Talk:John N. Mitchell

Having read two books that reveal some hidden aspects of Watergate, instead of its received official version ("Secret Agenda" by Jim Hougan and "Silent Coup" by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin"), I tend to think that John Mitchell was one of the biggest victims of Watergate, rather than one of its culprits. What I find especially baffling about the congressional "investigations" of the affair is the ease with which supposedly talented and experienced people accepted at face value those testimonies that tended to implicate the President of the United States or the Committe to Re-Elect the President in Watergate, without bothering to check if these testimonies were in any way self-serving (as they certainly were in the cases of John Dean and James McCord, at least). Thus Mitchell, as head of CRP (later labelled CREEP by the media)was made one of the culprits.

Finally, it is not strictly true that John Mitchell was the first Attorney-General of The United States to be sentenced to prison, for the very simple reason that he had resigned that position to become Richard Nixon' campaign manager, and it was in his tenure in that job that the Watergate break-in occurred.

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