Trump ambassador beat woman during Watergate: report
Newsweek
11 Dec 2017 at 17:38 ET
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pdated | American presidents have a long history of awarding ambassadorships to colorful characters as a way to thank them for their campaign donations. Roughly a third of U.S. ambassadors have no diplomatic experience beyond rounding up cash for successful presidential candidates.
Among them is Stephen King, 76, a longtime
confidante and
booster of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is the new U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. King, who is also a former b
usiness partner of Ryan’s brother Tobin, has no diplomatic experience and had never spent a day in Prague before taking up his post there on December 7. Radio Prague, the official state news outlet, called him “a rich Republican businessman…who worked for the FBI early in his career.”
Left unsaid was that King played a crucial role in the 1972 Watergate affair—and not a good one. According to several accounts over the years, King helped cover up ties between President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and the burglars arrested inside the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex—and in a particularly violent fashion. None of that came up during his confirmation hearing.
In June 1972, King was an ex-FBI agent working as a security aide for the Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP, Nixon’s campaign arm. His duty on the week of the break-in was to protect—and keep a close eye on—Martha Mitchell, the talkative wife of Nixon’s campaign director and former attorney general John Mitchell, while the Mitchells were on a campaign swing in California.
An outspoken Arkansan dubbed “the Mouth of the South” in press reports, Martha Mitchell had been complaining vaguely to anyone who would listen about campaign operatives carrying out “dirty tricks” against the Democrats. So when she learned that
James McCord, the security director of CREEP, who had served as her bodyguard, was among those arrested at the Watergate—and described by her husband as a private security contractor who was “not operating either on our behalf or with our consent”—she picked up the telephone and called a favorite reporter, UPI’s Helen Thomas.
Enter King. He “rushed into her bedroom, threw her back across the bed, and ripped the telephone out of the wall,” wrote veteran Washington reporter Winzola McLendon in her 1979
biography of Martha Mitchell, to whom she was close. But Thomas was still on the phone and taking notes. “The conversation ended abruptly when it appeared someone took away the phone from her hand,” Thomas reported. “She was heard to say, ‘You just get away.’”
Thomas added that when she called back, the hotel operator told her, “Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk.”
Related: Inside the battle between Mueller and Trump
Thomas’s story was a sensation. Reporters scurried to find Mitchell for a follow-up. A few days later, one did. Marcia Kramer of the New York
Daily News tracked her down where she was hiding out: the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York. A veteran crime reporter, Kramer described Mitchell as “a beaten woman,” with “incredible" black and blue marks on her arms from what looked like a “totally professional job.” A later account in
McCall’s magazine said that King “summoned” a doctor who gave Mitchell “a tranquilizing shot” and “[saw] to it that no more of her outgoing calls [would] be taken by the hotel switchboard.”
Yet few took Mitchell’s claims seriously. She was known to like a drink and make “wild” accusations, a reputation that Nixon’s aides exploited. “The Nixon and CREEP people began to spread stories that Martha was crazy, an out-of-control alcoholic, or had had a breakdown,” McLendon wrote.
Mitchell eventually returned to her husband, but only on condition that he resign from CREEP and that King be fired. He did resign, but when Mitchell learned that King had been promoted to security chief for the campaign, she wrote a
letter to
Parade magazine, the Sunday newspaper supplement, saying that he “not only dealt me the most horrible experience I have ever had, but inflicted bodily harm upon me.”
King’s response in the
October 22, 1972, issue of
Parade was that he could “no longer talk about the incident,” adding that “all such information must come from” spokesmen for CREEP. Officials there evidently did not respond to
Parade’s request for comment.
On Monday, King said, "With due respect to the privacy of the Mitchell family and in light of previous responses I have given to these allegations in decades past, I do not wish to comment further on this old story."
In McLendon’s authorized biography years later, Mitchell told a story that seemed scripted for
The Shining. After King ripped the phone from her hand, she related, she ran to another room to make a call. “Again...she was thrown aside while the phone was disconnected,” McLendon writes. “Steve then shoved her into her room and slammed the door.”
Mitchell next tried to get to an adjacent villa via the balcony, but “King ran out and pulled her back inside. She claimed he threw her down and kicked her,” McLendon writes. “The next day...she slipped downstairs, planning to escape, but King spotted her just as she reached a glass door. In the ensuing scuffle, Martha’s left hand was cut, so badly that six stitches were required in two fingers.”
That’s when a doctor was summoned to sedate her. “Before it took effect, she tried to get away,” McLendon wrote, “but according to Martha, King saw her dashing toward the door and ran over and slapped her across the room.”
All this was happening as her husband flew back to Washington,
reports about the incident suggest. But John Mitchell, who had stepped down as attorney general months earlier to run the Nixon campaign, had set the events in motion by first keeping news of the Watergate arrests from his wife, then leaving her in Kings protective custody.
In 1973, Martha Mitchell gave
sworn testimony about Watergate in support of a civil suit against CREEP officials by the Democrats. King was not a defendant in that suit or criminally charged in the scandal, and two more years passed before anyone came forward to corroborate any Mitchell’s story of what happened after her call with Thomas was abruptly terminated. In 1975, McCord, convicted of conspiracy in the Watergate affair,
admitted that “basically the woman was kidnapped.”
“Thank God somebody is coming to my assistance,” Mitchell told
The New York Times. “I was not only kidnapped but I was threatened at gunpoint, and you can put that in.”
During his August 1
confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, King was not asked about his role in allegedly roughing up Mitchell to keep her from exposing McCord’s connection to CREEP. But he did raise the issue of security for his wife outside the Prague embassy, telling Wisconsin Republican Senator
Ron Johnson, who chaired the hearing, that he was thinking about hiring a private security force to protect her.
No matter that King’s role in the Watergate affair occurred nearly a half-century ago; he should have been questioned about it, says Norman Ornstein, a
resident scholar on public policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
There is “no statute of limitations” against raising troubling allegations in a nominee’s past, said Ornstein, co-author of
One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported. “They should have taken this into account, and could have, no matter when it occurred.”
Sean Bartlett, a spokesman for the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said King was asked about the Watergate episode before his public testimony. “After questioning him, and measuring his other qualifications and responses to questions on a range of issues, staff did not believe there was evidence or reason to delay his nomination,” Bartlett said. King’s appointment was
approved by the Senate without objection in a voice vote.
“This is a political question, not legal,” said
Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush. Since King “was confirmed already by the Senate, he would be hard to remove.”
Not that the Republican majority or Donald Trump’s White House would be inclined to fire him, said Ornstein. The bar to what’s acceptable conduct, he maintains, has been dramatically lowered by congressional Republicans since Trump took office.
“This just one example,” he said, “among many very sordid ones, including judges and Cabinet officers.”
This story was updated with a response from King
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