’ve persuaded me that it’s Dean. But who told, actually physically told G. Gordon Liddy to go ahead? 

JR: That was Jeb Magruder, who was Mitchell’s deputy at the Nixon re-election campaign.  

HH: And so it may have been on orders of Dean, or it may have been Magruder on his own volition. What do you think? 

JR: Well, the conclusion I reached in the book was that John Dean, according to all of my research and evidence, was the person who gave Magruder the order to give to Liddy. By all accounts, Magruder was a sort of a weak character, and wouldn’t have had the cajones to sanction so dicey an operation on his own.
HH: And so after it gets going, and they’re all arrested, et cetera, the phone call comes into the Attorney General. They dispatched G. Gordon Liddy out to the golf course to try and get the Attorney General to spring them. It’s like Keystones Cops, reliving this.
JR: Well…
HH: And I think what you convey is that no one really had a clue what they were doing for a period of time here.

JR: And this surfaces on the Nixon tapes. You know, the conspirators here never could bring themselves to say okay, we are covering up a crime, let’s do it effectively. They would cross their legs and talk in discreet, gentlemanly terms about, well, managing the case. They spoke in bureaucratic terms, because they couldn’t really bring themselves to even admit that they were engaged in a criminal conspiracy.

And on the tapes, you hear people like John Dean say we don’t know how to do this, in terms of delivering hush money and that sort of thing. And you hear Haldeman volunteer at one point, don’t you go to Vegas to launder it? I don’t…and Dean says we’re not the Mafia. We don’t know how to do things like this. So there is an element of ineptitude here. 

HH: There’s also an element of surrealism. You describe a party that John Mitchell went to on the last calm night of his life. It’s a fundraiser beside a pool with Jimmy Stewart, Jack Benny, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Zsa Zsa Gabor. It’s a different world in 1972.
JR: Clint Eastwood is still around. That’s a good thing.
HH: He’s still around, but did you actually talk to him about this? Does he remember this?
JR: No, I didn’t.
HH: The hunt for money to hush up Jim McCord and Howard Hunt, and the Cubans, and G. Gordon Liddy, is what really enmeshes John Mitchell. And in fact, it’s fairly clear he had a role in this, don’t you agree?

JR: No, in fact, I conclude that he was estranged from the business of approving hush money. Mitchell was convicted of ten overt acts listed in his indictment by the Watergate special prosecutors. And I came to the conclusion that he only committed one of those acts.  

HH: But James, I know you wrote, “I never met with John Mitchell,” when Herb Kalmbach says, “I never met with him. Mitchell never asked me to raise the money.” But I got a sense from your book that he knew money-raising was going on for the purpose of taking care of these guys.
JR: Yes, but that doesn’t mean that he was culpable in it. I can know that right now, there’s organized crime activity taking place in Kansas City, Missouri. It doesn’t mean that I’m culpable in it. My point is that the one act in the Watergate cover-up of which I conclude Mitchell was indeed guilty, and right to have to serve a prison sentence, was his subornation of the perjury of Jeb Magruder…
HH: Right.
JR: The Watergate prosecutors got a hold of Magruder’s desk diary. They saw that these two Gemstone meetings we were just talking about in Mitchell’s office as Attorney General, even though Mitchell turned down Gordon Liddy’s illegal schemes three times, Mitchell recognized the public perception would be that an attorney general who had clamored for expanded wiretapping powers, no one would ever believe that he turned down a bugging of the Democratic National Committee. And so he wanted very much for those meetings never to see the light of day. And he suborned Jeb Magruder’s perjury, that they would tell a false story to the Grand Jury about what those meetings were actually about.
HH: Do you think he had an obligation, though, after this blows up, to tell Dean to stop raising the hush money, to stop and go to the defendants and say guys, we’ve got to fess up? After Nixon’s re-elected, because he always gave his defense, as you detail, getting Nixon re-elected was more important than anything else. That was his basic uber-defense. But did he have an obligation, in your view, to step up and say we’re raising money to hush these people up?
JR: There may have been, to use a term that is apt in any discussion of John Mitchell, a moral obligation. I do not believe, as a matter of the law, that there was a legal obligation for him to do so.
HH: All right, I want to talk, before we run out of time, about Martha. But before I get there, the operational diary in Howard Hunt’s old executive office building safe, on Page 343. This is, to me, the key act that not many people understand. This was really the record of what was going on with the wiretaps. What happened to that diary, James Rosen?
JR: John Dean, as he later admitted, destroyed it, but he fed it into a shredder that groaned on the strength of the job it was assigned. Dean withheld the fact that he had destroyed Howard Hunt’s operational diary of the Watergate break-in until after he concluded his plea deal with the Watergate special prosecutors. And in fact, just about a hundred days after he did that destruction, he was asked about the materials in Hunt’s safe by the Watergate Committee during his testimony on the Hill, and he gave a long, circumlocutory answer. But for the man who was supposed to have such an incredible, astounding power of memory, it was amazing that Dean, a hundred days after destroying that notebook, didn’t remember to tell the Senate Watergate Committee about it.
HH: Now it was always Nixon’s view that John Mitchell was crippled through this process by the deep, deep dysfunction of his wife, an alcoholic, it appears to me bi-polar, by your vivid descriptions. Before we talk about the specifics of that, though, she was sort of an epic figure. As you point out at one point, in one thirty day period, there were 5,000 stories on Martha Mitchell. I don’t think people understand today sort of, she was a prefiguring of our celebrity culture, to a certain extent.
JR: Exactly. Very well put, yes. And Martha Mitchell, to be alive in the year 1970, was to find the sound of her voice, and the sight of her face inescapable. She was on the cover of Time, the cover of Life, the cover of Look. She appeared on 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace. She was on the Today Show with Barbara Walters, all of the sort of appurtenances of modernity.
HH: And to this day, do people have an idea of how sick she was?
JR: I hope my book will convey it.
HH: It does. She was really a broken figure, and died not long thereafter.
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HH: I want to thank James Rosen of the Fox News Channel about his brand new book, The Strong Man: John Mitchell And The Secrets Of Watergate, linked at Hughhewitt.com. Thanks also to Adam and Generalissimo for being here. James, Page 390, “Senator Talmadge asked am I to understand from your response that you placed the expediency of the next election above your responsibilities and intimate to advise the President of the peril that surrounded him? John Mitchell: Senator, I think you put it exactly correct. In my mind, the re-election of Richard Nixon, compared to what was available on the other side, was so much more important, that I put it in just that context.” And if I had to send one page of your book to anyone to explain what happened in Watergate, that’s the page, James Rosen.
JR: Well, Hugh, we must remember that Watergate didn’t take place in a vacuum. It took place against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, and the still-larger backdrop of the atomic age. And the stakes, once you have a nuclear age, the stakes for who we make our president, as we’re finding out again today, are very large indeed. They are potentially fatal, and so I think what Mitchell was referring to there was the imperative, in his mind, of having Richard Nixon with his finger on the nuclear button rather than having George McGovern sit as commander-in-chief.
HH: At the conclusion of the book, you quote CBS’ John Hart on Page 439. “John Mitchell understood. It was a big game for him, played by rules he understood, and he lost.” A big game, played by rules he understood, and he lost it. So he wasn’t “bitter” at the end?
JR: He had bitterness toward men that he had treated like sons, like John Dean and Jeb Magruder, and even Fred LaRue, performing in a sense, acts of patricide against him by testifying against him falsely, and sending him to prison. As Mitchell told an intimate in the years when he was still appealing his case and preparing to go to prison, my mistake was not in law, but in men.
HH: And last question, James Rosen, you’ve written this sort of epic book. What do you do next? Are you done with writing? Or do you dive into another book?
JR: There’s a bunch of books I’d like to get off my chest before I die. I hope not to take seventeen years. I will sacrifice quality for speed and cut that time fully in half, maybe. If it were up to me, there is a specific book about Auschwitz that I would like to write, and also a small but vigorous manifesto in defense of Ringo Starr and his contributions to the Beatles. You can imagine, Hugh, which book my wife wants me to write next.
HH: (laughing) I am sure.
JR: (laughing)
HH: And I know which one’s probably more controversial. James Rosen, a pleasure talking with you. Congratulations, a magnificent book, The Strong Man: John Mitchell And The Secrets Of Watergate. Has it been reviewed by the Post yet?
JR: The Washington Post, very snide. My smackdown runs on June 15.
HH: Oh, I look forward to it. James Rosen, thanks, have a great Father’s Day.
End of interview.