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

Rosen, James

 
9780385508643: The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385508646 ISBN 13: 9780385508643
Verlag: Doubleday, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

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Based on 250 original interviews and hundreds of thousands of previously unpublished documents and tapes, The Strong Man resolves definitively the central mysteries of the Nixon era: the true purpose of the Watergate break-in, who ordered it,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

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JAMES ROSEN is a Washington correspondent for Fox News. He has covered the White House and State Department, and reported from dozens of foreign countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq. His writings on Watergate and other subjects have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, National Review, and Playboy, where he is a contributing editor. He lives with his wife and son in Washington, D.C.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

INTO THE FIRE

I don't think anyone ever really knew him. He lived within himself very much.
—Robert Mitchell to the author, 1998 (1)


"Do you really want to hear about this?"

John Mitchell was, in his lawyerly way, questioning his questioner, gently needling a young reporter who came to the Department of Justice in the spring of 1970 to interview the attorney general about, of all things, his childhood. On that sunny day in May, the reporter found Mitchell—currently embroiled in searing controversies over the killings at Kent State, two failed Supreme Court nominees, and the potentially explosive desegregation of Southern school systems—utterly at ease in his dark, thickly carpeted office, absently tilting his large frame back and forth in his swivel chair, lighting and relighting his pipe, tossing the still-burning matches into his wastebasket.

Yes, replied the reporter from Long Island's Newsday, he did indeed want to know about Mitchell's childhood; the subject would interest readers in Mitchell's hometown of Blue Point, New York, and there was, for all the attorney general's fame in those days, little known or written about Mitchell's formative years.

Reluctantly, his pale blue eyes becoming distant as his mind conjured the sights and sounds of coastal Long Island in the 1920s, the attorney general remembered a "normal" childhood spent, he said, "like Huck Finn," immersed in the twin pastimes of sports—"I played them all," he boasted, including baseball, hockey, golf, hunting, fishing, and sailing—and mischief. At one particular memory, Mitchell began to chuckle, softly at first, then uncontrollably, until he was "half-bent" in laughter and brought back into the moment only by a coughing fit.

"I'll tell you, there was one thing, there was one incident," Mitchell began. He described his old wooden school by the railroad tracks, at the intersection of Blue Point's Main Street and River Road, on which his family lived for a time. One night, he said, a fire burned the school clear down to the ground. "Whole damned school went," he said. Again now, Mitchell was laughing hard, and took a few moments to collect himself. "My brother and I were there," the attorney general continued. "We watched it. We were so damned glad to see that thing burn down. We watched it! We threw our books into the fire. We were so glad. We just threw our books in. My father gave us a good whack. I'll always remember that. Whew!"

The memory prompted Mitchell to tell the Newsday reporter another, similar anecdote from his youth, about an equally destructive fire. "You know, I burned down the house in Blue Point," Mitchell said. "It was one Fourth of July. We had sparklers and it was daylight and, you know, we were supposed to wait until dark. Well, I was a kid who didn't want to wait, so I took some of those sparklers down under the porch and—well, it burned down the house." You didn't have anything to do with the school fire? the reporter asked. "No," Mitchell assured him. "That was in the middle of the night. This was during the day. Of course not." (2)

With these beguiling stories, in which the stern-faced monument to law and order allowed a glimpse into a younger, more reckless self, one never permitted to emerge in his public appearances as attorney general, there was only one thing wrong: They weren't true. Mitchell's younger brother, Robert, who supposedly heaved his books into the schoolhouse fire along with Mitchell, told the first reporter ever to interview him, in 1998, that the story was complete fiction.

"Nothing happened!" Robert proclaimed. One night, he explained, he and young John Mitchell, or Jack, as his family called him, were awakened by whistles and sirens screaming past their house. "[W]e knew there was a fire somewhere, but didn't know anything about it. Next morning we went to school, and we got up there, and the school was an old frame school. They had just bought fire escapes for it, metal fire escapes. And they were laying in the yard. And we went up there, and the school-it was burnt to the ground, and the nice, new fire escapes were laying all around the edges of it, unused…But that's all…We never heard how the fire started or anything else."

It was much the same with the attorney general's sparkler story, which Robert laughingly dismissed as "another slight exaggeration." Yes, there was an Independence Day celebration at the Mitchells' home in Blue Point, where the boys, looking to escape a stiff wind, lit some sparklers under their back porch. "We went under that [porch] to try and light [the sparklers]," Robert remembered. "And I guess we-a couple of the leaves caught fire there, and we went scrambling out. And one of the adults there, I don't know who it was, took a pail of water and threw it on the leaves, and that was the end of it. The house never burned down. The porch didn't even burn down."

The falsity of the attorney general's childhood tall tales might be easily written off as inconsequential, an Irishman's love of lore, were it not for his multiple perjury convictions in Watergate, and for the recurring theme of factual dispute that accompanies all accounts, and every phase, of his life. That John Newton Mitchell was born in Detroit on September 5, 1913, the fourth of five children, the first three of whom died young, are incontestable facts.3 Yet little else in Mitchell's early biography is so invulnerable to challenge.

Mitchell's paternal lineage is usually traced to Scotland, but exactly when his forefathers came to America varies in the telling. The attorney general's daughter, Jill Mitchell-Reed, believed her family got its start in the States with a stonecutter from Edinburgh who settled in Rutland, Vermont, before moving to Chicago and ending up in Rockport, Maine. (4) Perhaps the most reliable authority-Robert, sole surviving member of the attorney general's boyhood family-said their grandfather, James A. Mitchell, a stonecutter seeking proximity to New Hampshire's granite quarries, emigrated from Aberdeen, Scotland, in the mid-1800s to Rockland, Maine. (5)

After meeting and marrying Margaret Porter, an immigrant from Newfoundland "of English extraction," James A. Mitchell fathered three sons. The youngest of them, Joseph Charles, born around 1882 in Rockland, Maine, was to become the attorney general's father. (6) Skillfully exploiting his family's limited connections, Joseph, when still a young man, joined the trading stamp business owned by an uncle, Esden Porter. Itching to start his own firm, but unwilling to compete directly against his uncle, Joseph left New York for the Midwest, initially eyeing Columbus, Ohio, before settling on Detroit. There he began the People's Legal Stamp Company. (7)

But before that, on an evening in 1906 or 1907, at the East Flatbush home of an older brother, Joseph met his future wife, Margaret Agnes McMahon. (8) Margaret's family was "very well off," her granddaughter Jill Mitchell-Reed recalled. (9) Peter McMahon, Margaret's father, died in his early fifties, but left behind a considerable fortune from his stake in Peter's Chop House, a Greenwich Village steakhouse he owned. (10)

Joseph and Margaret's first two children, a boy and girl, they named after themselves—though with typical Mitchell inscrutability in the matter of names, the boy was addressed as Scranton. The couple's third child, John Newton, died at birth. (11) The name was given anew to their fourth child, the future attorney general, in 1913.


John Mitchell's mother was unusual for her time: a Hunter College graduate (12)...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385508646
ISBN 13 
9780385508643
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
640
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Doubleday
https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar