Martha Beall Mitchell

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For other uses of this name, see Martha Mitchell (disambiguation).

Martha Elizabeth Beall Mitchell (2 September 1918 – 31 May 1976), wife of John Mitchell, United States Attorney General under President Richard Nixon. Martha Mitchell was famous for her phone calls to the press about matters the Nixon-era conspirators wanted kept under wraps

Martha Beall was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to cotton-broker George V. Beall and teacher Arie Elizabeth Beall (née A. E. Ferguson). Martha was graduated from Pine Bluff High School in 1937. Her loquacity was noted even in her high school days, when the comment beside her picture in the yearbook said:

I love its gentle warble,
I love its gentle flow,
I love to wind my tongue up
And I love to let it go.

She attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and the University of Miami, from which she received a BA in history. She worked for about a year as a school teacher in Mobile, Alabama, but returned to Pine Bluff in 1945. After World War II, she began work as a secretary at the Pine Bluff Arsenal, but was soon transferred (with her boss, Brigadier-General Augustin Mitchell Prentiss) to Washington, D.C., where she met Clyde Jay Jennings, whom she married on 5 October 1946, and with whom she moved to New York. By Jennings, she had a son, Clyde Jay (“Jay”) Jennings jr (b. 2 November 1947). The couple separated on 18 May 1956 and divorced on 1 August 1957.

She married John Mitchell on 30 December 1957. They had a daughter, Martha Elizabeth (nicknamed “Marty”) on 10 January 1961. John Mitchell met Nixon professionally, became a personal friend and politicial associate, and was appointed Attorney General after Nixon's election to the Presidency. He became entangled in administration efforts to obstruct the investigations of the Watergate scandal.

Dubbed “the Mouth of the South”, Martha Mitchell began contacting reporters when her husband's role in the scandal became known. At one time, Martha insisted she was held against her will in a California hotel room and sedated to keep her from making her controversial phone calls to the news media. However, because of this, she was discredited and even abandoned by most of her family, except her son Jay. Nixon aides even leaked to the press that she had a “drinking problem”. The Martha Mitchell effect, in which a psychiatrist mistakenly diagnoses someone's extraordinary but reasonable belief as a delusion, was later named after her. Nixon was later to tell interviewer David Frost (in September of 1977 on Frost On America) “If it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell, there'd have been no Watergate.”

The Mitchells separated in 1973. Three years later, in advanced stages of myeloma, Martha slipped into a coma and died in Washington at age 57. She is buried in the Bellwood Cemetery in Pine Bluff.

The birthplace and childhood home of Martha Beall Mitchell, now the Martha Beall Mitchell Home and Museum, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in January 1978.

Martha Mitchell is portrayed in the 1995 film Nixon by actress Madeline Kahn.

In 2004, a three-act play, This is Martha Speaking…, by Thomas Doran premiered in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. (The play starred Lee Anne Moore as Martha Mitchell and Michael Childers as John Mitchell.)

In that same year, a one-woman play about Mitchell, Dirty Tricks by John Jeter, appeared off-Broadway.[1] An adaptation (featuring multiple characters) for film has been announced for 2007, with Meryl Streep currently cast in the rôle of Martha Mitchell.[2]

In the television series 24, the character of first lady Martha Logan is based on her.