![]() ![]() Five men held her down on a bed while a doctor injected her with a tranquilliser. During their struggle, her hand smashed a window and required stitches. Martha Mitchell later accused King of assaulting, kidnapping and sedating her. She gets a little upset about politics, but she loves me and I love her and that’s what counts.” Thomas then tried John Mitchell, who casually dismissed the incident, saying of his wife: “That little sweetheart, I love her so much. They don’t want me to talk Martha Mitchell Thomas tried to call back but was told by the switchboard operator that Mitchell was “indisposed and could not talk”. From a hotel in California she phoned Helen Thomas, a journalist at United Press International, to discuss what she knew.īut 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. 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.Īfter 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. Mitchell came to know key details about Watergate largely from eavesdropping on her husband’s phone calls and meetings and looking through his papers. Photograph: Wally McNamee/Corbis/Getty Images ![]() Martha Mitchell at home with her husband, John, Nixon’s attorney general, and their daughter Marti. “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. She was in many ways the first conservative political pundit, the forerunner of outspoken voices like Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin. 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. 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”. Mitchell was a garrulous bon vivant on the Washington social scene with a penchant for drinking whisky and calling journalists late at night. 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.” “People denied that this happened to her. “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. Martha Mitchell is one of the most significant figures of the Watergate age and has been largely lost to history Garrett Graff 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. 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. 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. ![]() She had been accosted by a former FBI agent and would be forcibly tranquilized and held captive for days. But the conversation ended abruptly and Mitchell was heard shouting: “You just get away – get away!” Then the line went dead. ![]()
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