John N. Mitchell, Principal in Watergate, Dies at 75

John N. Mitchell, the only United States attorney general to serve a prison sentence, died here yesterday after suffering a heart attack. He was 75.

Mitchell, a friend, confidant and law partner of Richard M. Nixon, became a familiar face on television screens across America in the summer of 1973 as he sparred with members and staff of the Senate Watergate Committee probing his role -- and Nixon's -- in the Watergate scandal.

But the dour, pipe-smoking Mitchell, who dead-panned his way through three days of testimony on television, gave away very little. Other former White House aides and Nixon administration officials decided to avoid the ordeal of a trial after indictment and plea-bargained with the Watergate special prosecutor. Mitchell, however, was indicted, stood trial and was convicted along with three other defendants in the Watergate cover-up trial.

Eventually, he served 19 months in a federal penal institution before being released for medical reasons. After his release, he lived quietly in Georgetown, working as a consultant, occasionally being seen in restaurants, granting no interviews.

He was the ultimate Nixon loyalist. Unlike some of his codefendants, Mitchell wrote no memoir, no kiss-and-tell insider report, no novelized version of his time in Washington. He lived according to his own code to the end of his Watergate ordeal.

Nevertheless, it was a shattering fall for a man who had once been at the top of his profession as a senior partner in a prestigious New York law firm where he made a handsome living as an influential bond lawyer.

After losing the 1962 gubernatorial race in California, Nixon moved to New York and joined Mitchell's law firm, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander and Mitchell. Mitchell quickly became a key adviser for Nixon and managed his successful presidential campaign in 1968. In a period of civil protest and turmoil growing out of the civil rights movement and dissent from the Vietnam War, Mitchell was credited with fashioning the tough law-and-order posture that swayed millions of voters to support Nixon.

It came as no surprise when Mitchell was named attorney general, and in his public pronouncements he sounded like America's top cop. Nor did he shrink from unadorned criticism of antiwar demonstrators. Before a demonstration in Washington in 1969, Mitchell described its organizers as "active militants who want to destroy some of the processes and some of the institutions of our government."

In those days, Mitchell had a fearsome reputation as a gruff, tough, no-nonsense law enforcement man with a direct line to the Oval Office. He appeared unflappable and did not raise his voice in public, but his stern manner spoke of self-assured authority. A Washington Post profile of Mitchell in 1970 by Don Oberdorfer said, "People have noticed that when Richard M. Nixon utters a declarative sentence, he often turns toward John N. Mitchell as if searching for approval or reassurance. He is without question the most powerful man in the Cabinet."

Mitchell became something of a lightning rod, along with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, for critics of the Nixon administration. And his wife Martha became notorious for her outspoken public comments on all manner of subjects but directed especially at those who criticized her husband.

In early 1972 Mitchell resigned as attorney general to become director of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

It was the 1972 Nixon reelection campaign that led to Mitchell's disgrace, and the ultimate toppling, in August 1974, of the Nixon administration. Even before assuming formal control of the Nixon campaign, according to testimony in the Watergate hearings, Mitchell had serenely listened in his Justice Department office to a proposal by G. Gordon Liddy to use prostitutes and electronic listening devices to get information from Democratic officials.