The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

James Rosen, a long time news correspondent for the Fox News Channel, has written the first full biography of former Attorney General John Mitchell, entitled The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate. Rosen's thesis is that Mitchell was not guilty of many of the crimes in which he was convicted in United States v. Mitchell, better known as the Watergate Trial. In that trial, Mitchell and a handful of others were convicted of the conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury resulting from the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Washington, D.C. Watergate building complex. According to Rosen and the evidence he presents, Richard Nixon, John Dean, and others conspired against Mitchell and caused him to be the administration's scapegoat. Lest the reader be fooled by the title, this is not merely a rehashing of the Nixon Administration or the Watergate burglaries and the subsequent cover-up. In The Strong Man, Rosen presents a portrayal of the former Attorney General that differs from the way popular culture saw Mitchell: a tough, no nonsense, law-and-order type who wielded an iron fist in dealing with radicals during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rather, he is shown to be a doting father to his children, a loving and devoted husband to an alcoholic and mentally unstable wife, and a loyal-to-a-fault confidant and friend to the president of the United States. Well written, the book reads like a novel. Rosen guides the reader through the life of John Mitchell from his early days in Michigan to his days as a PT boat commander during World War II. Later, Mitchell became one of the most sought-after bond attorneys on Wall Street, eventually partnering with Richard Nixon. His time in prison and his life after the death of his wife are portrayed to give a complete picture of one of the twentieth century's most interesting personalities. According to the "Acknowledgements," James Rosen began working on this book in 1991. He put the seventeen years between 1991 and 2008 to good use interviewing hundreds of people to obtain the necessary information. The sectioned entitled "Notes on Sources" reads like a Watergate Who's Who. Included in the list are two of the five Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker and James McCord, along with their boss G. Gordon Liddy. Also included are former Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, Nixon chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, White House counsel John Dean, and Nixon Administration officials Robert Mardian, Alexander Haig, E. Howard Hunt, and John Ehrlichman. Further, he spoke with former vice-president Spiro T. Agnew and former president Gerald R. Ford, as well as Mitchell's children Jack Mitchell and Jill Mitchell-Reed. Many of the interviews were conducted in the 1990s; though a few interviews were conducted in person, most were done over the telephone or through written correspondence. Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Rosen was able to obtain many official documents that have never been released and heretofore published. The term "previously unpublished" is mentioned throughout the text, showing the lengths Rosen went to in order to obtain new information. Many of these documents include testimony from executive sessions of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, which were not open to the public. Other never before seen documents came from FOIA requests to the Nixon archives and included transcripts of White House tape recordings. To Rosen's credit, much of what he used as source material for The Strong Man came from primary sources; very little came from secondary sources. He effectively used these sources throughout the book to put together a narrative that was easy to follow, thus making a tale of political intrigue simpler to follow. As previously stated, the author's main contention is that John Mitchell, the former Attorney General of the United States, served as a scapegoat in an attempt to shield President Richard Nixon from the fallout of the Watergate burglaries and subsequent cover-up. He ultimately was sentenced to two-to-eight years in prison as a result of his convictions of perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. Rosen reminds the reader that "Mitchell was never formally charged with ordering the Watergate break-in. However, the notion that he did order it...persisted...." (273) In fact, Mitchell had only perpetrated one Watergate-based crime: he committed perjury when he testified before the Watergate grand jury in 1972. (495) "... [N]one of the crimes Mitchell committed, and none of those for which he was wrongly prosecuted, occurred while he was entrusted with public office." (496) It was clearly shown through the use of the aforementioned never-before-published documents that many of his contemporaries lied to save themselves. Chief among these were John Dean and Jeb Magruder. Through documentation and testimony of the principals, it is clear that Mitchell did not play the role in Watergate for which he was convicted. It is also clear that Mitchell could have saved himself by implicating President Nixon in the cover-up, but he never did out of a sense of loyalty to Nixon that was never returned. One might ask why another Watergate-based book is necessary. After all, Richard Nixon resigned from office nearly thirty-five years ago and so much has been written about Watergate already. Many of the principals wrote books after their trials and terms in prison, including John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy, and Richard Nixon himself. John Mitchell, however, did not. This is unfortunate because the public has never heard Mitchell's side of the story; his loyalty to Nixon was too strong to allow him to put his thoughts to paper. This book is recommended for several reasons. First, it tells the life story of an individual who played a pivotal role during a period of American history that saw significant social and political upheaval, in addition to a series of crimes that resulted in the resignation of the president of the United States. Second, a side of the Watergate conspiracy that has never been told has come to light. John Dean and G. Gordon Liddy are lauded by some in the media today despite their contributions to Watergate, but John Mitchell is still considered a villain by many. Perhaps this book will convince some that his role was not as significant as previously thought. Third, historians and students of history are always searching for new documents to peruse and examine. This book shows how discovering previously unreleased documents can change the perspective of history. And fourth, The Strong Man examines other significant aspects of the Nixon years, such as issues involving the Vietnam War, antiwar demonstrations, radical student groups, and desegregation. Certainly these areas are of interest to those studying the twentieth century.

John Mitchell wanted nothing more in life than to be a wealthy Wall Street lawyer. So brilliant that while still a law student, he developed the concept of the municipal bond as a means by which cities, towns and states could finance everything from the purchase of fire engines to huge construction projects.He developed a nationwide practice, dealing with political figures of various stripes. Wanting above all else to keep his clients and be retained by others, he, for the first thirty years of his career, seemed apolitical. Then, he and Richard Nixon, practicing law in New York after losing a race for Governor of California, merged their two firms. Had that not occurred, John Mitchell would never had managed Nixon's 1968 campaign, and Nixon might not have squeaked into the White House. Had he followed his own instincts, and returned to his law practice, Mitchell would not have become attorney general, but a true sense of patriotism convinced him to take the job. And had he not been so loyal to Nixon, choosing to guide the re-election campaign, and perhaps had he not been distracted by the erratic behavior of the woman he loved, Watergate might not have happened, and he would not have wound up in jail, financially destroyed and forever, aside from the man he served, the primary symbol of the scandal he did not create or sanction. In actuality, Michell was a good attorney general. Unlike the bullying Bobby Kennedy who used the post to do his brother's dirty work, Mitchell ran the Justice Department in a professional manner. He shielded the anti-trust division from White House influence in the ITT scandal, disregarded Nixon's order not to prosecute members of the Mafia until he had won a second term, and, without alienating the South, quietly made certain court orders were enforced to desegregate public schools, so much so that he did far more in three years than the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations did in eight. Knowing that Nixon viewed everything as political, he was able to moderate some of his worst instincts. All the while, Mitchell, on Nixon's command, wore a public mask as the stern, unsmiling symbol of law in order in a turbulent time of protest and disrespect for authority. In private however, he was naturally warm and humorous. The Watergate break-in was never approved by Mitchell. True, Gordon Liddy presented his plans for political intelligence to him, which Mitchell rejected as being illegal, but bugging the offices of the Democratic National Committee was never mentioned. There was no reason to do the deed, except to attempt to link members of the DNC to a prostitution ring. The book makes clear that Jeb McGruder gave Liddy the order, which was handed down from White House Counsel John Dean, concerned that his own fiance, whom he later married, had ties to the ring. And from there, the coverup that took down a president began. Why didn't Mitchell throw a nut like Liddy, then working for the Committee To Re-Elect the President, out of his office and onto the street? There may be two reasons. First, Mitchell was not above devious, even criminal behavior. He may have, along with Nixon, used Anna Chennault, the widow of World War II hero Claire Chennault, to attempt to influence the South Vietnamese to forestall a deal with the North after Lyndon Johnson stopped the bombing just before the 1968 election. Secondly, his wife Martha was a constant problem. Hardly the outspoken hero she was portrayed to be in the mainline press, Mitchell's second wife was a crude, condescending, ignorant alcoholic who eventually became mentally ill. His friends took an instant dislike to her long before Mitchell was ever linked to Nixon. But John Mitchell loved her and tolerated her for 17 years, until he walked out with only a paper bag in his hands, his patience exhausted. Although indicted and convicted on six counts of criminal conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice, he was surely guilty of only one, subornation of Jeb McGruder's perjury before a grand jury. The verdicts on the other allegations were based on the perjured testimony of McGruder and Dean, his protegees, who at various times, changed their stories as often as Henry VIII changed wives. It did not help matters that Judge John Sirica was biased and surprisingly inept on issues of criminal procedure. The Court of Appeals found his errors harmless, and the Supreme Court, as it does in most cases, refused to hear a final appeal. Certainly, Mitchell deserved jail time. What he did not deserve were guilty verdicts based on lies spooled out by Dean and McGruder on the witness stand to lessen their own sentences. Mitchell, who never was told by Nixon or anyone about the taping system in the White House, learned at the trial through the famous tape recordings, that as part of th coverup, Nixon, Erlichman, whom he intensely disliked, and Robert Haldeman, whom he trusted, plotted, along with Dean, to make him the fall guy, taking the blame for everything. Mitchell, although loyal to Nixon, and refusing to plea bargain in exchange for testimony against his former boss, thought Nixon his inferior. He was right. Although brilliant in foreign policy matters, Nixon comes off in the book as petty and amazingly, as a disorganized and disheviled thinker. James Rosen has written a fair, and sometimes surprising biography, attempting to bore into the mystery of the one prominent man in the Watergate scandal who never wrote a book, never cooperated with prosecutors to lessen any sentence, and never betrayed the man he thought of as his client, Richard Nixon. That John Mitchell would have done anything to get and keep Richard Nixon in the Oval Office is clear. Rosen does not however, fully solve the questions that will forever remain about Mitchell and Watergate. The only attorney general to go to jail stayed silent in life, and will forever remain so in death.

More than forty years on, Watergate buffs still haven't read everything they should on the subject. This biography of Richard Nixon's law partner, campaign manager and Attorney-General delves into the life story and personality of the man who, in my view, was the mother of all scapegoats in that mazy affair.