Details, Details | The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

Very, Very Good Treatment of Mitchell | The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate | James Rosen

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	• The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate James Rosen Doubleday, 2008 - 640 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Pulitzer Worthy

James Rosen has written the defining biography of the Watergate era. This incredibly detailed and painstakingly researched book is worthy of a Pulitzer. Rosen's writing is eloquent, informative, and impossible to put down. His observations are spot on. Reading this reminds me very much of the late David Halberstam who was one of America's greatest authors. This book is a must have for any political junkie. Mitchell was a truly fascinating character who was without question one of the most brilliant political minds of the twentieth century. Anyone who could take Richard Nixon who had self imploded politically, and get him elected twice to the White House is worthy of serious study. Rosen has written a brilliant book about an fascinating character.

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Details, Details

This is a heavily detailed book on John Mitchell and Watergate. Not a page turner, but interesting particularly if you lived through that era. It will give you a different perspective on many of the principal characters.

Very, Very Good Treatment of Mitchell

This is a great read. It really is because it provides a much needed insight into one of the key figures of the Nixon era. Mitchell played a key role in the Nixon presidency, it can't be denied, but has been neglected by the existence of a sound biography. Rosen provides the needed insight into this figure. What one obtains from reading this book is that Mitchell was more complex than he appears in other works. For example, Mitchell stood against Nixon in some key junctions in constitutional history, as well as preventing Nixon from causing more problems. We also see how Mitchell deals with being sentenced to jail, and how he dealt with the aftermath. One also gains awareness into the fact that Dean lied, and that provided more reason to convict him with this false evidence

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The Single Best Watergate Book of All

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 because 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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A new Watergate

I was a student at the time of Watergate and this book will open your eyes. John Mitchell is shown to be a man you never really knew and if he were here with us today you would want to be associated with him.

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.