The Watergate

by Joseph Rodota

  On Monday—Memorial Day—Gonzalez flew to Miami to pick up additional lock-picking tools and returned to Washington that afternoon. McCord taped open the locks of the door that led from the underground garage to the basement stairwell in the Watergate Office Building. Around 11:00 P.M., McCord and four men entered the building from the garage and made their way up the stairwell to the sixth floor. This time, Gonzalez was able to pick the lock.

  They placed eavesdropping devices in the suite and took photographs of correspondence on DNC chief Larry O’Brien’s desk. Liddy later claimed he and Hunt were “delighted” by the operation.

  ON JUNE 15, 1972, THE FIRM OF NELSON, DOLLAR AND BLITZ submitted its “Structural Analysis of Watergate East,” as requested by the board of directors.

  The firm identified fifteen different problems in the building that required correction, including cracks in the underground garage; leaking balconies, windows and penthouse planters; and various mechanical and ventilation defects. The total cost to address these items came to $580,000, with annual maintenance costs of $65,000 thereafter.

  AT AROUND 12:30 A.M. ON SATURDAY, JUNE 17, FRANK WILLS took a call from his supervisor, Bobby Jackson. Wills explained he had discovered and removed tape on the stairwell doors and Jackson directed him to check other doors in the building and report back. Wills hung up and finished his cheeseburger and fries.

  At around 1:10 A.M., the five-man “entry team”—Sturgis, Barker, Martinez, Gonzalez and McCord—arrived at the door on the B-2 level of the underground garage and discovered the tape was missing and the door was locked. Three of the men returned to the Watergate Hotel to consult with Liddy and Hunt; Sturgis and Gonzalez picked the lock, taped it open and proceeded to the sixth floor.

  Frank Wills finished dinner and made his rounds, checking for tape on other locks, as he had been instructed. At the B-2 level he found the doors had been re-taped. He left the tape in place and returned to the lobby, where he met Walter Hellams, a security guard working for the Federal Reserve Board, who had just arrived to conduct a routine check on the board’s suite on the eighth floor. Wills asked Hellams whether he should call the police; Hellams said he should, as it was clear a burglary was under way. Wills first called Bobby Jackson, and then, at 1:47, the Washington Police Department.

  Officer Carl Shoffler, Sergeant Paul Leeper and Officer John Barrett were undercover near the Bayou nightclub on K Street NW, less than two blocks from the Watergate. Shoffler was in disguise, wearing shoulder-length hair and “hippie clothes.” A radio call came at 1:52 from a police dispatcher to head over to the Watergate. Leeper and Barrett suspected a typewriter heist. Thefts of IBM electric typewriters had been a recent problem throughout the city’s commercial district.

  Wills met the officers and showed them the tape he had discovered on the B-2 basement door. Hellams told them about a burglary that had taken place recently in the eighth-floor suite of the Federal Reserve Board. Together, they climbed the stairs to the eighth floor, where they discovered the tape on the door.

  They made their way down to the sixth floor and found another taped door. Entering the hallway, Shoffler noticed an open window onto a balcony. “It was our experience these guys will hide anywhere,” he later recalled. “They are like roaches.” He crawled out onto the narrow balcony, expecting to bump into one of the burglars, but instead he saw a man across the street observing the scene through binoculars from a room at the Howard Johnson. Just as Shoffler crawled back into the building, he heard Barrett shout, “Freeze! Police! You are under arrest!”

  Shoffler watched from behind a pillar as five men stood, raising their arms above their heads. “We’re expecting thieves,” he recalled, “and I got five guys with sport coats.” The men were speaking to each other in Spanish as the officers directed them to speak English, to no avail. It was only at that moment the officers looked around the room and realized they were in the offices of the Democratic National Committee.

  Chapter Five: The Maelstrom

  Only after crossing an elevated threshold of income and maturity can life be transformed into an art of living.

  At Watergate, in its apartments, its hotel, its office buildings, you’ll find this art. And you’ll find residents, professionals, visitors, employees unified by an appreciation of the uniqueness that is Watergate.

  Art, and the willingness to invest in the refinement of that art of living. This is the essence of Watergate people.

  People who love privacy as much as luxury.

  “Les Champs at Watergate” marketing brochure

  SHELLEY AND PAT BUCHANAN MARRIED IN MAY 1971 AT Blessed Sacrament in northwest Washington and Pat moved into Shelley’s apartment in Watergate East. The Nixons and the Mitchells attended the wedding—Martha was “a sensation” at the parish and both Mitchells stayed late at the reception—and the Buchanans and the Mitchells became good friends. The Mitchells gave the newlyweds a silver bell engraved “from The Attorney General and Mrs. Mitchell.” Martha and Shelley chaperoned students from the District’s public schools for boat rides, with hot dog lunches, on the presidential yacht Sequoia.

  On Saturday morning, June 17, Shelley and Pat were at his parents’ home on Utah Street. The phone rang, and Pat was summoned to take the call. It was another White House aide, Ken Khachigian. “His voice was low,” Pat recalled, “like someone relating news of a bad turn in the medical condition of a friend.” Ken told him five men were caught breaking into the DNC at the Watergate. “Instantly, I knew it was us,” Pat recalled.

  Buchanan had earlier received photographs of documents from the Edmund S. Muskie campaign and passed them along, in blind envelopes, to sympathetic reporters. He had understood the photos had come to him via a “spy in the Muskie camp,” but suddenly feared he had been misled—and that the photos had been taken by the same people who had broken into the Watergate. If his hunch was true, they had committed a felony. “I felt ill,” Pat recalled.

  BRUCE GIVNER, THE TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD UCLA INTERN who had been the last to leave the DNC offices the night of Friday, June 16, 1972, returned to the Watergate around ten Saturday morning to help open mail. He arrived to find a crime scene.

  “Holy crap!” he said as he emerged from the elevator on the sixth floor. “What’s going on?”

  “There was a break-in last night,” a coworker told him.

  JOHN MITCHELL AND HIS DAUGHTER, MARTY, ATE BREAKFAST in their suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel while Martha slept in. Downstairs in the Polo Lounge, Joyce and Fred LaRue were having breakfast with Gail and Jeb Magruder. A waiter brought a telephone to the table for Magruder. The caller was Gordon Liddy. He told Magruder about the arrests the night before.

  Magruder whispered the news to LaRue, who left the table and headed upstairs to brief Mitchell. “That is just incredible,” John Mitchell said when he heard the news.

  When Martha finally emerged from her bedroom, John told her he was heading back to Washington. He suggested she get some rest and spend the weekend in Newport Beach. Martha agreed and, with her assistant Lea Jablonsky and Marty, plus a security detail, left the Beverly Hills Hotel and headed to the Newporter Inn.

  Spencer Oliver was on the Outer Banks of North Carolina that weekend, vacationing with his family. He heard on the Sunday evening news there had been a break-in at the DNC. “I thought that was strange,” he recalled. “Why would anybody break into the Democratic National Committee? I mean, we don’t have any money; the convention’s coming up and everybody’s moved to Miami; the delegates have been picked and the primaries are over. So why would anybody be in there?”

  JUNE 18, 1972, BEGAN LIKE ANY OTHER SUNDAY AT THE Watergate, Maurice Stans later recalled. He slept in one additional hour, as he often did on the weekend. He performed his morning exercise routine, including about twenty minutes on his electric bicycle. He showered and put on a robe.

  Slap.

  The Washington Post landed at the front door of his apartment and the doorman continued down th
e hall.

  Slap. Slap. Slap.

  Stans opened the door, picked up the Post and stepped back inside his apartment. He went into the kitchen to fix a breakfast of dry cereal, toast and tea, and turned on the morning news. Not much was going on. The war situation in Vietnam was unchanged and the economy was “doing fine.” A headline on the front page, however, caught his eye: FIVE HELD IN PLOT TO BUG DEMOCRATIC PARTY OFFICE.

  Who in the world could have been up to that? he asked himself. He wondered if the intruders might also have targeted the Nixon campaign headquarters.

  He did not recognize any of the names of the five men arrested at the DNC. “For that matter,” he recalled, “I did not even know that the Democratic Party headquarters were in the Watergate office building, although my Watergate apartment was only two hundred feet away.”

  AT THE NEWPORTER INN, MARTHA FOUND A COPY OF THE Monday Los Angeles Times and took it upstairs to her bedroom, where she first read the news of the Watergate break-in and arrests. “Jesus Christ!” she exclaimed. She jumped out of bed and tried to reach her husband by phone, but he was in the air on his way to Washington.

  She became agitated and began drinking gin—straight, with no ice. “Those bastards left me out here without telling me anything,” she snarled at Steve King, the ex–FBI agent who served as her security detail. She burned her hand when a pack of matches exploded as she was trying to light a Salem Long; a doctor came to the hotel to bandage the wound and prescribe the painkiller Phenaphen.

  On Tuesday, LaRue and Robert Mardian met with Gordon Liddy in LaRue’s Watergate West apartment. Liddy asked LaRue to turn up the radio, so that the conversation couldn’t be recorded, then told of his activities, including the hiring of the Cuban burglars, with their CIA and Bay of Pigs backgrounds, and a prior wiretapping of the DNC offices in the Watergate Office Building.

  On Wednesday, John Mitchell arranged for friends to fly with Martha to New York, on the red-eye, and moved her into the Westchester Country Club. A frustrated and unhinged Martha once more turned to the telephone. “I’m not going to stand for all those dirty things that go on,” she told UPI reporter Helen Thomas. Mitchell flew to New York and brought his wife back to the Watergate on June 28. The next day, Mitchell confided to Haldeman that Martha was despondent and drinking heavily. “He feels she’s suicidal as well as a little cracked,” Haldeman wrote in his diary, “and that there’s nothing he can do to cure it.”

  ANNA CHENNAULT ATTENDED A WHITE HOUSE BRIEFING IN advance of the upcoming GOP convention in Miami. As the briefing concluded, White House aide John Ehrlichman stood and asked if there were any questions. Chennault raised her hand.

  “I wondered if you could tell me any more about the break-in at the Watergate?” she asked. “I live there, so I’m interested in knowing what it’s all about.”

  Chennault recalled laughter rippling through the audience. “Nothing like starting with the really important questions,” someone said.

  “Who cares?” said another.

  Ehrlichman smiled. “Anna,” he said, “by the time we get to Miami for the convention, this will all be water under the bridge. All of this will be cleared up. So don’t worry about it.”

  Anna felt foolish for having asked the question. Whatever went on at the DNC, she thought, couldn’t be worse than the burglary at Rose Mary Woods’s apartment.

  A week after the Watergate break-in, Maurice Stans was informed that Gordon Liddy, general counsel to the campaign’s finance division for the past three months, had refused to answer questions from the FBI. Stans fired Liddy immediately. “I did not know what the questions were that he did not answer,” Stans later wrote, “or what his complicity was, but clearly I could not support his failure to cooperate with the investigative agency.”

  Because he was outside the “narrow orbit” of Nixon’s inner circle, Stans was kept in the dark about the “frantic meetings” taking place to deal with the growing scandal. His job was to make sure money kept coming into the campaign.

  On June 29, Anna Chennault brought Ernesto Lagdameo—a member of one of the wealthiest families in the Philippines, whom Chennault had feted with a party in her penthouse upon his appointment as ambassador to the United States—to meet Maurice Stans at the headquarters of the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Lagdameo presented $30,000 in cash, which he said was contributed in equal amounts by three donors, including himself. Because White House counsel John Dean had recently raised a red flag about accepting foreign contributions, Stans accepted the cash only on the understanding that he would check with counsel to be sure the contributions were legal to receive.

  The following day, Chennault escorted Ambassador Lagdameo and his wife into the Oval Office, for a photograph with Nixon. “Chennault, you’re a real, real tiger—flying tiger,” Nixon joked. “I really oughta get going to all these nice parties you people give. You give a real, real good ball.”

  A Nixon campaign attorney, Stanley Ebner, informed Stans the contribution could not be accepted legally, and Stans arranged for the money to be returned to Chennault, who then returned the funds to Lagdameo.

  Stans considered the transaction “aborted” and, as he had returned the funds during the same reporting period in which they had been offered, did not disclose the funds as having been received by the Nixon campaign on the next campaign finance report.

  AFTER MARTHA MITCHELL LEFT THE WESTCHESTER COUNTRY CLUB and returned to the Watergate, she became a virtual recluse. She told Winzola McLendon she was ashamed to see anyone, as she was distraught over the possibility her husband was involved in “something like Watergate.” She soon realized her “self-imposed exile” was a mistake. Rumors flew around Washington that she had a “severe personal problem” and was “cracking up.” “I played right into their hands,” Martha lamented.

  Martha reached out to a woman known in Washington social circles for her ability to sell household items discreetly, raising cash for her clients without drawing attention. This broker then contacted Mary Gore Dean, co-owner of the Jockey Club and widow of Gordon Dean, the first chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The two women met at a Watergate apartment. Dean hadn’t been told whose it was, but within a few minutes realized she was in the home of Martha and John Mitchell.

  Dean admired a blue corduroy sofa. They agreed on a price and the broker went downstairs to coordinate with the driver of a small moving van while Dean waited upstairs. A few minutes passed. Then Dean heard a man’s voice outside the door and the jingle of keys. She raced into an adjoining study and hid in a closet just as a man entered the apartment. She listened as he wandered around the apartment, entered his study, fixed “a few drinks” and made phone calls laced with profanity. Eventually, he went upstairs, changed for dinner and left the apartment.

  After a few minutes of silence, the front door opened and the furniture broker called out Dean’s name. She gingerly stepped out of the closet. Furniture movers entered the apartment. They placed the sofa on a dolly and headed to the service elevator.

  Years later, after John Mitchell finished his prison sentence and returned to Washington, he began a long-term romantic relationship with Mary Dean. By this time, the blue corduroy sofa had long been re-covered and was now in the apartment of her daughter, Deborah Gore Dean. One day, John and Mary were at Deborah’s apartment. He sat on the sofa and, after a few minutes, paused. “I used to have a couch just like this,” he said.

  On July 1, John Mitchell stepped down as campaign manager of the Nixon reelection campaign. In his resignation letter, Mitchell wrote he was unable to serve the campaign full-time “and still meet the one obligation that must come first: the happiness and welfare of my wife and daughter.” An unnamed Nixon campaign source confirmed Martha had failed to keep all of her campaign commitments in recent weeks. In response to the rumors that Martha had “a severe personal problem,” Kay Woestendiek, Martha’s former press secretary, denied Martha was an alcoholic, but speculated the pres
sures of the campaign “may have been too much.”

  “My bride was tired of traveling, of making speeches, nervous about flying, and I wasn’t around much to help,” John Mitchell told a reporter. “It was as simple as that.”

  On August 5, the Washington Daily News reported Martha and John Mitchell had sold their “swank” Watergate duplex to Senator Russell B. Long and his wife of two years, Carolyn. The Longs were giving up their two-bedroom unit on the sixth floor of Watergate East to move into the “plush, spacious duplex with its magnificent views” on the seventh and eighth floors. Carolyn Long said she had set her sights on the apartment for some time. The Mitchells were reportedly relieved to keep the sale in-house, thereby avoiding the need to list the apartment and open it up to curiosity seekers. Martha told McLendon she was “upset” about the sale price, which she said was “ridiculously low.”

  Long told reporters she would make major changes to Martha Mitchell’s décor. “Everybody’s taste is different,” she said.

  Martha was delighted to leave Washington for New York. “I woke up at five this morning and said, ‘Goodie, goodie, I’m leaving!’” she told McLendon. As she packed up her Watergate apartment, Marty Mitchell was downstairs saying goodbye to the staff of the Watergate bookstore. Martha dropped hints about getting involved in local politics in order to rattle John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, whom she detested, and promised to write her own book. “You bet!” she grinned. “I’m going to tell it all.”