The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate
By James Rosen

Product Description

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Based on 250 original interviews and hundreds of thousands of previously unpublished documents and tapes, The Strong Man resolves definitively the central mysteries of the Nixon era: the true purpose of the Watergate break-in, who ordered it,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




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Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #1542 in Books
Published on: 2008-05-20
Released on: 2008-05-20
Number of items: 1
Binding: Hardcover
640 pages

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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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review


ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE STRONG MAN

“James Rosen has brought us a fascinating and provocative account of John Mitchell’s life. Using fresh and unexpected sources, The Strong Man dispels some of the mysteries that still linger around this central figure of the Nixon administration and Watergate. Rosen has achieved the difficult task of showing us heretofore unseen facets of the subculture that led to the greatest scandal in American history.”
—Michael Beschloss, author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789–1989

“James Rosen’s The Strong Man is excellent. Few novels read as well as this first-rate blend of history and biography. Crammed with new information and steeped in deep research, political street smarts, fresh insights, and crisp, clear writing, it is a major contribution to the history of Watergate and the Nixon presidency.”
—Dan Rather, CBS News White House correspondent, 1969–1974

“The Strong Man is a fascinating work: a sympathetic portrait of John Mitchell, the Big Enchilada, Richard Nixon’s campaign manager and attorney general, who went to prison rather than talk about Watergate—and then took his secrets to the grave.”
—Richard Reeves, author of President Nixon: Alone in the White House

“Rosen has captured the players in Watergate as if he were on duty at the White House during the scandal. It is a tragic story that reads like a novel . . . The most accurate book on Watergate and the president’s men—and the president—yet to be published.”
—Dwight L. Chapin, special assistant to President Nixon

“For anyone who lived through Watergate or has studied it since, John Mitchell was always the dour, jowly, menacing embodiment of the nefarious Nixon administration. James Rosen’s original and penetrating portrait of Richard Nixon’s attorney general, the only alumnus of that office ever to land in prison, unveils the more complex figure lurking beneath the caricature. The Strong Man sheds important new light on a defining episode in American history.”
—David Margolick, author of Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink

“This book is a veritable hologram. You feel that you are watching John Mitchell, The Strong Man, move and bend wills, whack and get whacked—right here!—in real time!—and at the end you will feel it neurally, in the solar plexus, when he pays the stiff price of D.C. Hold ’Em politics.”
—Tom Wolfe, author of A Man in Full and I Am Charlotte Simmons


About the Author


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.



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Customer Reviews
Breathtaking!
Rosen hits the mark. He avoids the threat of getting bogged down in details and boring the reader, but writes the reader into the book. Rosen's book is a must read if not to experience elegant writing, then to be a part of the chronicling of our time.

Nonsense
More revisionist garbage from the RNC watercarriers at Faux Nooz. This book is a lie.

Wow
I can't remember the last time I've been this addicted to a book. I felt like I was reading a thriller -- couldn't put it down. I've already started casting The Strong Man as a movie in my mind.