Short Stuff: The Gaslighting of Martha Mitchell

Summary

Summary of "Short Stuff: The Gaslighting of Martha Mitchell"

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Hosts: Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant
Episode Title: Short Stuff: The Gaslighting of Martha Mitchell
Release Date: November 20, 2024

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Introduction

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant delve into the intriguing and tumultuous life of Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of John Mitchell, who served as President Richard Nixon's Attorney General and later headed Nixon's re-election campaign during the infamous Watergate scandal.

Martha Mitchell: The Mouth of the South

Martha Mitchell, hailing from Arkansas, earned the nickname "the mouth of the South" due to her fearless nature and willingness to speak her mind publicly. Unlike many political spouses of her time who maintained a low profile, Martha thrived in the spotlight, frequently appearing on television and engaging with journalists.

Chuck Bryant [00:29]: "Martha Mitchell was from the South. She was... some argue that she was one of the first sort of conservative political pundits because she loved to go on TV... and give quotes."

Martha's outspoken demeanor made her a beloved figure among many, including President Nixon himself, who appreciated her ability to vocalize sentiments that were not commonly expressed in public.

Martha Mitchell [01:18]: "I don't believe in that no comment business. I always have a comment."

The Watergate Break-In and Its Aftermath

The Watergate scandal began with the infamous break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972. As the investigation unfolded, Martha Mitchell became a person of interest due to her close proximity to key figures involved in the Nixon administration.

Chuck Bryant [01:59]: "In June of 1972, the Watergate Building was burgled, as everyone knows... and Martha Mitchell was from Arkansas."

Recognizing the threat Martha posed—given her propensity to speak to the press and her awareness of connections between her husband and the burglary—John Mitchell orchestrated a plan to silence her.

The Attempt to Silence Martha

To prevent Martha from divulging sensitive information, John Mitchell had her detained and sedated. The methods employed were both unethical and ineffective, ultimately leading to further complications.

Chuck Bryant [06:46]: "Martha Mitchell is being held in a hotel in luxury. ...they were able to keep her away from the news... but eventually she did get a newspaper."

Despite efforts to isolate her, Martha managed to access information about the Watergate break-in, leading her to suspect her husband's involvement. Determined to uncover the truth, she reached out to the press, which incited the Nixon administration to launch a smear campaign against her.

Martha Mitchell [09:41]: "She was being held down and sedated against her will, which is nuts."

Public Accusations and the Smear Campaign

Upon her release, Martha publicly accused the Nixon administration of orchestrating the Watergate break-in and silencing her to protect their interests. In response, the administration tarnished her reputation by portraying her as unstable and prone to excessive drinking.

Chuck Bryant [10:32]: "She was held against her will, essentially kidnapped, Held against her will, and then gaslit like nobody's ever been gaslit before."

This relentless campaign aimed to discredit Martha's allegations, painting her as a delusional figure rather than acknowledging the legitimacy of her claims.

Martha Mitchell [11:10]: "The Nixon administration painted her as a kind of a crazy lady with a drinking problem."

Legacy and the Martha Mitchell Effect

Martha Mitchell's unwavering stance against the administration's deceit earned her posthumous recognition. The term "Martha Mitchell effect" was coined to describe the phenomenon where a person's accurate perceptions are dismissed as delusional, a direct reflection of the tactics used against her.

Chuck Bryant [13:09]: "She refuses to believe that her husband had... into dirty politics."

Despite the challenges she faced, Martha's courage contributed significantly to the eventual downfall of the Nixon administration. John Mitchell himself faced legal consequences, becoming the first and only U.S. Attorney General to be incarcerated.

Martha Mitchell [14:21]: "She couldn't be kept sedated forever."

Tragically, Martha Mitchell passed away in 1976, but her legacy as a truth-seeker and whistleblower endures.

Conclusion

Martha Mitchell's story is a poignant reminder of the perils faced by those who challenge powerful establishments. Her determination to speak out against wrongdoing, despite personal risks and public vilification, marks her as a significant figure in American political history.

Chuck Bryant [13:55]: "Julia Roberts made a TV show about her, so at least her story got out there in a pretty major way."

Her life not only influenced the course of the Watergate scandal but also left an indelible mark on how dissent and truth are perceived in the realm of politics.

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Notable Quotes:

• Chuck Bryant [00:29]: "Martha Mitchell was from the South... one of the first sort of conservative political pundits."
• Martha Mitchell [01:18]: "I don't believe in that no comment business. I always have a comment."
• Chuck Bryant [06:46]: "Martha Mitchell is being held in a hotel in luxury... but eventually she did get a newspaper."
• Martha Mitchell [09:41]: "She was being held down and sedated against her will, which is nuts."
• Chuck Bryant [13:55]: "Julia Roberts made a TV show about her... her story got out there in a pretty major way."

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This episode provides a comprehensive look into Martha Mitchell's role during one of the most critical periods in American political history, highlighting her resilience and the lengths to which those in power will go to suppress dissent.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, order up.

[Josh Clark]

Small Business Saturday is right around the corner, and so is that shop you've been meaning to check out on November 30th. Support your local community by shopping small on Small Business Saturday, founded by American Express.

[Martha Mitchell]

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. Started. Everybody calm down. It's Short Stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 politician spouses at the time that kept a lower profile. She loved to be on TV and talk about things. And she loved to call into journalists, maybe have a couple of bourbons and call into 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.

[Martha Mitchell]

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. Like, she wasn't just like, hey, I really like what you have to say to the papers. Way to go. When you ran into her at lunch, like 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, like you said people loved her, including Richard Nixon, who is just a fan, essentially.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 is something that Martha knows about this that could spell trouble for us. And this is that. Because it gets pretty crazy. 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 makeup and balded and changed Sean Penn as John Mitchell.

[Martha Mitchell]

Yeah. Although Sean Penn has done so many eight balls, it's possible he just looks like that now.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, Sean Pimps looks good. This guy, he looked like John Mitchell, which is to say old and bald and little tubby and.

[Martha Mitchell]

Well, so just as a spoiler, John Mitchell eventually went to prison. He's the first and only U.S. 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 was, 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 dc, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 reelection 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.

[Martha Mitchell]

Yeah. So I say we take a break and we come back and talk about Martha Mitchell's ordeal.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's do it. Sysk.

[Martha Mitchell]

You should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sysk.

[Martha Mitchell]

Josh Clark. Hey, come on in.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Thanks so much. See you soon.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Martha Mitchell]

Okay, Chuck, so Martha Mitchell is being held in a hotel in luxury. Of course, this isn't, you know, she's not like in some rundown hotel. This is a nice hotel. I'm presuming. I don't know why that matters. It does a little bit, but it's unnecessary to say, well, they didn't take.

[Chuck Bryant]

Her to like a abandoned warehouse and tired to a chair.

[Martha Mitchell]

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 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?

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Martha Mitchell]

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 sure, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And when they checked in, when they said, well, would you like the paper slid under your door every morning, sir? And they were like, oh, yeah, for sure.

[Martha Mitchell]

Right. That sounds great. Is it free? Because I don't want to pay for it, but if it's free, definitely. Can we get two?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, boy. Yeah, they didn't do it. Right, Martha. And we should say we're kind of joking here, because Martha was not 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, I was detained. I was forced into sedation. And the New York Times ran it on page 25. And the Nixon administration painted her as a kind of a crazy lady with a drinking problem.

[Martha Mitchell]

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 reelection 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. It 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?

[Chuck Bryant]

And, like, who would do that? What kind of administration would do that.

[Martha Mitchell]

What kind of husband would do that, too? Even I saw that the stuff. Stuff. The articles that they did run were run in the women's pages. I made 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right? Like gossip.

[Martha Mitchell]

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 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, she seemed like a. 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.

[Martha Mitchell]

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 you. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, let's just go ahead and call him a real scumbag.

[Martha Mitchell]

Yeah, let's.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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.

[Martha Mitchell]

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. He showed his hand and. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

We couldn't keep her sedated forever.

[Martha Mitchell]

Way to go, man. Who can you? Who can't you do?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well? Anybody? Very good.

[Martha Mitchell]

All right, well, Chuck's saying that, and I don't know what to say. So Short Stuff's out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the.

[Josh Clark]

Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.