THE HEARINGS: John Mitchell Takes the Stand

The penetrating glare of Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate committee focuses this week on the President's closest political confidant−and most devoted loyalist−former Attorney General John Newton Mitchell. Mitchell was a Manhattan law partner of Richard Nixon, his campaign manager in 1968, and headed Nixon's re-election drive in 1972 until two weeks after the Watergate arrests. Even after that Mitchell continued to talk with the President almost daily throughout Nixon's triumphant re-election year. If the President is truly as innocent in the scandal as he claims, no one is in a better position to know and proclaim it than Mitchell. On the other hand, if Nixon is guilty, no one is less likely to admit it than the same John Mitchell.

New Challenge. In the five weeks of public testimony thus far, the basic allegations of Watergate wrongdoing on the part of President Nixon's closest former associates have been laboriously detailed by subordinates, most of whom willingly admitted their own illegal or improper acts. Now, beginning with Mitchell, the Senate Select Committee faces a new and more difficult challenge: how to assess the testimony of more important witnesses who sharply deny the accumulated accusations against them.

Terse and taciturn, Mitchell was expected to present no opening statement to the committee. It will be up to the Senators and the counsels to elicit whatever information Mitchell possesses. Yet countless questions should come readily to mind, since Mitchell has been repeatedly cited by other witnesses as a key figure in both the illegal political espionage at the Democratic National Headquarters and the multiple law-breaking involved in its concealment.

Although he was the nation's highest law-enforcement officer in a self-proclaimed law-and-order Administration, Mitchell has been accused of sitting calmly in his office through two meetings at which plans for such crimes as kidnaping, prostitution, mugging, burglary and wiretapping were presented−and objecting only that they were not what he had in mind and would cost too much. He was accused by Jeb Stuart Magruder, former deputy director of the Nixon re-election committee, of having approved the Watergate wiretapping plans at a third meeting in Key Biscayne, Fla., after he became Nixon's campaign director. Magruder, moreover, contended that Mitchell saw the wiretapping summaries, as well as some photographs of Democratic documents taken by the burglars, and was so angry at the poor results that the wiretappers made their second−and bungled−break-in on June 17, 1972.