Robert Mueller, the quintessential G-Man, a patriot and Purple Heart recipient who spent a half-century serving the country and pursuing the highest traditions of the Justice Department across six presidential administrations, repeatedly answering the nation’s call — from Vietnam to the halls of the J. Edgar Hoover building and the halls of Main Justice — until in his final chapter of public service he was betrayed by a former colleague and the Republican Party he’d spent a lifetime supporting, died Friday. He was 81.
I’ve spent much of the last twenty years writing about Robert Mueller, both as FBI director and then as special counsel in the Russia investigation. Ironically, I came to know him — a famously reticent and spotlight-averse Washington figure — intimately in a way few journalists ever get to know a subject. (My Mueller coverage over the years is probably how many of you first came to know and read me!) I spent dozens of hours interviewing him, shadowed him through his workdays and traveled repeatedly with him across the country on the FBI director’s jet; interviewed scores of people about his history and career, including his wife, best friend, and closest aides, and wrote the closest thing that exists to a biography of him — the first of thus far four books that focus heavily on the bureau — as well as the definitive story about his time in Vietnam, which influenced the course of his life in myriad ways.
I’ve described him over the years as “America’s straightest arrow,” and while there have been several good full-length obituaries this weekend, I think looking across his career there are two stories that best illustrate who Robert Mueller was at his core.
First, there’s his time at the “Triple Nickel.”
By the early 1990s and the end of the George H.W. Bush administration, Mueller had risen to the top ranks of the Justice Department — assistant attorney general for the criminal division, overseeing all of the nation’s federal criminal prosecutions. It’s normally a terminal career role — the type of role that people then cash in and refer to for the rest of their careers. Mueller, indeed, did that for a brief moment — but he hated the private sector. (Instead of offering to defend one wrongdoer, Mueller said the defendant, then in jail, was “right where he belongs.”) After a while, Mueller called Eric Holder, then the US attorney for Washington, D.C., and asked to come back as a homicide prosecutor — it was the rough equivalent of a three-star general retiring and then asking to re-enlist as a first lieutenant.