![]() Martha Mitchell at home with her husband, John, Nixon’s attorney general, and their daughter Marti. “During the Nixon administration, she was the second most in-demand figure for Republican events after the president himself and was this larger-than-life, colourful, outspoken woman in Washington at a time when most cabinet wives were seen, not heard. She was in many ways the first conservative political pundit, the forerunner of outspoken voices like Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin. Garrett Graff, author of the recently published Watergate: A New History, said: “Martha Mitchell is one of the most significant figures of the Watergate age and has been largely lost to history for most of the intervening 50 years. Born in Arkansas, she earned the nickname “the Mouth of the South”, while the New York Times once called her “the most talked about, talkative woman in Washington”. ![]() Mitchell was a garrulous bon vivant on the Washington social scene with a penchant for drinking whisky and calling journalists late at night. In today’s phrase, they gaslit her, they called her crazy, they used that age-old reference for women as hysterical … She was the whistleblower and we respect her today.” “People denied that this happened to her. “She was kidnapped, sedated, drugged,” said Kate Clarke Lemay, a historian at Washington’s Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which features a Time magazine cover image of Mitchell in its Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue exhibition. Martha Mitchell is one of the most significant figures of the Watergate age and has been largely lost to history Garrett Graff The series on America’s Starz network – riding a wave of books, exhibitions and films marking the 50th anniversary of the break‐in and burglary of the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate complex – illuminates the mostly forgotten role of a woman who paid a tragic price for trying to raise the alarm about Nixon’s skulduggery. The 1970s celebrity socialite will next month be played by the Hollywood actor Julia Roberts in Gaslit, an eight-part TV drama co-starring Sean Penn as John Mitchell and Dan Stevens as the White House counsel, John Dean. Mitchell would also see her reputation destroyed by loyalists to the then president, Richard Nixon, because of what she knew about Watergate – dooming her to become one of the hidden figures of the biggest political scandal of the 20th century. She had been accosted by a former FBI agent and would be forcibly tranquilized and held captive for days. But the conversation ended abruptly and Mitchell was heard shouting: “You just get away – get away!” Then the line went dead.
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