I couldn't figure out why Martha Mitchell was trending on Twitter until...

[catbyte]

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[Sedona]

1. And.....Steve King is still lurking

http://www.newsweek.com/2017/12/29/donald-trump-watergate-stephen-king-martha-mitchell-richard-nixon-john-744823.html

SNIP

Among them is Stephen King, 76, a longtime confidante and booster of House Speaker Paul Ryan (and former business partner of Ryan’s brother, Tobin), who is the new U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. He has no diplomatic experience and had never spent a day in Prague before taking up his post there on December 7. Radio Prague, the official state news outlet, called him “a rich Republican businessman…who worked for the FBI early in his career.”

SNIP

Left unsaid was that King reportedly played a crucial role in the 1972 Watergate affair. According to several accounts over the years, King helped cover up ties between President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and the burglars arrested inside the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex—and in a particularly violent fashion. None of that came up during his confirmation hearing.

Martha Mitchell, an outspoken Arkansan dubbed “the Mouth of the South” in press reports, had been complaining vaguely to anyone who would listen about campaign operatives carrying out “dirty tricks” against the Democrats. So when she learned that James McCord, the security director of CREEP, was among those arrested at the Watergate—and described by her husband to the press as a private security contractor who was “not operating either on our behalf or with our consent”—she called a favorite reporter, United Press International’s Helen Thomas.

Enter King, who “rushed into her bedroom, threw her back across the bed, and ripped the telephone out of the wall,” wrote veteran Washington reporter Winzola McLendon in her 1979 biography of Martha Mitchell, to whom she was close. “The conversation ended abruptly when it appeared someone took away the phone from her hand,” Thomas reported. “She was heard to say, ‘You just get away.’” Thomas added that when she called back, the hotel operator told her, “Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk.

Thomas’s story was a sensation. Reporters scurried to find Mitchell for a follow-up. A few days later, one did. Marcia Kramer of the New York Daily News tracked her down at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York. Kramer, a veteran crime reporter, described Mitchell as “a beaten woman,” with “incredible" black and blue marks on her arms. A later account in McCall’s magazine said that after King ripped the phone from Mitchell, he “summoned” a doctor, who gave her “a tranquilizing shot” and “[saw] to it that no more of her outgoing calls [would] be taken by the hotel switchboard.”

[Gabi Hayes]

2. Remember that story well, which reminds me of a very compelling photo:

Then, Replace haldeman, erlichman, Mitchell, Agnew, and Nixon with Trump, Flynn, Manafort, Sessions, Lewandowski, or whomever:

[efhmc]

3. Didn't understand it at the time but I remember

my mother saying, "See she was right."

[The Blue Flower]

4. Do I remember correctly that they institutionalized her at one time?

To get her to shut up, I believe.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. Except she wasn't crazy.

She actually knew what the hell was going on and wanted to share it, but of course the "She's a woman therefore she's crazy" meme always works.

[UTUSN]

6. I thought it was because I posted about her an hour ago!1

I love Madeline KAHN:

*******QUOTE********

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Mitchell

Martha MITCHELL

.... In the days immediately after the Watergate break-in in 1972, her husband enlisted former FBI agent Steve King to prevent her from learning about the break-in or contacting reporters. Despite these efforts, Martha learned that one of her friends, her daughter's bodyguard and driver James W. McCord Jr., was among those arrested. She began to explore the events in order to help him. While on a phone call with Helen Thomas about the Watergate break-in, King pulled the phone cord from the wall. She was held against her will in a California hotel room and forcefully sedated by a psychiatrist after a physical struggle with five men that left her needing stitches.[2][3] Nixon aides, in an effort to discredit Mitchell, told the press that she had a "drinking problem".[citation needed] Mitchell began contacting reporters when her husband's role in the scandal became known, initially in an effort to defend him. [4] Nixon was later to tell interviewer David Frost in 1977 that Martha was a distraction to John Mitchell, such that no one was minding the store, and "If it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell, there'd have been no Watergate." Because of these allegations, she was discredited and abandoned by most of her family, except for her son Jay. The Mitchells separated in 1973. ....

Martha Mitchell was portrayed in the 1995 film Nixon by actress Madeline Kahn who, like Mitchell, also died at the age of 57 of cancer. ....

*********UNQUOTE********