In a new book, Fox News reporter James Rosen revisits the life and times of John Mitchell. Rosen recently took questions from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez on The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.


Kathryn Jean Lopez: What drew you to John Mitchell?

James Rosen: John N. Mitchell was the one major figure in the Nixon presidency and Watergate who never wrote a book and never had one written about him — which was just how he wanted it. A World War II Navy veteran and fabulously successful Wall Street lawyer with a fondness for pipes, Scotch, and golf, Mitchell ran both of Richard Nixon’s winning presidential campaigns, in 1968 and 1972, and then (reluctantly) agreed to serve, at Nixon’s urging, as attorney general of the United States.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ADVERTISEMENT

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Mitchell’s tenure as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, from January 1969 to March 1972, witnessed a uniquely chaotic and scary time in American history: the clash of law and order forces against antiwar demonstrators and radical subversive groups like the Weather Underground and Black Panthers; the killings at Kent State and the Mayday riots; and unprecedented controversies and crises including the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the discovery that the Joint Chiefs of Staff spied on president Nixon and Henry Kissinger for some 13 months in wartime. Mitchell also presided over the peaceful desegregation of the public schools in the south — one of the landmark achievements of the executive branch in the 20th century. And with his primacy over the selection of Nixon’s judicial nominees, including the four justices Nixon placed on the Supreme Court, Mitchell effectively reshaped that institution for decades.

However, by virtue of his involvement in the Watergate cover-up, the former attorney general became the highest-ranking U.S. government official ever to serve a prison sentence. When he left federal prison in January 1979, after nineteen months and one denial of parole, he quipped to the assembled news media: “Henceforth, don’t call me; I’ll call you.” Yet no biographer ever did. Ironically, there were three books written about Mitchell’s mischievous and unstable second wife, Martha, who became one of the most famous women in America thanks to her inebriated late-night telephone calls to reporters. So it struck me, around the time I was graduating from college, that there should be a book about John Mitchell, who was such an important figure in recent American history.


Lopez: How strong a man could he have been? He wound up in jail after all.

Rosen: This is akin to asking how good a boxer Muhammad Ali was, since he wound up with Parkinson’s, after all. Mitchell’s incarceration in some ways reflected his strength. Unlike his fellow Watergate convicts, Mitchell never traded evidence, real or fabricated, against a more senior official — which, in Mitchell’s case, would have meant President Nixon — in exchange for a more lenient sentence; instead, Mitchell secretly proffered to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) to accept a guilty plea if the prosecutors would cease their pursuit of Nixon, a gallant gesture replicated nowhere else in the scandal and flatly refused by the prosecutors.

As I like to say, the scandal presented in The Strong Man is not your father’s Watergate. And the reason for this is because no previous study of the subject has benefited from the exhaustive review of evidence, old and new, undertaken for my book. In addition to mastering the voluminous secondary literature on the subject — the roughly 500 books published on Nixon, Watergate, and the convulsions of the Sixties, and the daily-deadline reporting by my predecessors in the Washington press corps — I conducted 250 original interviews and aggressively used the Freedom of Information Act, over several years’ time, to secure access to literally hundreds of thousands of previously unpublished documents and tapes.

These included whole archives of official Watergate evidence that no researcher had ever before seen. Among these untouched collections were the internal staff memoranda of the WSPF, which showed what the special prosecutors knew about Watergate, and when they knew it, particularly about the deeply flawed testimony of John Dean and Jeb Magruder, the chief accusers of Nixon and Mitchell; and more than 5,000 pages of sworn testimony taken by the Senate Watergate committee in executive session, which included previously unpublished interrogations of key witnesses like Dean, Magruder, Watergate burglar James McCord, and others.

The most fascinating revelation of these documents was the way the Democratic counsel to the Senate Watergate committee, Sam Dash, and the liberal staff lawyers on the WSPF, including Richard Ben-Veniste, worked aggressively to reshape their star witnesses’ testimony in order to shore up what was otherwise a fairly weak case against John Mitchell. Indeed, of the ten “overt acts” in the Watergate cover-up ascribed to the former attorney general in the indictment issued in U.S. Mitchell, I conclude he actually only committed one, and even then, Mitchell’s act of deceit was designed, paradoxically, to conceal his own honorable conduct in the events in question.

My book thus presents some starkly different conclusions about the central mysteries of the Nixon era — namely, what was the true purpose of the Watergate break-in and wiretapping operation? who ordered it? and what role did CIA play in the affair? — than those reached by the major (and Democratic-controlled) investigative bodies. As such, The Strong Man constitutes a frontal assault on the Woodward-Bernstein version of events, which may account for why the Washington Post ran a brief, snide, and non-substantive review of the book and the New York Times refuses to review it at all.


Lopez: Can you really argue that a former attorney general who winds up in jail isn’t a bit of a disgrace?

Rosen: This question prompts two in return: Where, exactly, did I so argue? And a disgrace to whom? If a criminal defendant is systematically denied access to evidence exculpatory to him, and is forced, by the very officers charged with faithfully executing the law, to respond to damning testimony by men bearing false witness against him, to whom should disgrace accrue?

What I did argue was that Mitchell, while flawed, was an honorable man, undone by unswerving loyalty to his “client,” the president — a loyalty maintained even after the Watergate tapes showed Nixon cynically betraying Mitchell in the spring of 1973, time and again, as the cover-up collapsed. As even John Dean, whose testimony sent Mitchell to prison, has observed, Mitchell was a restraining influence on Nixon and the men around him. The Strong Man concludes that Mitchell stood not at the center of, but fundamentally apart from, the criminality of the Nixon administration.


Lopez: How and when did he “intervene on behalf of the republic”?

Rosen: As ex-President Nixon and former CIA Director Richard Helms attested in later years, it was the opposition of Attorney General Mitchell that persuaded Nixon to rescind his approval, in July 1970, of the Huston Plan, a wide ranging and admittedly illegal program for domestic espionage against radical groups and their suspected supporters. Mitchell can also be heard, on the tapes of April 1971, persuading Nixon to rescind his angry order that the Justice Department drop its massive anti-trust lawsuits against the ITT conglomerate. And it was Mitchell again, in December 1971, who gently but firmly dissuaded Nixon from prosecuting the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, for espionage, after Nixon learned of the chiefs’ treachery against him and Kissinger. This was an unprecedented constitutional crisis, at the heart of which Nixon saw “a federal offense of the highest order” and which Mitchell, in his talks with the president, likened to the chiefs “robbing your desk.” While the prosecution of Moorer may have been justified, Mitchell wisely foresaw such proceedings doing grave damage to the armed services and the nation, and convinced Nixon of same.


Lopez: Isn’t doing a sympathetic portrait of a Watergate figure a thankless task? How has it been received thus far?

Rosen: Well, the task has yielded the intrinsic rewards of a rich investigative project — I got to interview presidents, secretaries of state and defense, Supreme Court justices, CIA directors, the Democratic National Committee secretary who was wiretapped in the Watergate operation, Ida “Maxie” Wells, and the wiretap monitor who was eavesdropping on her, Alfred C. Baldwin III. And I loved writing the book, usually on campaign buses and Air Force One rides, drowning out the sophomoric kibbitzing of David Gregory with noise-canceling headphones that throbbed with endless repetitions of sinister Philip Glass masterpieces like Koyaanisqatsi and The Fog of War.