Duncan Currie reviews The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate by James Rosen.

This book is more than a biography of former U.S. attorney general John Mitchell; it is also a keen and wide-ranging study of the entire Nixon presidency. Author James Rosen, a Washington correspondent for Fox News, aims "to ensure [that] the facts and lessons of the Watergate scandals are properly recorded," and to situate Mitchell, the "highest-ranking government official ever to be convicted on criminal charges," in the context of a turbulent era in which American society seemed to be unraveling.

Upon picking up The Strong Man, one of my first thoughts was: How did a busy TV reporter ever find the time to produce such a door-stopper? As Rosen explains, the book represents "two decades of research, synthesis, and writing." Among his sources were "hundreds of thousands of previously undisclosed documents and tape recordings," most of which came from the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives. He also interviewed (by his count) 250 people.

Some may question the need for yet another book on Watergate. Rosen assures his readers that "the scandal presented in The Strong Man is not your father's Watergate."

Mitchell, who died in November 1988 at age 75, left behind relatively few personal or official papers, which makes him a tricky figure to analyze. For whatever reason, he was prone to embellishing or even fabricating stories of his Long Island youth. It appears that he also perpetuated falsehoods about his service in World War II.

He was a pioneer in housing finance ("moral-obligation bonds" were his brainchild) and proved quite successful as a Wall Street lawyer. "Sway in financial circles eased his way in political circles, and vice versa," Rosen writes. Mitchell grew close to Nelson Rockefeller, the wealthy and powerful Republican governor of New York. He also met Richard Nixon; they became law partners, and Mitchell served as Nixon's campaign manager in the 1968 presidential race.

The Nixonites have long been accused of collaborating with South Vietnamese officials to sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks. They feared that a pre-election settlement would hurt their candidate, and were also concerned that LBJ might spring an "October Surprise" (as he did, in the form of a U.S. bombing halt announced just before Election Day). The details and significance of the 1968 South Vietnamese affair are still controversial. In particular, the murky activities of Anna Chennault--a Chinese-born woman known as "the Dragon Lady," she was prominent in GOP and China-lobby circles and served as the Nixon campaign's "primary interlocutor with Saigon"--remain hotly disputed. As Rosen notes, "the South Vietnamese needed little convincing to frown on the Paris talks." But he concludes that "Nixon and Mitchell, with the aid of Anna Chennault, violated the laws of international diplomacy, directly contacting South Vietnamese officials to urge them not to be swayed by Lyndon Johnson's last-minute bombing halt." The episode would "haunt" Nixon for years.

"At a minimum," says Rosen, it "served notice on high-level Washington, as early as the spring of 1968, that Richard Nixon and John Mitchell were men to be watched carefully. And when they assumed office, as president and attorney general of the United States, respectively, few of their peers in the intelligence community--at the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency, especially--forgot that lesson."

Mitchell did not want to be attorney general, but Nixon convinced him. He soon became "the very symbol of 'law and order' in Nixon's America," during what Rosen calls "the most searing political turmoil in America since the Civil War." The bald, pipe-smoking Mitchell was a bête noire of the New Left and the counterculture. As Rosen points out, he is often remembered for his August 1971 announcement that the Justice Department would not convene a federal grand jury to investigate the National Guardsmen who had shot student protesters at Kent State University. But the full story is more complicated. Relying on "previously unpublished notes and documents," Rosen demonstrates that Mitchell actually supported convening a grand jury on the Kent State killings, and only relented ("begrudgingly") at Nixon's insistence.

Both Mitchell and Nixon were characterized by a "duality of thought and action," as Rosen puts it. ("Watch what we do instead of what we say," Mitchell said famously.) For example: Mitchell reportedly made racist and anti-Semitic comments in private, but he also backed aggressive school-desegregation efforts, worked to guarantee voting rights for blacks, championed the cause of Israel, and helped Soviet Jews. "For America's blacks Mitchell shed no tears," says Rosen, "but to ensure racial progress he did more than any executive-branch official of the 20th century."

Though "Big John" was the ultimate Nixon loyalist, the president was not always satisfied with him. As the administration set about attacking Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, Nixon complained to White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman that "John is just too damn good a lawyer, you know. He's a good, strong lawyer. It just repels him to do these horrible things, but they've got to be done." Nixon said they would be "better off" when Mitchell left his post as attorney general.

Yet at key moments, Mitchell "emerged as the indispensable figure, the strong man of the Nixon presidency," Rosen argues. In the end, "it was the twin pressures of Martha and Nixon that brought the strong man down." Martha was Mitchell's second wife, an erratic and unstable woman given to wild, alcohol-fueled outbursts. In September 1973 Mitchell finally left her, beginning a nasty divorce saga.

By that point, he had already resigned from the Nixon administration (in 1972), and the Watergate scandals had metastasized. Who actually ordered the infamous break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters? Rosen reckons it was White House counsel John Dean, who subsequently led "the effort to funnel hush money to the burglars and their attorneys." Dean claimed that Mitchell had given the order.

A short review cannot possibly do justice to Rosen's near-encyclopedic treatment of Watergate. He paints Mitchell as "the fall guy," whom the craven Nixon betrayed, though he admits that Mitchell participated in the cover-up and was guilty of suborning perjury. "That Mitchell played a role is indisputable; however, it is equally true that the former attorney general was, in simplest terms, framed, a casualty of a wicked alliance between coconspirators eager to tell lies and prosecutors eager to believe them." Rosen shows that Mitchell was falsely convicted of multiple offenses "largely on the strength of perjured testimony." Sentenced in February 1975, he spent 19 months in jail. Shortly before his death in 1988, Mitchell told an interviewer that he felt "the CIA was behind the whole thing."

Rosen maintains that Big John has been treated unfairly by history, and that his accomplishments (such as school desegregation) have been neglected or ignored. That may be true. But Mitchell comes across as a deeply flawed individual who both suborned and committed perjury to help a dysfunctional and criminal administration. In various forums, he lied about his role in the wiretapping of government officials and journalists between 1969 and 1971, about his knowledge of the U.S. military's spying on the Nixon White House, and about the International Telephone & Telegraph scandal (though, as Rosen notes, "the central premise" of this scandal was "unproved, if not outright refuted").

While The Strong Man doesn't answer all the questions about Watergate--some of them may never be answered--it is a magnificent piece of journalism and scholarship. However low one's opinion of Richard Nixon, that opinion will almost certainly be lower after reading this book. Revisiting the crimes and deceptions of his administration lends some much-needed perspective to our squabbles over George W. Bush.

Duncan Currie is the managing editor of The American magazine.