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

state in Kennedy’s ledger. Nixon and his entourage always believed political skulduggery by the Daley machine in Cook County had cost him Illinois. 52
    With that in mind, Mitchell had, in the spring, authorized Operation Eagle Eye, a mission by GOP precinct captains in Chicago to prevent a repeat performance by the Daley machine. Vigilance in Chicago wards formed one element; the other was Mitchell’s order for downstate Illinois forces to withhold their vote tallies until Daley had released Cook County’s. “So,” Len Garment later recalled, “hour after hour, John Mitchell and Richard Daley dueled, each withholding his ultimate weapon as the sun rose over a still-sleeping America.”

    About 8 a.m., Nixon, out of patience, told Mitchell to place a call to Mike Wallace, who was live on CBS television, and challenge Daley to release his votes. We watched the TV screen as Mike took Mitchell’s call and put Mitchell’s challenge to Daley. 53

    Finally, Mitchell and Haldeman convinced Nixon to get some sleep. Six a.m. came, and with 94 percent of nationwide precincts reporting, Humphrey’s lead over Nixon had shrunk to 5,000 votes. Two hours later, the networks declared Nixon the winner in California and Ohio; only Daley’s returns remained outstanding. Finally, at 8:30 a.m., Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s young personal assistant, dark-haired and handsome, burst open the doors to the candidate’s suite and excitedly blurted out the news: “ABC just declared you the winner! They’ve projected Illinois. You got it. You’ve won.” Still groggy, Nixon led the rush to a television set in an adjoining room to confirm his victory. No one in Nixon’s camp missed the delicious irony: Illinois, the very state that had cost him the 1960 election, now put him over the top. 54
    After a few moments savoring the dream emanating from the television set before them, Nixon put his hand on Mitchell’s shoulder and looked to the future: “Well, John,” Nixon said expansively, “we had better go down to Florida and get this thing”—the Nixon presidency—“planned out.” Yet Mitchell, who had labored so hard to engineer the moment, could scarcely enjoy it. A tear streamed down his face, and he answered quietly: “Mr. President, I think I’d better go up to be with Martha.” Nixon remembered the scene, in his memoirs, as a “moving moment” for both men. “It was the first time anyone had addressed me by the title I had just won,” Nixon wrote. “It was also the first time that Mitchell had directly referred to his wife’s problems, which I knew had been an immense emotional strain on him…. I fully understood his desire to be with her now.” 55

    Martha Mitchell had never thought much of Richard Nixon. “I talked my husband into becoming a Republican [in 1966],” she rued in a 1974 television interview. “He’d always been a Democrat. And the day I talked him out of calling the president ‘Tricky Dick’—I could still shoot myself!” Perhaps for this reason, Mitchell’s management of the Nixon campaign had begun as a secret from his wife. “Mitchell is so unassuming,” reported the
Daily News
, “that his family didn’t learn he was Nixon’s campaign manager until five weeks after the appointment.” 56
    At first, Mitchell tried to mollify Martha with sweet talk during his campaign-related road trips. But the last few years had not been entirely happy ones for the Mitchells. Jill Mitchell-Reed remembered a Thanksgiving dinner ruined when her volatile stepmother, unhinged by Jill’s brief, college-age flirtation with communism, responded by hurling pots and pans. 57 For eight years after Mitchell married Martha in 1957, her son, Jay Jennings, had lived with them. Ten years old when Mitchell became his stepfather, Jay fled to his father’s home in Lynchburg, Virginia, shortly before he graduated from the Peekskill Military Academy in 1965. “When I left home, it was not under the most pleasant of