The Watergate
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Clarke called forward the first speaker against the proposal, Mrs. Harold B. Hinton, chairman of the Planning and Zoning Committee of the Progressive Citizen’s Association of Georgetown. “We don’t oppose the Watergate,” she began, but the developer’s plans, models and drawings, she said, were deceptive. “It is not going to be a low thing,” she said. “It is going to be a Trojan Wall.” She pointed to the model. “It is just too tall. Aesthetics is not un-American. It was planned into this capital.”
Charles Martin, the CFA’s counsel, presented a four-page statement in opposition to the Watergate, indicating “disappointment with the preliminary plans and designs for the proposed Watergate Towne and office complex.” The CFA was “greatly concerned” over the height and “character” of the Watergate, its size relative to the public monuments nearby and the inadequate amount of open space provided. The “strongly sculptural” and “sweeping” design was “overpowering.” According to the Washington Star, the Commission of Fine Arts considered the Watergate to be “neither fine nor artful.”
A week later, at the next public meeting of the CFA, District Engineer Commissioner Clarke acknowledged “several” of his fellow members of the District Zoning Commission had some “misgivings” about the Watergate’s impact on the surrounding area. But he urged the CFA to endorse the project, observing “it is in the interest of the city to allow some development to go ahead there as rapidly as possible, simply for tax considerations.” He presented a rendering of an alternative vision for development on the site—helpfully provided to him by the Watergate team, which got the idea from Bill Finley at the planning commission—showing a series of ordinary, cross-shaped apartment buildings that could be built on the site, using current zoning rules and regulations. “I am not here to sell anything,” Clarke said, but the proposed design for the Watergate was “something a whole lot better” than forcing the developers to construct “routine” apartments on the site.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, CFA MEMBERS RALPH THOMAS WALKER and Douglas Orr, both architects, met with Milton Fischer, Nicolas Salgo and Giuseppe Cecchi in New York, at Walker’s office on Park Avenue. The CFA had given up on converting the land to a park and was now willing to allow some sort of development on the property, Walker said. But if the Watergate wanted approval from the CFA, the buildings would need to be smaller and shorter. As currently conceived, the Watergate was a nonstarter.
None of the Watergate representatives at that meeting had the authority to change Luigi Moretti’s design without his approval. Instead, they proposed bringing Moretti to the United States to discuss the matter in person, if the CFA would postpone its formal vote on the project. Walker and Orr agreed and a meeting was set for May 15. Fischer flew to Italy to brief Moretti.
“To those who oppose the project,” the New York Times reported, “the meeting represents a step toward saving the capital from what might prove to be an architectural catastrophe on a scale so grand that the city’s character would be irretrievably damaged.”
WHITE HOUSE ACTS TO CUT HEIGHT OF HUGE WATERGATE DEVELOPMENT, read the headline in the May 5, 1962, edition of the Washington Post. “The White House has been thrust into the billowing controversy over the proposed $50 million Watergate Towne development along the Potomac shore at Foggy Bottom,” the Post reported. “While it is not clear who on the White House staff notified District officials of the Administration’s interest in the zoning dispute, it was understood that the President had been briefed.”
Cecchi was aware, from his back-channel conversations with Bill Finley, that Rowe had sought support from a White House aide for her park proposal, but had made no progress. Finley called Lee White, an aide to Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen, who said there was “no official White House position” on the project and the Watergate had “never become an issue” in the White House, and he suspected it would not be. The Washington Star, in an editorial titled WEAK IN THE KNEES, expressed skepticism about the Post report. “If this position has been taken by the President, which we doubt, it of course would carry considerable weight,” the Star wrote. “If, however, it was expressed by some White House assistant who was persuaded to do so by the opponents of the project, it is not entitled to serious consideration.”
Nerves were raw as the National Capital Planning Commission met in closed session on May 6. Commissioner C. McKim Norton charged Chairman Rowe and Commissioner Louchheim had “pulled the rug out from under us” by attending a meeting with the District Zoning Commission and the CFA without any representation from the majority of planning commission members who supported the Watergate. “The idea was, as the papers picked up apparently, the Commission votes one way and the chairman and somebody else didn’t like it,” fumed Commissioner Alexander C. Robinson. Woodruff, the vice chairman, said he was “greatly disturbed that an intimation could be made in the press that the Commission either had changed its mind without having formally done so or that you, Madam Chairman, were taking the reins in your own hands and speaking adversely to an opinion which had been expressed collectively by the Commission.”
“Everyone there knew exactly what the Commission had done,” Rowe objected. “I don’t feel as indefensible as you make me sound.”
General Clarke turned to Rowe. “I am not at all being critical of you expressing your personal views,” he said. “I admire you for expressing them. But here, in the case of the Watergate, we have known as a Commission for a year that our staff was actively engaged in that work. I just don’t feel that we can ever go back and say, ‘Well, that was only the staff acting.’”
“Mr. Louchheim and I didn’t know anything about this project until last fall,” Rowe replied. “I don’t know how informed the other members of the Commission were. You might have been well informed, but I did not know the staff was working closely with the developers.”
“I thought we all knew it,” said Clarke.
Louchheim proposed the planning commission release a statement as a placeholder, pending further developments, which read: “The National Capital Planning Commission has no new position on the Watergate project, but its staff will, of course, cooperate with the Fine Arts Commission and the architects of the project toward working out a satisfactory solution.”
The motion passed. Rowe handed Louchheim’s notes to a staff member. “Would you get this typed up,” she asked, “so we can move on to something peaceful?”
The Washington Post reported the National Capital Planning Commission stuck by its support for the Watergate, despite “White House concerns about the impact of the massive development on the city’s skyline.” The Post added, however, at least two individuals “close to President Kennedy have said that he has expressed personal concern about the size of the project, but they differed as to how strongly he felt about it.”
LUIGI MORETTI ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON. IT WAS HARD FOR him to travel outside Italy—he was extremely ill, with diabetes and a heart condition—yet he recognized that in order to defend his design, it was imperative he do so in person.
The CFA met on May 15. Chairman Finley said the Watergate failed to “harmonize” with nearby buildings and was too tall. Moretti, through an interpreter, said he was open to discussion of his design, but on the matter of height, there could be no compromise. If the CFA insisted on keeping the Watergate to a height of no more than ninety feet, he said, the developers would simply abandon the project and sell the land to whoever wanted it, presumably to erect more “conventional” buildings. The meeting ended with an agreement to hold one final session three days later in New York.
After the meeting with the CFA, Moretti paid a call on the district commissioners. Speaking through an interpreter, Moretti said he had studied Washington and discovered a “deep commitment” in the federal city, inspired by English landscape design, to link nature and architecture through gardens and greenery. He assured the commissioners his design for the Watergate was solidly in that tradition and his overall design—which he called “a petrifie
d garden”—was simply a modern take on Washington’s architectural heritage.
In New York, Moretti and three architect members of the CFA—Ralph Walker, Michael Rapuano and Douglas Orr—met for three hours and hammered out an agreement. According to the Washington Post, the developers agreed to “scale down” the square footage of the project and Moretti agreed to review his design “to create the impression of maximum space” between the buildings. Commissioners said they would “depend on Moretti’s judgment in the scaling down of building heights and other proposed changes.” SGI and the Commission of Fine Arts issued a joint statement that “expressed agreement in principle” with Moretti’s design, but noted “the height of 130 feet of the buildings should not exceed 25% of the total of the building complex to be erected”—a poorly crafted sentence that would cause the entire agreement to unravel within a year.
Moretti returned to Rome. The trip to America had exhausted him. While he recovered, architects in the Studio Moretti offices at the Palazzo Colonna, working with SGI architects, developed new designs consistent with the agreement reached in New York. CFA chairman David Finley informed District Engineering Commissioner Clarke that agreement had been reached and “there would seem to be no reason for delaying action on the zoning request.”
On July 13, 1962, the District Zoning Commission voted three to one to approve revised plans for the Watergate. The only opposing vote was Capitol architect J. George Stewart. The zoning commission added a condition requiring the height of the building closest to the planned National Cultural Center be subject to “a possible adjustment.” An SGI representative told the Washington Post final plans would be submitted to District building officials in the fall, and construction would begin in the spring of 1963.
That prediction would prove to be optimistic.
MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL CAPITAL PLANNING COMMISSION met in June for a private lunch at the Cosmos Club in Washington, to resolve the bitter conflicts between Libby Rowe and Bill Finley, which had spilled out into the press. “It has been an open secret that Planning Commission Chairman Elisabeth [sic] C. Rowe, a Kennedy administration appointee, and planning director William E. Finley have not seen eye-to-eye on some key city planning issues,” including the Watergate, the Washington Post reported. Rowe could count on Walter Louchheim’s support, but the rest of her colleagues were in Finley’s camp. To avert a “potentially dangerous impasse,” agreement was reached on a “stronger role” for Rowe and the commission on planning issues, while “administrative authority” was retained by Finley. Authority shifted clearly—and publicly—to Rowe. Within a few months, Finley would step down as staff director of the National Capital Planning Commission to head the planning and development of the new town of Columbia on fourteen thousand acres in Maryland.
IN MID-JULY, DREW PEARSON, WASHINGTON’S MOST FORMIDABLE syndicated columnist, reignited the Watergate controversy, in a column headlined: VATICAN SEEKS IMPOSING EDIFICE ON POTOMAC.
“Some prominent Catholics in Washington,” Pearson wrote, “are concerned over the battle staged by Vatican representatives to override Washington building codes in order to erect a massive, Italian-type apartment house on the banks of the Potomac not far from the Lincoln Memorial.” Abigail McCarthy, wife of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, a Catholic, had told her friends, “I feel certain that if some of us went to Rome and talked to the Pope, he would agree with us that the building ought not to be built.”
Fueled by the attention Pearson’s column generated, POAU kicked its anti-Watergate campaign into high gear. The Rev. Dr. C. Stanley Lowell, assistant director of the organization, urged supporters to protest the Watergate.
ROGER L. STEVENS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S PICK AS THE new head of the board of trustees of the National Cultural Center, discovered shortly after his appointment in September 1961 that the center’s ambitious fund-raising plan was a flop: The center’s bank account held just $13,425. Stevens, a successful New York real estate investor, sent Edward Durell Stone back to the drawing board to come up with a new design for the building—at half the cost of the concrete-and-glass “clamshell.”
On September 11, 1962, Stone presented his revised plans for the National Cultural Center to the trustees and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, at a meeting held at The Elms in Newport, Rhode Island. Stone called the center’s waterfront location “one of the most glamorous settings for a public building in the world,” adding that America had “not made sufficient use of our rivers as settings for great buildings.” He replaced his original “clamshell” design with a streamlined, rectangular structure housing a 1,200-seat theater, a 275-seat symphony hall and a 250-seat opera house, all under one roof. A “garden-like” area, for festivals, balls and other functions, included a retractable roof for year-round use. The center would be faced in white marble—following the Washington tradition of “white buildings in park-like settings.” And, as requested by Stevens, the new design cut construction costs in half.
MORE THAN FIFTEEN HUNDRED LETTERS ARRIVED AT THE White House by mid-November 1962. Charles Horsky, Kennedy’s aide for affairs in the capital, responded to every letter, assuring writers that “Watergate Towne” would be carefully vetted by the appropriate federal and local agencies; that “nothing will be done which will not enhance and improve the Nation’s Capital”; and that developers “would of course pay taxes” on the property. Horsky’s letters carefully avoided making reference to SGI, Italy or the Vatican. He described the Watergate developer only as “Island Vista, Inc., a District of Columbia Corporation” backed by financing from “a Boston insurance company.”
On January 23, 1963, after more than three thousand letters protesting the Watergate had been received at the White House, Horsky sent Kennedy a three-page memo about the “Watergate Towne Project,” alerting the president to the controversy. The developer, Horsky wrote, “is Island Vista Corporation (a DC corporation), which is a subsidiary most of whose stock (and perhaps all of it) is owned by Societa Generale Immobiliare.” He explained “the Vatican” was one of SGI’s principal stockholders, and “several Vatican officials” sat on the SGI board of directors. “It is this latter fact that has sparked the current protest against Watergate Towne.”
Horsky enclosed for the president’s information a copy of the response he had been using for months, expressing “confidence” in the judgment of the responsible agencies. “I propose to continue to respond this way,” Horsky wrote. Kennedy instructed Horsky to handle the Watergate controversy as he saw fit—and to keep it away from the Oval Office.
Separately, Kennedy had asked Horsky what could be done in the year ahead to help make Washington “a more beautiful and functional city.” The president had recently read an article in Architectural Forum by Paul Rudolph, chairman of the Department of Architecture at Yale, bemoaning the federal city’s “monumental dullness” and characterizing the new buildings in the District as “ridiculous.” Horsky sent Kennedy a four-page memo outlining goals and actions for the administration, including an intense effort to improve Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall and steps to “lift, in a major way, the architectural and aesthetic quality of government architecture.” Horsky also recommended Kennedy “rejuvenate” the Commission of Fine Arts “by appointing new blood of the highest caliber possible.” Kennedy had an opportunity to replace six of the seven sitting CFA commissioners. Horsky reported that William Walton was already engaged in seeking out new members.
Sandy-haired and youthful, Walton looked “like a rugged representative of the New Frontier,” according to a Washington Post profile. He was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, to a newspaper family, and received a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1931. Two years later, he was hired by the Associated Press and in July 1934 he covered the shooting of John Dillinger in Chicago. Walton went to work for Time in 1941 and reported on U.S. Air Force operations in England, where he jumped with the 82nd Airborne Division to cover the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Walton
returned to the United States after the war and worked as the Washington editor of the New Republic until 1949, when he quit and devoted himself to painting full-time. Walton met young congressman John Kennedy and a beautiful photographer named Jacqueline Bouvier in Washington shortly thereafter. After the Kennedys married, they moved into the townhouse next door to Walton’s in Georgetown.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, Walton volunteered for Kennedy in three states—Wisconsin and West Virginia in the primaries, and New York in the general. After the election, Walton served as an unpaid advisor to the White House on arts and culture.
At Walton’s recommendation, Kennedy had earlier appointed landscape architect Hideo Sasaki to the CFA, replacing a Republican appointee, Michael Rapuano. Sasaki—known as Hid to his friends and family—was born in Reedley, a small town in California’s Central Valley. He studied planning at the University of California, Berkeley; when World War II erupted he was sent to an internment camp—along with five hundred of his fellow students. After the war, Sasaki received degrees from the University of Illinois and Harvard, where he became chair of the department of landscape architecture in 1958.