A strong recommendation for The Strong Man

by the Night Writer

History means the endless rethinking — and re-viewing and revisiting — of the past. History, in the broad sense of the word, is revisionist. History involves multiple jeopardy that the law eschews: People and events are retried and retried again. –John Lukacs

I was in my early teens when the Watergate saga dominated the news and politics, setting the course of the style and tone of political reporting we take for granted today. You couldn’t avoid the story as it played out, though eventually my attention would not extend much beyond the headlines as things such as girls and getting my driver’s license became more important.

Then, a couple of months ago I heard Hugh Hewitt interviewing author James Rosen about his just released book, “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.” At first my long-buried, reflexive mental eye-glazing at the mention of the word “Watergate” had me tuning out but some of Rosen’s statements piqued my interest. Watergate was one of the defining and far-reaching events of our modern history and Mitchell was, next to Nixon, the central character in the drama — yet little was known about him. He himself was largely close-mouthed and much of the testimony by others about his role and involvement was contradictory and self-serving. As I listened to the interview I had to admit that it would be fascinating to get a look at what went on in the mind and life of the man who was the Attorney General not just for Watergate, but also the era of school desegregation battles, campus unrest and Kent State, and the investigations of historical figures such as Lt. William Calley and Jimmy Hoffa.

Before it could slip from my mind I went on-line and requested a copy of the book from my local library (it had yet to be purchased). A couple of weeks ago I was notified the book was waiting for me and I picked it up. I was finishing another book at the time so I didn’t turn to The Strong Man right away. My borrowing period was almost up when I started to read it and I was so taken with the Prologue that I immediately tried to renew the book, only to find that I couldn’t because others were waiting for it. Rats! I seriously thought about keeping the book until I was finished and just paying the fines, but realized that was selfish and inconsiderate of me when other people are waiting. From what I’ve read so far, I think people are going to be very happy to get their hands on this as soon as they can. I’m turning it back in — and I’ve got my name back on the waiting list!

The Prologue does a great job of setting the scene and outlining the significance of Mitchell’s historical role and the irony of there being so little examination of it. Some of this was due to Mitchell’s own reticence, so unlike his contemporaries:

Equally unlike his fellow Watergate convicts, Mitchell never published a book about his years in power, never sold his soul to pay lawyer’s fees, never dished dirt on Richard Nixon to delight university audiences on the lecture circuit or viewers of The Mike Douglas Show. He never “found God.” In electing to tough it out, one columnist wrote, Mitchell stood “up to his hips in midgets among the other Watergate characters…dividing the men from the boys.” “Among the WASP Westchester country club Mafia,” another columnist observed of Mitchell’s behavior in Watergate, “the code of omertà holds.” Richard Nixon, toasting his former attorney general at a post-prison party he threw for Mitchell in San Clemente, put it simplest: “John Mitchell has friends — and he stands by them.”

No biographer even contacted him, though three books were written about his wife Martha, “an emotionally disturbed alcoholic whose late-night crank calls splashed her face across the front pages of every newspaper and magazine in the country.”

Stunningly, no one bothered to chronicle the life of John Mitchell: child of the Depression, World War II combat veteran; Wall Street innovator; gray-flannel power broker to governors and mayors in all fifty states; Richard Nixon’s law partner, consigliere, and winning campaign manager in 1968 and 1972; America’s top cop, as attorney general, during the Days of Rage, the May Day riots, and the Pentagon Papers; and Public Enemy Number One when, in the words of a British observer, “the great black cloud of Watergate seemed to settle over America like a kind of grand judgment, not just on Nixon himself, but on the whole of post-war America.”

In fact, Rosen notes,

John Mitchell bore witness to the most searing political turmoil in America since the Civil War. After all, it was Mitchell who ran the Department of Justice, and the administration of justice in those years occupies the central role in all lingering controversies from that era: Was justice done in the enforcement of school desegregation and antitrust laws? In the battles against antiwar protesters and radical groups? At Kent State and Jackson State? In the cases of Daniel Ellsberg and Lt. William Calley, Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Vesco, Abe Fortas and Clement Haynsworth, John Lennon and the Berrigan brothers, the Black Panthers and ITT?

Rosen devoted two decades to researching and writing the book, poring over relevant secondary sources such as the 500 books written about Watergate, Nixon, the 60s, and the countless newspaper and magazine articles from that time. Additionally, he interviewed

… 250 people, including two presidents, a vice president, two chief justices, three secretaries of state, two CIA directors, and a great many staff members of the Nixon White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President … Also questioned were party officials and secretaries employed at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June of 1972. These sessions included the only extensive interviews ever conducted with the woman whose telephone was wiretapped in the Watergate break-in and surveillance operation and more than eight hours of interviews with the only man who monitored the wiretap.

He also used the Freedom of Information act to get access to thousands of undisclosed documents from the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, including all of Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s 200,000 pages of hand-written notes from their meetings with the President. His research even included the internal files of the staff lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and sworn testimonies from closed-door executive sessions of the Senate Watergate committee. He claims to know “what the WSPF lawyers knew about Watergate and when they knew it.” These details showed key witnesses consciously changing their testimony to implicate Mitchell and hide their own actions. Finally, he had Mitchell’s own private correspondence from prison, as well as Mitchell’s tax returns and other de-classified documents. While he hints at revelations and developments in the prologue it is clear, in Rosen’s own words, “Assuredly (this)… is not your father’s Watergate.”

Whereas the mention of Watergate used to bore me senseless, I am now excited to get this book back in my hands. It’s almost as if I’ve discovered a long-last family album labeled with the names of people I half-remember that promises to explain the past…and describe the future. Oh, hell, forget the library. I may have to buy the book!

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