When times get tough, George Mitchell has become the international go-to guy. Just ask Major League Baseball.

George Mitchell oozes understated gravitas, which is why he is in such demand; it would seem that there just aren’t enough wise men to go around. So since his retirement from politics, the former Senate majority leader from Maine with the judicial demeanor has been drafted to broker peace for Northern Ireland, assess the extent of baseball’s steroid addiction and oversee a contentious CEO succession at Disney, among other delicate assignments.

We caught up with Mitchell at the Manhattan offices of the world’s largest law firm, DLA Piper, which he presides over as board chairman. He spends the bulk of his time in New York these days, and that allows him to transcend the more provincial Washington realm of former-lawmakers-turned-lobbyists.

Watch George Mitchell as he discusses his role as a superdelegate and all of the political positioning that the position entails.

But regardless of where you find him, remaining a universally admired statesman is no easy task when you have to engage in the grubby day-to-day world of business. Mitchell was under a great deal of fire as the chairman of Disney’s board, when shareholder activists accused him of being too close to CEO Michael Eisner.

Mitchell presided over the much-questioned selection of Robert Iger, Eisner’s top lieutenant, to become the new Disney boss in 2005. “That turned out pretty well,” Mitchell said, referring to the company’s stellar performance since. “But no matter what you do, you’re going to get some criticism.”

Mitchell’s father was the orphaned son of immigrants from Ireland; his mother was an immigrant from Lebanon. Neither was educated. Mitchell graduated from Maine’s Bowdoin College at age 20 thanks to the ROTC program.

Months after, he found himself on his first airplane trip, headed for army counterintelligence work in Berlin from 1954 to 1956. The Wall had yet to go up, but the city was a veritable spy chessboard; the Cold War’s epicenter conjured up scenes from a John le Carré or Graham Greene thriller.

“That was one of the best jobs I ever had,” Mitchell recalled whimsically. Part of his duties entailed sorting through refugees from the East to identify sleeper agents coming in or people with the potential to be turned into Western spies.

In later years, Mitchell would write about the end of the Cold War in Not For America Alone: The Triumph of Democracy and The Fall of Communism, one of his four books. “It was a system that operated contrary to human nature,” he said.

Once the Wall went up, he knew it was only a matter of time before it would come down. “No conflict is irresolvable,” he maintained, “because they are all created, conducted and sustained by human beings.”

That was also the theme of his acceptance speech when he was awarded the highest civilian honor in this country—the Medal of Freedom—for brokering the Irish peace accords.
Watch George Mitchell speak about the “prestige” of politics.Mitchell was asked in 1996 by the governments of Northern Ireland and Britain to chair the negotiations. He got high marks from all parties for his patience and perseverance over the course of the ensuing two years, listening to all grievances and finally cajoling the sides to agree to a deal that ended decades of conflict.

Is he equally confident about the ability of reasonable people to bring an end to conflicts like the ongoing war on terror? “Well, I am not utopian about this. Conflicts end when people are made to accept that the course they are engaged in is not the means to achieve their goals.” Each discrete conflict can and will be resolved, only to be succeeded by another, new conflict.
Watch George Mitchell explain his experiences in World War II and how key moments shaped his life.Mitchell attended Georgetown Law School after his time in Berlin and worked as a federal prosecutor before going to work for his political mentor, Sen. Edmund Muskie. Before entering the Senate in 1980, Mitchell also served as a federal judge for a year. “Not long enough to ever be reversed,” he joked.

His report on steroid addiction for Major League baseball—which was released last December and named more than 80 ballplayers—allowed him to reprise his roles of prosecutor and judge.

Mitchell, an ardent Red Sox fan (and club director), was often named as a potential league commissioner. He said he had an inkling in the beginning that writing his report would be a challenging task. “I knew it would be difficult, because I lacked any authority to compel cooperation.”

In the end, he felt he was able to cull enough information to accurately portray what had happened and why.

Mitchell, now 74, left the Senate in 1995, after serving as majority leader for six years (he was reelected in 1989 with a mind-boggling 81 percent of the vote).

He decries how poisoned the atmosphere in Washington has become since his departure. He disagreed on most issues with his Republican counterpart Bob Dole, the minority leader, but in six years “we never had a harsh word for each other in public or private.”

As a former Senate majority leader, Mitchell will be one of the Democratic Party’s 794 superdelegates at this summer’s convention. He has not yet committed to either Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama, but it’s widely known, he said, that he has a close relationship with the Clintons. So he isn’t being wooed as aggressively as some other superdelegates.

When asked if he thinks it would be acceptable for these insider superdelegates to hand the nomination to a candidate who may not be leading in the race from the primary contests, Mitchell got cagey. “It would be acceptable to those on the prevailing side and not acceptable to those on the losing side…Isn’t that the nature of the political process?”

Pressed if there should even be superdelegates, Mitchell demurred that there are many aspects of the nominating process that could be revisited, and that he wouldn’t single one out. He said he has long-favored a more rational calendar of primaries, of the kind that routinely gets suggested by earnest blue-ribbon commissions only to be disregarded by states eager to jump near the front of the line.

Mitchell’s work has spanned so many different arenas, and he is so widely respected as a politician—voted the “most respected Senator” six years running—that when asked if there was some job he wished he’d had the chance to hold, he mentioned one that was actually offered to him. “President Clinton offered me a seat on the Supreme Court,” which he would have loved to take. But he declined, as he was so immersed in the effort to pass landmark health care legislation.

“I thought we had a realistic chance of getting it done,” he said, as wistfully as he does when talking about Berlin.