The Watergate whistleblower who was ridiculed |
'I believe Mr Nixon knew all along': The tragic story of Martha Mitchell - the Watergate whistleblower who was ridiculed
Martha Mitchell was a flamboyant Washington DC socialite whose husband was embroiled in the Watergate scandal. Her shocking claims of a violent abduction and a "dirty business" were ridiculed as delusional – until they turned out to be true.
Martha Mitchell was a character; everyone agreed on that. Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1918, she emerged as a flamboyant, charismatic Washington socialite after the appointment of her second husband, John Mitchell, to the Nixon White House.
She liked a drink, and sometimes liked to follow those drinks with gossipy late-night phone calls to reporters. Her outsized personality and presence earned her the nickname "Washington's Other Martha". Her candidness saw her nicknamed "the Mouth of the South".
Warning: This article contains language that some may find offensive.
But in 1972, as her husband was embroiled in the Watergate scandal and she became, in the words of the reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, "the Greek chorus of the […] drama, sounding her warnings to all who would hear", Martha's eccentricities were turned against her.
She was dismissed as a drunk, a fantasist and a self-publicist, even as the broad truth of her claims of a "dirty business" became clear.
Her more specific and lurid accusations – of a violent abduction by Nixon associates, of being held hostage and drugged – only enhanced her status as a seemingly unreliable witness. "The whole thing is incredible," she acknowledged to David Frost in a September 1974 BBC TV interview. "It's like reading a James Bond novel. You can't believe it. I can't believe what's happened to me."
Years after her death, Harvard psychologist Brendan Maher used her name to describe a psychological phenomenon: the Martha Mitchell effect, wherein a patient's outlandish but real experiences are misdiagnosed as delusions. But it wasn't until recently that the significance of her Watergate interventions, erratic and self-interested though they sometimes were, started to be properly acknowledged.
In 1977, Richard Nixon had told David Frost that "if it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell, there'd have been no Watergate". He meant that her unpredictable behaviour had caused his close ally John Mitchell to take his eye off the ball. In reality, she came close to exposing the entire criminal enterprise before a cover up could even begin.
Martha Beall grew up in a small town, the only child of well-to-do parents. A one-time aspiring actress, she was known as talkative and headstrong. She studied at the University of Arkansas and later at the University of Miami. Upon graduation, after a short stint as a schoolteacher, she got a job as receptionist to the general of the Pine Bluff Arsenal, transferred with him to Washington DC, and there met and married an Army captain.
After Martha's husband's discharge, the couple moved to New York where they eventually divorced after 11 years of marriage. A few months later, Martha married again, this time to wealthy Manhattan lawyer John Mitchell. And 11 years after that she found herself back in DC, a resident of the exclusive Watergate apartment complex as the wife of the Attorney General of the United States.
In Washington, Martha established herself as a gregarious and enthusiastic partygoer with a distinctive sense of style, "the most colourful" of the Nixon cabinet wives, according to a contemporary New York Times report. She soon became known as the most outspoken and indiscreet, too, telling a TV reporter in November 1969 that anti-Vietnam war protests reminded her husband of the Russian Revolution and earning national notoriety in........