Free The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate by James Rosen Page A

effective members of the local Republican establishment.” 16
    Mitchell ran the same playbook in California. Jeb Magruder, then an obscure businessman and young Republican, recalled with admiration how Mitchell and his campaign deputy, investment banker Peter Flanigan, bypassed California’s “top-heavy, fouled-up” GOP organization to set up their own precinct operation—obtaining registration rolls, renting office space, installing phone banks—then repeated the process, with similar success, in other states. 17
    To organize Western states, Mitchell reached out to someone he knew only “by reputation”: Richard Gordon Kleindienst of Phoenix, then forty-four, a fiercely combative, brilliant lawyer—magna cum laude from Harvard and Harvard Law—and director of field operations in the 1964 Goldwater campaign. Kleindienst swiftly fielded a national slate of Nixon precinct captains.
    Len Garment, then chief of the litigation department at Mudge Rose, suggested Nixon take the next obvious step and name Mitchell campaign manager. A Jew who played swing jazz clarinet to pay his way through Brooklyn Law School, Garment cut an odd figure among the pinstriped Wasps at 20 Broad Street, and remained an outsider in the Nixon White House, where he first worked on “liberal” issues like the arts and Native American outreach, subjects of little moment to Nixon, and again later, when, following the dismissal of John Dean, Garment took over as counsel to the president. “I remember the Mitchell moment,” Garment later wrote. “It was the end of 1967, and we were in Nixon’s office. Suddenly, the light bulb clicked on over my head…”

    I announced, “The answer to our problem is sitting twenty feet away from us, in the next office, a guy who looks, walks and sounds like a campaign manager, knows more about politics than all the other guys you’ve been talking about, and his name is John Mitchell.” Nixon reacted by doing something he did…very rarely. He abruptly stood up—shot up, actually—and started pacing the room. Mitchell. But of course. 18

    Nixon told Garment to sound Mitchell out: “But do it gently.” A few weeks later, Garment ran into Mitchell in the restroom at a black-tie firm dinner at the University Club. “Say, John,” Garment said, “how would you feel about managing a presidential campaign?” Pipe clenched, Mitchell replied with a question of his own. “Are you out of your fucking mind, Garment?” 19 “John Mitchell turned out to be just what Nixon needed,” Garment recalled in 1992. “Mitchell had status. He had national standing as a major lawyer…He knew all the politicians in America…. And he had his own money. I mean, he wasn’t, this wasn’t—he wasn’t dependent upon this. He had all those qualities of being a smart man, kept guy, loyal man, intelligent, humorous, interested, animated by the single mission, which was to try to get Nixon elected.” 20
    As Nixon and his men soon learned, Mitchell’s political contacts were only one factor that made him an ideal campaign manager. A second, surely, was Nixon’s deep trust in Mitchell, from which arose the candidate’s unprecedented deference to someone else’s political judgment. The third, a surprise, was Mitchell’s managerial excellence. The same agile mind that revolutionized municipal finance now focused on getting Richard Nixon elected president.

    Central to Mitchell’s effectiveness was his indifference to public criticism. As campaign manager he gave not a single news conference. Working from “a bare desk in a shabby office” at 445 Park Avenue, Mitchell was dubbed by the
Washington Evening Star
the campaign’s “hidden figure,” a status he happily accepted. “It was a very simple precept,” Mitchell said. “The candidate is the one who ought to get the publicity.” 21
    With taxonomic precision, Mitchell eyed the deviants malingering about the campaign. He loathed “party hacks” and “prima