Jamie Malanowski

STRONG, BUT NOT SHOCKPROOF

01070002.jpg

I had fun lunch last week with James Rosen, who is a Playboy Contributing Editor, a Fox News correspondent, author of The Strong Man, a new and likely to be quite controversial biography of John Mitchell, and a lethally accurate impersonator of Bob Woodward. We ate at one of my favorite restaurants, Estiatorio Milos. I’m in the midst of reading The Strong Man and will have more on it when I’m done, but in the meantime, here’s an interesting anecdote from 1969, when Attorney General Mitchell was standing on the balcony of his office and watching an anti-war demonstration, which police tried to break up with tear gas. But then the wind changed. Recalls an aide: “We started coughing and he started coughing, and he fell forward and there’s a wire along the balcony that’s electrified to get the pigeons off, and he got electrocuted–not electrocuted, but shocked. . . .He started to cough very badly and he stumbled backwards. . .and he started to turn purple. He said `If I pass out, don’t let Kleindeinst call in those troops!”’ Priceless!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *