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. Eclipsing her husband as a household name^{[citation needed]}, Martha’s portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1970, and later on the cover of New York magazine in a glamor shot supervised and photographed by Francesco Scavullo.

[edit] Life

Martha Beall was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to cotton broker George V. Beall and teacher Arie Elizabeth Beall (née A. E. Ferguson). Martha graduated from Pine Bluff High School in 1937. Her talkative nature 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, then 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 Jennings, Jr. whom she married on 5 October 1946, and with whom she moved to New York. By Jennings, she had a son, Clyde Jay Jennings (b. 2 November 1947). The couple separated on 18 May 1956 and divorced on 1 August 1957.

Mitchell’s former home (left) in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

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 friend and political associate, and was appointed Attorney General after Nixon’s 1968 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 prevent her from making controversial phone calls to the news media. 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 identifies a patient’s extraordinary claims as delusions, despite their veracity, was later named after her. Nixon was later to tell interviewer David Frost (in September 1977 on Frost on America) “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have been no Watergate.”

2 Responses to “Martha Beall Mitchell”

1. Pv
   June 4th, 2011 @ 10:03 pm

   “Dubbed “the Mouth of the South”, Martha Mitchell” – I always thought her name was Debbie

2. Hotlanta Mike
   June 5th, 2011 @ 1:11 pm

   The “Martha Mitchell effect“, in which a psychiatrist mistakenly identifies a patient’s extraordinary claims as delusions, despite their veracity, was later named after her.

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