B (13:42)
In a news story announcing their impending separation, Martha was quoted as saying that her husband was a fool for choosing to shield the President. According to her biography, Martha lost respect for John because she believed he was bending to Nixon's will. I continue to reflect on the past, she said. I forage for the answer. How could a weak, insecure man, a conglomerate of nothing, manipulate and overpower a strong, confident person like John Mitchell? After John moved out, Martha attacked a portrait of him that had been hanging on the wall in their apartment. She smeared it with turpentine, Clorox, mayonnaise, and Heinz ketchup. In doing so, the Washington Post reported, Martha erased John Mitchell's face from the canvas. I learned about Martha Mitchell from a book called the Underside of the Nixon Years by journalist J. Anthony Lucas. I couldn't believe I'd never heard her story before. How was it possible, I thought, that I'd never known about this very famous woman, this political celebrity, who was married to the former Attorney General and who had tried to blow the whistle on Richard Nixon and had been sedated against her will. If you had followed Watergate as it unfolded, you would have definitely been reading about Martha Mitchell. But if your knowledge of the scandal has come mostly from the movie version of all the President's Men, you probably have no idea who she is. I realized recently that Martha Mitchell reminds me of someone, someone who has nothing to do with her or with her husband or with Watergate. Someone by the name of Anthony Scaramucci. Remember him? One of the things I cannot stand about this town is the backstabbing that goes on here, okay? Where I grew up, in the neighborhood I'm from, we're front stabbers. He was a loudmouth from Long island who became Trump's communications director for 10 days in July, during which he told a New Yorker reporter that Steve Bannon was trying to suck his own cock. Now, I want to be clear here. It's not that Martha Mitchell and Scaramucci were similar figures, and it's not even that they got talked about in the same way. It's if you've been following politics, you probably spent a lot of time thinking about the Mooch this past summer, and then he got fired, and now we've all pretty much forgotten that he ever existed. But the brief rise and rapid fall of Anthony Scaramucci was really entertaining. It also probably tells us as much about this year in politics as anything else that's happened in 2017. If historians 45 years from now want to understand the Trump administration, they could do a lot worse than taking a long, hard look at the Scaramucci era, brief as it was now, I can tell you, having spent the past two months reading old articles about the Nixon years and interviewing people who experienced those years firsthand, there are dozens of Scaramucci level stories about Watergate, stories that everyone knew at the time, but that, for whatever reason, have not been passed down in our collective memory. I think that's why hearing Martha Mitchell's story gives me such a vivid sense of what it was like to live through Watergate. It lets me inhabit that moment when no one knew what was going to happen, when the people involved didn't know, the reporters covering it didn't know. Nixon himself certainly had no idea. Imagining Martha on the phone with Helen Thomas that night in June, about to blow the lid off this thing, you can catch a glimpse of an alternative reality in which everything played out differently. What if she had managed to stay on the phone? What would she have told Helen Thomas about James McCord and John Mitchell and the Burglary. Thinking about Martha Mitchell forces us to put aside what we know about Watergate. And it lets us imagine what it felt like to find out about it in real time. How did people defend Nixon as the saga unfurled? What were the turning points? What did it feel like to absorb the daily drip of news when you didn't know what was coming next or how it was all going to end? In the process of telling that story, we'll be excavating all kinds of subplots that some of you may have forgotten and others never knew in the first place. I'll also be introducing you to more people like Martha Mitchell, people who were involved in the burglary or the COVID up or the investigation, but who have not become canonical figures along the lines of Woodward and Bernstein, Deep Throat and John Dean. Among the fascinating bit players you'll meet, he's a 79 year old populist from Texas, sort of the Elizabeth Warren of his time, who led the first congressional investigation into Watergate. You're also going to meet the Senator who, despite being a segregationist, became a liberal hero when he led the Senate Watergate hearings in the summer of 73. Then there are all of Nixon's apologists, the commentators and the politicians who stuck by the President even after it became clear that he was a criminal. You might be asking, why are we doing this now? It's not like there's some big anniversary to celebrate. And the answer is we are living at a time right now when it feels like anything could happen. It makes you wonder, if we were living through the next Watergate, would we know it? That's what I'm hoping to figure out by the time we get to the end of this story. One thing I've already figured out is that Watergate was kind of a blast to live through, at least for some people. Dick Cavett, the late night host who interviewed a slew of people involved in the Watergate saga on his show throughout 1972 and 73, told me he still thinks back on that time of his life with a great deal of wistfulness.
