CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY By Shelly MacLeod The admission price to the Republican fundraiser was $150 but the guests thought it was worth it. Because among the speakers at Washington’s Sheraton Park Hotel were the Party’s leading lights: the Attorney General’s wife, Martha Mitchell, and the Vice President, Spiro Agnew. It was November 1970. Within three years, according to accounts fully released only recently, both these right-wing ideologues would fear for their lives at the hands of the Nixon White House. The key facts of Mrs. Mitchell’s case have been known since her death in 1976, although they have never been presented comprehensively. After her husband’s appointment as Attorney General in 1969, Martha Mitchell helped popularize the Nixon Administration’s campaign against the left by hurling epigrammatic broadsides against liberals and radicals. “ I don’t think the average Americans realize how desperate it is when a group of demonstrators — not peaceful demonstrators but the very liberal Communists — move into Washington,” she warned in 1969. And after Senator Fulbright voted against G. Harold Carswell’s confirmation as Supreme Court justice, her nighttime advice to the Arkansas Gazette was blunt: “ I want you to crucify Fulbright and that’s it.” But when Nixon directed Mitchell to supervise his re-election, Martha privately fretted, concerned that the risks of the unorthodox campaign placed her husband in jeopardy. And when her bodyguard, Jim McCord, was arrested at the Watergate, she publicly exploded, threatening to leave her spouse unless he quit the Re-election Committee. *Tm sick and tired of the whole operation,” she began telling UPI’s Helen Thomas from a phone in a California motel room. Except at that point, her new bodyguard, Steve King, destroyed the telephone, summoned a doctor, and assisted the physician in ' forcibly tranquilizing Mrs. Mitchell. Back home in Rye, New York, Martha remained adamant even though she was under surveillance. ^Charging that King’s treatment had necessitated stitches in a Los Angeles hospital, Mrs. Mitchell protested she was “ a prisoner” and vowed to resist “ this dirty business” . And then, unexpectedly, John caved in to her demands: he resigned from CREEP and returned to his law practice. (Only months before her death, Mrs. Mitchell confided to a divinity student how dangerous her rebellion had been. “ I ’ve always had beautiful hands but look at them now,” she said softly, pointing to her scars. “ These are from when they kept me a political prisoner in Newport Beach, California and up at the Westchester Country Club in Rye. You know, I might not be alive today if it hadn’t been for the press. Like that day at the Westchester Country Club. Even after that incident, they would have tried to kill me if they hadn’t feared the press would have investigated the circumstances.” ) By the following spring, John Mitchell was being accused by various sources of having authorized the Watergate break-in. This incensed Mrs. Mitchell, who now insisted that her husband name Nixon as the instigator. “ I’ll be damned if I’ll let my husband take the rap for Mr. Nixon...,” Martha thundered in a series of interviews. “ The whole campaign was planned by the White House. They had this green campaign book and everything they were going to do was in it. It had in it the most secretive operation ever conducted in an election in the United States... Between you, me, and the gatepost, Mr. President always knew...The President planned the whole goddamned thing...It’s a darn better idea for Mr. Nixon to resign rather than be impeached.” John Mitchell never did accuse Richard Nixon. But a year and a half later, the President resigned for concealing the circumstances of the break-in.after its occurrence. “ Sometime they will know Martha told the truth and they will find out the whole story,” Mrs. Mitchell once remarked. At her funeral, two admirers from Pasadena had a wreath placed on her grave, with a ribbon which read “ Martha Was Right.” The Vice President’s case evolved similarly. Irked by campus protest against Nixon’s foreign policy, Agnew began attacking “ pushy youngsters and middle-aged malcontents” on a southern tour in the fall of 1969; by tour’s end he had accused an “ effete corps of impudent snobs” of engendering “ national masochism” in their criticism of American military actions. Even as he became the icon of a bestselling wristwatch, Spiro escalated his attacks against radical scholars: insurgent faculty and students should be “ identified and dismissed,” as easily as one discards “ rotten apples from a barrel.” Trouble began, however, in the summer of 1973 when the Justice Department decided, on the basis of testimony from two Baltimore contractors, that Agnew was possibly a rotten apple himself. The Vice President insisted that the testimony was divergent and contrived and was confident that the President agreed with him. But, according to Agnew’s new book, Go Quietly or Else, the direction of the beleaguered Nixon White House had by then devolved upon General Alexander Haig, who believed that the Vice President’s predicament was grave and that he should resign. As Agnew tells it, the General communicated his wishes in a private conversation with the Vice President’s military attache, Gen. Mike Dunn. If Agnew doesn’t resign, Haig threatened, the White House would likely turn against him. “ Don’t think that the game cannot be played from here,” Haig warned. “ The President has a lot of power — don’t forget tha t.” Shortly after Dunn debriefed Agnew, the Vice President docilely folded his tent and resigned. “ Someday I ’ll be able to explain why I did what I did,” he explained afterward. “ I know it seems strange... but someday I’ll be able to explain why.” Someday turned out to be two months ago when Agnew’s book was released. There, Agnew affirms that he took Haig’s admonishment as a threat against his life, an “ innuendo” that “ an automobile accident, a fake suicide or whatever” might be in the offing should he refuse the general’s advice. “ I had attended meetings of the National Security Council and knew something about the functioning of the intelligence community,” writes the former Vice President. “ I knew that men in the White House professing to speak for the President could order the CIA to carry out missions that were unhealthy for people who were considered enemies.” To hear Agnew tell it, the request for his resignation was an offer he could not refuse. It is difficult at this juncture to know to what degree Martha and Spiro’s impressions were accurate. But should history corroborate their versions, the character of the Nixon Administration would become perfectly clear. Far from appearing an overzealous conservative regime, the Nixon White House would emerge as an authoritarian nationalist one — as willing to smother renegade right wingers as it was its opposition on the left. And such an image of the thirty-seventh presidency would be confirmed by the tales of those who, at its outset, were its foremost stars. we buy used records 832 S.W. PARK • 222-4773 22 Illustration by Frank Poliat
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