If you happened to grow up in a particular section of Brooklyn in the ‘70s and played a game called Hot Peas and Butter with neighborhood kids, you might still have the welts to show for it.
15.12.2022 - 04:09 / deadline.com
At the beginning of the Netflix documentary The Martha Mitchell Effect, Richard Nixon, deflated in his ex-presidential phase, sits for an interview with David Frost. A somber Nixon tells his natty interlocutor, “I’m convinced if it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate.”
What he really meant, one can imagine, is that were it not for Martha Mitchell, Watergate wouldn’t have become the scandal that ended his presidency.
But as the documentary illustrates, blaming Martha Mitchell, obsessing over her, ridiculing and besmirching her had long and troubling antecedents to that Nixon interview. Generations born after Watergate don’t realize how much the mere mention of Attorney General John Mitchell’s wife set tongues wagging in Washington and across the country. The film directed by Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy is an Oscar contender for Best Documentary Short.
The directors didn’t know about Mitchell before they learned of her through a podcast.
“The more digging we did, the more we realized, oh, there is a reason why we didn’t hear about her,” Alvergue tells Deadline. “She was essentially a victim of a gaslighting campaign from the Nixon administration to silence her and stop shedding the spotlight on the Watergate scandal at the time. We thought, this is truly a hidden figure in history, and there’s never been a documentary about her. We were at the time on the heels of Trump and two impeachments and the MeToo movement, and we thought it was a perfect time to exhume her story.”
Mitchell married John Mitchell, a high-powered New York lawyer, several years before he and Nixon merged their law firms in 1966. When Nixon was elected president in 1968 he tapped John Mitchell as his attorney general, and
If you happened to grow up in a particular section of Brooklyn in the ‘70s and played a game called Hot Peas and Butter with neighborhood kids, you might still have the welts to show for it.
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