The phone call came five days after the Watergate break-in. Martha Mitchell began telling a reporter that she would leave her husband, former US attorney general John Mitchell, if he did not quit the “dirty business” of politics.
But the conversation ended abruptly and Mitchell was heard shouting: “You just get away – get away!” Then the line went dead. She had been accosted by a former FBI agent and would be forcibly tranquilized and held captive for days.
Mitchell would also see her reputation destroyed by loyalists to the then president, Richard Nixon, because of what she knew about Watergate – dooming her to become one of the hidden figures of the biggest political scandal of the 20th century.
That is now about to change. The 1970s celebrity socialite will next month be played by the Hollywood actor Julia Roberts in Gaslit, an eight-part TV drama co-starring Sean Penn as John Mitchell and Dan Stevens as the White House counsel, John Dean.
The series on America’s Starz network – riding a wave of books, exhibitions and films marking the 50th anniversary of the break‐in and burglary of the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate complex – illuminates the mostly forgotten role of a woman who paid a tragic price for trying to raise the alarm about Nixon’s skulduggery.
“She was kidnapped, sedated, drugged,” said Kate Clarke Lemay, a historian at Washington’s Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which features a Time magazine cover image of Mitchell in its Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue exhibition. “People denied that this happened to her. In today’s phrase, they gaslit her, they called her crazy, they used that age-old reference for women as hysterical … She was the whistleblower and we respect her today.”
Mitchell was a garrulous bon vivant on the Washington social scene with a penchant for drinking whisky and calling journalists late at night. Born in Arkansas, she earned the nickname “the Mouth of the South”, while the New York Times once called her “the most talked about, talkative woman in Washington”.
Garrett Graff, author of the recently published Watergate: A New History, said: “Martha Mitchell is one of the most significant figures of the Watergate age and has been largely lost to history for most of the intervening 50 years. She was in many ways the first conservative political pundit, the forerunner of outspoken voices like Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin.
“During the Nixon administration, she was the second most in-demand figure for Republican events after the president himself and was this larger-than-life, colourful, outspoken woman in Washington at a time when most cabinet wives were seen, not heard.”
Mitchell came to know key details about Watergate largely from eavesdropping on her husband’s phone calls and meetings and looking through his papers. John Mitchell, Nixon’s most trusted adviser and former attorney general, had taken charge of the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP) and authorized the Watergate break-in on 17 June 1972.
After the burglars were caught red-handed, Martha Mitchell was astonished to learn that the CRP’s security director, James McCord, a former CIA officer who had worked as her personal security guard, was among those arrested. From a hotel in California she phoned Helen Thomas, a journalist at United Press International, to discuss what she knew.
But the conversation was cut short when an ex-FBI agent, Steve King, instructed by John Mitchell to keep his wife away from the media, yanked the phone out of the wall. Thomas tried to call back but was told by the switchboard operator that Mitchell was “indisposed and could not talk”.
Thomas then tried John Mitchell, who casually dismissed the incident, saying of his wife: “That little sweetheart, I love her so much. She gets a little upset about politics, but she loves me and I love her and that’s what counts.”
Martha Mitchell later accused King of assaulting, kidnapping and sedating her. During their struggle, her hand smashed a window and required stitches. Five men held her down on a bed while a doctor injected her with a tranquilliser. In 1975 McCord admitted “basically the woman was kidnapped”.
When Mitchell returned to Washington, she told Thomas: “I’m black and blue. They don’t want me to talk.” But the media paid relatively little attention and Nixon loyalists, desperate to conceal the White House’s role in the break-in, set about discrediting her as a say-anything alcoholic and therefore unreliable witness.
Graff said: “Polite Washington shrugged and saw her as this figure worthy of ridicule, not sympathy, and so she was not taken seriously in either her allegations about her own treatment or about her warnings about the behavior of the Nixon administration writ large and the Nixon campaign specifically.”
“Her husband basically told everyone that she was mentally unwell and an alcoholic and not to put too much stock in her. She was one of the first voices to try to warn the country about the corruption at the centre of the Nixon administration and was really laughed at.”
Mitchell’s candor made her popular with reporters before Watergate. Sally Quinn, an author and journalist, talked to her many times. She recalled: “She said exactly what she thought all the time and was very clever and very witty and very smart.
“She realized right away the crowd she was traveling in and she didn’t like it. She put up with it for a while and then she just kind of thought, ‘I can’t do this any more’, and she started speaking out.
“They had to figure out a way to deal with her so what they did was they said she was crazy. She wasn’t crazy. It turns out because she was right: they locked her in a room, they kidnapped her. When they did what they did to her, you realize she really wasn’t crazy at all.”
John Mitchell resigned from the CRP soon after the break-in and it transpired that he had controlled a political slush fund used for gathering intelligence on Democrats. He eventually served 19 months in a federal prison for his part in the cover-up – the first former attorney general to be convicted of a crime.
Without saying goodbye, he had walked out on Mitchell in 1973 and they never spoke again. According to a biography of her by Winzola McLendon, she took his portrait from the wall and “with turpentine and such kitchen supplies as SOS pads, Ajax, Clorox, mayonnaise and Heinz catsup, Martha erased John Mitchell’s face from the canvas”.
Martha Mitchell called for Nixon’s resignation as early as May 1973; the president was eventually forced to step down in August 1974. Nixon later told interviewer David Frost: “I’m convinced if it hadn’t been for Martha – and God rest her soul, because she in her heart was a good person. She just had a mental and emotional problem that nobody knew about. If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate.”
Mitchell died of bone marrow cancer in 1976 at the age of 57. Quinn commented: “She’s an absolute tragedy. One of the Washington people who end up being just ground up and spat out, and she had a tragic ending. She wasn’t crazy. She was brave. She called it like she saw it and and she paid for it.”
Half a century on, Watergate lore is dominated by men such as Nixon, John Mitchell, journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, and FBI whistleblower Mark Felt, known as “Deep Throat”. Notably the film All the President’s Men features the Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee, but not the publisher, Katharine Graham (an oversight corrected by Steven Spielberg’s The Post).
But efforts to rescue Mitchell’s reputation have been growing in recent years. She featured in Slate’s Slow Burn podcast on Watergate – the first episode, Martha, told “the story of a woman who knew too much” – and is the subject of a new short documentary film on Netflix entitled The Martha Mitchell Effect.
Patton Oswalt, an actor and comedian who plays the Nixon hatchet man Charles Colson in Gaslit, said: “The Watergate scandal was always looked at as oh, it was a huge challenge to democracy and to America but it was taken down and defended by noble journalists, and certainly Woodward and Bernstein did their job and Deep Throat certainly acted his conscience.
“But the fact that a major part of it was just a very troubled marriage by a fascinatingly complex woman – history always becomes richer as you go further and further down the line, newer and newer details about what actually went down. This is just an aspect of that.”
