Clyde Jay Jennings enjoys celebrity status because of his popular mother, Martha Mitchell, often referred to as the Watergate whistle-blower. “If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate,” Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, once said.
Clyde Jay Jennings’ Family
Clyde Jay Jennings is known to the world as the son of Martha Mitchell.
Martha Elizabeth Beall Mitchell was born on September 2, 1918, in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). Her father, George V. Beall, was a cotton broker, and her mother, Arie Elizabeth Ferguson Beall, was a speech and drama teacher. Martha graduated in May 1937 from Pine Bluff High School. She met Clyde Jennings Jr., a young U.S. Army officer from Lynchburg, Virginia, and went out on a date with him. Soon after he was honorably discharged, they were married in Pine Bluff on October 5, 1946, at the Presbyterian Church on 5th Avenue. They moved to Rye, New York, and had a son named Clyde Jay Jennings.
The couple filed for divorce on August 1, 1957. On December 30, 1957, she married John N. Mitchell, an attorney in New York City. They had one daughter, Martha (Marty) Elizabeth Mitchell Jr. Her husband managed Richard Nixon’s successful presidential campaign in 1968 and was appointed attorney general after Nixon took office.
Jay grew up and studied law at the University of Mississippi, where he met his future wife, Janis Crawford of Tylertown, Mississippi. They exchanged wedding vows at the First Baptist Church in Crawford’s hometown in September 1974. Martha Mitchell died in New York City on May 31, 1976, two years after her diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a rare bone cancer.
Clyde Jay Jennings’ Net Worth
In January 1980, Clyde Jay Jennings held a job as a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigator in Washington. His mother, Martha is reported to have had a net worth of $2 million at the time of her death. It was reported that a storage company had auctioned off her belonging in Manhattan.
Martha Mitchell gained worldwide recognition for her outspokenness during the Watergate scandal—a scandal that forced President Richard Nixon to resign from office on August 9, 1974. After her marriage to Attorney General, John Mitchell, Martha became so well known as the outspoken wife of a cabinet member that, whenever her first name was mentioned, everyone knew who she was. She shared her views on everything: the Vietnam War, school busing, nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, and more.
In 1972, John resigned from his position to manage Nixon’s second campaign. He left Martha without any financial support. Martha got a job as a TV show host. She was a special guest host for Washington’s WTTG television program Panorama during the first week of April 1974. On April 27, the station aired the best of the week’s interviews as “Panorama Presents: The Best of Martha Mitchell.”
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