18 The Times Magazine

veryone knows the story of the

Watergate scandal: the botched

break-in at the Democratic

National Committee’s headquarters

50 years ago this June, the White

House cover-up and President

Nixon’s resignation. But who

remembers the scandal’s most

extraordinary sub-plot, the

kidnapping and public trashing of

Martha Mitchell, the feisty and outspoken wife

of Nixon’s attorney-general, by White House

henchmen intent on silencing her?

Martha sensed very early that Nixon and

his aides were engaged in “dirty tricks” to

secure the president’s re-election in 1972. She

sought to alert journalists to what would

become the 20th century’s greatest political

scandal. Had she been taken seriously, the

cover-up might never have happened and

Nixon might have survived. But she was not.

The media swallowed the White House

line that she was mentally unstable and an

alcoholic. Her marriage broke up. Her life

unravelled. Within four years she had died of

cancer – alone, impoverished and aged just 57.

Martha soon became a forgotten victim of

the Watergate scandal, and of the misogyny

of that era. But not any longer. The tragic

story of Watergate’s first whistleblower, the

forerunner of the much better-known “Deep

Throat”, is about to be resurrected in Gaslit, a

television series that retells the scandal using

her as the central character. She is played by

Julia Roberts, her husband by Sean Penn.

It has taken half a century, but this flawed

but brave and honest woman can finally,

posthumously, expect a degree of rehabilitation.

Nothing about Martha’s upbringing suggested

future celebrity. She was born in 1918 in Pine

Bluff, a small town in Arkansas. Her father

was a cotton broker, her mother was an

elocution coach.

A teacher at Pine Bluff High School,

perhaps unaware that Martha was dyslexic,

said she had “a good mind when she used it

• but she never used it. She was a pretty,
  happy, empty-headed little girl.”
  She graduated from the University of
  Miami. Her parents refused to let her become

an actress. She taught briefly before returning

to Pine Bluff to work as a secretary at an

army base. In 1945 her boss transferred to

Washington DC and took her with him.

There she met and married Clyde Jennings,

an army officer who became a travelling

salesman after the war. They moved to New

York and had a son, Jay, before divorcing in

1957. Soon afterwards, she met John Mitchell,
      a former torpedo boat commander who was
      by then a wealthy lawyer. They married,
      settled in the affluent New York suburb of
      Rye, and had a daughter, Marty.
      Nine years later, John Mitchell met Nixon,
      a former US vice-president, when their law
      firms merged. They became close friends.
      In 1968 Mitchell chaired Nixon’s successful
      presidential campaign and was appointed
      attorney-general. The family moved to
      Washington where Martha soon became well
      known as a feisty, fun-loving, tart-tongued,
      attention-seeking socialite who made gossipy
      late-night telephone calls to reporters from
      her swanky Watergate apartment.
      She called anti-Vietnam demonstrators
      “communists”. She lobbied senators’ wives
      to persuade their husbands to support a
      controversial Supreme Court nominee. She
      refused to curtsy to the Queen, saying “an
      PREVIOUS SPREAD AND THIS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES American citizen should not bow to foreign

E

She was ‘the Mouth of

the South’. Nixon called

her ‘spunky’ when her

targets were liberals

Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell in Gaslit