Remembering Martha Mitchell. I believe a refresher course may have current applications...

[blondeatlast]

From the great Helen Thomas (Front Row at the White House). Helen was one of the very first reporters to take her seriously:

"Why did Martha Mitchell call you?" someone asked me after I filed my first story based on one of her many telephone calls in which she expressed her outraged a few days after the Watergate break-in.

I wasn't the only reporter she called, but I did take her seriously and I wrote about what she told me. Sometimes the stories made it to the wire and sometimes they go spiked. But Martha perhaps put the answer best herself when she told an interviewer, "Helen knows me well enough to know I'm not going to give her a line of bull. We just kind of fell into each other's arms. Several other reporters had been recommended to me, but when I talked to them they were cold fish. They were calculating, and, I thought, unwilling to stick their necks out. Helen Thomas, I knew would print the truth no matter what it cost her personally, and I wanted the truth to be known."(1)

I don't think the dust will ever entirely settle on the Watergate scandal, but I do think Martha deserves more than a footnote in its history. She should be remembered as the woman who tried to blow the whistle on what was going on, but sometimes her stories seemed so out there, it was close to impossible to get anyone to listen. However, I listened and I wrote and I'll let history decide.

I do remember her telling me early on in her time in Washington, "Politics is a dirty business," and I remember equally well a memorable remark her husband made shortly after they arrived: "Watch what we do, not what we say."

http://www.maebrussell.com/Watergate/Helen%20Thomas.html

This was a courageous--and very fun--woman. I was a budding political wonk back then, and I loved her and Helen Thomas. And they both helped topple a corrupt administration.

I'm just sayin'...

[Demeter]

1. Martha Mitchell--One of Our Founding Mothers

Founding a new path for us women and our nation. May we always walk that path.

[cosmik debris]

2. I had forgotten

Thanks for the reminder.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. Sadly, we have no Martha Mitchell today

[katmondoo]

6. John Mitchell went to jail in 1975. Who prosecuted him?

Any one know. Could the same thing happen to Gonzo?

[H2O Man]

9. He wasn't the Att Gen

at the time.

[Gman]

4. To read later

[Solly Mack]

5. "... - the truth - no matter what it cost her personally..."

sigh

If only others were not craven little pieces of debris floating about

and I don't mean just the Press either...

[kskiska]

7. "If it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell, there'd have been no Watergate."

(snip)

Dubbed “the Mouth of the South”, Martha Mitchell began contacting reporters when her husband's role in the scandal became known. At one time, Martha insisted she was held against her will in a California hotel room and sedated to keep her from making her controversial phone calls to the news media. However, because of this, she was discredited and even abandoned by most of her family, except her son Jay. Nixon aides even leaked to the press that she had a “drinking problem”. The 'Martha Mitchell effect', in which a psychiatrist mistakenly diagnoses someone's extraordinary but reasonable belief as a delusion, was later named after her. Nixon was later to tell interviewer David Frost (in September 1977 on Frost on America) “If it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell, there'd have been no Watergate.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Beall_Mitchell

[Tanuki]

8. Payback was that she was roughed up, sedated, and held incommunicado

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,914217,00.html

"When she called a reporter to describe politics as "dirty business" and to announce that she had told Mitchell to choose between their marriage and continued service to Nixon, a campaign security agent assigned to look after her ripped out the phone, had her sedated, and confined her to a hotel room."

[blondeatlast]

15. "Martha was right." If that isn't on her tombstone, it should be.

:patriot:

BTW--great obituary. I bookmarked it.

[Bitwit1234]

10. I have always thought that John Mitchell was in cohoots with

the assassination of JFK along with several other republican operatives. After JFK was killed he immediately jumped to the republican party.

[blogslut]

11. I once blogged about Martha

A few snips:

"If the phrase: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" ever applied to anybody, it applied to Martha.

Martha was a pampered, Southern Belle who married a man that eventually became both the US Attorney General and a convicted criminal. His name was John Mitchell.

From all accounts, Mitchell worshiped his jovial wife. When Richard Nixon appointed John Mitchell to be Attorney General, Martha became a media star. She had a habit of speaking her mind but John was always there to defend her. That is, until Nixon's Plumbers were arrested for breaking into the Democratic Headquarters, located in the Watergate Hotel...

<snip>

I know dirty things. I saw dirty things. I am not going to stand for all those dirty tricks that go on."

This was an exchange between Martha and her favorite reporter, Helen Thomas. Martha made a lot of phone calls to a lot of people. She had stopped being delightful and had become a liability to both her husband and to Nixon. Rumormongers spread tales of her supposed alcoholism and implied she was a negligent mother. She lost her marriage, the love of her daughter and in May, 1976 she lost her life to bone marrow cancer.

"I want to be sure my side is revealed and that people know I'm not sitting here a mental case or an alcoholic."

In March, 1974 John Mitchell was indicted for conspiring to thwart the Watergate investigation along with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson. In February of 1975, Mitchell was found guilty of obstruction of justice, conspiracy and perjury. He entered prison in 1977. He dropped dead in front of his house in 1988.

Martha Mitchell might have been a little off the beam but she was right about Watergate..."

[blondeatlast]

13. MM is a testament to what life would be like if Helen Thomas never existed.

Helen was the only reporter who took Martha seriously in the beginning.

Those were two women that truly represented a time of transition for women--the Southern belle with a real spark who would not back down--and the female, Lebanese reporter who asked a question that rolled into thumder: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

I was pretty young then, but it was the budding of my political wonkness. I would have never thought I'd see such corruption repeated on such a larger and darker scale.

[donsu]

12. back then I admired her for her courage - they treated her badly

real bad.

I'll remember her.

[King Coal]

14. I was a college freshman in 1970. In a speech class, I was assigned

to write a paper on speeches of the current era. I wrote it on the speeches of John Mitchell and the topic was how John's speeches were always about the need for wire-tapping and surveillance of the population. It was eerie. The professor, who really didn't care for me, liked my paper immensely. He was a democrat who hated Nixon. I never forgot that paper, it seemed to write itself and was a turning point in my academic career.:smoke:

[monmouth]

16. It has been said more than once she was murdered....I believe it.

[Hidden Stillness]

17. The First Moral Voice

The first time I ever heard anyone refer to "slush funds" and "laundered money" and "illegal payoffs," connected to the Nixon dirty tricks, slander campaigns against Democrats (such as Ed Muskie), and other financed illegal activities, it came from Martha Mitchell. Long before Woodward and Bernstein and Walter Cronkite on CBS, Martha Mitchell tried and tried to get the "press," as it was known then, to pay attention to what she knew. She had become more and more alarmed at the viciousness and ruthlessness of Nixon, and before she realized how much John Mitchell was also in it, she courageously sounded the alarm. Then she started to get retribution from Mitchell and all the rest of that Administration. John Dean had not even developed a conscience yet.

She was telling about these secret illegal slush funds to pay off all these shady characters, some of whom later became known as code-names such as the "plumbers" and the "Cubans," being laundered and funneled through the Republican National Party or through the Committee to Re-Elect the President, (usually correctly called CREEP), remembering that John Mitchell, aside from being Attorney General (a crook as bad as Gonzales, and a bastard as bad as Cheney), also headed CREEP, so she knew whereof she spoke. She knew, for example, that Watergate burgler James McCord was employed by CREEP. Because she was so adamant about how dangerous all these Nixon people were, how they would stop at nothing, the crimes they had probablyalready committed, etc., she was considered a kind of a nut, treated outrageously as a complete joke by an oblivious male media, and incredibly, there were "sympathetic" stories on John Mitchell for having to "put up with" this "troublesome big-mouth," etc. It is hard to overstate how shabbily she was treated--ignored and ridiculed...until the facts started to come out, and it was just exactly as she had said. They were as ruthless, and as criminal, as she had told. One thing I happened to remember a while ago: when the Nixon group, (that insane creep G. Gordon Liddy, etc.), broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist after Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, showing that Nixon had invaded Laos and Cambodia, who were not at war with us--war crimes--and the FBI started investigating the break-in, Nixon planned to blame it on George McGovern's campaign; running against Nixon that year. It was on tape; they really did stop at nothing.

From the book, "Watergate in American Memory" by Michael Schudson, a book that barely mentions her, but nonetheless, (page 37, on "The Cover-Up"): "Martha Mitchell's bodyguard prevented her from making phone calls for several days. He ripped the telephone out of the wall while Mrs. Mitchell, who had feigned sleep to get to a phone unobserved, was talking to Helen Thomas of UPI. Mrs. Mitchell, who said--not inaccurately--that she was 'being held a political prisoner,' was forcibly restrained and sedated."

Much of the earliest information and most of the earliest clues, for over a year I think, came from the lone voice of Martha Mitchell, a true hero of this whole tragic, horrible story--and she has never gotten the credit she deserved, only attack. Typical. She was also very funny, by the way.

[KAT119]

18. blondeatlast, THANK YOU for highlighting a great American Heroine!!

Have tried in vain to recall Martha Mitchell's last name until your great thread!!

Have been wondering where our next Washinton wife with a conscience and courage enough to tell the TRUTH-IS???

Was a student at G'town Univ. when I heard Martha utter her heart palpitating truths re Nixon...and was transfixed to the spot!!!

How True, what IF our Heroine Helen Thomas was not there to receive her truths???

No doubt at all that she was murdered!!

I too would have never dreamed back then that we would be right back to this Godawful Republicon evil and oppression!!

God Bless your Beautiful Spirit Martha--Eternally.... I know that you are always surrounded by choirs of Angels praising you so lovingly and unendingly....

[Cha]

19. And the bushits made it a

whole dirtier.