Mueller the Marine: From War Hero to FBI Reformer to a Divisive Final Act

Robert Swan Mueller III was a blue-blood, a federal prosecutor, an FBI director, a partner at a white-shoe law firm, and a special investigator. But at his core, Mueller was — in service and in spirit — a Marine.He served in Vietnam, primarily in Quang Tri Province near the Demilitarized Zone, as a Marine platoon commander from 1968 to 1969, earning several commendations for his service. He received a Bronze Star Medal with “V” distinction for rescuing a badly wounded Marine while sustaining heavy fire from the North Vietnamese Army. He earned a Purple Heart after rushing to the aid of his platoon, who had just been ambushed by the NVA. Mueller sustained a gunshot wound to the thigh. The Navy commendation for Mueller praised him for having “resolutely maintained his position and, ably directing the fire of his platoon, was instrumental in defeating the North Vietnamese Army force” — all while being severely wounded.In his later years, when he steered the FBI out of the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks — a national tragedy that occurred just a week into his new job — he kept things in perspective: horrible as those attacks were, he was still “getting a lot more sleep than I ever did in Vietnam.” “That’s what we do in the Marine Corps,” a retired FBI assistant deputy director and former Marine, Scott Nelson, tells the Sun.“We know what the mission is, and we do it, and we overcome great odds,” Mr. Nelson, himself a decorated Vietnam veteran who won a Purple Heart for taking shrapnel from an RPG while leading a platoon of Marines during the Tet Offensive, adds. Both Mr. Nelson and Mueller were among a generation of Vietnam veterans, like former assistant director in charge James Kallstrom, who shared more than battle wounds and the kind of FBI careers that would be the stuff of legend. The men were exposed to Agent Orange, a tactical herbicide used by the U.S. military to destroy crops, but which caused long-term health effects. One such condition: Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative brain disorder that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has linked to exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam and Korea. Kallstrom died in 2021 of blood cancer, the result of exposure to Agent Orange, according to his obituary. Mr. Nelson was recently diagnosed with preclinical Parkinson’s, which he says is from exposure to Agent Orange during his tours of duty in Vietnam.Mueller, who died Friday at the age of 81, had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease as of 2021, although his family did not specify the cause of death. There has been no established connection between Mueller’s Parkinson’s condition and any potential exposure to Agent Orange during his time in Vietnam.“In the Marine Corps, as a platoon commander, he fought like hell and was wounded. When he came to the FBI, he fought like hell,” Mr. Nelson says.“But Bob Mueller then failed as a special counsel,” he adds.Indeed, Mueller, one of the longest-serving directors in FBI history, second only to J. Edgar Hoover, will be remembered as much for his valor on the battlefield and his ambitious transformation of the FBI as he will be for his third act as a special counsel in charge of the Justice Department’s investigation into alleged ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Mueller’s investigation did not find sufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy, although it concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election “in sweeping and systematic fashion.”“The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed,” Mueller told lawmakers in 2019 (Mr. Trump would later assert that the investigation, which he frequently called a “witch hunt,” had exonerated him). Six people were charged as a result of Mueller’s investigation, including ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser and retired general Michael Flynn, and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. None of the charges against those men in Mr. Trump’s orbit involved a conspiracy with Russia. Mr. Trump later pardoned the men — including Messrs. Manafort, Flynn, and Stone — all of whom had refused to cooperate with Mueller.On Saturday, Mr. Trump, long angered by the special counsel probe and the imprisonment of his associates, shed no tears for Mueller’s passing.“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” Mr. Trump posted on social media. “He can no longer hurt innocent people!”The law firm WilmerHale, where Mueller was once a partner, confirmed his death Saturday. His family had moved him to a senior living facility in Virginia in 2021 after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease that same year, the Washington Post reported.After Mueller’s Parkinson’s diagnosis was made public, Mr. Nelson wondered whether the former FBI director should have overseen the “Russiagate” investigation in the first place. “Bob Mueller served his country so well in Vietnam and so well following 9/11, only to fall into his morass of dementia and partisanship, and then to be followed by James Comey, who was a snake in the grass,” Mr. Nelson adds.Mueller was the son of a DuPont executive and a product of elite, East Coast academia: St. Paul’s for prep school, Princeton University for his bachelor’s degree, NYU for his master’s, University of Virginia for his law degree At St. Paul’s — a boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire — he excelled at soccer, lacrosse, and hockey and would become captain of all three teams. It was his love of hockey that lured him from Princeton, New Jersey, to St. Paul’s in 1958.“All I cared about was putting on my skates and going to the rinks,” Mueller told the St. Paul’s Alumni Horae in 2015. Among his hockey teammates was a future secretary of state, John F. Kerry. One St. Paul’s classmate, Maxwell King, described Mueller as the embodiment of “the muscular Christian” archetype. The school’s required church attendance —” Chapel every day and twice on Sunday,” he remembered in 2015 — would instill in him an appreciation for religion, one that he would turn to while serving in Vietnam. After graduating from the UVA in 1973, Mueller worked as a federal prosecutor in San Francisco, moved to Boston, and eventually transitioned to private practice. He joined the Justice Department in Washington in 1989.There, he ran the criminal division, where he oversaw the prosecution of former Panamanian military dictator Manuel Noriega and the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to be the FBI’s sixth director in 2001 and was sworn in on September 4th. One week later, the nation was hit by a series of coordinated attacks, orchestrated by the terrorist group Al Qaeda, that destroyed the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, making it the deadliest attack on U.S. soil.A retired FBI assistant director, Office of Public Affairs, Michael P. Kortan, was with Mueller during his first week in office, seeing Mueller go from a “logical, fluid introduction as director” to a battle-ready leader. “He had to shift his focus in a hurry to leading this organization forward,” Mr. Kortan tells the Sun. At the FBI’s headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover Building that morning, as the September 11th attacks unfolded, Mueller abandoned his director’s suite on the seventh floor and relocated his office to the FBI’s Strategic Operations Center two floors below. Within moments, Mueller had gone from a relative outsider to being the de facto leader faced with leading a massive organization in preventing the next big terror attack. “He just emerged as a leader, without question,” Mr. Kortan tells the Sun.In the days following September 11, the attacks presented for the FBI both an existential crisis and an urgent need for reform.While presenting Mr. Bush with updates on the progress of the investigation, like the identities of the hijackers and identifying Al Qaeda’s financing of the attacks, the president replied, “that’s all great, Bob. But I want to know what you’re doing to make sure another attack doesn’t happen,” Mr. Kortan recalls.Mueller had to transform what had been a “majority criminal investigative agency” into a domestic intelligence-gathering organization.“Both in Washington and certainly in New York, the issue became whether the bureau was equipped to deal with terrorism and prevent what occurred on 9/11,” a retired assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York office, Lewis Schiliro, tells the Sun. “Mueller accepted it as a state of transition. That’s not to say that the FBI wasn’t operating in a counter-terrorism mode, but it wasn’t to the extent that it needed to,” Mr. Schiliro adds. Mueller, Mr. Kortan remembers, became a “student of corporate change.” He devoured corporate case studies and business management books by CEOs like General Electric’s Jack Welch. He brought in outsiders from corporate America to tap into their expertise on corporate transformation.It was as though Mueller was looking “at a different business model, a transformation to be more responsive to the present,” Mr. Kortan.Mueller himself recognized the bureau had to “focus on long-term, strategic change.” That included upgrading its technology and forming new international alliances. An estimated 2,000 agents were transferred from the criminal division to work on national security. When Mueller’s ten-year term was set to end on September 4, 2011, President Barack Obama convinced him to remain in the role for an additional two years, which the Senate approved 100-0. “He has impeccable law enforcement and national security credentials, a relentless commitment to the rule of law, unquestionable integrity and independence, and a steady hand that has guided the Bureau as it confronts our most serious threats,” Mr. Obama said in a statement in 2011.But many agents saw Mueller’s corporate transformation of the bureau as having come at the expense of actual investigative work. Yes, he had transformed the FBI’s DNA. But, in Mr. Nelson’s estimation, Mueller’s successor, James Comey, used Mueller’s intelligence framework to “weaponize the FBI into a partisan political machine.”Current FBI Director Kash Patel has shifted the FBI’s focus towards what he calls “crushing violent crime,” an approach his supporters say has yielded considerable results. But the Trump Administration’s push for accountability from Justice Department prosecutors and FBI officials for what the president has described as partisan misconduct has led to the departure of thousands of experienced agents, through a combination of firings and resignations. These departing agents have taken with them decades of counterterrorism and national security knowledge that Mueller himself once prioritized, for better or for worse. While Mueller may be remembered by the public as the stern and stoic G-man, forever in a tie, starched shirt, and blue suit, Mr. Kortan insists that beneath the steely facade was a genuine heart.“He had an incredible, sincere warmth and caring about him that most people probably didn’t get a chance to see,” Mr. Kortan tells the Sun. “That’s the man I remember.”

Mueller the Marine: From War Hero to FBI Reformer to a Divisive Final Act

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