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

circumstances,” Jennings recalled in 2002.

    I had gotten into an argument [with my mother]…And she took a swing at me, and I put my arm up to block her swing, and she hit her forearm on my forearm and hurt herself. And then she said I had hit her and told me to go to my room, which I did. When John Mitchell came home that night—in the only violent act I’ve ever seen this man commit—he walked into my room, swung the door open and, without a word, hit me so hard across my face that it flung me across the room. Open hand. I’d never seen him do anything like that ever before. And I was really disappointed, because he didn’t even ask me for an explanation. I’m sure he came in, my mother said I’d hit her, and he reacted to it. But for me that was it. I called my father and I said: “I’m out of here.” 58

    Adding to the strain, Martha’s mother, who had also lived with her and John for several years, died in 1967. That year, Mitchell’s firm merged with Nixon’s, and the increasing devotion Mitchell showed his new partner left Martha lonely and embittered. As a cry for attention, she impulsively bundled up Marty, their six-year-old daughter, packed their belongings, and boarded the RMS
Queen Mary
for Europe, spending five weeks there before Mitchell flew to Scotland and persuaded her to return.
    When the campaign began in earnest, Martha, already unstable, plunged into even deeper despair. She became convinced Mitchell was carrying on affairs with at least two prominent Republican women, and lashed out through her favorite weapon: the telephone. Her crazed shrieking into Herb Klein’s ear in June was, for many in the Nixon orbit, a regular occurrence. With Mitchell immersed in the delegate hunt, Martha instructed an attorney to initiate divorce proceedings, only to relent after Mitchell again calmed her down. Fueling the rash behavior was a long-standing problem with alcohol. “The more distressed and abandoned Martha felt,” a friend remarked of this period, “the more she sought comfort in the bottle.” Finally, several weeks before Election Day, Mitchell arranged for Martha to be institutionalized at Craig House, a psychiatric facility in Beacon, New York. According to one account, it was merely “the first of many trips to the hospital alcohol would cause her to make.”
    Now, on Wednesday morning, November 6, 1968, moments after watching ABC News project him the winner in Illinois, Nixon came face-to-face for the first time with the Martha Mitchell problem. While he “understood” Mitchell’s need to be with Martha at that moment, Nixon repeatedly intruded on their time at Craig House with telephone calls demanding Mitchell’s attention to the pressing business of forming a government. 59

    Another problem that lingered beyond Election Day was Anna Chennault. Having carried Nixon’s private messages to the South Vietnamese throughout the campaign, she now felt entitled to payback, or at least a measure of respect—but she got neither. Mitchell abruptly canceled her first meeting with the president-elect, then—with equal abruptness—instructed her to tell the South Vietnamese to return to the Paris talks, the better to smooth Nixon’s transition into office. Chennault felt betrayed.
    Nixon and Mitchell realized they could ill afford to make Chennault angry—or talkative, especially with reporters starting to sniff about. “You’re going to get me in a lot of trouble,” she coquettishly told one journalist. “I know so much and I can say so little.” “Whatever I did during the campaign,” she told another, “the Republicans, including Mr. Nixon, knew about.” She wrote later that Mitchell remained “concerned even after he was confirmed” as attorney general that she would go public. 60
    Concern at the White House also reached high levels. Peter Flanigan, Mitchell’s deputy during the campaign and now the White House liaison to the Business Roundtable, wrote Mitchell to say