Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Gaslighting of Martha Mitchell

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon's Attorney General, was well-known to spread a juicy rumor. That's why when Watergate unfolded, she was held captive in a hotel room on her husband's orders and painted as a crazy alcoholic. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us and that's okay because we're doing short stuff so let's get started everybody. Calm down, it's short stuff. That's right. We're going to talk about Martha Mitchell, who was the wife of John Mitchell in the 1970s, who was Nixon's attorney general for a time.

And Martha Mitchell was from the South. She was a, some argue that she was one of the first sort of conservative political pundits because she loved to go on TV, not like a lot of politicians spouses at the time that kept a lower profile. She loved to be on TV and talk about things and she loved to call in to journalists, maybe have a couple of bourbons and call in to journalists and give quotes and you think like, oh boy, this sounds like trouble. Eventually it could have been, but they loved her. Nixon loved her because she went out there and said the things that not a lot of people were saying in public at the time that he loved.

Yeah, I saw that she was known as the mouth of the south. She was from Arkansas. And one of her quotes was, I don't believe in that no comment business. I always have a comment. That was basically her guiding ethos, her ethos. One of the two. And she was huge at the time. She wasn't just like, hey, I really like what you have

to say to the paper's way to go when you ran into her at lunch. In 1970, during the election, if you went to a Republican fundraiser, there was a really good chance that she would be speaking there. Like you said, people loved her, including Richard Nixon, who was just a fan, essentially.

Yeah, for sure. In June of 1972, the Watergate building was burgled, as everyone knows. And Nixon and his inner circle were like, we didn't have anything to do with this. I don't know what you guys are talking about. And then one of them said, hold on a minute. There's something that Martha knows about this that could spell trouble for us. And this is that story because it gets pretty crazy.

Yeah. So crazy that there was a series in 2022, was it a series or a show? I think it was a series called Gaslit, starring Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell and a very heavily makeuped and balded and changed Sean Penn as John Mitchell. Yeah, although Sean Penn has done so many eight balls,

it's possible he just looks like that now. Oh, no, Sean Pimps looks good, this guy. He looked like John Mitchell, which is to say, old and bald and a little tubby. And well, so just as a spoiler, John Mitchell eventually went to prison. He's the first and only US Attorney General to go serve time in federal prison.

That's how badly this went for him. But at the time, after the Watergate break-in, when the Nixon campaign, because he stopped being Attorney General for Nixon and became the head of Nixon's re-election campaign, he ran the committee to re-elect the president, the CRP, everyone else on the planet called it creep instead. And so he was running that. So at the time, right after the Watergate break-in, when they were still denying, denying, denying, you can't prove anything, and he realized that his wife would definitely call the press if she got the chance, he hatched a plan to keep her from doing that.

And like you said, it takes a crazy turn and it's about here where it does because he and Martha, John and Martha, were at a fundraiser in California at the time with Governor Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. And they were, that's when the news of Watergate broke, essentially. So John Mitchell flew back to D.C. but he said, Martha, stay here. And then he talked to some other guys and he said, essentially, make sure Martha stays

here. Keep her away from the newspaper and do not let her call anybody. That's right. And the big, big reason that they were worried about her was not just because she liked to talk to the press, but it was because one of the people caught in the Watergate burglary and arrested was a guy named James McCord. He was a security director for the re-election committee for Nixon and had a very close tie to that family because when her husband quit the attorney general position

to become head of that committee for reelection, she lost her secret service protection and he got none other than James McCord to be her private personal bodyguard. So if you can add one and two together as Martha Mitchell, you would know if you knew James McCord was caught breaking into the Watergate that it probably had something to do with the Nixon campaign. Yeah. So I say we take a break and we come back and talk about Martha Mitchell's ordeal.

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Well, they didn't take her to like an abandoned warehouse and tie her to a chair. Oh, great, great. Thank you for saving me. And apparently for a little while they did, they were able to keep her away from the news. I mean, this is a time when there was no such thing as 24 hour news networks and you had to physically get your hands on a newspaper to read the news

a lot of times. But eventually she did get a newspaper and she did read about the Watergate break-in and she did read that James McCord, her former bodyguard, was one of the people arrested and she did read that James McCord, her former bodyguard, was one of the people arrested and she did put two and two together and say, I can't believe this but my husband and probably Richard Nixon directed the Watergate break-in, who can I call?

That's right. She was pretty mad about the fact that she was being kept in the dark. Obviously very frustrated, just watched that trailer at least with Julia Roberts. And it got kind of hairy in there, so she starts fuming a little bit and causing a bit of a commotion. I'm not sure if it happened exactly this way, but in the TV show she called from a bathroom phone, like hotels have bathroom phones sometimes, right there by the toilet. And one of these guys, you know, quote-unquote safeguarding her was an ex-FBI agent named Steve King, burst into the bathroom, ripped the phone out of the wall. She was talking to Helen Thomas of UPI, one of her favorite reporters that she liked to talk to.

And Helen Thomas hears the line go dead, tries to get back in touch, and then eventually calls John, the husband, who said, that little sweetheart, I love her so much. She gets a little upset about politics, but she loves me and I love her and that's what counts. When all along what had happened is that Martha was physically tackled and injected with a tranquilizer. Yeah, by a doctor, but still, she was being held down and sedated against her will, which is nuts. Again, under the direction of her husband. Yeah, I mean, it's better than some FBI agent doing it, but a little.

I guess so. I do have a huge criticism of this operation though, Chuck. I don't condone what they did to her, but if they were going to do it, there was a huge step that they missed, which is rent a second hotel room and get rid of all of the phones in the hotel room that Martha Mitchell's being kept in.

And if John Mitchell wanted to get in touch with her, he could call the other hotel room, and then they could relay whatever message they needed. That was just Bush League amateur stuff, leaving any phone in there, if one of the directives was to keep her away from the phone. Yeah, and when they checked in, when they said, well, would you like the paper

slid under your door every morning, sir? And they're like, oh yeah, for sure. Right, that sounds great. Is it free? Because I don't want to pay for it, Well, would you like the paper slit under your door every morning, sir? And they're like, oh yeah, for sure. Right. That sounds great. Is it, is it free? Cause I don't want to pay for it, but if it's free, definitely. Can we get two? Oh boy. Yeah.

They didn't do it right. Uh, Martha and we should say we're kind of joking here cause Martha was not, um, injured or anything like that, but she was held against her will, essentially kidnapped, held against her will and then gaslit like nobody's ever been gaslit before. Because she eventually was set free. She went right to the press and said, you know, I was detained, I was forced into sedation. And the New York Times ran it on page 25, and the Nixon painted her as a kind of a crazy lady with a drinking problem. Yeah, I mean very much so.

As a matter of fact, their smear campaign was so far-reaching that when John Mitchell resigned from being the head of Nixon's re-election committee, he said that he needed to spend or wanted to spend more time with his wife and daughter. The Nixon campaign leaked to the press that the real reason he left was because Martha had a drinking problem that was unstable and needed basically constant attention from her husband, which just supported the whole idea that she was just off her rocker talking about being held against her will and sedated. What is this lady even saying?

And like who would do that? What kind of administration would do that? What kind of husband would do that too? You know, and I saw that the stuff, the articles that they did run were run in the women's pages. I mean, scare quotes, but that's what they were at the time,

like women's interest stuff. And the way that they ran it was essentially not like, can you believe what happened to this woman? It's, hey, get a load of this. These two are a famous married couple and there's trouble in paradise. Right, like gossip. Yeah, so this poor lady got dragged through the mud. And we know for a fact that this actually happened

because later on, James McCord, her former bodyguard who was involved in the Watergate break-in, he confirmed it. He said this absolutely happened to her break-in, he confirmed it. He said this absolutely happened to her. In 1975, he confirmed it. But one of the first things she did was to call on Nixon to resign. She's like, you were involved in Watergate, you need to step down. And all Nixon did was turn the heat up on the smear campaign against her.

Yeah. I mean, she seemed like a very, like she may have been into gossip, but she seemed like a very principled conservative because she, you know, she didn't like this dirty business from Nixon. No, that was huge. She was also a very loyal spouse to the end. She refused to believe that her husband had, you know, dreamed this up and that he essentially was dragged into it and had been led astray into dirty politics,

like you said. So much so that she testified on his behalf at his federal trial. And yet he still was like, thanks a lot, Martha. See ya. I'm walking out on you. And if you weren't like, wow, this guy's a real jerk already, he gave a quote to the press after he was sentenced to 17 or 18 months in prison. And he said, hey, it could have been worse.

They could have sentenced me to the rest of my life with Martha. Oh, God. Can you imagine? And she's, this lady's alive for, to hear this, to hear her husband say this about her after being that loyal to him, you know, and mistaking who he was for so long.

Yeah, let's just go ahead and call him a real scumbag. Yeah, let's. I feel good about that. So Martha, like you said, her husband served 19 months in prison after walking out on Martha and their daughter in 1973. And later on, Martha, this gaslighting would actually become a term, the Martha Mitchell effect, because of what happened to her, which is a misinterpretation of a person's justified belief as a delusion. Very sadly, she died of cancer in 1976, just a couple of years after Nixon left office.

And yeah, and Julia Roberts made a TV show about her. So at least her story got out there in a pretty major way, you know? Yeah, and a few years after Nixon resigned, he gave an interview, and he tried to drag her through the mud a little more, but ultimately, he showed his hand, and he kind of paid backhanded tribute to her by saying if it hadn't been for Martha,

there never would have been a Watergate. Like he never would have been caught because he could have just kept denying, denying, denying. If you do that enough, you can get away with anything. And that was Nixon's plan and Martha under undermined that big time. We couldn't keep her sedated forever. Way to go, man. Who can you, who can't you do? Well, anybody very good. Alright, well Chuck's saying that and I don't know what to say, so short stuff's out.

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