The beating heart of Starz’s new Watergate drama, Gaslit, is its depiction of the volatile marriage between President Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell (Sean Penn, buried under heavy prosthetics) and his Southern, gossipy wife, Martha (Julia Roberts tuned in the key of Steel Magnolias). As depicted in Gaslit, which is based partly on Slate’s Slow Burn podcast, the Mitchells’ toxic marriage was so inextricably linked to the Watergate scandal that trying to tease the two apart is about as futile an exercise as Nixon attempting to plug leaks to The Washington Post.
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Did the Mitchells’ marriage destroy Richard Nixon’s presidency? Or did Watergate destroy their marriage? Gaslit suggests each incident was caused and consumed by the other, Nixon and the Mitchells stuck on a path shaped like a figure 8 and lined with explosives. By the time the Watergate era ended, every member of this twisted throuple had met their own tragic fate. Nixon was forced to resign in no small part due to Martha Mitchell’s whistleblowing, John Mitchell was in prison due to his misplaced loyalty to Nixon, and Martha Mitchell was left penniless and on the verge of death due to the Nixon administration’s ruthless corruption and her husband’s cowardly cruelty.
Despite knockout performances from Penn and Roberts, Gaslit leaves its viewers with more questions about the Mitchells’ marriage than answers. Questions like: “What the hell?”, “Why didn’t she dump his ass?” and, most importantly, “This shit really happened?” Yes, it did. Here’s the true story:
Who were Martha and John Mitchell?
Wally McNamee//Getty ImagesMartha and John Mitchell at home with their daughter, Marty.
Gaslit argues that President Nixon and the Mitchells were in a mutually destructive relationship, but it doesn’t show how they got so entangled in the first place. That story is just as interesting as the one that brought them all down.
Martha Mitchell (née Beall) was born in 1918 in rural Arkansas. Her father was a cotton broker, and her mother was a teacher. In high school, Mitchell earned a reputation for being “friendly, outgoing, and extremely talkative.” After graduating from the University of Miami, Mitchell moved to Mobile, Alabama, to teach. She hated it and quit after one year. She met her first husband, U.S. Army Officer Clyde Jennings Jr., after returning to Arkansas. The two married in 1946 and eventually settled in Rye, NY. They had one son and separated in 1656.
Within the year, Martha Mitchell met and married John Mitchell—a bond lawyer and senior partner at a prestigious New York law firm. Mitchell was born in Detroit, MI, and raised in Queens, New York. During World War II, he served in the Navy as a commander of a PT boat. John and Martha were busy living the high life in Rye, NY, when Richard Nixon, fresh off a gubernatorial loss in California, waltzed into their lives. Nixon joined Mitchell’s firm, and the two became besties. When Nixon decided to run for president in 1968, he tapped Mitchell to oversee his campaign. Then, when he won the election, Nixon installed Mitchell as Attorney General.
Keystone//Getty ImagesJohn Mitchell being sworn in as Attorney General.
Historians credit Mitchell with establishing the Nixon administration’s super cool and not at all regrettable tough-on-crime policies. Mitchell didn’t have much tolerance for Civil Rights and Vietnam protestors, and he was always down to sacrifice a few civil liberties if he felt like doing so was in the country’s best interest. He supported chill stuff like no-knock warrants, wiretapping, and preventive detention. I can’t prove it, but I bet Mitchell would’ve been all for Guantanamo. Above all, Mitchell was a diehard Nixon loyalist. So was his wife—until she wasn’t.
Never one to hold her tongue, Martha Mitchell and her penchant for gossip found a welcome audience in the D.C. press. She frequently appeared in newspapers and talk shows to lend a wise-cracking, conservative opinion on anti-war protesters (she hated them, just like her husband) and Supreme Court justices (she was gung ho about Nixon’s nominee, G. Harrold Carswell.) Eventually, Mitchell’s caustic wit and charm earned her the nickname “The Mouth of the South,” and within a few years of arriving in D.C., she became one of the most famous and recognizable faces of the de-facto Nixon administration, operating like a pro-bono publicist for all of his and her husband’s causes. According to N.Y. Daily News reporting, Nixon cheered Mitchell on in public and seemed to be all for her straight-from-the-hip soundbites, but things took a turn for the happy throuple when Mitchell denounced the Vietnam War. “It stinks,” she allegedly said to reporters aboard Air Force One. Well said, Martha.
Evidently, up until that comment, President Nixon had publicly urged Mitchell on, telling her on several occasions “to give ’em hell.” Privately though, he resented her for her outsized role as a GOP celebrity and worried about her growing influence among progressive feminist groups who appreciated her outspokenness. Meanwhile, John Mitchell appeared to grow wearier of his wife every time she opened her mouth.
In Gaslit, Martha and John Mitchell are initially portrayed as hopelessly in love with one another, chemistry on full display in the show’s early scenes. It’s hard to know how factual this portrayal is, but one Time profile from 1969 aligns with the show’s depiction. According to the article, Mitchell often greeted his wife with “an unruffled ‘Hi gorgeous.’” In the same piece, Martha says, “John is an extremely outstanding person.” She claimed that nothing bothered him.
However true that was at the time, Watergate was about to ruin it.
What was their role in Watergate?
1972 was a very bad year for The Mitchells. It all started when Mitchell resigned as attorney general to become the director of the Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP—yup, you read that right—as it would come to be known. As the head of CREEP, Mitchell was the one to give G. Gordon Liddy the green light to break into Watergate. (Fun fact: As a kid growing up in New Jersey, G. Gordon Liddy used to eat rats to strengthen his resolve. You know, in case one day he’d have to scour for food while saving America from a Nazi invasion. Liddy is the only man capable of making Alex Jones seem down to earth.) Anyway, Mitchell also authorized a $250,000 payment to the Watergate burglars. Dis was a colossal mistake.
Shit hit the fan in mid-June, a few days after the bungled break-in. The Mitchells were in California for a campaign event when John received a phone call alerting him of the news. He knew that if his wife found out that her beloved old security guard, James McCord, had been arrested for the crime, she’d get pissed and tell reporters about it, enabling them to trace the burglary back to the White House.
So Mitchell suggested his wife stay out on the west coast for some additional r&r while he returned to D.C.. On his way out the door, Mitchell ordered his security guards to keep Martha in the dark about the news and asked them to prevent her from reaching out to any reporters. Martha found out about the break-in anyway, possibly from eavesdropping on her husband’s calls, and called one of her favorite reporters at UPI to tell her the news. “I’m sick and tired of the whole operation,” she reportedly said to UPI’s Helen Thomas, before telling her she would leave her husband if he didn’t resign. That’s when the phone call abruptly cut off.
Bettmann//Getty ImagesMartha Mitchell.
Mitchell told the press about what happened in California when she got back to D.C.. She relayed that upon discovering her chatting with Thomas, one of the security guard’s ripped the phone off the wall. Mitchell said she was held hostage in the hotel room for days and was even pinned to the ground by the guards and injected with sedatives. “I’m black and blue,” she told Thomas in an interview a few weeks later. “I’m a political prisoner.” She really was. And then she was gaslighted by everyone in the Nixon administration— including her husband.
John Mitchell resigned as the head of CREEP on July 1, 1972, citing the need to spend more time with his wife and daughter. An article in McCall’s recalls headlines from the time reading "MITCHELL GIVES UP POLITICS FOR LOVE." This was after weeks of Martha phoning reporters and intimating about the Watergate and the ensuing cover-up. D.C. politicians speculated that Mitchell was either forced out by Nixon or quit to devote himself full-time to keeping his wife quiet. He joined in on the president’s efforts to discredit Martha, telling reporters it was “ridiculous” for anyone to take her seriously.
As Watergate threatened to derail Nixon’s second term, attacks on Martha became more frequent and severe. Nixon’s staffers labeled her a desperate alcoholic in the papers and spread rumors about her “mental instabilities” on television. They started a whisper campaign among influential D.C. politicians that Martha was unwell.
From McCall’s:
By early September, when the Mitchells were preparing to leave Washington, the attack on Martha’s mental stability was at its heaviest. The Washington Star reported Republicans in the highest places have been implying that Mrs. Mitchell has had a nervous breakdown.Nixon blamed Martha Mitchell for Watergate almost entirely. “I’m convinced there would be no Watergate without Martha Mitchell,” he said to David Frost in 1977. “Because John wasn’t mindin’ the store. He was practically out of his mind over Martha in the spring of 1972.”
Things got much worse for John Mitchell that fall when The Washington Post reported that he was in charge of a secret Republican slush fund used to gather intelligence on potential threats to President Nixon. He denied it, but as we know now, the reporting checked out. Worse still for Mitchell was that Nixon was angling to pin the cover-up on him, just like his wife said he would. The second episode of the excellent docuseries, Watergate, includes a re-enacted scene based on the recently unsealed Nixon Tapes. “Mitchell has a serious problem with his wife,’ Nixon says. “He was unable to watch the campaign and as a result, the underlings did things without his knowledge.”
What happened to Martha and John Mitchell?
Bettmann//Getty ImagesMartha Mitchell giving an interview ahead of her sworn testimony.
In May of 1973, Martha Mitchell called for Nixon’s resignation from her isolated bunker in Manhattan. The announcement did John Mitchell in. Gaslit depicted the turbulence of this time in disturbing detail. Martha and John’s fights were portrayed as violent and extreme. Martha’s drinking habits expanded to include a cocktail of pills. Again, it’s hard to know how factual the show’s version of events is. Newsweek, quoting an intimate friend of the couple’s, said they were having regular, violent outbursts. Martha Mitchell denied the allegations.
According to UPI, John Mitchell separated from his wife on advice of his lawyers on September 17, 1973. In November, when asked by The New York Times if her marriage was going to last, Mitchell replied, “I don’t want it to. You don’t know what I’ve been through for four and a half years. But don’t worry about Martha. She’ll get along.” The Mitchells’ marriage did not end amicably. “He walked out and left me with $945,” Mitchell told The Washington Post.
Mitchell sued her husband for back alimony in 1974 while he was on trial for conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The charges stuck, and Mitchell spent 19 months in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. “It could have been worse,” Mitchell said to the press after receiving his sentence. “They could have sentenced me to spend the rest of my life with Martha Mitchell. Mitchell remained a well-liked Nixon loyalist until his death from a heart attack in 1988.
Martha Mitchell died of cancer in 1976. She was 57 years old. UPI reported that she died “desperately ill, without friends, and without funds.” That may be so, but she had at least one admirer. According to The Washington Post, a California admiral sent a large bouquet of white mums for Mitchell’s memorial service. The arrangement was placed under Mitchell’s grave so that attendees, a small group that included her estranged husband and Martha’s two children, could read its message: “Martha Was Right.”
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