Worked security for Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign
The 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was a fascistic spectacle where Donald Trump and many of the other speakers spewed vile anti-immigrant rhetoric and a masochistic ultra-nationalistic, extreme right-wing ideology.
Fifty-three years earlier, the CEO of the convention’s host committee, Stephen B. King, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the Czech Republic during his first term, had beaten, drugged, and kidnapped Martha Mitchell, the wife of Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) Director John Mitchell, to stop her from talking to reporters about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office building in June 1972.[1]
King’s attack on Mitchell came as she was about to speak with White House correspondent Helen Thomas, with whom she was on the phone when King ripped it out of the wall.[2]
A southern belle from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who had developed a popular following for speaking what was on her mind, Mitchell had become critical of the Nixon administration because of its failure to end the Vietnam War and because of other dirty practices that she saw.[3]
It was feared that Mitchell would tell Thomas various secrets that would spearhead Nixon’s political downfall.
John Mitchell had allegedly told Martha about wiretaps on administration enemies, espionage being carried out against Democratic Party presidential candidate Edmund Muskie, secret information on presidential appointments, and about Mafia involvement in government.[4]
Martha was also a threat to expose the secret CIA machinations behind Watergate and “dirty business” of Watergate burglar James McCord, who had been Martha’s personal security guard.
A number of recent books show how McCord was a pivotal figure who set up the Watergate plumbers to be caught so as to provoke a scandal that would bring down Nixon in a neo-conservative coup.[5]
Although Nixon was an extreme right-winger who had pursued a zealously anti-communist foreign policy, the neo-conservatives had come to loathe Nixon because of his moves toward détente with the Soviet Union and restoration of U.S.-China diplomatic relations.
Nixon was also concentrating power over foreign policy decision making by the National Security Council (NSC) and away from the CIA.[6]
Historian Winzola McLendon’s biography of Mitchell details how, when Mitchell picked up the telephone in her hotel room in Newport Beach, California, to speak with Helen Thomas, King rushed into her room, threw her back against the bed and ripped the telephone out of the wall.[7]
When Helen called back, the hotel operator told her: “Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk.”[8]
When Martha tried to call Thomas again in her daughter Marty’s room, King entered the room, pulled the cord out and threw Martha on the bed. He then shoved her back into her room and slammed the door, according to McLendon.[9]
Martha recognized that McCord, a CIA agent who was a key figure in the Frank Olson assassination cover-up and numerous other CIA crimes, was the one who hired King, and the one who wanted to keep her silent.[10]
While being held against her will, Mitchell tried to escape from her room by climbing over the balcony, though King ran out and pulled her back inside. He then threw her down and kicked her.[11]
Subsequently, King stood guard at her door as she remained incarcerated in her room as a “political prisoner” subjected to periodic beatings during the night.[12]
When Marcia Kramer of the New York Daily News tracked Mitchell down at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York, a week later, Kramer described Mitchell as a “beaten woman” with “incredible black and blue marks on her arms.”
King and the FBI tried to spread stories that Mitchell was crazy and an alcoholic. Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson wrote that Mitchell was a “rip roaring drunk.”[13]
Even to this day, Mitchell is frequently described in popular media as an “emotionally disturbed woman” and a drunk—a standard way that whistleblowers are presented.[14]
When Mitchell finally left her room, she encountered King in the hotel lobby, where he assaulted her and cut her finger with glass.[15]
After administering six stitches, the doctor gave Mitchell a sedative hypodermically to subdue her so she could not speak out further.[16]
When King was promoted security chief for Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, Mitchell wrote a letter to Parade magazine, saying that King “not only dealt me the most horrible experience I have ever had, but inflicted bodily harm upon me.”
Amazingly, when King was confirmed by the Senate as ambassador to the Czech Republic in October 2017, he was not asked any critical questions about his past—even though James McCord had validated Mitchell’s story about what he had done to her.
King’s role in the Watergate scandal shows a stark continuity between the Nixon and Trump administrations.
Both have adopted the rhetoric of law and order to try to win popular support while adopting thuggish methods that Mitchell experienced directly.
As much as Trump likes to present himself as a victim of the “deep state,” he is in fact a pivotal instrument of it who directly employs its operatives.
For more on Mitchell, see Winzola McLendon, Martha: The Life of Martha Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1979). ↑
Holding a Master’s degree in Political Science from Western Illinois University, King joined the FBI in 1967 after a short teaching career. He is a long-time Republican Party official who was a legislative aide to Senator Edward Gurney (R-FL). He is a close friend of former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and business partner of Ryan’s brother Tobin. ↑
Mitchell had a highly conservative world view commensurate with her Arkansas upbringing. She started to be on the outs with the Nixon administration when she told reporters that the Vietnam War “stinks.” After hearing about these comments, Secretary of State William Rogers went to the press area where Martha had said them and told her: “Why don’t you stick to law and order and I’ll take care of foreign policy?” ↑
McLendon, Martha, 13. ↑
See, for example, Nick Bryant, The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2023); Robert Merritt, Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up, as told to Douglas Caddy, original attorney for the Watergate Seven (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2024). ↑
Ibid. ↑
McLendon, Martha, 11. ↑
McLendon, Martha, 12. ↑
McLendon, Martha, 13. ↑
Idem. ↑
Idem. ↑
Idem. ↑
McLendon, Martha, 14. A key source for Anderson’s columns, Frank Sturgis, was a CIA operative and Watergate “plumber” who played a key role in covering up the CIA’s role in the Watergate scandal. ↑
In 2013, the New York Post called Mitchell “emotionally disturbed” and said that she “had a habit—owing in part to her reported alcoholism—of getting drunk and telephoning whoever would listen to her rants. Most reporters stopped exploiting Mitchell once it became clear how ill the woman was.” Fox News reporter James Rosen’s 2008 biography of John Mitchell, The Strong Man, attacked Martha viciously, describing her as “sick, mean and ignorant,” an “aging belle [with a] fragile psyche,” a “rich eccentric” with “long standing problem with alcohol,” “unstable,” “prone to violent bursts of alcoholism.” Rosen called journalists sympathetic to Martha “opportunistic partisans and dowdy society columnists,” and said Mitchell was the one to have swung at King who comes across as innocent in his account. As time passes, more media and film depictions are presenting Mitchell positively, a pattern that is often the case with other whistleblowers. ↑
McLendon, Martha, 14. ↑
McLendon, Martha, 14, 15. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
