Et Tu, Al?

John Mitchell biographer James Rosen (shown here) gives high marks to Leak, in which Max Holland argues that Bob Woodward's most famous secret source, Mark Felt, wanted Richard Nixon to make him FBI director so he would plug his own leaks. Rosen has two demurs:

[S]ome wobbly columns in the Deep Throat temple Leak inexplicably lets stand. “Felt was much too busy and prominent a man to circle page 20 of Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times . . . or monitor the movement of a red-flagged flower pot on the balcony of Woodward’s apartment,” Holland notes. Such chores, he shrugs, “were probably entrusted to reliable [FBI] agents.” Who, exactly — and why haven’t they been identified? Perhaps, alternatively, Holland is wrong to accept Woodward’s statements about this signaling system.

Likewise, Holland describes in detail Deep Throat’s “last great leak”: the accurate disclosure to Woodward, in November 1973, that the Nixon tapes contained a deliberate erasure. Felt had been forced out of the FBI five months earlier, in June 1973, and the existence of the “tape gap,” a rather recent development, was a secret held closely by President Nixon, his secretary Rose Woods and only a few White House intimates and attorneys; so how could Felt have been in a position to tell Woodward about it?

Holland ignores this problem. The only logical conclusion — especially since other Nixon-era officials, like Alexander Haig, Donald Santarelli, and Robert F. Bennett, are known to have served as sources for Woodward — is that “Deep Throat” was more than just Mark Felt. Holland’s unusual silence on this point suggests his otherwise indefatigable research turned up no other satisfactory answer.

Put another way, how many FBI agents does it actually take to overthrow an elected president, and who inside the White House may have helped them, and why? Rosen says that the records Bob Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, have opened so far don't add much to the picture. But as I wrote last April, when Woodward visited the Nixon library:

He said that when he and Bernstein open more reporting files from their second book, The Final Days, people will be surprised to find that one of Nixon's intimates was especially helpful, having concluded by late 1972 that he was doomed.

Hardly Fulsom Praise

Good for the Boston Globe. It recruited John Mitchell biographer James Rosen (left) to review Don Fulsom's Nixon's Darkest Secrets, which recycled Anthony Summers' false wife-beating charges and proposed that Nixon (the straightest, squarest person in history) was gay. He calls it "the most virulently hateful book about the 37th president ever written -- and the worst." Amen.

Clapping For A Seal

One important (though sometimes overlooked) Watergate scholar says Richard Nixon's 1975 grand jury testimony should remain closed at least until John Dean is dead:

[N]ot all Nixon historians support release of his testimony. James Rosen, author of "The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate," says not enough time has passed as it had in the Hiss case when the main figures were long dead.

"In this case, President Nixon's chief accuser — John Dean — remains very much alive," said Rosen, a correspondent for Fox News. "The court should wait until all participants in Watergate have died before making public the testimony that President Nixon gave willingly and with the assurance that it would, like all grand jury testimony, remain sealed."

Doth The Grey Bell Finally Toll For Dean?

A few scholars and writers -- James Hougan, Len Colodny, Joan Hoff, Jonathan Aitken, and James Rosen -- have challenged the conventional wisdom about Watergate, especially the role of White House counsel John Dean. Some even assert Dean covered up the Watergate break-in to obscure his own crimes, not President Nixon's.

Among Dean's friends and boosters is scholar Stanley Kutler, whose 1997 book Abuse of Power contains transcripts which he seemed to edit to make it appear that Mr. Nixon had known in advance about the September 1971 break-in by the White House Plumbers at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. When I challenged Kutler an "American Spectator" article, he corrected the most egregiously misleading passage in the paperback edition.

Elsewhere on the tapes, the President is heard telling aides that someone should "buck up" GOP senator Howard Baker. In Abuse of Power, Kutler used a different consonant at the beginning of the word "buck." In my "Spectator" article, I wrote that anyone who'd spent much time with RN knew his preoccupation with making sure discouraged allies and aides were bucked up. In this case, Kutler didn't take my advice, and so the unspoken expletive remains, along with the spoken ones, in Abuse of Power. The Ellsberg break-in reference, though, was far more important, and Kutler deserves credit for having changed it.

His wasn't the only counterfeit smoking gun. In his 2008 book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein misconstrued a secondary source to make it appear as though the President had approved the Ellsberg break-in. It's a vital nuance, because if the President had known of illegal activity by the Plumbers, his Watergate-related statements and actions in June 1972 appear in a darker light. Although we pointed out Perlstein's error at The New Nixon in July 2008, he never addressed it, though he replied to many of our other posts about his book. To be fair, I don't know if he has dealt with it in the paperback edition, as Kutler did.

Kutler's Watergate scholarship and his personal friendship with Dean are receiving new and surprising attention today in the New York Times, which describes an article about Kutler's work that scholar Peter Klingman has submitted to the prestigious "American Historical Review":

[L[ongtime critics of his transcripts say Mr. Kutler deliberately edited the tapes in ways that painted a more benign portrait of a central figure in the drama, the conspirator-turned-star-witness, John W. Dean III, the White House counsel who told Nixon that Watergate had become a “cancer” on his presidency.

Oddly, we don't know whether Klingman's article will even be published. Nor is it immediately clear how the controversy ended up in the paper. In my experience, Times articles and even editorials about Nixonian archival questions have something of the immaculate conception about them. One day, they're just there. Why is the poor man's peer review being performed in public?

Such mysteries abound when it comes to the accusations that periodically swirl around John Dean. His role as the repentant, whistle-blowing hero seems to be so important to the prevailing Watergate narrative that alternative theories not only aren't investigated, they're essentially aborted. The most recent example is the odd decision by the Times itself not to review James Rosen's full-scale, carefully researched biography of former attorney general John Mitchell, The Strong Man, which raises many questions about Dean as well as the opportunistic actions of Watergate prosecutors.

The paper's decision on the Rosen book makes its coverage of Klingman's journal article especially intriguing. Perhaps someone hoped a well-timed Times article would be a Saturday afternoon massacre deterring the "American Historical Review" from saying yes. That possibility seems unlikely in view of this comment in the article by the respected former supervisory archivist in charge of the Nixon tapes, Fred Graboske:

“In the history profession, you never change the original evidence; Dr. Kutler has changed the original evidence,” said Mr. Graboske, who learned of the disparities six months ago.

“I spent 12 years listening to the tapes,” he said, contending that no one could mistake the evening and morning recordings as being part of the same conversation. “I don’t know why he did it, but what he did was deliberate.”

He added: “I did work with Stanley. I’m sorry that it has come to this.”

James Rosen's Inconvenient Truths

This post was first published at The New Nixon on June 17, 2008.


James Rosen, backstage at the Nixon library

Seventeen years in the writing, the product of 250 interviews and his painstaking study of records no other journalist or historian has ever seen (or evidently asked to see), James Rosen’s just-published The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Doubleday), which brims with new information about Watergate, ought to be the political junkie event of the season. Before a crowd of 70 at the Nixon Library this evening, the Fox News Washington correspondent and first-time author talked about the years after President Nixon’s resignation when journalists were desperately hungry for new revelations, especially that hoped-for tape or document that would explain the Cold War era’s greatest political scandal once and for all.

So using the Freedom of Information Act, Rosen dug deep for those new revelations. He was the first to see all the records of the Watergate special prosecutor and the transcripts of the Senate Watergate committee’s executive sessions. “Now I stand here able to talk about Watergate with a breadth and depth unequaled by any other human being,” he said with a wry smile, “and no one wants to talk about it anymore.”

Nor, it seems, review it. Though Rosen has written the only biography of the only attorney general in American history to do time, the New York Times still hasn’t found the time to review The Strong Man. It’s not that it contains no smoking guns. But it may be that some would prefer if Rosen had found somebody else’s fingerprints on the triggers. “What did the special prosecutor know and when did he know it?”, one of Rosen’s key questions, may not be of pivotal interest to the Times, even though Rosen demonstrates conclusively that ambitious prosecutors deep-sixed evidence that tended to undermine the cases they were making against Mitchell and the President.

Even more inconveniently, Rosen concludes that not Mitchell but former White House counsel John Dean, now a darling of the left for his Bush- and conservative-bashing books, is the most likely author of the Watergate break-in, which occurred 36 years ago tonight. Dean has called Rosen’s findings “pathetic,” and he and Mrs. Dean have denied any connection with the lurid story about a Washington prostitution ring that lies behind the revisionist theory of the genesis of the Watergate break-in first proffered in the early 1990s by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in their book Silent Coup.

Yet the fact remains, Rosen said tonight, that the only information gleaned from the Watergate bugs came from a phone in the office of a functionary responsible for looking after visiting Democratic state and county chairmen. The conversation was mostly about sex. Nothing was picked up from the phone of Democratic national chairman Larry O’Brien, accepted by history as the target of the bugging because of the White House’s preoccupation with his links to industrialist Howard Hughes. O’Brien’s phone was completely out of reach of the line-of-sight bugs, and O’Brien was known to be out of town for most of the three weeks the bugs were in place.

Meanwhile, back at the White House, Dean put a bug in the President’s ear to say that Mitchell supported a coverup even though Dean and Mitchell had evidently not even discussed the matter.

Seemingly not bugged by the relative lack of attention being paid to The Strong Man, at least so far, is its patient, methodical, quietly brilliant author. As it happens, Rick Perlstein’s much more convenient Nixonland has ended up being the Nixon book of the hour. It received a front-page review in the Times Sunday book review, and by George Will, no less, thus putting RN in his accustomed position of being simultaneously hammered and with equal ardor by ideologues of the left and right.

Edged out by Perlstein, Rosen is biding his time. Recently dubbed the funniest celebrity in Washington, Rosen — in his opening remarks and then in conversation with Nixon Library director Tim Naftali — enlivened his account of long-ago events with dead-on impersonations of President Nixon and General Mitchell. His George W. Bush is great, too. But behind Rosen’s affability is skill, will, and not a not inconsiderable measure of heart. In the mid-1980s, as a college student on Staten Island who became fascinated with the Nixon era, he realized that the author of RN’s 1968 campaign victory deserved a biography of his own. He got to know Mitchell and came to admire him for his largely unheralded accomplishments ranging from civil rights to law and order.

Rosen concludes in his book that Mitchell was guilty of only one of the ten offenses with which he was charged by prosecutors. You would think this would attract a line or two from the newspaper of record that once devoted millions of words to Mitchell and Watergate. TNN is complaining, but Rosen isn’t. It appears his greatest regret is that William F. Buckley, Jr., who gave encouragement and support to the young author in the early 1990s, didn’t live to receive an inscribed copy of The Strong Man. This sense of obligation to a mentor is a deeply impressive thing, as is Rosen’s command of the massive detail and literature of the complex scandal. The Strong Man is here now, and its equally formidable author isn’t going away.