"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 without foundation. To fight crime in the District of Columbia, Mitchell has advocated preventive detention for some suspects, a formula of uncertain constitutionality that would allow judges to withhold bail from men with criminal records. In the battle against organized crime and subversion, he has contended that the Justice Department should have far greater control than it now has to conduct wiretaps and plant electronic bugs (see THE LAW). To combat the narcotics traffic, he urged adoption last week of a national "no-knock" law that would empower federal agents to break into a suspect's house, unannounced and unidentified, so that the occupants would not have time to destroy evidence.
Rejection on the Hill. In the area of civil rights, a prime concern for any Attorney General, Mitchell, Nixon's campaign director and chief architect of his celebrated Southern strategy, has created the impression that he is trying to placate the white South. He is credited with the recent decision to ease school-desegregation guidelines. He was responsible for drafting the Administration's voting rights bill, which would have done away with the current law in favor of a much weaker measure — and was unceremoniously rejected by the House Judiciary Committee last week. On Capitol Hill, Mitchell has earned a reputation for being brusque and undiplomatic.
Questioned by TIME, some of the most distinguished law professors were almost entirely negative in their comments on the new Attorney General. "It seems," said Berkeley's Sanford Kadish, "as if the department sees the values of the Bill of Rights as no more than obstacles to be overcome. There seems to be a single-minded effort to cut the crime rate, with little sense of the constraints of the Constitution." Some of Mitchell's critics also complain that his background as a Wall Street expert on municipal bonds—about as far removed from criminal practice or civil rights as a lawyer can get—was not the best preparation for the Government's chief legal office.