The Watergate

by Joseph Rodota

  Sweden opened a new chancery spanning the entire twelfth floor of Watergate 600 in November. The old chancery, at 2249 R Street NW, had become so packed that bathrooms were being remodeled into offices. The new suite covered 24,000 square feet, roughly double the size of its former quarters. Architect Björn Hultén of Göteborg adapted the new interiors to the Watergate’s kidney shape, filling offices and conference rooms with Swedish furniture and contemporary art. The blue-and-white color scheme matched the Swedish flag. Every office had a view. “The military section chief can literally wave at his counterpart at the Pentagon,” the Washington Post reported. Chancery personnel had access to the rooftop terrace, with its panoramic view, and reserved spaces in the garage. The only concern was the city bus lines did not conveniently link the Swedish embassy with the Watergate, so a private bus was put into service to shuttle employees between the two locations.

  Don McAfee designed the interiors of three Watergate South model apartments, including fully furnished one- and two-bedroom apartments and a partially furnished three-bedroom unit. McAfee used “a whole range of warm neutrals” with “a few dashes of black.” In one living room, everything was ivory—furniture, walls, draperies and carpet—to put “more emphasis” on the vivid paintings of artist Tom Woodard. McAfee placed white furniture against modern wallpaper with pastel flowers or white geometrics against backgrounds of brown or black. “The effect is striking,” noted a local reporter.

  A brochure for the Watergate South apartments listed the building’s amenities:

  Magnificence. Flair. Saunas.

  An outdoor café.

  Parking. Restaurant. Wining. Dining.

  A sinfully good pastry shop.

  A marvelous little hairdresser.

  Security. Intercoms.

  And, a bidet.

  Over the past six years, real estate prices had climbed throughout the Watergate. One owner of a three-bedroom apartment in Watergate East sold it two years later for a $14,000 profit. When Watergate East was first built, the least expensive unit was a studio priced at $17,500. Units in Watergate South now started at $32,000. On the tenth floor, the least expensive unit was a one-bedroom apartment with a view of the courtyard, priced at $70,000.

  Despite the slow pace of leases for the Watergate 600 office building, optimism permeated SGI headquarters back in Rome. Negotiations were under way for the purchase of six acres on New Mexico Avenue, close to Glover-Archbold Park, for another cooperative apartment, and a lot on the corner of Virginia Avenue and 25th Street, facing Watergate East, for the construction of a ten-story apartment building. Across the Potomac River, the company was ready to purchase land, some private and some public, within the city limits of Alexandria, Virginia. That location, Samaritani said, was the perfect site for a new residential community of buon tono (“good tone”), with buildings of about fifty meters in height, with commercial spaces, where residences could be sold, like the Watergate, as cooperative apartments. The price of the land—about $1.5 million—was “most favorable, given the property’s attractive location.”

  Many Alexandria officials wanted to bring a “Watergate-type” development to their side of the Potomac; a year earlier, the Alexandria board of trade endorsed a thirty-to-forty-story hotel for an area known as “Watergate north.” In May, the city council approved a new zoning ordinance that permitted construction of high-rise buildings along the waterfront. Some residents of Old Town Alexandria were alarmed. But Royce Ward, who was both a Watergate executive and an Old Town resident, said many of his friends supported the idea. He assured the Post any new development would be as architecturally distinctive as the Watergate, whose developers had no tolerance for “pedestrian buildings.”

  Henry Winston became president of Watergate Management Company and Watergate Improvement Associates, the two entities responsible for sales, leases and operations throughout the complex, and began planning a new shopping arcade for the ground floor of Watergate 600. The arcade would be called Les Champs, patterned after a similar “boutique mall” of eighty shops built by SGI on the ground floor of the Pan American building on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and would draw suburban shoppers with valet parking, a shuttle service to downtown Washington and on-site babysitting.

  “IN LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR,” NEWSWEEK GUSHED, “the Watergate has blossomed from just another ostentatious housing development into the ne plus ultra, the sine qua non, the honi soit qui mal y pense of gracious Washington living.” (The last of these phrases, in French, “Shame on him who thinks evil of the place,” is the motto of England’s Royal Order of the Garter.)

  On warm evenings, Maurice Stans took his projector down to the Watergate East outdoor pool and set up a screen, inviting neighbors to watch home movies of his adventures on safari. (The films might not have had “overtones of racism,” neighbor George Arnstein commented, but they were at least “patronizing.”) Another movie director who lived at the Watergate showed films that had not yet been released, or something starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. A waiter from the Watergate Hotel served caviar while residents sipped champagne and watched the movie under the stars.

  According to Newsweek, the center of the social life at the Watergate was the penthouse of Anna Chennault, who was fond of serving guests her special dish “Concubine Chicken,” and was careful to invite some of her Democratic neighbors, including Senators Russell Long of Louisiana and Alan Cranston of California. “You learn you can disagree but not be disagreeable,” she said.

  One evening, a small dinner party in Anna Chennault’s apartment was interrupted several times by calls from the White House. One by one, Chennault’s guests—including John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—were called away from the table to speak with President Nixon. As each aide got up to take his call, she observed Henry Kissinger become agitated. She thought he was wondering when—or if—his turn would come.

  When dinner was over, Kissinger turned to her. “Well, I didn’t get any calls from the White House,” he said, smiling, “but the next time I come to dinner at your place I’ll make arrangements with the White House operator to call me so I don’t feel left out.”

  Martha and John Mitchell hosted a cocktail buffet to celebrate the engagement of Nancy Hardin, daughter of the secretary of agriculture, and Douglas Rogers, son of the secretary of state. Vice President Agnew sat down at the piano and played “a romantic piece for the couple as they stood over his shoulder, then he switched to a jazzy beat and really swung it.” He played one song on Martha’s Hammond organ and guests thought they were about to be treated to a duet. But Martha got “cold feet,” Washington Star columnist Betty Beale wrote, “because the vice president can play by ear and she can’t.”

  Chennault and the Mitchells began to see more and more of each other. According to Chennault, John Mitchell would call her up in the evening and ask if he could come up to her penthouse “to discuss an issue,” or Martha would invite her down “to have a drink or play bridge.” They often attended the same parties and functions and, upon returning home to the Watergate, would stop at either the Mitchells’ or Anna’s for a nightcap.

  “I love it,” said director of the mint Mary Brooks about the Watergate. “Everything you want is here,” said Hobart Taylor, Jr., a former director of the Export-Import Bank and one of the Watergate’s few black residents, “post office, bank, florist, grocery, travel agency. Last night, I wanted some ginger ale. I used the phone. It was up in ten minutes. I didn’t need money, just signed for it.”

  “The view is glorious,” said another resident. “My wife and I sit there and hold hands like a couple of kids. It could be Florence or any romantic city.”

  According to the Washington Post, the Watergate was “a glittering Potomac Titanic,” as glamorous as the doomed ocean liner, but “with no icebergs or steerage class.”

  Chapter Four: Not Quite Perfect

  WATERGATE EAST. By appt. today. “You bring the dollars—we have the quarters!”
This grand upper floor apt. even includes quarters for the maid (room and bath) plus two large bedrooms, 2 baths (the 3rd Bedrm. has been added to the spacious living room to effect a magnificent sweep of about 38 feet). Large dining room, kitchen with a window, impressive foyer and powder room. We haven’t done it justice; it must be seen.

  Washington Post classified advertisement

  NICOLAS SALGO TOOK A CALL FROM AN SGI EXECUTIVE IN Rome. “You have a new boss,” the caller said. “His name is Signore Michele Sindona.”

  “How?” Salgo asked.

  “He’s bought Immobiliare.”

  Salgo didn’t know what to think of the news.

  “You’ve got to meet Sindona,” the caller said. “He’s brilliant. He’s nice. He’s . . . agreeable.”

  Salgo met Sindona for the first time at the Monaco Grand Prix. SGI had a major development in the Mediterranean kingdom and Sindona invited Salgo and his wife, Josseline, to attend as his guests. They had dinner with Sindona and his wife, Caterina.

  “What do you think of the Sindonas?” Salgo asked Josseline after the dinner.

  She paused.

  “He will never put his foot in my home as long as I am there,” she said.

  “Why do you tell me that?” Salgo asked. “What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything,” she said. “But I don’t like him. It’s your business if you want to work with him. Socially, he is not acceptable.”

  ON FEBRUARY 20, 1970, FIVE OF THE “CHICAGO SEVEN” WERE sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000 each for crossing state lines with the intention of causing a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Within hours, nearly six hundred protesters marched on the Watergate. “Two, four, six, eight—liberate the Watergate!” they chanted. Demonstrators shouted epithets at District police and threw rocks, paint and hot water. According to flyers handed out on the streets, protesters targeted the Watergate because it “symbolizes the ruling class.” It was also, of course, the home of Attorney General John Mitchell. Antiwar activists had another name for the Watergate: the “Republican Bastille.”

  O.P. Easterwood, president of Watergate East, sent around a memo instructing residents to stay in their apartments and not attempt to watch “the proceedings” from either the lobby or outside. “If you try to come down,” he wrote, “it will only hamper the efforts of the police and furnish material for the news media.”

  Walter Pforzheimer, chairman of the Watergate East security committee, surveyed the scene as he smoked his pipe. He wore an American flag pin in his lapel and a walkie-talkie strapped to his hip. He told a resident he was “in charge of this thing for Watergate” and ordered her to go up to her apartment. She refused to budge. “When the police tell me to go, I’ll go,” she snapped.

  One Watergate resident, in slacks and a bandanna, stood in an island in the middle of Virginia Avenue and sketched the scene. Another removed wooden items from her ground-floor balcony “in case they threw firebombs.” Some residents stocked up on food and other necessities at the Watergate Safeway, afraid the store would be looted by the rioters. The maître d’ of the Watergate Hotel attempted to escort three guests to the Watergate Pastry Shop and was trapped for twenty minutes in a locked passageway.

  Six busloads of police officers kept protesters a block away from the Watergate, while other officers guarded the roofs and lobbies of each building. “I sure wish we had all this protection the night my suit was stolen out of my car in the parking lot,” said one resident, sipping a cocktail at the Watergate Hotel bar.

  By late afternoon, the situation was under control. District police, armed with clubs and tear gas, arrested 145 protesters. Mary Brooks returned to the Watergate around 5:15 P.M. to walk her toy poodles, instructing them to “say hello” to District policemen.

  The next day was peaceful, though at least a dozen officers remained scattered around the Watergate in case protesters decided to return. Building management set up a coffee urn and a tray of Fig Newtons and lemon wafers in the lobby to serve to District police officers on duty. The Watergate Hotel sent over ham sandwiches.

  Martha Mitchell was home the entire time. She told Washington Star columnist Betty Beale it was “absurd” for protesters to target the Watergate. The Chicago Seven trial centered on events at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Martha fumed, “which had nothing to do with us.”

  A few weeks later, Jerry Rubin, one of the Chicago Seven, posed in front of the Watergate, flipping his middle finger for photographers. He stopped by the Saville-Watergate Book Shop to sign copies of his new book, Do It!, and inscribed a copy “Fuck John Mitchell” and sent it up to the Mitchells’ apartment.

  “HELLO, GORGEOUS!” JOHN MITCHELL SHOUTED, AS HE stepped into the foyer of the apartment and greeted his wife with a kiss, in the presence of two reporters, Vera Glaser and Malvina Stephenson, who were writing a profile of Martha.

  “Hi, honey!” Martha bubbled.

  Martha said she was initially “dead set” against moving to Washington and giving up her house and friends in New York, “but she adjusted fast” to life in Washington. She initiated “study visits” by cabinet wives at their husbands’ agencies and functioned as “leading lady” and “unpaid assistant” to her husband. “We think just alike on everything,” she said. “Yes, he’s tough. I wouldn’t want him any other way.” Asked if his wife was an efficient aide, John Mitchell laughed. “She’s tremendous,” he said. “She knows how to fib.”

  “Incredible as it seems today,” wrote Martha Mitchell’s biographer, Winzola McLendon, “Martha lived a relatively private life the first ten months her husband was Attorney General.” That changed on November 21, 1969, when Martha appeared on CBS Morning News and took a question on recent antiwar protests in the capital. “My husband made the comment to me, looking out the Justice Department it looked like the Russian revolution going on,” she told correspondent Marya McLaughlin. “As my husband has said many times, some of the liberals in this country, he’d like to take them and change them for the Russian Communists.”

  Following the broadcast, Martha recalled, “Holy hell broke loose.”

  Her remarks became instant fodder for national and local television news broadcasts and newspaper columns and letters to the editor all over the country. Nixon White House communications chief Herb Klein called and told her the comments were reminiscent of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He asked her to consider the impression she was making as “the wife of a Cabinet officer.” Worse, according to her biographer, Martha believed her own husband “seemed to side against her.” He told reporters he would have preferred she had used “violence-prone militant radicals” rather than “liberals.” Martha took refuge in her apartment for days until the president sent her a supportive note. “Don’t let the critics get you down,” Nixon wrote. “Just remember they are not after you—or John—but me.” He assured her, “We’ll come out on top at the end.”

  “That letter is what gave me the courage to go on,” Martha told McLendon.

  According to McLendon, the CBS interview made Martha Mitchell “a national celebrity” and set her on course to become “eventually something of a folk heroine.” According to John Mitchell’s biographer, James Rosen, “hordes of reporters began flocking to the Watergate East, eager to exploit the new source of snappy comment.” Unfortunately, Rosen wrote, “Martha seldom thought before she spoke.”

  “My family worked for everything,” she told Time. “We even have a deed from the King of England for property in North Carolina. Now these jerks come along and try to give it to the Communists.”

  In an interview with Women’s Wear Daily, she lamented living conditions at the Watergate. “We’re not living on the same means that we had in Rye,” she complained. “I had to sell my stock, and now we are having to dip into the till.”

  “I think the government should give us free housing,” she pouted.

  Mail flooded into the Mitchell apartment—up to four hundred lett
ers a day, overwhelmingly supportive, although there were hate letters and even threats of violence, which were turned over to federal authorities. Martha had one secretary, provided by the justice department, to help answer the letters, but could not keep up. When she asked her husband for another secretary, he suggested she throw the mail in the garbage. “His answer infuriated me,” she told McLendon. “I felt that if the public wanted something of me, if there were questions they wanted me to answer, I was going to answer them—that’s why I was in Washington.”

  Then, with a single phone call placed from their Watergate apartment, Tropical Storm Martha Mitchell was upgraded to a hurricane.

  Early on the morning of April 10, 1970, while her husband slept, Martha Mitchell woke up, downed a few drinks and placed a call from the green phone in her bathroom to the Arkansas Gazette. She launched into a tirade against Senator J. William Fulbright, a fellow Arkansan, who had recently voted against Nixon’s nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the U.S. Supreme Court. “I want you to crucify Fulbright and that’s it,” she told reporter John Woodruff, who was recording their conversation. “He is not representing the people of Arkansas.” She hung up the phone, walked down the hall and rejoined her husband in bed.

  The next morning, John Mitchell got up, turned on the radio “and heard the sound of his world turning upside down.” Martha’s comments in the morning’s edition of the Arkansas Gazette were national news.

  John Mitchell told Nan Robertson of the New York Times, “What else can I do, but let her speak? She has no inclination to be quiet. She’s not politically motivated, she’s just saying what she feels.” He was fully aware, of course, of his wife’s unstable condition. He felt responsible for placing her in the public eye, despite the risks to her emotional well-being, by having accepted the job of attorney general. There was another reason, however, why he stood by his vivacious, exasperating bride. “I love her, that’s all I have to say.”