Mitchell, George (1933 - )

Genre: Non-Fiction

George J. Mitchell was born and raised in Waterville, ME. He attended the local public schools, graduated from Bowdoin College (1954), Georgetown University Law Center (1960) and serviced in the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps in Berlin, Germany (1954-1956). He was admitted to the bars of both the District of Columbia and Maine, and practiced in Portland, as well as acted as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D. C. (1960-1962). He was executive assistant to Senator Edmund S. Muskie (1962-1965), assistant county attorney for Cumberland County, U.S. Attorney for Maine, U.S. District Judge for Maine and appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1980 as a Democrat to replace Muskie after his resignation. He was elected to that office in his own right in 1982 and served until 1995, as Senate majority leader from 1989-1995. He was also Special Advisor to the President and the Secretary of State for Economic Initiatives in Ireland (1995-2000), chairman, Sharm el-Sheikh International Fact-Finding Committee to examine the crisis in the Middle East (2000-2001), was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1999), and appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as Special Envoy for Middle East Peace (2009 - ). For his work in Northern Ireland, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace and invested as an Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE). He also acted as Chairman of the Board of the Disney Corporation from 2004-2007 and led the Major League Baseball's investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs by their players (2006). He now lives in Washington, D. C.

Select Bibliography

• Men of Zeal: A Candid Inside Story of the Iran-Contra Hearings (with William S. Cohen) (1988)
• World on Fire: Saving an Endangered Earth (1991)
• Not for America Alone: The Triumph of Democracy and the Fall of Communism (1997)
• Making Peace (1999)
• The negotiator: A Memoir (2015)