Playboy Contributing Editor and Fox News correspondent James Rosen has just published The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, a massive biography of John Mitchell, the lawyer, Attorney General and Watergate felon. James spent 17 years on this biography, and his indefatigable research has led to some challenging and sure-to-be controversial views of Mitchell and his role in Watergate. I interviewed James for playboy.com:
PLAYBOY: Let’s start at the beginning: who was John Mitchell, and why should we care bout him?
ROSEN: John Mitchell was the closest thing to a friend Richard Nixon had in government, and, as a result, became the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to be convicted on criminal charges and to serve prison time. After a fabulously successful career on Wall Street, where his innovations in the financing of public works projects made him an indispensable figure to mayors and governors in all fifty states, Mitchell merged his law firm with Nixon’s in 1967. The next year, Mitchell served as campaign manager for Nixon’s amazing comeback presidential bid, and, after Nixon won, reluctantly agreed to serve as U.S. attorney general. As head of the Justice Department from 1969 to 1972, Mitchell served as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer during a period of extraordinary turbulence in American life, one that witnessed the Kent State killings, the Mayday riots, the heyday of radical groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, and a number of controversies unprecedented in their nature and seriousness, e.g., the desegregation of Southern schools, the Pentagon Papers, and the episode where the Joint Chiefs of Staff were discovered to have been spying, during wartime, on the commander-in-chief. After resigning to run Nixon’s ’72 re-election campaign, Mitchell became embroiled in the Watergate scandal, and ultimately served nineteen months in prison for his role in the cover-up.
PLAYBOY: You call the book The Strong Man, in large measure because of Mitchell’s reputation as a tough, law and order Attorney General. What you show is that Mitchell was tough across the board, even in matters of civil rights and anti-trust, sometimes in contradiction to the policies of the Nixon administration. Please explain.
ROSEN: The title of the book actually came from Robert Caro, the great historian and biographer of Lyndon Johnson. I met Caro casually in 1998 and mentioned my work on the Mitchell book to him. Caro told me that when President-elect Nixon went to meet with LBJ at the White House after the ’68 election, the only aide Nixon brought with him was Mitchell, which prompted Johnson, after the meeting was over, to tell his own aides: “The strong man over there is Mitchell.” I, in turn, related this story about Caro to my colleague at NY-1 News at the time, Deborah Feyerick (now of CNN), and she said instantly: “Well, you realize that’s your title — The Strong Man!”
Mitchell was a man of few words and with his icy blue eyes and wintry demeanor, he projected, in between portentious puffs on his ever-present pipe, a certain strength and toughness that Nixon sought to harness to advance the administration’s policy goals. The 100,000 pages of yellow pad notes scribbled by Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, who saw the president more frequently than any other aide, are replete with almost romantic comments by Nixon about Mitchell’s aura of toughness, and the need to use it effectively, on television, to promote law and order in what was an age, as Tom Wolfe called it, of “radical chic.” Others had the same idea. George Shultz, who served in the Nixon and Reagan cabinets, recounted to me how he would host diverse groups of Southern segregationists and integrationists at the Nixon White House, trying to get them to work through their differences to achieve racial harmony, and only to see them degenerate into intractable bickering. By pre-arrangement, Shultz would have Mitchell drop by for a cameo, and when asked what he proposed to do about racial tensions, Mitchell would growl: “I will enforce the law” and leave. Shultz said this performance, by someone they regarded as a solid American, would awe the segregationists, and impress upon them the inevitability of racial integration back home. Shultz added that when he later served as secretary of state, in the 1980s, he would tell this story to the Israelis and Palestinians (amongst whom, evidently, it had less impact).
One of the hallmarks of Mitchell’s conduct as attorney general was his singular stature with the president. He was widely believed to be the only man who could say no to Nixon, tell him when he was flat wrong. This Mitchell did at some critical points. Two among them were when Nixon wanted to prosecute the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for having committed internal espionage — a course of action Mitchell wisely and astutely dissuaded Nixon from pursuing, both because it would have exposed Nixon’s and Kissinger’s secret machinations in Cambodia and elsewhere, and, too because it would have done grave damage to the armed services — and when Nixon, goaded by another aide, tried to scuttle the Justice Department’s antitrust cases against the ITT conglomerate. Here, too, Mitchell intervened to protect Nixon, and the country, from Nixon. The beauty, for a historian of the era like myself, is that both of these moments were captured on Nixon’s secret taping system.
PLAYBOY: Mitchell, of course, is one of those convicted of Watergate crimes. One of he highlights of your book is your close study of all the Watergate estimony and evidence, and your conclusion is that Mitchell got a bum rap. How so?
ROSEN: No court of law ever addressed the question of who ordered the break-in and wiretapping operation at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex; but the verdict of the major investigative bodies, and of the first generation of writers and historians to tackle Watergate, was that Mitchell, his denials notwithstanding, was the culprit behind that crime. What Mitchell was indicted for, and convicted of, were ten “overt acts” that the Watergate special prosecutors alleged he committed during the subsequent cover-up of the break-in, which began almost instantaneously after the arrest of the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972, and lasted until around April 1973.
My conclusion was that of these ten “overt acts” — wherein Mitchell supposedly ordered his subordinates to destroy evidence, perjure themselves, illegally obtain FBI reports, apply pressure to the Central Intelligence Agency to rein in the FBI, pay “hush money” to the arrested men and their confederates, extend offers of executive clemency to them, and other crimes — Mitchell, in reality, only committed one of them. This conclusion derived from my review of the complete record of Watergate, an exhaustive undertaking from which no previous study of the subject has ever benefited: all the important newspaper stories, all the books and memoirs, the complete transcripts of the Senate and House committees and U.S. v. Mitchell. I also unearthed whole archives of official evidence that, to my surprise, no previous researcher had ever mined. Among these were the internal staff memoranda of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and some 5,000 pages of executive session testimony by the major witnesses before the Senate Watergate committee.
The evidence was overwhelming that the testimony against Mitchell by his chief accusers was consistently false and often internally contradictory, but that the Senate counsel and special prosecutors worked actively to reshape it in order to build a case against Mitchell. On the other hand I also concluded that Mitchell participated, albeit to a very limited extent, in the Watergate cover-up — and that he also committed other crimes, unrelated to Watergate, for which he was never prosecuted. On top of all that, he was also wrongly prosecuted, and ultimately acquitted, on charges that he attempted to derail a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the activities of fugitive financier Robert Vesco. All in all, it is, as I say in the book, a complicated box score.
PLAYBOY: In arguing that Mitchell was guilty of at most one of the ten Watergate-related crimes with which he was charged, you also point out he Mitchell could have been charged with at least three other felonies elated to actions he took in other matters. Why should we not judge him harshly?
ROSEN: My conclusion was not that Mitchell was an innocent lamb — “No more than I deserved my dear,” he reportedly replied to a woman who approached him on the street and said, “Oh, Mr. Mitchell, I’m so sorry” — but that he was, at bottom, a good and honorable man who stood fundamentally apart from, not at the center of, the criminality of the Nixon administration. It is also worth pointing out that the non-Watergate crimes to which I refer were committed when Mitchell was a private citizen, not during his tenure as attorney general. This distinction is useful because it underscores the seriousness with which he approached his duties as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
It is also useful to point out that in two of three cases, Mitchell’s crime — lying to FBI agents and a Senate committee — were designed to conceal his honorable conduct as attorney general. The details are spelled out in my book. The irony, however, is that Mitchell colluded in a false, authoritarian public image of himself, and his testimony at various points similarly — paradoxically — served to conceal his ethical discharge of official duty.
PLAYBOY: Tell us about the relationship between Nixon and Mitchell. Why didn’t Mitchell turn on Nixon during Watergate?
ROSEN: Above all else, Mitchell saw himself as a lawyer — the lawyer’s lawyer, in fact, the consummate legal professional, which is what he in fact was before his association with Nixon. The latter, of course, was the consummate politician, and therein lay the explanation for why each man treated the other as he did. For Mitchell to have testified against Nixon in Watergate, sought leniency in exchange for evidence, real or fabricated, against the president — the one individual higher up in the food chain than Mitchell and in whom the prosecutors would have been interested — would have been abhorrent to Mitchell’s every instinct as a lawyer. He regarded Nixon as his client and testimony against him as a fundamental breach of the professional code; thus Mitchell secretly offered the prosecutors a guilty plea if they would cease their pursuit of the president, an offer they refused. He also believed in Nixon’s Cold War policies and exalted them above his fealty to the law, as he admitted during the Senate Watergate hearings.
Nixon, on the other hand, as his tapes catalogue in excruciating detail across the spring of 1973, ultimately proved all too willing to make his old friend and law partner the fall guy in the great scandal. This was one of the great shames of Nixon’s life, and in the interviews with David Frost, he nearly broke down in tears discussing it.
PLAYBOY: Tell us a bit about Martha Mitchell, the Attorney-General’s outspoken and troubled wife. Nixon said that Watergate happened because Mitchell was too istracted by his wife’s condition to properly supervise his subordinates. Is that credible? Is it possible that had Prozac and similar drugs been vailable in 1973, Watergate might have been avoided?
ROSEN: There were, until now, three books about Martha Mitchell and no books about John Mitchell, one of the most important political actors of postwar America. In the space of about eighteen months across 1969-1970, Mrs. Mitchell went from being the gregarious, eccentric and high-living (second) wife of a private attorney in Rye, New York to one of the most famous and polarizing women in America, as visible and well known as Pat Nixon, Jacqueline Onassis, and Indira Ghandi. She was prone to stealing away from the bed she shared with her husband in their Watergate duplex, having a few pops of whiskey, and calling up reporters like Helen Thomas to blurt out whatever was on her mind, which was usually bilious and incendiary.
In an age when women were still largely confined to roles of docile domesticity, and Cabinet wives were seldom, if ever, heard from, the media regarded Mrs. Mitchell as a radical departure from the norm and a cash cow; thus to be an American in the year 1970 was to find Martha’s face and voice inescapable. She appeared on the covers of Time, Life, and Look, and was featured on “60 Minutes,” “Today,” and “The Mike Douglas Show.” When Watergate hit, she began to train her barbed commentary on Nixon, leading some writers to champion Martha as some kind of heroine, a brave lady surrounded by evil men but determined, in her own gloriously nutty way, to speak truth to power. This glorification of Mrs. Mitchell accelerated after her tragic death from bone cancer in 1976, at age fifty-seven, by which point she and John Mitchell were long estranged.
Knowing nothing about psychopharmacology, I can’t say whether Prozac, or, for that matter, any drugs that existed at the time, would have been of any use. The fact is that, as Martha’s first husband told me, corroborated by numerous other interviewees, Mrs. Mitchell was a fun-loving but extremely insecure, often mean-spirited person, the kind who talked down to waitresses and others she considered below her station in life. On top of that, she had a problem with alcohol which pre-existed her fame — leading, for example, to her institutionalization as early as 1968 — and which was only exacerbated by the pressure and scrutiny of high-level Washington. Then the incomparable strain of Watergate, the quintessential scandal of the saturation-coverage Information Age, unhinged her completely. She became violent to those around her. Mrs. Mitchell’s FBI files, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, offer a pathetic study in mental deterioration. One has to wonder, as Nixon did, how history might have unfolded differently had John Mitchell had a more stable and supportive partner, one whose own troubles did not, as Martha’s often did, distract him from his work.
In the 250 interviews I conducted for my book, I returned again and again to the question: What was John Mitchell’s great mistake in life? How did so brilliant and accomplished a lawyer go, in the span of a decade, from a secure and prosperous member of the Establishment, the nation’s highest law enforcement official, to a convicted felon, disbarred, disgraced and deeply in debt? I discovered, in the interviewees’ responses, a fault line, one that divided them, in roughly even numbers, between those who thought John Mitchell’s great mistake in life was marrying Martha Mitchell, and those who thought it was allying himself with Richard Nixon. The most vocal proponents for each argument were, of course, Nixon and Martha themselves. But what did John Mitchell himself think about this, in his heart of hearts? And what conclusion did I reach? The answers to these and other mysteries — including who ordered the Watergate break-in and why — await you in The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.