It was also the final meeting for Walter Louchheim. He and Rowe had formed an alliance against the Watergate. Six years later, the Watergate was back on the agenda.
The commission’s zoning committee studied the compromise and concluded conversion from residential to office use was “inappropriate and inconsistent with the Commission’s previously stated land use objectives for Watergate.” Commission staff director Charles Conrad said he thought the proposal, which would add 700,000 square feet of office space for 3,500 employees, “changes the complete nature of the project.” The planning commission, he said, has worked to get a “24-hour type of population in this section of the city.” The proposal for another office building would make the Watergate a “predominately commercial area.”
The planning commission, by a unanimous vote, urged the District Zoning Commission to delay approval of the final Watergate building as proposed, and directed its staff to continue discussions with the developers, the Kennedy Center, the interior department and the owners of Watergate East, in order to find a compromise that improved the “height-distance relationship” between the Kennedy Center and the Watergate, while keeping the area “predominantly residential.”
ACCORDING TO NICOLAS SALGO, THE “TROUBLES” WITH THE final Watergate building began when the “Kennedy family” got involved. An executive at John Hancock, which had provided construction financing for the Watergate, invited Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Salgo to lunch. “We discussed the situation but weren’t able to get anywhere,” Salgo said. He called their initial negotiations “shadowboxing.”
Salgo then called upon Roger Stevens. They had known each other since the 1950s, when Salgo was with Webb & Knapp in New York and Stevens was a major figure in New York real estate. “Look,” Salgo said to Stevens, “let’s stop the nonsense.” The two men had several meetings, mostly in New York so as not to become part of the Washington rumor mill, and Salgo offered a solution: Shrink the final Watergate building slightly and cut it in two. The new building closest to Watergate East would hold apartments, satisfying concerns of the Watergate East owners; the building closest to the Kennedy Center would hold offices. Stevens liked the idea. The question: How to get it done? Salgo suggested Stevens tell Senator Kennedy and other family members the solution came from him, not the Watergate team; Salgo in turn told “the Italians” the solution was his idea.
Watergate East owners were satisfied with the compromise and backed down. The National Capital Planning Commission voted in favor of this revised plan and transmitted it to the zoning commission on August 9, 1968. The compromise, according to the planning commission, improved the setting of the Kennedy Center, and protected the “residential setting” and “improved the views” of Watergate East.
ON OCTOBER 16, 1968, NIXON JOINED A CONFERENCE CALL with President Johnson; Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee; and independent candidate George Wallace. LBJ told them there had been “some movement” by the North Vietnamese in the Paris Peace Talks, but “anything might jeopardize it.”
At 7:30 A.M. on October 30, FBI agents monitoring the South Vietnamese embassy learned that Ambassador Bùi Diem “was contacted by a woman who did not identify herself, but whom he recognized by voice.” Agents identified the caller as “possibly Mrs. Anna Chennault.” The woman apologized for not having called the day before, “inasmuch as there were so many people around,” but thought “perhaps the Ambassador would have some more information this morning.” The caller then “asked what the situation is.” Ambassador Diem said he could not go into specifics, but something was “cooking” and suggested the caller drop by later that day. The caller said she would drop by “after the luncheon for Mrs. Agnew.”
At 3:26 that afternoon, Chennault entered the South Vietnamese embassy. More than an hour later, FBI agents watched her leave the embassy in her 1968 maroon Lincoln Continental and stop by her office on K Street before proceeding to a party hosted by Robert McCormick, the editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. National Security Advisor Walt Rostow forwarded the information to LBJ at 6:50 P.M. on October 31, 1968—Halloween—with a note: “The latest on the lady.”
That night, President Johnson invited Nixon, Humphrey and Wallace to join another call just minutes before he planned to announce, in a televised address from the Oval Office, a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. “Some of the old China Lobbyists—they are going around and implying to some of the Embassies . . . that they might get a better deal out of somebody that was not involved in this,” Johnson told them. “Now that’s made it difficult and it’s held up things a bit, and I know that none of you candidates are aware of it or responsible for it.” According to Chennault’s biographer, Johnson was warning Nixon that he knew about the back-channel communication between Chennault and Diem, and wanted it to stop. According to Chennault, John Mitchell called her with a message on behalf of Nixon. “It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position, and I hope you have made that clear to them.” He asked Chennault to stay in touch.
The next morning, Anna Chennault left a message for Ambassador Bùi Diem asking him to “make certain he notified her in the event he leaves town.” The call was reported to the White House Situation Room and Rostow, who forwarded the information to President Johnson.
Shortly after 6:30 P.M., FBI agents observed Anna Chennault and Tommy Corcoran leave Watergate East and head over to the Sheraton Park Hotel, where they attended a reception hosted by socialite Perle Mesta on the seventh floor. From there they went to the nearby Ontario Theatre for a private showing of Funny Girl, after which they attended another party at the Shoreham Hotel, hosted by Columbia Pictures executive Raymond Bell. Chennault dropped Corcoran off at his residence shortly after midnight and her driver took her home to Watergate East.
The next morning, Rostow updated President Johnson and attached a “significant intelligence report” from that morning’s Washington Post society section: an article headlined A WEALTH OF TALENT, describing the forty-two-year-old widow of General Claire Chennault as “the most titled woman in the Nixon campaign and one most likely to be offered a post in his administration if he wins.”
On November 2, FBI wiretaps picked up a telephone conversation between Chennault and Diem. Chennault told the ambassador she had received a message from her “boss,” which “her boss wanted her to give personally to the ambassador.” Her message: “Hold on, we are gonna win.” According to a summary of the call, transmitted to the White House Situation Room within hours, Chennault told Ambassador Diem “her boss had just called from New Mexico.” Vice presidential nominee Spiro T. Agnew was in New Mexico that day on a campaign swing. That afternoon, FBI agents observed Chennault as she got into her car at 1:45 P.M. and headed north on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, with her chauffeur at the wheel. Agents assumed she was headed to New York, but later observed her returning to the Watergate for the evening.
On November 3, FBI agents observed Chennault leave Watergate East. She drove herself to the Apex Theatre on Massachusetts Avenue to see the movie Finian’s Rainbow with “an unidentified male companion.”
On the morning of November 4, Chennault paid another visit to the South Vietnamese embassy, where she remained for approximately thirty minutes before continuing to Nixon’s campaign office at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, a block from the White House. An embassy aide called her there, and asked her to return for a meeting with Ambassador Diem; Chennault hopped in a taxi.
On Tuesday, November 5—Election Day—Anna visited her voting precinct and stopped by briefly at her offices on K Street before heading to New York. At 7:45 P.M., FBI agents confirmed she was in the Nixon suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, waiting to go down to the ballroom for the victory celebration.
At 12:30 A.M., NBC News reported Humphrey was ahead by 600,000 votes. Nixon remained in his suite. At 6:00 A.M., Humphrey’s lead had shrunk to 5,000 votes, with 94 percent of the nation’s pre
cincts reporting. At 8:00 A.M., the networks called California and Ohio for Nixon. Finally, at 8:30 A.M., ABC projected a Nixon victory in Illinois and declared Nixon the newly elected thirty-seventh president of the United States.
The next day, LBJ bundled up a week’s worth of intelligence reports and handed them to an aide, with the notation: “Put that with the other stuff on that woman.” He was not yet finished with Anna Chennault.
JOHN MITCHELL SAID HE TURNED DOWN THE POST OF ATTORNEY general twenty-six times before relenting. “I’m a fat and prosperous Wall Street lawyer, which is just what I always wanted to be,” he said. The real reason Mitchell hesitated was his concern that his wife, Martha, could not survive in the Washington fishbowl. She had “very real psychological problems,” recalled Nixon aide Leonard Garment. Bringing Martha to Washington, he said, was “sort of like carrying an explosive substance into a very hot area.”
Mitchell sold Martha on the move to Washington by telling her he needed her help putting together the new administration. As she was checking out of Craig House, a psychiatric hospital on sixty acres in Beacon, New York, overlooking the Hudson River—the same facility where Zelda Fitzgerald sought treatment—she told hospital staff to pick up the pace and stop “holding up the selection of Nixon’s Cabinet.”
According to Chennault, John Mitchell had been to her penthouse on several occasions and liked the Watergate, so Anna put him in touch with the management and within a few weeks he bought a three-bedroom duplex at Watergate East boasting “one of the most impressive views in the Nation’s Capital.” Martha Mitchell told the Washington Post she selected the apartment personally, although John liked it when he finally saw it. According to a report in the Washington Post, the Mitchells paid $325,000 for apartment 712-N, but building records show the sale closed on December 16, 1968, for price of $151,880. Maintenance charges, including property taxes, were reportedly $1,000 per month.
Anna Chennault met Martha Mitchell for the first time only after they moved into the Watergate, in an elevator on the way to a reception.
“Martha, this is Anna Chennault,” Mitchell said. “You’ve heard me talk about her.”
Martha looked her over, in what Anna later called “the most blatantly curious way.”
“Well, well,” Martha said. “If I had only known what a beautiful woman my husband’s been working with, I would have been so jealous.”
Anna recalled later that Martha was “uninhibited about the rivalry, so honestly competitive.”
“I liked her instantly,” Chennault wrote.
Chapter Three: Titanic on the Potomac
Views that never lose their appeal. Peaceful. Quiet. Or alive with night lights. The splash of a summer sunset. The flash of fall. Winter white. The Potomac with its graceful bridges. A misty sunrise. Or a glorious one that lights up a row of barges gently moving with the flow of the river.
Watergate South marketing brochure
ON JANUARY 20, 1969, PRESIDENT AND MRS. JOHNSON RETURNED to Texas, the Nixon family moved into the White House, and Edith and Lee Burchinal received a golden key to their new apartment in Watergate West.
By the time the Burchinals moved in, 87 percent of Watergate West’s 143 cooperative apartments, priced from $28,000 to $186,000, had been sold. There were 33 different floor plans, including 8 penthouses with roof terraces and 14 townhouses. The average apartment cost around $70,000 and the typical down payment was more than $25,000. When Aldo Samaritani visited the Watergate from Rome, he learned sales had already reached $19 million. “It takes a heap of selling to move a shelter project with that price tag,” the Washington Post reported.
As a student at George Washington University, Mike Brenneman had parked his “clunker” on the site of the abandoned Washington Gas Light Company plant to attend classes. At age thirty-seven, he now parked his car at about the same location—but in the underground garage of the Watergate. He was now president of Riverview Realty, the exclusive sales agent for the complex.
From his office in Watergate East (the original sales center, with its flags and fountains, had been torn down to make way for construction of the Watergate Hotel and the Watergate Office Building), Brenneman, tall and handsome with a perpetual tan and graying sideburns, briefed a reporter on his sales strategy. “All of us in this office,” said Brenneman, “stress the obvious blessings of our location, the striking architecture of Luigi Moretti, the concept that includes shops, the Watergate Hotel, the office building, health club, the restaurant and the environment of open acres around the building.” The Post gushed, “Watergate statistics sing from the Brenneman tongue that has been trained by its owner to relate the luxury-living aspects of the town within the city concept.”
Riverview also had the contract to manage the operations of Watergate West on behalf of the residents. The company had a similar contract to manage the affairs of Watergate East, the Post reported, until owners there “had construction gripes” and “wanted a change.” Brenneman acknowledged it was “something of a conflict to represent both the developers and apartment owners.” But he predicted those problems would be avoided in Watergate West, because he had set up “an advisory group of owners” and planned to consult with them on contracts for insurance and maintenance.
The two-story model townhouse apartment in Watergate West was furnished by members of the local chapter of the American Institute of Interior Design. They used “subtle, earthly colors” to “create a restful mood”—in sharp contrast to the “Oriental Opulence and Italianate Grandeur” of Duke Arturo Pini di San Miniato’s design for the model apartment in Watergate East. Sixteen design students in Washington and Baltimore entered a contest to design the new Watergate West apartment of Howard Mitchell, conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, which had performed summer concerts on the nearby Watergate Barge until noise from nearby National Airport closed the venue in 1965.
The Italian influence found its way into the public spaces of Watergate West. A local designer, Don D. McAfee, selected Pietro Lazzari to design a sculptured frieze for the lobby. Lazzari was born in Rome, apprenticed to a local sculptor at the age of fifteen and earned a degree from the Ornamental School of Rome in 1922. He immigrated to the United States in 1929, exhibited his work in New York galleries, made courtroom sketches of the Lindbergh kidnapping trial for a New York newspaper and designed post office murals for the U.S. Section of Fine Arts of the Works Progress Administration. Since 1942, he had lived in Washington with his second wife, Evelyn, and taught painting and sculpture.
When Lazzari initially balked at the $5,000 commission for a hundred-foot sculptural frieze, which he felt was too low, McAfee suggested he prepare a small section that could be “mechanically repeated” to cover the entire lobby. Lazzari was appalled at that idea, however, and accepted the original budget. He designed a series of figures on horseback, surrounded by flowers and trees, and produced panels in his studio in sections, framed in white, with anchoring devices on the backs to allow workmen to attach each piece to the lobby’s masonry walls. Cecchi inspected the frieze and asked that one panel, which had been touched up by the artist after installation in darker shades, be repainted to match the others. McAfee praised the design, telling Lazzari the frieze provided “some real ‘guts’” in the lobby and the developers were “quite pleased.”
“TO GO FORWARD AT ALL IS TO GO FORWARD TOGETHER,” read one applause line in Nixon’s Inaugural Address. So many new members of the Republican administration were making the Watergate their home, the Washington Post quipped, “much of his Cabinet and other aides and officials took it literally.”
Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s “confidential secretary,” rented a two-bedroom duplex on the seventh floor of Watergate East, with a “verbal” option to buy. She selected the apartment because it was an eight-minute drive from the White House—even in traffic—and it was a duplex. “I bring a lot of paperwork home on weekends,” Woods told the Post. “If friends stop by, I can leave all that work out up
stairs in the den, and the downstairs won’t be disturbed.”
Another Nixon secretary, Shelley Ann Scarney, a petite blonde with a broad smile, ran into Elizabeth Hanford at a party in New York, soon after the election. Hanford, a graduate of Duke University and Harvard Law School, was working in the White House Office of Consumer Affairs and had been asked to stay on by the incoming Nixon administration. Hanford lived in Watergate East and recommended the building to Scarney, who called the leasing office and learned a one-bedroom apartment would be available soon, on the sixth floor. Scarney took the apartment, at a monthly rent that was only a few dollars more than what she was paying in Manhattan. While waiting for the current tenants to move out, she rented a room at the Watergate Hotel for $17 a night. The hotel had been open more than a year, but was nearly empty. Her boyfriend, a young Nixon speechwriter named Pat Buchanan, rented an apartment nearby.
Nixon press aide Nancy Lammerding took a one-bedroom apartment in Watergate West because the building had a swimming pool and was close to the White House, where she sometimes worked long hours. “It’s easier for the White House limousine to drop me off there late at night than it would be if I lived in the suburbs,” she told the Washington Star.
Maurice Stans, the incoming secretary of commerce, read Horatio Alger stories as a young man, following the prototypical young hero as he struggled valiantly against poverty and adversity and traveled the road from “rags to riches,” fulfilling the American dream. Stans’s own life followed the Alger formula. He was born in Shakopee, Minnesota, to Belgian immigrants. After high school, he moved to Chicago and worked as a stenographer by day while earning his business degree from Northwestern University at night. He moved to Washington in 1953 and within two years was recruited into the U.S. Postal Service as deputy postmaster general. President Eisenhower tapped Stans in March 1958 to head the Bureau of the Budget, the predecessor of today’s Office of Management and Budget. After Eisenhower left office, Stans became a banker. He raised funds for Nixon’s failed 1960 presidential and 1962 gubernatorial campaigns and served as finance chairman for the 1968 Nixon-Agnew presidential campaign, whose $36.5 million in expenditures set a new record.
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