As sympathetic and well-argued a defense as Mitchell could have hoped for.
A Fox News political correspondent examines the life and legal travails of Nixon’s attorney general, the highest-ranking cabinet member ever to be convicted of criminal charges and imprisoned.
Thirty-five years ago, ITT lobbyist Dita Beard, fugitive financier Robert Vesco and E. Howard Hunt and the White House “plumbers” were infamous for the possibility that their wrongdoing, loosely grouped under the Watergate heading, reached into the highest levels of the Nixon administration. The president’s men proved only too willing to deflect any lawbreaking onto the darkly brooding, former attorney general, John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s ostensible friend, law partner and campaign manager. By doing so, they hoped to satisfy the press and prosecutors with the sacrifice of, in Nixon’s Domestic Policy Advisor John Erlichman’s memorable phrase, “The Big Enchilada.” If the supporting cast of wrongdoers has receded into history, so too has Mitchell. He’s remembered today for his stewardship at the Justice Department, where his law-and-order crackdown essentially destroyed the New Left, and for his marriage to the alcoholic, severely disturbed Martha Mitchell, whose late-night phone calls to Washington reporters defending her husband and assailing Nixon allowed the press to cast her as a “truth-teller,” a heroine of the sordid Watergate affair. As for Mitchell himself, Rosen never quite persuades us that he was, in fact, a warm, witty, genial man, forced to play the role of tough cop and archconservative, a public image demanded by Nixon, responding to the turbulent times. Instead, Rosen’s Mitchell possesses all the charm and charisma normally associated with a municipal-bond lawyer, albeit a tremendously successful one. More convincingly, Rosen takes us through the tangled, manifold legal charges Mitchell weathered, demonstrating that the attorney general, while not wholly innocent, stood only on the periphery of the Nixon administration’s criminality. He instigated little—White House Counsel John Dean is this story’s villain—short-circuited many of the wilder schemes hatched around Nixon and ended up jailed for perjury and obstruction of justice, all in a misguided attempt to protect the presidency. Maybe Mitchell never “controlled” a secret fund dedicated to spying on the Democrats, but his deliciously vulgar reply to reporter Carl Bernstein’s late-night phone call levying the charge underscores the era’s low tenor. Referring to the Washington Post publisher, Mitchell responded, “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big, fat wringer if that’s published.”
As sympathetic and well-argued a defense as Mitchell could have hoped for.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-50864-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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