chorus of the Watergate drama – sounding her
warnings to all who would hear”.
But Martha was also learning the extent
of her husband’s complicity in Watergate, and
within their vast apartment their marriage was
collapsing. According to the Slow Burn podcast
that inspired Gaslit, “Martha told John that
he had to choose between his family and his
president – which is to say, he had to turn on
Nixon and save himself, or else.”
A source told Woodward and Bernstein,
“Martha yells at him all day long that he
ought to take every damn one of them down,
including Nixon. Anything he knows about
the president being involved, though, he’s
keeping to himself.”
Mitchell was indicted but refused to plea
bargain. Testifying before the Senate
Watergate committee, he refused to
incriminate Nixon. That September, he left
Martha without even saying goodbye. She told
People magazine that he took with him not
only their 13-year-old daughter, but also their
maid, chauffeur and her Rolodex file of
telephone numbers.
She said he was “a fool for choosing to
shield the president”, and that her marital
problems had begun when he “fell into the
clutches of the king [Nixon]”. According to
Winzola McLendon, her biographer, she
took down his portrait and using “turpentine
and such kitchen supplies as cleaning pads,
Ajax, Clorox... erased John Mitchell’s face
from the canvas”.
They never spoke again, although she
sued him (successfully) for alimony and
(unsuccessfully) for custody of their daughter.
He was later convicted of conspiracy,
perjury and obstruction of justice, and served
19 months in prison. “It could have been a
lot worse,” he quipped. “They could have
sentenced me to spend the rest of my life
with Martha Mitchell.”Martha enjoyed some vindication when
Nixon resigned in disgrace in August 1974.
Six months later, she enjoyed more when
McCord, by then convicted for the Watergate
break-in, confirmed that she had been held
against her will.
“Martha’s story is true. Basically the woman
was kidnapped... They kept her locked up,” he
told an interviewer. There had been “a great
effort in the White House to discredit Martha
Mitchell... They were extremely jealous of her
and feared her because she was very candid.”
But by then her life was imploding. She was
diagnosed with multiple myeloma. She was
alienated from her family. She was broke. She
was “drunk almost as often as she was sober”,The Washington Post reported, and her few
remaining friends had to dissuade her from
suicide. She died alone in a New York hospital
in May 1976.
The following year, Nixon, who had been
pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford,
blamed her for his fall from grace.
“If it hadn’t been for Martha, there would
have been no Watergate because John wasn’t
minding the store,” he told David Frost. “He
was practically out of his mind about Martha
in the spring of 1972. He was letting Magruder
[Jeb Stuart Magruder, Creep’s deputy director]
and all these boys, these kids, these nuts run
this thing. The point of the matter is that if
John had been watching that store, Watergate
would never have happened.”
Martha Mitchell was buried in Pine Bluff.
An anonymous well-wisher sent an
arrangement of white chrysanthemums to
her funeral that spelt the words “Martha was
right”. Within a few years, her sad tale was
almost forgotten except, curiously, in the
psychiatric world. There, the process whereby
a patient’s truthful description of a bizarre
event is dismissed as delusional became
known as the Martha Mitchell effect. nGaslit premieres on StarzPlay on Prime Video
on April 24