Same Cloth
Now that our president’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, has become full-time attorney general, it is not the first time an unqualified, corrupt presidential crony ascended to that particular throne.
In 1969, Richard Nixon appointed John Mitchell to become attorney general by requesting that then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover not conduct the normal background checks required. Nixon knew.
Mitchell stayed in the position until 1972 when he resigned to become Nixon campaign manager, a role he had played in 1968. Like Blanche is today, Mitchell was a totally cool dude. He played a central role in attempting to covertly sabotage the 1968 Paris Peace Accords that could have ended the Vietnam War. He also believed his buddy Nixon’s “law and order” political platform justified restrictions on individual civil liberties.
He advocated the use of wiretaps without court orders and supported the efforts of police to detain criminal suspects without due process. He brought conspiracy charges against critics of the Vietnam War, likening them to Nazi “brown shirts.”
Talk about the pot calling the shirt brown. Sound familiar?
To top it all off, Mitchell was reluctant to involve his Justice Department in civil rights cases, maintaining that the Department was purely “a law enforcement agency, not the place to carry forth a program aimed at curing society’s ills.” He also said to antiwar activists, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
Mitchell was a fun guy to be around and was eventually undone by two women—his second wife, Martha, who was prone to disagree with him and his boss in conversations with the press, and Katherine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, which made public the Pentagon Papers, a top secret history of the war. The Post was Nixon’s and Mitchell’s crown of thorns throughout the Watergate scandal.
Though Trump’s cult is more stubborn than Nixon’s, they are cut from the same cloth and will come to the same demise, having taken fat chunks out of American democracy. If it survives, we will be lucky as hell, and with no thanks to Mitchell and Blanche.
Craig J. Corsini
San Rafael
