The Watergate

by Joseph Rodota

  Over the next forty-eight hours, Martha received more than a hundred requests for media interviews. At his personal expense, John Mitchell hired Kay Woestendiek, the former women’s editor at the Houston Post, to serve as his wife’s press secretary. Woestendiek compared working in Martha’s “command post”—the turquoise-blue breakfast room in the apartment, with a Formica table, fish tank and potted plants—to a stint at the U.S. Post Office after a mail strike.

  Martha became “the darling of the press; among all those drab, button-down Nixonians she provided a gaudy splash of color.” She kept up a steady pace of outrageous commentary. “I think I’m going to join the Women’s liberation movement,” she proclaimed. She criticized the Brown v. Board of Education ruling and challenged a reporter: “Are you going to be prejudiced against me because my grandparents had slaves?” She appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes and told Mike Wallace, “I love the Democrats.” She complained about a heating plant she said was polluting the air outside her Watergate apartment, lobbied for a woman on the Supreme Court and declared “the Vietnam war stinks!”

  Martha was “compulsive,” “emotionally volatile” and “totally unprepared” for her life in Washington, Woestendiek recalled. “Hardly a week passed, when Martha was scheduled to be at a social event, that she didn’t first have a feeling of great depression. She wouldn’t want to go. She might actually be in tears. The dread was almost overwhelming. Once she got there, it was like a shot of adrenaline. She would turn on.”

  Martha, she said, reacted to the public “like others react to hard liquor.”

  Woestendiek lasted only two months in the job. Her husband, Bill, found a new editorial post with the Colorado Springs Sun and the family moved to the Rockies. “Those two months Kay was with Martha were probably the best of Martha’s Washington experience,” McLendon wrote.

  A Gallup poll showed Martha Mitchell had 76 percent name identification. “No woman in public life has achieved so quickly the national awareness of Martha Mitchell,” concluded the American Institute of Public Opinion. She became the first-ever cabinet wife to be named one of the ten most-admired women in the world. “Thousands of admirers thought of her as a national heroine,” McLendon wrote. “Middle America loved her.” According to McLendon:

  The Silent Majority embraced her as its own. Martha had struck a chord with all these people by saying in public the same thing she and John had been saying for years, in the den before dinner over those glasses of Scotch. Liberal permissiveness—in the courts, the schools, the Congress, and especially in the press—was selling the United States down the drain to Communists. Every time she took off after justices, educators, senators and representatives, reporters and newscasters, her mail increased a hundredfold.

  Within the District of Columbia, however, the reception was less enthusiastic. A Washington socialite called her “grotesque.” “She’s quite an unstable one, isn’t she, calling a newspaper long distance at two or three in the morning?” said Mrs. J. William Fulbright.

  Nixon’s top aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, however, thought Martha could be useful as an “unofficial spokesman” for the administration. As a woman, she could make statements that would be attacked if they were made by a man. They treated her as a “prize product” and “packaged” her for the public. Her code name—“The Account”—was an advertising term for “client.”

  “Why would John Mitchell join in this scheme to exploit his wife?” McLendon asked later. He thought of himself as Martha’s protector, and was worried she was in over her head. “John Mitchell knew his wife was totally unprepared for the rough and tumble life of a controversial Washington celebrity,” McLendon wrote. “He was aware of her feelings of insecurity and that she was high-strung and had a drinking problem. It was obvious she was a poor risk for overexposure to the limelight.”

  Herb Klein said Mitchell went along because he thought Martha was enjoying the attention, and because he felt guilty working long hours at the justice department. Klein also thought putting Martha on the campaign trail might keep her busy, and make things at home “more peaceful” for the attorney general.

  Martha moved from her breakfast room to an office at Nixon campaign headquarters—a cubicle so small, she sarcastically complained to the Washington Star, that she and her secretaries nearly drowned when she spilled a cup of coffee. She was eventually moved to a two-room suite on the eleventh floor. She filled it with paintings and objets d’art from her Watergate apartment, original cartoons of herself, and a red, white and blue French telephone she received after appearing on The Dinah Shore Show.

  An unnamed Nixon aide later confessed to McLendon there was another reason Martha Mitchell was given an office: “She has to be watched.”

  SPRINKLED THROUGHOUT THE LIFE MAGAZINE STORY IN August 1969 about life at the Watergate were indications everything was not quite picture-perfect. “Watergate has been gradually revealing its imperfections,” Life wrote. Despite twenty-three closed-circuit TV cameras on the property, there had been several “spectacular” jewelry thefts. Some residents felt “dwarfed and entombed” by the concrete-and-glass buildings. Jets from nearby National Airport interfered with conversations on the balconies. The Potomac River was so polluted, “on some hot summer evenings you can hardly smell the honeysuckle.” John Mitchell said their apartment was “convenient but that’s about all.”

  Martha showed a reporter the seventh-floor hallway carpet, which had stripes of blue tape covering rips at regular intervals. “It’s a disgrace,” she said. “I have been trying to get them to fix it ever since we have been here.” Plaster walls in her duplex were cracking. “The noise is terrible,” she told Newsweek. “The balconies are so close together everyone can hear you talking—you feel like a monkey in the zoo.” (A neighbor suggested Mrs. Mitchell was responsible for much of the noise, as she “talks to her maids at the top of her voice.”) “It’s not a good place to live,” Martha said. “I’ve had better apartments in New York for $120 a month.”

  Kathy and Maurice Stans returned from a weekend trip to discover water had seeped into their apartment from leaks in windows in two of the rooms, damaging art objects and important papers. They asked the building’s engineer to check immediately with the apartment above theirs, as previous leaks had been caused by planters in that unit’s balcony. But the owner refused to let the engineer enter his apartment and check the situation. “I am now out of patience,” Stans informed Arthur Weld, chairman of the Watergate East building committee, and Robert R. Mullen, president of the board. Stans demanded the building take steps to force his upstairs neighbors to reimburse him for the loss. Mullen wrote back, sympathizing with Stans and promising only, “we will do our best.”

  E. F. Hamm, president of Traffic Service Corp., which published trade magazines, noticed leaks in his $150,000 Watergate East penthouse. “Once we noticed in the morning that water had come down near the fireplace and buckled the parquet floor in the living room,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Another time, before a cocktail party, we had a leak in the hall. We had to mop it up just before everybody arrived.” Additional leaks appeared in the penthouses of Joel Barlow and Anna Chennault. To fix leaks in his penthouse, John Cannaday’s rooftop garden had to be uprooted completely. He was able to move his fruit trees to safety, but his vegetable garden was interrupted until repairs were completed.

  In some apartments, the air-conditioning system malfunctioned—cooling a room from the waist down, but emitting hot air from the waist up. The air-conditioning in the Stanses’ apartment gave out completely. “We couldn’t breathe at all,” lamented Kathy Stans. Humidity caused her parquet floors to buckle and wall-to-wall carpeting to shrink in seven different rooms. The tiger skins, elephant tusks and other mementos of her husband’s safaris were at risk of damage.

  The basement of Watergate West flooded during a summer rainstorm. Residents were urged to hurry downstairs and remove snow tires, heavy furniture and other possessions from th
eir storage lockers. “I thought I had seen a lot of water in the submarine service,” said one resident, “but nothing like this!”

  A prominent stockbroker said he could hear his neighbor in Watergate West take a bath. His ice maker also “went berserk,” he said. “Cubes spill all over the floor.”

  There were “cubbyholes” outside the apartments in Watergate West where laundry could be left and picked up, and packages delivered while residents were away. When White House aide Martin Anderson tried on his shirts, they didn’t fit at all—the sleeves hung way below his fingertips. Annelise figured out her husband’s laundry must have been switched with Tennessee congressman William Anderson’s and called the lobby to report the error. “It’s computerized,” the attendant sniffed, “and the computer never makes a mistake.”

  Television reception was spotty, despite two years of work on the rooftop antenna. “You’d get ghosts and many times you couldn’t get any picture at all,” said retired admiral Paul Dudley. The Watergate Post resident newsletter advised that channel 26 could be found on channel 6, and channel 20 could be found on channel 12—“we hope.”

  “The Watergate is not what it’s cracked up to be,” said Nancy Lammerding.

  What most unnerved Watergate residents, however, was a rash of burglaries that demolished their sense of personal security.

  Shortly after Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods was burglarized, thieves stole a fur coat and $6,000 worth of jewelry from the Watergate apartment of Laurence Wood, General Electric’s Washington vice president. In April 1969, the Mosbachers’ suite in the Watergate Hotel was burglarized and $3,500 in valuables taken. Thieves broke into four Cadillacs parked in the underground garage.

  Apartment maids told reporters it was possible to enter the Watergate through unlocked service elevators open to the parking garage. “There used to be hotel policemen patrolling the halls,” one maid said, “but I haven’t seen them in quite a while.” Irone Shah, resident manager of Watergate East, declined to comment on security, except to note the closed-circuit television units were monitored by front-desk staff twenty-four hours a day. But residents said desk clerks often ended up watching “elevator scenes of women hiking up their skirts to fix their stockings or wriggling around to straighten their girdles.” Security patrol and “listening devices” installed in the parking garages and laundry rooms were there to deter violent crimes, the Wall Street Journal reported, but were not useful in preventing burglaries of apartments.

  O.P. Easterwood, chairman of the Watergate East board, said the thefts were most likely perpetrated by “somebody on the inside with a key.” Residents suspected the thefts were mostly “inside jobs.” The apartment key rack was located alongside a key-making machine just off the lobby, behind the front desk—with easy access for maintenance staff.

  Carolyn Blount, wife of the postmaster general, reported $2,000 in jewelry was missing. Although she wasn’t 100 percent sure the theft took place at the Watergate, the Blounts surrendered their Watergate apartment and moved to Georgetown.

  “USUALLY AT DINNER PARTIES YOU END UP SITTING NEXT TO someone, and you don’t have any idea who he is, much less his politics or religion,” Anna Chennault, in a coral-colored mini-dress, told her guests as they arrived at her penthouse. “So let me introduce you to each other once again.”

  The occasion was a farewell dinner for the departing ambassador of Ceylon, Oliver Weerasinghe, and his wife, Cristobel. Chennault’s guests included the ambassadors of Burma and Saudi Arabia; Watergate residents Laurence Wood and Walter Pforzheimer; the State Department’s Ray Cline; James Holcombe, a vice president of Northrop Corporation; and the president of the Export-Import Bank, Henry Kearns. “Don’t eat too much shrimp,” she warned her guests. “We have an eight-course dinner.” Guests climbed the spiral staircase to see Chennault’s new “dancing room”—an enclosed pavilion on her rooftop terrace. She had built it “because it’s windy up here,” she said, “and also because I like to dance.” Downstairs, seating charts were adorned with different-colored flowers, matching the flower arrangements on each table. Before dinner, guests stood as Chennault spoke about each person, and sat down to applause.

  Anna’s party that night was covered by a Washington Post reporter named Sally Quinn. Sally’s parents, Bette and Bill Quinn, were friendly with Chennault. They met through Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. Bill Quinn retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of lieutenant general—the same rank as Anna’s late husband—and Chennault sometimes came to dinner at the Quinns’ home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Bette and Bill also went to Chennault’s Watergate penthouse or joined her for dinner around town.

  Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee had just started the “Style” section in March and put Quinn to work covering parties. Washington hostesses would call the Post’s social editor and tell her about a party coming up, and the Post would send out a reporter. “They all wanted their parties covered,” recalled Quinn. “And generally, in those days, the coverage was all benign.”

  Chennault was “a pistol,” Quinn said. “She took no prisoners. She was extremely aggressive socially, and ambitious, and she wanted to be the queen, she wanted to be on the top of the social heap, and she worked it.” Quinn added, “People were kind of afraid of her.”

  Chennault was “worshipped” by the conservatives in Washington, Quinn said, but never “cracked” the liberal, Democratic, Georgetown elite. “That was not her crowd.”

  Quinn remembered Chennault’s long red fingernails, her tightly wound hair on the top of her head and her perfect, dramatic makeup. “I loved watching her.”

  Quinn covered Anna’s party for producer M. J. Frankovich (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) and his wife, actress Binnie Barnes. “Richard Nixon missed a good party last night,” Quinn wrote. “In fact, it could have been a Cabinet meeting in the corner by the buffet for a while.” David Kennedy, the secretary of the treasury, chatted with White House aide John Ehrlichman. Rose Mary Woods was there, as was Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America. Chennault introduced Vlastimil Koubek, the architect who had earlier examined her penthouse while it was under construction and produced a long list of defects needing attention, to Robert Finch, secretary of health, education and welfare. Another guest, John Lear, inventor of the Lear jet, was in town “to do something about air pollution.” Kathy and Maurice Stans joked they had walked the length of the building “for a plate of food to take back to our apartment.”

  “As far as the social life of the Nixon Administration goes,” a source told the New York Times, “the Watergate is where it’s happening, and the hot center of it all is Anna Chennault’s apartment.” The Associated Press reported Chennault go-go danced every night to rock music for fifteen minutes for exercise and guests at her parties sometimes did “silly things like throwing cards into a hat on the floor.”

  Nancy Reagan, wife of the California governor, came to Anna’s apartment for lunch. Martha Mitchell joined them. “Your apartment is lovely,” Mrs. Reagan wrote Anna later, “and it was fun to have girl talk with you and Martha.”

  In June 1970, Chennault made the cover of the Parade magazine insert in Sunday newspapers around the country. The article, written by Lloyd Shearer, was headlined: ANNA CHENNAULT: HER ENEMIES CALL HER THE DRAGON LADY OF WATERGATE EAST.

  “For years diminutive Anna Chennault has been regarded as one of the most intriguing and controversial personalities in Washington,” Shearer wrote. “Referred to by others of her sex as a little Chinese scorpion stinging her way through life,” Chennault’s “icy and imperious beauty has earned her the name of ‘The Dragon Lady.’”

  “Most of the stuff written about me is lies, especially what was written about me in Theodore White’s book,” she said. “About that I am really sensitive.” She continued:

  Of course, I campaigned for Richard Nixon. And of course I talked to the representatives of the South Vietnamese government. I talk to them all the time. But I did not a
dvise them not to send peace representatives to Paris until after the election so that Richard Nixon could win.

  This is just stupid for anyone to believe. I discussed the South Vietnamese issue with Richard Nixon during the campaign. He regards my knowledge on Southeast Asia very highly. I gave information to Sen. John Tower and the Republican campaign committee. But to say that I tried to influence the South Vietnamese government, that’s to underestimate my intelligence. To have Teddy White not even check with me and to write about that kind of thing—that the government tapped my telephone line. I don’t know if they did—it was so unfair.

  Lots of people came to me after Teddy White’s book and said, “Anna, you must make a statement.” Now, if I were a smaller person, I would have come out and said, “You are terrible, Teddy White,” and so forth. But I felt the country had enough problems. So I said nothing. But I am going to write a book about this and it’s going to be very, very interesting.

  Shearer reported Anna was “unabashedly in love” with Tommy Corcoran. “As a woman I am more interested in love than power,” Chennault said.

  ON THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 23, 1971, RICHARD NIXON picked up his phone. “Miss Woods, please,” he said to the White House operator.

  After a moment, the operator got back on the line. “Mr. President, I find Miss Woods has gone to a reception at Mrs. Chennault’s.”

  The party was a salute to the U.S. Air Force, at which Anna presented $63,000 in checks to various charities—proceeds raised the year before at the annual Air Force Ball, which she had chaired.

  “Would you like me to reach her there?” the operator asked.

  “No, no, skip it, thank you.”