14 April 2006
Back in the issue of 31 March, I stated that the practice of addressing the US attorney general as general dated to the Clinton administration. Hugh Rawson has written me with an antedating of the term to the Nixon administration and Attorney General John Mitchell. In his book Blind Ambition, John Dean quotes G. Gordon Liddy as saying to Mitchell on 27 January 1972, "Now, General, this operation will be equipped with its own operational arm."
