Martha Mitchell

Martha Beall Mitchell (1918 to 1976) was an American socialite from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who became nationally known in the Nixon era as the wife of John N. Mitchell, who served as United States Attorney General and then headed the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Her frank telephone calls to reporters made her a media figure, nicknamed Martha the Mouth, and by 1970 a Gallup poll found that 76 percent of Americans recognised her. After the June 1972 Watergate burglary she told journalists that she had been held against her will and sedated to stop her speaking out, and aides to President Nixon publicly discredited her by pointing to her drinking. Her account was later partly corroborated by James McCord, and in 1977 Nixon told David Frost that without her there might have been no Watergate. She separated from her husband in 1973 and died in 1976. Historian Garrett Graff has argued that her role as a whistleblower was ignored because of the misogyny of the era. She held no office, so this entry sits with dissident voices.