The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate [Hardcover]

James Rosen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 20, 2008

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Based on 250 original interviews and hundreds of thousands of previously unpublished documents and tapes, The Strong Man resolves definitively the central mysteries of the Nixon era: the true purpose of the Watergate break-in, who ordered it,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.

Editorial Reviews

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)
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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.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (May 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385508646
• ISBN-13: 978-0385508643
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #171,949 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #30 in Books > Law > Administrative Law > Federal Jurisdiction

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review by one of Mitchell's lawyers, June 6, 2008

By 

Plato Cacheris (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Hardcover)

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.

52 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent political biography!, May 20, 2008

By 

Jamie Malanowski "Jamie Malanowski" (NY NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Hardcover)

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.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Single Best Watergate Book of All, July 23, 2008

By 

Kenneth D. Gartrell "www.kengartrell.com/BLOG/" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Hardcover)

This is a very smart and incisive book. It is recommended as one of the best Watergate books yet written. NO... IT IS THE BEST. It is carefully and motivationally written. I cannot speak to all the facts of the book. No one could, but I can rely on James Rosen as a good faith journalist - his accounts of the Kent State shootings and other issues I do know about are accurate, aware and alive.

I was, for example, a student at Kent State during the ridiculous and tragic events of 1970 and during the late 1960s. My tenure as eye witness to history and as a student of politics and human behavior spanned the entire pregnant period from 1966 to 1973 when the Second, Failed or Red American Revolution came and went.

Rosen has a keen, circumspect and balanced understanding of the events that shows he is not biased in either his view of history or his world view. His approach is scientific and he is a slave to his facts not to his ideology - whatever it may be. In the instance of his views on the Second or Red Revolution in the USA, he established his bona fides with me. I have confidence that the rest of his reporting and thinking is similarly well founded. If a journalist follows his facts to the bloody end like James Rosen, he can only be celebrated.

I am still reading and evaluating the book, so I am going to keep adding to and revising this review as I go along. I will come back later and mop up and synthesize my thinking. I see no harm whatever in a provisional review. THE BOOK IS GREAT -- very eye opening.

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