• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • Home
  • About
    • About Current
    • Masthead
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
    • The Way of Improvement Leads Home
    • The Arena
  • Reviews
  • 🔎
  • Membership
  • Your Account
  • Log In
  • Member Assistance Request
  • Way of Improvement
  • About John
  • Vita
  • Books
  • Speaking
  • Media Requests

Bob Woodward and the copy machine

John Fea   |  June 9, 2022 Leave a Comment

Last Sunday night we watched the first two episodes of CNN’s documentary on John Dean and Watergate. I am looking forward to the last two episodes this weekend. It’s good. So needless to say, a recent Washington Post piece on how John Mitchell‘s wife Martha Mitchell invited Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to rummage through the former attorney general’s home office caught my eye. Here is Manuel Roig-Franzia’s piece:

There was no mistaking the voice on the other end of the phone line. That twangy timbre. Brash and sass. Undiluted Arkansas Delta.

Bob Woodward had heard this voice before. So when he answered his desk phone in the Washington Post newsroom that Sunday in the spring of 1974 he didn’t have to strain to realize he was talking to Martha Mitchell, the mercurial wife of President Richard Nixon’s former attorney general, the corrupt, pipe-smoking John Mitchell.

Portrayed by Julia Roberts in a Starz miniseries that started airing this spring, Martha Mitchell was something of a star in those days in Washington. She had style. She laughed loudest. She piled that marvelous thick blond hair higher and higher. In an era when the men ran most everything, she said what she wanted — and did what she wanted. She may have been married to one of the most famous men in Washington, but she refused to be defined as a “wife of” someone.

She considered herself to be someone. She was, as the papers sometimes put it, “Washington’s other Martha.” The capital crowd called her “The Mouth of the South.” She was almost impossible to control — though her husband and his thuggish crew tried.

On this particular Sunday, Martha was calling Woodward with an invitation. Her husband, recently indicted for a second time in the cascading Watergate scandal, had left her, moving out of their Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Would Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein — she always pronounced it, incorrectly, as “bern-STINE” ― like to come up and look through her husband’s home office?

Woodward, discussing the episode at length publicly for the first time in an interview at his Georgetown home, said he did not want to miss such a rareopportunity. The sequence of events shows Mitchell at her most swaggering but also offers a glimpse at the reportorial techniques that made Woodward and Bernstein two of the most celebrated journalists of the 20th century.

Read the rest here. It is a fascinating story!

RECOMMENDED READING

Eric Foner on C. Vann Woodward There is a historical precedent for Ron DeSantis’s sending of aslyum-seeking Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard

Filed Under: Way of Improvement Tagged With: Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, John Mitchell, journalism, journalism history, Martha Mitchell, Watergate

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Footer

Contact Forms

General Inquiries
Pitch Us
  • Manage Your Account
  • Member Assistance Request

Search

Subscribe via Email



Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide
Subscribe via Email


Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide