Martha Mitchell effect

When Martha Mitchell effect is called a misdiagnosis since the late 1980s, which comes about as fantasies and delusions due to a misinterpretation of factual evidence and facts. It may come to this false assessment when someone signs of a conspiracy or other machinations discovered to be dismissed and rejected by others for various reasons as absurd and nonsensical.

The effect was named by Brendan Maher to Martha Mitchell, the wife of John N. Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States and later campaign manager for Richard Nixon. Your allegations presented in the course of the Watergate scandal as right out.

Background

When Martha her second husband John Mitchell married in 1957, he was a lawyer in New York. In the coming years, he was a key employee Nixon, who had known him when their firms were merged. After his successful election as 37th president of the United States Nixon appointed his confidante to the Minister of Justice, after which the family moved to Washington, DC moved.

Soon Martha fell into their environment on by strange behavior. So she remarked often quite bluntly, unlike other wives of high government officials and did not want to be limited to common activities such as donations galas and charity events.

During the election campaign in 1972, the police arrested five burglars who had tried to install listening devices in the election district the Democrats. After one of the perpetrators had indicated, the wiretap was ordered by Mitchell and John Dean, escalated the affair. While the facade Nixon initially was true, it became increasingly difficult for John N. Mitchell, to talk ourselves out.

His wife had called several times in the past, in the early morning hours at reporters often so that her husband did not notice from the bathroom so. You whispered, she would have been intoxicated at many of the conversations, and took their views seriously. Well she went to work again at the journalist Helen Thomas, stating that Nixon had to be about the events in the picture: If her husband should know something about the burglary could, the President this not remain hidden. Nixon had to resign. Add more phone calls they reiterated their allegations and often spoke this with drawled, which was attributed to both their alcohol intake as the Southern accent. She walked out of a conspiracy to which the president is involved and her husband should act as a scapegoat for their cover-up. It soon turned out that Nixon had not only the burglary, but further actions initiated and advocated, which has been confirmed by many abstruse held suspicion Martha Mitchell.

Martha Mitchell is the model for the character played by Jean Smart First Lady " Martha Logan ", wife of the corrupt Charles Logan in the hit American TV series 24 to the anti-terrorist specialists Jack Bauer.