Perhaps, as the author suggests, Mitchell was “framed” by underlings scrambling for a plea bargain, in that he probably didn’t specifically know of and/or agree to the break-in at DNC headquarters . Never the less, I still consider John Mitchell the number one culprit in the Watergate affair for the simple reason that he was supposed to be the “grownup in charge”.

On January 17, 1972, when Jeb Magruder and John Dean trouped into his office with a certifiable lunatic in tow, John Mitchell, Attorney General of the United States, had the opportunity and the responsibility to quash the greatest political scandal of our lifetime. If he had been half the man he was presumed to be, the meeting would have gone something like this: About two minutes into G. Gordon Liddy’s spiel, Mitchell would have raised his hand to halt the presentation, picked up the phone and called security to have Liddy escorted from the premises; then he would have rounded on the two “jackass kids”, as Nixon later referred to them, and read them the riot act!

That would have been the end of “Watergate”, and Rosen, along with Woodward & Bernstein and many others, would have had to write about something else.