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Then it was the turn of Peter Fleming, 44, to try to explain away the charges against Mitchell. Standing 6 ft. 7 in., Fleming towered over the jurors, attempting to capture the twelve with his assured presence, elegant manner and easy, ingratiating smile. Fleming worked especially hard to dismiss John Dean's testimony against Mitchell—a key part of three perjury counts—by discrediting the former counsel to the President as a man who had already pleaded guilty to helping to cover up the Watergate breakin. Someone was going to have to judge Dean someday, Fleming said. "Is he St. Paul on the road to Damascus struck by the lightning of God?" he asked. Or was he a man who had scrambled frantically to save himself when Watergate began to break open?
Fleming scoffed at the Government's basic charge that Mitchell and Stans had conspired to help Vesco, noting that the financier had clearly got nothing for his money. Seven months after the $200,000 was given, the SEC charged Vesco and 41 of his associates with perpetrating a $224 million stock fraud. "This case is not a case about a fix," said Fleming. "This case is a mess of confusion. This case is conjecture."
During parts of the long trial, Chief Prosecutor John R. Wing, 37, had been outshone by Bonner and Fleming. Younger and less experienced, he also lacked their dramatic flair. But when his time came to deliver the last word for the Government, Wing held the jury's attention from the moment he began. Without using any notes, Wing spent five hours and 37 minutes patiently and skillfully reviewing the Government's case. "What we're interested in, what this case is about, is political power interfering with justice," he said. The defendants were men, he declared, who did not call "a fix 'a fix.' That would be gauche." Instead, they asked for "help" for their friends. But, in the end, Wing's case turned out not to be sufficiently persuasive to the jury.
In a sunlit defense conference room after the verdict, Mitchell and Stans, fully relaxed for perhaps the first time since they were indicted nearly a year ago, talked of their plans. Stans said that he wanted to take his ailing wife off somewhere for two weeks "to get away from the tension." Mitchell wryly suggested that "I think I'll retire to a nice secluded place and buy myself a drink." Asked if his wife Martha, from whom he is separated, knew of the verdict, Mitchell said: "Who?" Both professed having had confidence all along that they would be vindicated. But when Stans was asked if they had truly never been worried about the outcome, he replied with a winner's smile: "If we said that, that would be perjury."