The Administration: Nixon's Heavyweight

"I've found the man," Richard Nixon told his personal staff in 1967. "I've found the heavyweight!" The President was not, of course, speaking of sport but of politics, and his eye was not on the scales. Two years later, John Mitchell, the Attorney General, is still the heavyweight in Nixon's hierarchy, although to many outsiders he seems more like the heavy. Dour, taciturn, formidably efficient, Mitchell comes across to liberals and civil libertarians as a hard-lining prosecutor with all the human graces of the Sheriff of Nottingham.

The tough image is not...

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