This woman was held hostage and drugged because she knew too much about Watergate Nixon’s goons made Martha Mitchell the subject of a sexist smear campaign
Inthe summer of 1972, Martha Mitchell was on the telephone in her hotel room in Newport Beach, California, when a security guard for President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign walked over and yanked the cord out of the wall. According to Mitchell, for the next 24 hours, the guard, who was working on orders from her husband, former attorney general John Mitchell, refused to let her leave. Every time she tried to escape, the guard caught her. Later she recounted, “From then on I saw no one — allowed no food — and literally kept a prisoner.” At more than one point, things got physical. Mitchell said that the guard, Stephen King, kicked her and, later, during one of her escape attempts, put her hand through a glass window, causing an injury that required six stitches. The incident was humiliating. Mitchell reported, “He came into my room while the doors were closed and I was undressed.” At some point, King called a doctor, who walked into the room without saying a word to Mitchell. He and King threw her on the bed and held her down while the doctor removed her pants and administered a tranquilizing shot to her rear end.
Mitchell wasn’t being held captive as a part of some ransom scheme. It was a threat and a sinister political maneuver. That summer, Nixon was running for reelection, and her husband was serving as the campaign’s manager. A 53-year-old southern belle from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, she was a lively figure in the Washington social scene, known for her humorous tirades against liberals and communists and her willingness to say exactly what she thought. But perhaps more impressive than her talk were her powers of observation. Mitchell was known to listen in on her husband’s meetings and report back to her journalist friends. When four burglars were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, Mitchell recognized one of them and guessed that her husband and the president were involved, though she couldn’t say exactly how. She got on the phone with a reporter friend to voice her lurking suspicions. Thus began what she called “the most horrible experience I ever had,” which culminated in a sexist campaign to discredit a woman who knew too much.
There was something distinctly gendered about Martha Mitchell’s treatment, even before Watergate. “Why do they always call me outspoken?” she wondered. “Can’t they just say I’m frank?” It was hard to imagine someone saying the same of a male Washington insider. After the burglary, the White House tried to discredit Mitchell, arguing that she was insane and had been institutionalized. They described her as a gossip and a drunk. The thing was, Mitchell was a drinker with notoriously loose lips (she was known around Washington as the “Mouth of the South”), and at the time of the Watergate scandal, she did appear to be having a nervous breakdown, sometimes dramatically referring to herself in the third person. “Martha won’t stand for it,” she said, referring to the possibility that Nixon might get off scot-free, while her husband would take the fall.
But none of this changed the fact that Martha Mitchell was right about Nixon. While there was no direct evidence suggesting that Nixon ordered the break-in, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein revealed that he had orchestrated a cover-up, which involved paying the burglars hush money and sending in the CIA to muck up the FBI’s investigation.
In response to the smear campaign, Mitchell wrote an incensed letter to Parade, “to set the record straight.” She laid out exactly how she had been detained and physically abused. She ended the letter, “I will not let these lies be told.” She continued to call on her friends in the media, including White House reporter Helen Thomas, whom she told, “They’re not going to get away with this, Helen.”
After being held hostage, everything went wrong for Mitchell. From the hotel in California, she was flown back East, where she was taken to the Westchester Country Club, in Rye, New York. She gave her husband an ultimatum: either he resign as Nixon’s campaign manager or she would leave him. John Mitchell stepped down, saying he wanted to focus on his family. But not long after, Martha Mitchell told Helen Thomas, “We have been suffering.” In another conversation, she said, “I love him very much. He loves me because I’ve stood up for him. But he is defending the president, who planned the whole god-damned thing. I’m under surveillance day and night. I’m no fool.”
John Mitchell moved out of their home; by all accounts, the subsequent divorce proceedings were acrimonious. The breakup of the fallen Washington darlings was discussed widely in the press, with stories of Martha throwing John’s clothes out the window. The only bright spot for Martha was that Nixon didn’t get away with it. In 1974, amid impeachment proceedings, the president gave a televised address announcing his resignation. In 1975, John Mitchell was convicted on five counts for the cover-up and served 19 months in federal prison. Martha said later, “Four years ago we had everything, and now we have nothing.” By 1976, she was dead at the age of 57, from a rare bone cancer.
Martha Mitchell’s legacy was laced with hearsay and ulterior motives, and the sexism seen in portrayals of her continues to the present day. Fox News reporter James Rosen, in his 2008 book The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, wrote, “After Watergate, critics of the Nixon administration depicted Martha Mitchell as a brave lady surrounded by evil but determined to tell the truth.” But Rosen, a prominent reporter for a conservative outlet, had a horse in the race, too. He relied on gender tropes to take Mitchell down, calling her “a sick, mean, and ignorant woman, roiling with vanity and insecurity.” He quoted a “friend” who said, “Oh God, she was awful, an awful woman,” and another who described her as wanting attention and having “a bouffant hairdo that went all over the place.” Rosen, who has since left Fox amid allegations of sexual harassment, went so far as to justify the capture and sedation of Mitchell. She was, he argued, a “hysterical woman.”
Things went better for Stephen King, the agent who detained and kicked Mitchell. He went on to have an illustrious career in chemical manufacturing. In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed him ambassador to the Czech Republic.
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