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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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