John Mitchell served as Attorney General during President Richard Nixon's first term, until early 1972, when he resigned to assume charge of the President's re-election campaign. During these three years he was the most influential member of the administration, concerning himself not only with the work of the Justice Department, but also with the whole range of foreign and domestic policy. As Attorney General, he was regarded as a staunch “law and order” advocate, favoring wiretapping, capital punishment, “no-knock” searches, and other liberalized police procedures. Mitchell was later found guilty of participating in the Nixon administration's cover-up of the Watergate scandal; after his conviction, Mitchell served a short term in federal prison. One of the primary concerns of his office from 1969 to 1971 was the pervasive campus unrest, sometimes erupting into violence, that was triggered by the antiwar protest. On May 1, 1969, Attorney General Mitchell addressed himself to this issue in a Law Day speech delivered to the Detroit (Michigan) Bar Association. Portions of his remarks are reprinted here.
Source:
Congressional Record, 91 Cong., 1 Session, May 13, 1969.
Campus disorders are basically a local problem to be solved at the local level
and not by the federal government. But as Attorney General—as the senior
law enforcement officer in the nation—I believe that I have the responsibility
to comment on national problems which affect the administration of justice
even though my legal jurisdiction may be limited.
I also come to you tonight as a fellow citizen, as a parent with two children recently graduated from college and as a grandfather concerned about the future.
An eminent Nobel laureate said last month in Boston: “What we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure it has a future.” I disagree with that assessment.
I suggest that this generation has the most promising future world of any generation of Americans.
But I must pose to them the query of Mr. Justice Holmes:
“Behind every scheme to make the world over lies the question, what kind of world do you want?”
What kind of world do our students want? Do our university officials want? Do our teachers want? Do our citizens want? And I must remind you that when we talk about our students we are not talking about an alien people—we are talking about our own sons and daughters and about the type of nation we are making for them to inherit.
Let me quote briefly to you a capsulized dispatch issued by the Associated Press at 10:15 a.m. EST on April 24:
Washington—Student militants seize buildings at American University
and George Washington University.
Ithaca—Cornell University faculty members agree to demands of students
who seized college buildings armed with guns.
Kent, Ohio—Kent college students create physical disturbances.
New Orleans—Southern University students lower the American flag.
Cambridge—Harvard professor resigns in the wake of police-student clash.
Princeton—Sixty students block doorways to a research facility.
New York—One hundred-fifty students and faculty stage a sit-in at Fordham
University.
College Park, Maryland—University of Maryland protestors attempt to block
entry to a science center.
New York—Two Brooklyn high schools forced to close after three days of
student unrest.
That is one day of what kind of world some of our students have. In the current
academic year, there have been demonstrations on over 200 college campuses
throughout the nation. This has resulted in more than 2300 arrests and property
damage in excess of an estimated $2.2 million.
Since January 1, 1969, the protest movement has escalated its tactics. For example, in the State of California:
At San Francisco State a bomb permanently blinded one student and a second bomb was discovered before it exploded.
At Pomona College in Claremont, a secretary was blinded in one eye and lost two fingers when a bomb exploded as she was removing it from a college mailbox.
At the University of California in Santa Barbara, a custodian at the Faculty Club died from burns when he picked up a firebomb.
At Berkeley, in the last eight months, there have been four arsons and two bombings, and $1.1 million in property damage.
This Administration has tried to be patient in the hope that students, faculty, and local officials, working together, would put an end to this chaos.
But the time has come for an end to patience. The time has come for us to demand, in the strongest possible terms, that university officials, local law enforcement agencies and local courts apply the law.
I call for an end to minority tyranny on the nation's campuses and for the immediate reestablishment of civil peace and the protection of individual rights.
If arrests must be made, then arrests there should be. If violators must be prosecuted, then prosecutions there should be.
It is no admission of defeat, as some may claim, to use reasonable physical force to eliminate physical force. The price of civil tranquillity cannot be paid by submission to violence and terror. …
The right to express disagreement with the acts of constituted authority is one of our fundamental freedoms. The First Amendment expressly protects “the freedom of speech” and “of the press” and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and petition the Government for a redress of grievance.” …
But there are definite limits beyond which these First Amendment guarantees may not be carried.
The Supreme Court has flatly rejected the argument “that people who want to propagandize protests or views have a constitutional right to do so whenever and however they please.” …
In any honest discussion on student protests, one must meet the claim that civil disobedience is an accepted tradition in American society.
This is especially true among our student population who claim that their seizures of university buildings and imprisonment of university officials are legitimate acts of civil disobedience similar to their participation in the civil rights protests.
I disagree. First: traditionally, civil disobedience has involved an issue of universal or fundamental morality—such as the equality of the races. No such issue has been involved in the current student protests.
Second: organized disobedience in the civil rights movement has rarely involved violence or bloodshed. It has concentrated, rather, on non-violence and on symbolic action which offered no substantial deprivation of rights to anyone else. One can hardly equate a sit-in at a bus terminal with throwing a student out of a second-story window.
Third: in this country, the historical key to civil disobedience has been its amenability to arrest and prosecution. Indeed, it has always been considered, as Thoreau told Emerson, that the moral righteousness of breaking a law was in the punishment that the law meted out.
Today's militants also reject that concept. They physically resist arrest and they are unwilling to submit the merits of their cause to any tribunal other than their own self-determination.
Having defined the problem, I feel obligated to offer a few suggestions on what can and should be done to resolve it.
My jurisdiction, as you well know, is limited to the application of federal law. Our concept has always been that, unless we in the federal government have a clear mandate, we permit the states and the municipalities to deal with law enforcement problems. The clearest mandate we have, so far, is the anti-riot provisions of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. It prohibits persons from crossing state lines with intent to incite riots.
We have substantial information confirming the widely accepted belief that several major university disturbances have been incited by members of a small core of professional militants who make it their tragic occupation to convert peaceable student dissatisfaction into violence and confrontation.
These circumstances can only lead to the conclusion that this hard core is bent on the destruction of our universities and not on their improvement.
You can be assured that these violence-prone militants will be prosecuted to the full extent of our federal laws.
We are also collecting a great deal of information about student disorders and those who cause them.
We are offering this information to state and local law enforcement officials operating in jurisdictions where campus disorders may occur.
No society, including an academic society, can survive without basic agreement by a great majority of its members as to the fundamental precepts upon which it operates.
Let me be specific: University officials are not law enforcement experts or judges. When a violent outbreak occurs, they should not take it upon themselves to decide how long the violence should endure and what rights should be trampled upon until local government is called in. For minor demonstrations, which involve no serious disruptions, the university should have the viability to decide for itself what the best solution may be.
But when people may be injured, when personal property may be destroyed, and
when chaos begins, the university official only aids lawlessness by procrastination
and negotiation. The university is not an extraterritorial community and its
officials have the obligation to protect the rights of the peaceful students
on its campus by use of the established local law enforcement agencies and
the courts.