The Martha Mitchell Effect

“I’m convinced if it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate,” says Richard Nixon in an archive interview clip at the start of this documentary.

She came from New York yet sported big Southern-style hair, painstakingly sculpted, and those oversized, pointy-edged glasses worn by women in Gary Larson cartoons. She married politiical counsel John Newton Mitchell, who would go on to manage two Nixon election campaigns and, in between, spend three fateful years as US Attorney General. They lived together in Watergate Apartments and socialised with some of the most influential people in the world. But where other women accepted that, in that age, their role was to smile and support their husbands, Martha had opinions of her own, and she didn’t care who knew it.

As directors Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy observe, Tricky Dicky just didn’t know how to handle women like that. Archive footage reveals his nervous body language around her, in contrast to her absolute confidence. She found this amusing, and would reportedly phone him up in the middle of the night, after knocking back a few drinks, to give him advice. She was a Republican and, at first, a strong supporter of his political agenda, but Martha believed in honesty, decency, and the vital importance of transparency in democracy. Once she realised that something seriously dodgy was going on within the Nixon regime, she started speaking out – and once she started speaking out, she discovered just how far that regime would go to preserve its secrets.

If you watched much US television during the early Seventies, you may well remember Martha, first as a playful raconteur and then as a figure of fun. Once she disappeared from view, rumoured to have been detained in a psychiatric clinic, she was the subject of cruel jokes by men who knew exactly what they were doing but, because of their established authority and apparent light-heartedness, got everyone else laughing along. People would roll their eyes at the mention of her name and make their own jokes without thinking. But here’s the thing: as subsequent events would prove, all the wild claims which Martha made were true. She may have been eccentric, but she was never mad – she was right.

Shortlisted for an Oscar, this film may finally give Martha the justice she deserves. Its ambitions, however, are bigger than that. It’s an illustration of how easily the powerful can take advantage of the media to discredit the voices of those with less social clout. It’s an invitation to viewers to think more critically about people who are ridiculed in media today. The personal horror of Martha’s experience – which she thankfully came through well enough to talk about afterwards – is compounded by reflection on how vulnerable she was because of her sex, or, rather, the attitudes which other people, including other women, held towards it.

Well supplied with archive footage and giving Martha plenty of opportunity to put her own case, this dive into the dark side of politics is enlivened by her trademark wit and the indomitable spirit which helped, in the end, to clean up the politics of a nation.