20 The Times Magazine
Thursday she managed to call her favourite
journalist, Helen Thomas of the UPI wire
service, and said she had “given John an
ultimatum”. She would leave him unless he
quit the “dirty business” of politics. She was
“sick and tired of the whole operation”.
Before Thomas could quiz her further, she
heard Martha shout, “You just get away – get
away.” Then the phone went dead. When
Thomas called the hotel operator, she was told
Martha was “indisposed”. When she called
Mitchell, he dismissed her concerns. “That
little sweetheart,” he said. “She gets a little
upset about politics, but she loves me and
I love her and that’s what counts.”
Martha was not seen again until she
appeared at a New York country club the
following weekend with severe bruising on
her arms. She told Thomas, “I’m not going to
stand for all the dirty things that go on. If you
could see me, you wouldn’t believe it. I’m
black and blue... They don’t want me to talk.”
She said King (whom President Trump
appointed ambassador to the Czech Republic
in 2017) had yanked the phone cord from its
socket. She was then locked in her room and
physically restrained when she tried to escape
from her balcony. The following day, she
sought to escape again, put her hand through
a glass door during a scuffle, and required six
stitches. Finally, she was pinned to her bed
by five men as a doctor forcibly sedated her.
Martha’s story should have caused uproar.
It did not. New York’s Daily News ran the story
under the headline “I’m a prisoner of the
GOP”, but The New York Times relegated it to
page 25 without mentioning Watergate. Other
publications put it on their women’s or social
pages. “Editors thought it was just another
case of Martha being Martha and newsworthy
only because it revealed a rift in a very public
marriage,” Thomas wrote in her memoirs.
Nixon loyalists simultaneously launched a
vicious smear campaign to discredit Mitchell,
portraying her as a mentally fragile woman
who drank too much.
“Everyone knows that Mrs Mitchell has
her private, personal problems... She can be
perfectly charming and then at other times- especially at night – she is not herself,” said
one anonymous official. Another claimed that
“the pressure has taken a toll on Martha’s
nerves, that she has a severe personal
problem”. The Washington Star reported,
“Republicans, in the highest places, have been
inferring that Mrs Mitchell has had a nervous
breakdown.”
Mitchell complained that the White House
“treated me abominably, half-crucified me”.
But the dirt stuck, not least because she did
drink and was a bit zany.
Two weeks after the Watergate break-in, John
Mitchell accepted his wife’s ultimatum. Heresigned from Creep and the Mitchells moved
into a 14-room apartment on Manhattan’s
Fifth Avenue that he dubbed the “Taj Mahal”.
That November, Nixon was re-elected in
a landslide, but by then The Washington Post’s
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had learnt
of Mitchell’s slush fund. When Bernstein
asked him about it, Mitchell famously told
him, “Katie Graham [the Post’s owner] is
gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer
if that’s ever published.”
As the scandal deepened in early 1973 and
Mitchell’s role came under increasing scrutiny
from congressional and federal investigators,
Martha staunchly defended her husband.
She complained to The New York Times
that he was being made “the goat” for the
whole affair, and she was “not going to let
that happen”.
Long before other public figures, she
demanded Nixon resign, telling an impromptu
news conference on 5th Avenue, “John
Mitchell was the honest one in the whole
lousy bunch. And who do you think he’s been
protecting?” Asked to clarify, she replied,
“Mr President.”
She told UPI that her husband was deeply
depressed and reclusive. Of Nixon she said,
“He bleeds people. He draws every drop of
blood and then drops them from a cliff. He’ll
blame any person he can put his foot on.”
Bob Woodward described her as “the Greek