The quiet man
After Watergate, most players labored to portray their actions in the best light, but not John Mitchell
The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate
By James Rosen
Doubleday. 609 pp., illustrated, $35
It was love, twice over, that undid John Mitchell. He adored his mad, dipsomaniacal wife, Martha. Her raving late-night phone calls to reporters helped make her just about the most famous woman in America during the first Nixon administration - and Mitchell the most beleaguered husband. Mitchell, in turn, was the recipient of the hero-worshipping love of Richard Nixon. Nixon's near-boundless admiration led him to make Mitchell his campaign manager in 1968 (an excellent choice), his first attorney general (a more dubious decision), and his campaign manager in 1972 (a definite mistake).
That last job embroiled Mitchell in the Watergate scandal. Nixon's love, alas, did not extend to rejecting the idea of Mitchell as fall guy in the coverup - "the big enchilada," as White House aide John Ehrlichman memorably dubbed him - which contributed to Mitchell's being the highest level US government official to serve prison time.
True, love was never a word much associated with Mitchell, a monumentally phlegmatic man even by the standards of his chosen profession, Wall Street bond lawyer. In fact, it was Mitchell's imperturbability that helped attract Nixon. (They were partners in the same firm.) Nixon had a famous weakness for strong, unswerving men such as General George S. Patton and his Treasury secretary, John Connally.
Mitchell's strength is the main reason James Rosen has called his biography/apologia "The Strong Man." Rosen, a Washington correspondent for Fox News, is himself a bit smitten. "The Strong Man" is very clearly a labor of love. Rosen interviewed 250 people and spent untold hours combing archives during the two decades he spent researching and writing the book.
There's another presumed reason for Rosen's title: the derisive echo of Bob Woodward's book about Deep Throat, "The Secret Man." W. Mark Felt, the FBI official who was Woodward's best source on Watergate, is history's most famous leaker. Mitchell never leaked or ratted or even wrote a self-justifying memoir. He did accept an advance for one, though.
Again and again, Rosen rises to Mitchell's defense: "That Mitchell played a role [in Watergate] is indisputable; however, it is equally true that the former attorney general was, in simplest terms, framed, a casualty of a wicked alliance between coconspirators eager to tell lies and prosecutors eager to believe them."
Rosen argues that "Mitchell's woes originated in the fact that his confederates, in and out of government, were too often beneath him. If Mitchell grasped this, he likely regarded it as part of the devil's pact he made when, at Nixon's insistence, he left Wall Street for the grimier councils of government. Indeed, the attorney general was surrounded by men who would never have made it into his office at [his law firm] Mudge Rose."
Rosen makes a compelling case that Mitchell was more sinned against than sinning in Watergate. Far more culpable were Ehrlichman (whom Rosen clearly dislikes); Jeb Magruder, Mitchell's number two at the Committee to Re-elect the President, and in Rosen's persuasive portrayal a duplicitous weakling; and, above all, White House counsel John Dean, a onetime Mitchell protégé, whom Rosen considers the true mastermind of both break-in and coverup.
But it remains true, as Rosen acknowledges, that Mitchell failed to reject outright G. Gordon Liddy's fantastical Gemstone plan to be directed against the Democrats (involving not just bugging but also kidnapping and prostitution), which led to the Watergate break-in. And he did participate in the coverup, albeit to a lesser degree than commonly assumed.
In everyday use, the phrase "the strong man" is often followed by "in the circus." Rosen surely didn't have that in mind in choosing his title, but part of the enduring fascination of the Nixon presidency is its three-ring cast, from Henry Kissinger, at one extreme, to Liddy at the other. Even someone so ostensibly dull as brush-cut Bob Haldeman turns out to have been gadget-happy and an obsessive diarist. Mitchell isn't just the only Watergate figure not to fink and/or cash in; he may well be the only one not to be interesting.
Rosen's unflagging efforts to praise and restore his subject bear some fruit and make for intermittent good reading. Nearly every Watergate book takes one of two approaches: omniscient overview or first-person self-justification (for prosecutors and journalists no less than defendants). In looking at the scandal from the perspective of one participant, and that participant the only major figure previously unheard from, Rosen offers a surprisingly fresh look at the scandal. But nearly 500 pages of narrative works to underscore the bland, recessive nature of John Mitchell. "I'm a fat and prosperous Wall Street lawyer," he told an interviewer in 1969, "which is just what I always wanted to be." Although his wife and his president put an end to that, his character remained proudly colorless to the end.
Mark Feeney, a member of the Globe staff, is the author of "Nixon at the Movies" (University of Chicago Press). 