Now, Another Villain

Would you believe--Martha Mitchell?

Guess who is now getting blamed for Watergate? Martha Mitchell, says Richard Nixon, and then he adds, typically, "God rest her soul because she, in her heart, was a good person." Nixon takes off after Martha, who died last year following a prolonged bout with bone cancer, in the fifth and presumably last of his taped television interviews with British Television Personality David Frost, being aired this month.

Just what did Martha have to do with it all, since she was telling her husband John at the time that the Nixon crowd was up to no good? Says Nixon: "She just had a mental and emotional problem that nobody knew about. If it hadn't have been for Martha, there'd have been no Watergate, because John wasn't mindin' that store. He was practically out of his mind about Martha in the spring of 1972. He was letting Magruder and all these boys, these kids, these nuts, run this thing."

John's store, to be precise, was the infamous Committee to Re-Elect the President, run on a day-to-day basis by its deputy director, Jeb Stuart Magruder. For his role in obstructing the probe, Mitchell this year began serving a 2 1/2-to eight-year term while Magruder got out of prison in January 1975 after having served seven months. Nixon professes nothing but "compassion" for Mitchell, who, he says, was "too smart to ever get involved in a stupid jackass thing like Watergate." But, alas, Mitchell "could only think of that poor Martha and that lovely child Marty, and so that's the human side of this story..."

The Nixon show amounts to a pastiche of odds and ends from Frost's 28 hours of interviews--material left over from the four conversations that have already been aired. It involves a few new tidbits, but not much more. Who, for instance, erased 18 1/2 minutes of taped conversations between Nixon and Aide H.R. (Bob) Haldeman? Nixon says he has no idea--but he does know who did not do it. "I didn't touch the machine," he says. Secretary Rose Mary Woods? Nor she, he says. "She's so smart, she'd a done a ... she'd destroyed a lot more." Nixon also explains why the press kept picking on him. His basic problem, he says, is that "I'm not a lovable man."

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