This Oscar-nominated short documentary film is worth watching.
For many years – many years ago – people would hear my last name and ask, “Any relation to Martha Mitchell?” Today, very few people I know or meet would understand the reference. But if you’ve heard of the Watergate scandal – yes, the one that led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon – then you may have heard of the woman, Martha Mitchell, who played a much bigger role in that political scandal than is well known or understood.
Until now.
One of the five Oscar nominees in the Documentary Short category this year tells her story, a political and psychological thriller that I highly recommend. “The Martha Mitchell Effect” had its World Premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is now streaming on Netflix. Whether it wins the Oscar or not, its nomination has elevated the awareness of this complicated, controversial and historically important woman.
At the beginning of this 40-minute documentary, filmmakers Debra McClutchy and Anne Alvergue present a clip from an interview that President Nixon did with David Frost a few years after he resigned in 1974. In it, he tells Frost, "I'm convinced if it hadn't been for Martha, there'd have been no Watergate."
Of course, that's not true at all. What he meant was that without Martha Mitchell, no one would have known about Watergate and he might still have been able to continue as president.
So, who was Martha Mitchell?
Attorney General John Mitchell and his wife, Martha. (Credit: Mike Thimmesch, Nixon Presidential Library)
Martha Mitchell was the wife of Nixon's closest confidante, John Mitchell. Mitchell was a lawyer at the law firm where Nixon worked before running for president. They became friends and although he had never been involved in politics before, Nixon convinced Mitchell to run his 1968 presidential campaign. After he won, Nixon made him the Attorney General. Martha and John moved from New York to Washington, taking up residence at the Watergate building and becoming regular fixtures on the Washington social and political scene. But Martha was not your typical Washington Cabinet wife. Martha was bubbly, witty and talkative — especially talkative to the press, a no-no for political wives!
"She was incredibly popular," filmmaker Anne Alvergue noted in an interview with the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. "I think it’s really hard to fathom these days, the idea of actually knowing the name of a cabinet member’s wife, much less anything about her. She became a household name. She was as popular as Jackie Onassis at the time. She was on every major talk show. She was really a personality."
AP Image/Netflix
Early on, the Nixon administration appreciated her vivaciousness and notoriety. She was a great supporter of Nixon and all that he stood for, and she was 'on message' with the administration's aims and goals. She'd get on the phone with Washington insiders, Washington reporters and the president himself, to gossip, cajole, advise and comment on the news of the day.
As filmmaker Debra McClutchy told WNYC's Alison Stewart, "The administration was always described as being 'buttoned up' and Martha was a very colorful character that people listened to. She was definitely an advocate of Nixon's administration and was considered an asset to the administration. She was able to get attention for policies that otherwise might not have gotten attention."
Netflix
"The Martha Mitchell Effect"
Everything changed after the Watergate break-in. Martha was in a hotel in California, reading the newspaper after the arrest of the burglars who stole files from the National Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate, when she recognized one of the accused men. James McCord was her family's bodyguard when they first moved to Washington. She called her husband, alarmed. When she couldn't get answers from her husband about the coincidence, she began calling the press.
The first reporter she called was Helen Thomas who was perhaps the best-known White House Correspondent at that time. Helen remembers that as Martha started to tell Helen about her discovery, the phone was disconnected. Later, Martha said that her bodyguard had come into her room and hung up the phone. Martha was distraught, so the bodyguard called the hotel doctor and he injected her with a tranquilizer. In an interview afterwards, the doctor told a reporter, "When some high official from the government calls, well, then you do it."
And that's where the "Martha Mitchell Effect" comes in. The term, coined in the 1980s by Dr. Brendan Maher, a psychology professor at Harvard University, describes a scenario in which a medical professional labels a patient's accurate perception of real events as delusional, often resulting in misdiagnosis. Some would even suggest that the “Martha Mitchell Effect” is a factor in the way many male medical doctors perceive women patient’s real complaints as delusionary.
The more Martha tried to talk, the more she was maligned by the administration and her husband in the press. They tried to contain her; she claimed that her husband's security guards were watching her constantly and preventing her from using the telephone. She described herself as a "prisoner of the GOP." Regrettably for her side of the story, Martha was already known as “a drinker” and the Nixon administration used that gossip to discredit her and anything she said. They leaked stories to the press, stating she was unwell, disturbed and delusional.
The filmmakers include many snippets from the secret Nixon White House tapes (he recorded many of his meetings and phone conversations in the Oval Office) and you can hear the big names in the Watergate operation — Haldeman, Mitchell and even President Nixon himself – complaining about the Martha problem.
She was the first Washington insider to call for the resignation of the president, in an interview with Helen Thomas. In a later television interview she said, "This man knew what was going on, or he was negligent in being president." In the film, the reporter Bob Woodward, who eventually would break the big story of the cover up, said that during that summer of 1973, "Carl Bernstein and I started realizing she was a Greek chorus of one because she was telling the truth."
After Martha called for Nixon's resignation, her husband left her, saying it was because of a series of violent outbursts. Friends of Mitchell tell the press that he said his wife was a sick woman, but he couldn't bring himself to take the legal steps necessary to have her committed. Eventually he divorced her.
The film’s director, Anne Alvergue, said in her interview with WNYC, "On one level, it's a tragedy. It's sort of a riches to rags story. She spoke out the truth and she was collateral damage. She suffered for that. On the other hand, I like to see Martha's story as an inspiration. She did have a little period of a honeymoon after Nixon resigned where people did realize that she was speaking the truth and that she was right all along."
I suspect that many women watching this film will reflect upon times when they have felt the “Martha Mitchell Effect'' themselves — perhaps remembering times they were encouraged to keep quiet, play along with the power game, or were dismissed as hysterical or even delusional.
Watch the film. It’s short but it’s Big in its ambitions to tell an untold story from the recent past that is presently relevant.
A New Report: Diversity and the Oscars
Debra McClutchy and Anne Alvergue, the filmmakers of The Martha Mitchell Effect, are among the rare female film directors nominated this year. Other nominees in their category include women directors Kartiki Gonsalves for Elephant Whisperers and Evgenia Arbugaeva for Haulout. No women directors were nominated for Best Director or Best Foreign Film this year. In the Best Documentary Feature category, just two were nominated: Laura Poitras for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and Sara Dosa for Fire of Love.
A new report out this week on inclusion at the Oscars notes that progress has been made in terms of both gender and racial diversity since the #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign shook Hollywood eight years ago, but there's still a lot of room for more progress to be made.
The research appears online at a new website, launched by Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the USCAnnenberg Inclusion Initiative, and supported by the Adobe Foundation. The two groups have joined forces to present the information under the banner of The Inclusion List, a new research effort to track and celebrate inclusion progress in entertainment. The site offers users an online experience that tracks the gender and race/ethnicity of all Oscar nominees and winners from 1929 to 2023, allowing visitors to see where change has occurred and where it has not.
Of the 13,253 nominees at the Academy Awards since 1929, 17% were women and 83% were men. The ratio of men to women nominees was 5 to 1. Sixteen percent of all winners across the last 95 years were women. Less than 2% of nominees were women of color.
Dr. Smith told Good Morning America on Thursday, "We can tell you based on data who is working with women of color, who's hiring women directors, [and] who's hiring underrepresented cinematographers. That data can help change this ecosystem that is still largely white and male."
She also talked about how the film industry needs to go about creating the change we want to see — improving the pipeline for underrepresented groups. "There needs to be more access and opportunity from film school through the production process, through who gets vetted and the resources put behind those stories for awards consideration."
Stories like Martha Mitchell's would have been lost to history had these two women filmmakers not made this film, and its Oscar nomination has ensured that many, many more people will see it and learn about this bit of important US history. One more woman’s story, almost lost to history, is restored.
Onwards!
- Pat
