By Kimberly Voss, professor, University of Central Florida
Martha Mitchell was a major figure during Watergate – although you would not know that from much of political and journalism history. The current Starz series Gaslit features the story of Martha Mitchell – played by Julia Roberts. Martha Mitchell was an American socialite and the wife of President Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, a good friend of Nixon and head of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The Mitchells lived in the infamous Watergate building.
A fascinating figure, Martha Mitchell earned the reputation of being an outspoken media celebrity with the nickname “Martha the Mouth” and the “Mouth of the South.” She was a media darling. She would often phone female reporters with political gossip after reading her husband’s papers.
She had stories to tell. Martha Mitchell was the first person to speak about Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. (The series title was a nod to the fact that the truth she was told was treated as lies.) As John Mitchell’s wife, she was one of the most well-known Watergate whistleblowers. In the famous 1977 interview with the British journalist David Frost , Nixon said: “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have been no Watergate.”
Many have questioned why Martha Mitchell has been largely left out of the histories about Watergate. The same could be said about the women who covered Martha Michell. For example, longtime Washington reporters Vera Glaser and Malvina Stephenson became journalism partners during the presidential election night in 1968. They got information from John Mitchell and other Nixon employees. Glaser had reached out to Stephenson and suggested a joint column: Offbeat Washington. (Glaser had been the press secretary for a Republican and Stephenson had been a spokesperson for a Democrat.)
Several male reporters had teamed up for columns and they would be the first women. One of the more common sources for “Offbeat Washington” was Martha Mitchell. The Nixon administration had invited wives to cabinet meetings, as a way of reaching out to women. One wife complained to Glaser. The wife said she called Martha Mitchell to say she did not want to be part in a particular program, “but Martha is someone you don’t say ‘no’ to. Martha didn’t realize until later that her zeal for what she termed ‘helping both the country and the Administration’ wasn’t shared by everyone. She forged ahead, looking for meaningful thing the wives to do.”[i] Apparently, Nixon later became concerned. Glaser noted that an unnamed Cabinet wife that the president had turned to her husband and “completely out of the blue, in the middle of another conversation, asked, ‘What are going to do with Martha Mitchell’?”[ii]
According to Stephenson: “Martha was comparatively anonymous until our first column in October 1969, which proved her a talking doll. She would call us very early in the morning.”[iii] Glaser recalled that the pair were threatened by then-Attorney General John Mitchell, “who told us if we quoted him he’d see that we never got inside the White House or Justice Department again.[iv]
In the weeks prior to the Watergate break in, Martha Mitchell had been interviewed by reporters and anybody who would listen to her about the Republicans carrying out “dirty tricks” against the Democrats after overhearing her husband’s conversations.
Soon after the burglary, John Mitchell resigned as attorney general. Martha Mitchell gave testimony in a deposition regarding the Democratic Party‘s civil suit against the CRP. In 1975, John Mitchell was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy, He served 19 months in prison. Martha Mitchell died in 1976 at 57 years old.
The Gaslit series featured Martha Mitchell being interviewed by Winzola “Winnie” McLendon. She asked hard news questions – about Martha Mitchell being banned from Air Force One and how she felt about the Vietnam War. McLendon couches her tough questions by saying that she was reporting only from a women’s magazine – although it was a real interview. When Martha Mitchell speaks to her husband, she also defends her interview because it was just a women’s magazine.
It has been a long historical oversight for Martha Mitchell – as well as the women journalists who covered her. Instead, we too often cover the same politicians and reporters in a sort of echo chamber. It marginalizes the many women who played an overlooked part of our history. Now that Martha Mitchell has been featured, it is also time for McLendon, Glaser, Malvina Stephenson and their colleagues to be examined.
[i] Winzola McLendon, Martha: The Life of Martha Mitchell (New York: Ballantine’s, 1979), 158.
[ii] McLendon, 161.
[iii] Hoyt and Leighton, Drunk Before Noon: The Behind-The-Scenes Story of the Washington Press Corps, (New York: Prentice Hall, 1979), 193.
[iv] Hoyt and Leighton, 194.