She came to the capital Washington like a country bumpkin, not quite young anymore Southern Belle in kindergarten clothes and a mess of hair that could easily hide a martini and then another. She didn’t talk, but sang in that incomparable Southern voice about how patriotic she was and how important it was to finally take action against the press, which keeps leaking government secrets. She was staunchly conservative and a good wife, making her husband the smartest in America, “maybe even the whole world.” John Mitchell didn’t mind the compliment, after all Richard Nixon had made him Attorney General. In 1972, he served as his manager in the election campaign that was supposed to bring the President to the White House a second time.
Nixon’s reelection committee took various actions against the competition, against the Democrats, including the infamous burglary of their headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. The burglars were caught, and their leader turned out to be the Mitchell daughter’s bodyguard. The Netflix documentary about Martha Mitchell is therefore not just a film with bright candy-colored dresses, baroque sweeping cars and silly sunglasses, but a real, i.e. bad, political drama, a story about the overheated fame and the miserable end of a woman who is definitely craving for recognition.
Women show solidarity with this anti-feminist, even hippies demonstrate for her
Fifty years ago feminism was all the rage in the USA, Gloria Steinem just ran the magazine Ms. founded, Erica Jong published “Fear of Flying” in 1973, brassieres were burned all over the country, but Martha Mitchell stood by her husband as the incomparable Tammy Wynette had demanded. He’s not to blame for the burglary, no, no, it came from the very top, it must have been the man she affectionately called “my president” and whom she supplied with political advice without being asked. She says it to a journalist she trusts, she says it on the radio, she says it on television and has no idea that it is her dear, intelligent husband, that it is John Mitchell himself who is using force to silence her, like in a Victorian novel wants, who has her locked up, sedated and beaten. Mitchell agrees with Nixon that Martha will be declared ill and that her husband will resign at the same time “because his wife is more important to him”.
Women show solidarity with this anti-feminist, even the hippies she despises take to the streets for her. Martha Mitchell can’t be kept out of the papers but her remarks only get reported on the gossip pages, nobody believes her when she talks about state-ordered crime, it’s too unlikely. This is now known as the “Martha Mitchell Effect”. But sometimes even a paranoid is right. Martha Mitchell was right, it said on a wreath on her grave. It didn’t do her any good.
The Martha Mitchell Effect, on Netflix.
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