During her time, Martha Mitchell was inescapable. The Arkansas-born wife of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, was an invaluable source for gossip columnists, a guest star on Laugh-In, and the cover star of a 1970 issue of Time devoted to the women of Washington, DC. But her true place in history is weightier than pop culture ubiquity. “If it hadn’t been for Martha,” Richard Nixon told David Frost in 1977, “there’d have been no Watergate.”
Mitchell’s predilection for critiquing the administration—which earned her the nickname “The Mouth of the South”—caused headaches, but it was her threat to tell reporters the truth about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that resulted in a beating, kidnapping, and smear campaign. Fifty years later, she’s finally getting her due.
“It was brave of her to speak truth to power,” says Debra McClutchy, a co-director of The Martha Mitchell Effect, a documentary premiering on Netflix on June 17. “We don’t see a lot of that happening today in politics.”
The Martha Mitchell Effect comes out on the heels of Gaslit, a series on Starz featuring Julia Roberts as Mitchell. While the documentary presents archival footage of Mitchell as she’s transformed from media darling into political pariah, Gaslit dramatizes her role in exposing corruption. The series doesn’t ignore Mitchell’s contradictions...
A Raleigh professor has agreed to pay $152,500 to resolve allegedly false national science grant claims. According to the Department of Justice of ENC, Dr. Michael Harrington and his company, Geno...