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In reply to the discussion: Nancy was asked.. ".. If Impeachment could Backfire?" [View all]coeur_de_lion
(3,676 posts)[link:https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/03/21/im-political-prisoner-how-martha-mitchell-became-george-conway-nixon-era/|
For some, her commentary could go too far. In the Slate podcast Slow Burn, Leon Neyfakh describes Nixon at one point telling his chief of staff, We need to turn off Martha.
In the spring of 1972, John Mitchell resigned as attorney general to become Nixons campaign manager for his reelection. And in June, Martha joined her husband in California for several campaign events. It was there, on the night of June 17, that John Mitchell got a call about some arrests made at the Watergate Hotel.
According to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Mitchell realized that if his wife found out that she knew one of the men arrested, James McCord, she might become upset and tell reporters about it, thus tipping them off to the connection between the burglars and the president. So as he headed back to Washington, he instructed security guards working for the campaign to keep his wife in the dark in California and to stop her from calling members of the media.
But find out she did, and just as her husband predicted, she soon called UPIs Helen Thomas.
Im sick and tired of the whole operation, she said, before telling Thomas she was giving her husband an ultimatum her or Nixon.