Product Description

The Strong Man is the first full-scale biography of John N. Mitchell, the central figure in the rise and ruin of Richard Nixon and the highest-ranking American official ever convicted on criminal charges.

As U.S. attorney general from 1969 to 1972, John Mitchell stood at the center of the upheavals of the late sixties. The most powerful man in the Nixon cabinet, a confident troubleshooter, Mitchell championed law and order against the bomb-throwers of the antiwar movement, desegregated the South’s public schools, restored calm after the killings at Kent State, and steered the commander-in-chief through the Pentagon Papers and Joint Chiefs spying crises. After leaving office, Mitchell survived the ITT and Vesco scandals—but was ultimately destroyed by Watergate.

With a novelist’s skill, James Rosen traces Mitchell’s early life and career from his Long Island boyhood to his mastery of Wall Street, where Mitchell's innovations in municipal finance made him a power broker to the Rockefellers and mayors and governors in all fifty states. After merging law firms with Richard Nixon, Mitchell brilliantly managed Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign and, at his urging, reluctantly agreed to serve as attorney general. With his steely demeanor and trademark pipe, Mitchell commanded awe throughout the government as Nixon’s most trusted adviser, the only man in Washington who could say no to the president.

Chronicling the collapse of the Nixon presidency, The Strong Man follows America’s former top cop on his singular odyssey through the criminal justice system—a tortuous maze of camera crews, congressional hearings, special prosecutors, and federal trials. The path led, ultimately, to a prison cell in Montgomery, Alabama, where Mitchell was welcomed into federal custody by the same men he had appointed to office. Rosen also reveals the dark truth about Mitchell’s marriage to the flamboyant and volatile Martha Mitchell: her slide into alcoholism and madness, their bitter divorce, and the toll it all took on their daughter, Marty.

Based on 250 original interviews and hundreds of thousands of previously unpublished documents and tapes, The Strong Man resolves definitively the central mysteries of the Nixon era: the true purpose of the Watergate break-in, who ordered it, the hidden role played by the Central Intelligence Agency, and those behind the cover-up.

A landmark of history and biography, The Strong Man is that rarest of books: both a model of scholarly research and savvy analysis and a masterful literary achievement.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #479526 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-20
• Released on: 2008-05-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 640 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780385508643
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Casting the 66th attorney general and Watergate felon as the most upright man in the Nixon administration is faint praise indeed, to judge by this biography. Fox News correspondent Rosen applauds Mitchell for his tough law-and-order policies, school-desegregation efforts and hard line against leftist radicals, and for enduring wife Martha's alcoholic breakdowns and raving late-night phone calls to reporters. The book's heart is Rosen's meticulous, exhaustively researched study of Mitchell's Watergate role, absolving him of ordering the break-in and most other charges leveled against him. Instead, Mitchell is painted as a force for propriety who was framed by others—especially White House counsel John Dean, who comes off as Watergate's evil genius. (Rosen also claims Watergate burglar James McCord was secretly working for the CIA and deliberately sabotaged the break-in.) Unfortunately, Rosen's salutes to Mitchell's integrity and reverence for the law clash with his accounts of the man's misdeeds: undermining the Paris peace talks, suborning and committing perjury, tolerating the criminal scheming in Nixon's White House and re-election campaign. Mitchell may have blanched at the Nixon administration's sleazy intrigues, as Rosen insists, but he seems not to have risen above them. (Feb. 19)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
After Richard Nixon lost the gubernatorial race in California, in 1962, he moved to New York to practice law and fell in with John Mitchell, a self-assured municipal-bond lawyer, who went on to run Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign and serve as Attorney General. Mitchell’s fame, such as it was, sprang from Watergate; in 1975, he went to prison for his role in the cover-up, and never broke his silence about the affair. Rosen, a correspondent for Fox News, believes that Mitchell’s story has not been properly told. He spent years researching his life and his downfall, and arrived at the fascinating—and disputed—theory that the White House counsel John Dean was the mastermind behind the Watergate break-in. Mitchell, with a public image of beady-eyed, pipe-smoking arrogance, was never a lovable figure, but he was in many ways a sad one. Particularly wrenching for him was the fate of his wife, Martha, who was regarded as a somewhat comical figure—a Southern Gracie Allen for the Nixon era—even as she was falling apart.
Copyright © 2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Lincoln Caplan

John Mitchell was Richard Nixon's attorney general from 1969 to 1972 and campaign manager in both of Nixon's elections to the presidency. He was also the first chief law-enforcement officer of the United States to be imprisoned for breaking the law. Found guilty of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice for his part in the Watergate break-in and cover-up as head of CREEP, the Committee to Re-elect the President, he was sentenced to up to eight years behind bars. For medical reasons, he was let out after 19 months.

Mitchell was known for outbursts of crude language that seemed at odds with his wingtips and pipe but reflected his self-image as a tough guy who had risen far. After going to the night program at Fordham Law School, he had become a partner in a striving, second-tier New York City law firm, with a lucrative practice related to housing-finance bonds. When his firm merged with Nixon's in 1966, his life took a fateful turn. William Safire, the retired New York Times columnist then in the Nixon camp as a public relations man, observed, "John Mitchell was the rock upon which Nixon built his church."

To the future president, his new law partner was a "heavyweight," mature and self-possessed. Mitchell sneered that "Nixon couldn't piss straight in the shower if I wasn't there to hold him," according to a former Justice Department aide. But he took the job as attorney general because the president-elect asked him to, directly, and because he had a hefty ego. He became known as "Mr. Law and Order," leading Nixon's war on crime and the campaign against student activists.

In contrast to other offenders in what Mitchell called "the White House horrors," including John Dean, John Ehrlichman, Bob Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, Jeb Stuart Magruder and Nixon himself, Mitchell didn't publish a memoir telling his side of the story before he died 20 years ago at the age of 75. He remained, as Nixon dubbed him, "great stone face." He frustrated politicians and prosecutors by choosing not to divulge the president's part in his administration's misdeeds -- even after Mitchell learned about the secret White House taping system that Nixon had used to record their conversations.

The Strong Man, by James Rosen, a Fox News Washington correspondent and a contributing editor to Playboy, displays wide-ranging and obsessive reporting, especially about the Watergate story. The book seeks to accomplish what a Mitchell memoir could not. It may seem strange to say that Rosen aims to vindicate the lawman-turned-convict, since the author affirms Mitchell's guilt and even details crimes "he got away with," but Rosen's purpose is wholesale revision: He presses the thesis that Mitchell should be recognized as a distinguished, if tragic, American figure.

To the author, Mitchell was a victim repeatedly wronged -- by a petty cabal of men in the White House who schemed to make him the fall guy for Watergate; by a conspiracy among the press, politicians and prosecutors, for whom Rosen reserves his harshest words because, in his view, they shared a baseless ardor to put Mitchell away; and, most of all, by the two people at the center of his life, the grandiose, self-pitying Nixon and Mitchell's unhinged, headline-grabbing second wife, Martha. Rosen doesn't really explain her hold on Mitchell, but he recounts how she used her weird celebrity to intrude repeatedly on matters of state.

Billed as a biography, The Strong Man reads more like a polemic. Rosen elevates Mitchell's standing at the bar (his bond practice, this book unpersuasively insists, put him "among the nation's most elite lawyers"). The author exaggerates the good that Mitchell did as attorney general ("to ensure racial progress he did more than any executive branch official of the twentieth century," Rosen claims -- overlooking, among others, Burke Marshall, the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights chief who led the effort to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act). Rosen does this to boost the credibility of his restoration project, but his hype accomplishes the opposite.

About Watergate, however, Rosen tells a relentless, intricate, sometimes engrossing tale. John Dean comes across as a duplicitous manipulator, Jeb Magruder as a spineless liar, Gordon Liddy as a maniacal soldier of misfortune. It was their Gemstone plan for intelligence operations against the Democrats in 1972, Rosen relates, that led to the Watergate break-in for which Mitchell was held responsible. Three times, in Rosen's narrative, they wouldn't take "no" for an answer when they vainly sought the approval of "the strong man."

Mitchell's most famous utterance was about The Washington Post's late, great publisher. When he was called by Carl Bernstein in September 1972 for comment the night before the newspaper ran a story alleging that he controlled an illegal slush fund used to spy on Nixon's political opponents, Mitchell snapped: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big, fat wringer if that's published. Good Christ! That's the most sickening thing I ever heard."

In the annals of Watergate, the slush-fund story was the beginning of the end. In a 2005 Vanity Fair article, Bernstein recalled that when he learned that Mitchell was one of the keepers of the secret fund used to pay the Watergate burglars, he turned to Bob Woodward and said: "Oh my God, this president is going to be impeached." In her memoir, Personal History, Katharine Graham said she was "shocked" that the attorney general's response was "so personal and offensive." But Rosen contends that Mitchell's distress was genuine and justified because the Post story was "dead wrong." Mitchell "never knew about, let alone 'controlled,' any secret fund used to finance 'intelligence operations' against the Democrats," he writes.

Perhaps Rosen has his own definitions of "control," "secret" and "intelligence operations." Otherwise, his revisionism, at this point, has crossed over to an alternate universe. A month after the Post story, Mitchell's successor as head of CREEP, Clark MacGregor, admitted there was a cash fund from which five men, including Mitchell, were authorized to get money. In his acclaimed book Nightmare, J. Anthony Lukas reported that Mitchell approved the use of $250,000 for gathering "intelligence" on the Democratic Party. Rosen acknowledges that most historians share Lukas's line. He takes another.

Watergate junkies will have to see whether Rosen's book changes their views about who did what. But to my mind, Mitchell's failure to put a halt to Gemstone with the blunt, unequivocal language for which he was known leaves him seeming ineffective, not strong. His crucial part in the illegal cover-up -- played, Rosen says, because he believed that a lawyer shouldn't rat on a client and that nothing should be allowed to jeopardize Nixon's reelection -- marks him as badly misguided and weak.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Review by one of Mitchell's lawyers
The author, James Rosen, has written a painstaking reproduction of the events that occurred during the Watergate hearings and trial. This book is a meticulous and detailed recitation that Mr. Rosen has set forth in this very well-written book.

Mr. Mitchell is deserving of criticism for his role in Watergate and suffered the consequences of a conviction for his activities. The book is not a proclamation of Mr. Mitchell's innocence, but an exposition of his role and raises questions of the complicity of others who were also convicted.

Having served as one of Mr. Mitchell's defense counsel, I found the book to be an accurate recitation of the events of the Watergate affair.

Gripping
The scenes where young Marty watches her psychotic, alcoholic mom self-destruct were devastating. I usually don't read nonfiction, but this has the cinematic flow that I associate with great novels. And it's pretty funny considering how heavy the material is.

Excellent political biography!
This is a very well-written book, scrupulously researched, and challenging in its conclusions. The Strong Man should change our understanding of the Watergate scandal.