by FRED GARDNER
The White House put out the story that Martha was about to be institutionalized. Back at the Newport Inn, her guards wouldn’t give her food but plied her with liquor. She eventually negotiated the right to fly back east. She checked into the Westchester Country Club and called UPI to declare, “I’m leaving him until he decides to leave the campaign. It’s horrible to me… I’m not going to stand for all those dirty things that go on. If you could see me you wouldn’t believe it. I’m black and blue. I’m a political prisoner… They don’t want me to talk.”
In his famous comeback interview with David Frost in September ’77, Richard Nixon said, “If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate, because John wasn’t mindin’ the store.” Nixon told Frost that Martha was mentally unbalanced and that “John was practically out of his mind about Martha in the spring of 1972. He was letting Magruder and all these boys, these kids, these nuts, run this thing.”
It was a total lie. In the spring of 1972 Martha Mitchell was a highly active, visible and popular member of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. They turned her into a crazy drunken dame.
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