The Watergate

by Joseph Rodota

  On April 15, 1973, the Democratic National Committee moved out of their sixteen-thousand-square-foot suite in the Watergate to a building near Dupont Circle. “It’s more sensibly located,” Strauss told the committee. “It’s easier for people to come to town. It’s two blocks from the hotels.”

  “It’s a little more than we need, but less than we have.”

  DNC staffers were unhappy with the move. The new suite was smaller and darker than the Watergate office, and it was only a mile and a half closer to Capitol Hill.

  As the Democrats were moving out, the Post reported, “Washington’s most notorious piece of commercial property is also its most valuable,” with a market value in excess of $50 million. Efficiency apartments in Watergate East, which sold originally for about $20,000, were now worth nearly $40,000. All but three units in Watergate South had been sold. Donald H. Richardson, a mortgage broker with John Hancock Life Insurance and owner of a three-bedroom apartment in Watergate West with a river view, told the Post he still regarded the Watergate as “a premier place to live.”

  “If that imposing complex called Watergate is bothered by all the publicity,” observed Renata Smith Byrne, the “Woman’s World” columnist for the San Antonio Light, “it isn’t evident.” Byrne had arrived in Washington to interview Anna Chennault, who was unexpectedly called away to New York, but was given a private tour of Chennault’s apartment by her new social secretary, Lou Tower, wife of Senator John Tower. Anna’s private cook, Miss Shun Tang Ying, prepared dumplings while the two women toured the apartment, which Byrne described as “deceptively fragile, with a happy mixture of antique Chinese and French furnishings.” Security in the building, she noted, had been upgraded since the break-in at the DNC. Every apartment in Watergate East appeared to have been wired to an alarm system, which could be set off “by merely touching a door that has not been programmed for your opening.”

  As the DNC break-in approached its second anniversary, many retailers who had offered Watergate-themed souvenirs had moved out. “We’re down to the more solid stores,” Henry Winston told the Washington Post. “Most are not playing it up at all now.” The Watergate Men’s Shop, however, still offered $20 red silk ties embroidered with Watergate bugs. Melvin Norwood, owner of the shop, sold them to everyone from singer Tom Jones to the son of Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal. “I couldn’t have bought this kind of publicity for a million dollars,” Norwood said. At the Watergate liquor store, Rip Packman continued to sell Watergate Scotch, gin, vodka and bourbon. “After the break-in, everybody wanted Watergate booze,” he said. “Our sales shot up 35% to 50% and I’ve increased the sales staff from two to eight.”

  A political memorabilia show was held in the carpeted halls of Les Champs. “Out of respect for the Watergate,” said the show’s organizer, “we have left out anything that would be derogatory to either the present administration or the Watergate.” Items related to Martha Mitchell, including a “Free Martha” campaign button, were banned.

  After more than a year on the market, however, the DNC suite in the Watergate Office Building remained vacant. Watergate sales manager Lee Elsen turned to a local advertising firm for help. Don Vogel, the firm’s creative director, concluded his client needed to embrace the space’s history. He designed advertisements, placing them in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which read: “Don’t be bugged with the commonplace. Locate your office at the Watergate . . . the prestige location in Washington that is ne plus ultra.” Elsen sent a thousand executives around the nation a mailing about the suite, accompanied by a bug-shaped tie clasp.

  The ad campaign, however, failed to generate a viable tenant.

  “FRANK WILLS IS A BLACK MAN WHO ALWAYS HAS BEEN jinxed by one thing or another,” Jet Washington bureau chief Simeon Booker reported in May 1973, in a six-page profile of the former Watergate Office Building security guard.

  Wills only made it as far as eleventh grade in Savannah, Georgia. He enrolled in the Job Corps and studied heavy machine operation in Battle Creek, Michigan, “only to be barred from union membership and not allowed to work.” He finally landed a job on a Ford assembly line in Detroit, but his asthma forced him to quit. He arrived in Washington in 1971 and worked at a few hotels before getting work as a guard with the private security firm GSS.

  “It was a deadbeat job,” Jet reported. And because Wills had no seniority, he was working the “lonely midnight-to-dawn shift” when he discovered tape on a door in the stairwell of the Watergate Office Building on the morning of June 17, 1972.

  After the break-in, GSS promoted him to the rank of sergeant and gave him a small raise—about 40 cents a week, after taxes. “They said I did a pretty good job,” he said, “but they seemed more interested in plugging the firm than in trying to help me.” He left GSS for another security job paying $5 more a week, and with better working hours—4:00 P.M. to midnight.

  “Everybody tells me I’m some kind of hero,” he said, “but I certainly don’t have any hard evidence.”

  He received awards from the Democratic Party and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and played himself in the movie version of All the President’s Men.

  Mills eventually moved to South Carolina to live with his mother, and was arrested in a discount store for stealing a $17 pair of sneakers in 1982. At the time of his arrest, he had been unemployed for at least a year. He was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison. When his mother died in 1993, he donated her body to medical science because he did not have enough money to bury her. Wills died of a brain tumor in Augusta, Georgia, at the age of fifty-two.

  AS AN AUDIENCE OF 80 MILLION WATCHED GAVEL-TO-GAVEL coverage of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Democrat Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina, Nixon aide Pat Buchanan made a new friend at the pool in the Watergate Hotel: Rolling Stone columnist Hunter S. Thompson. “Your work is hilarious,” Buchanan said, and invited him over to meet Shelley and have a beer at their Watergate East apartment. “She thought he might show up stoned,” Buchanan recalled years later, but when Thompson appeared at their door he was “neatly dressed” and, as far as either of them could tell, perfectly sober.

  In late September, Rolling Stone published “Fear and Loathing at the Watergate,” in which Thompson wrote of swimming laps in the hotel pool the night of the break-in, before joining Tom Quinn, a sportswriter for the Washington Daily News, at the hotel bar for shots of Sauza Gold Tequila and general disparagement of the National Football League’s management.

  At Watergate East, Pat Buchanan was awakened every morning at six by the sound of the Washington Post landing on the carpet outside their apartment. Before he reached the door, their Persian cat Cratchit “had bounded out of bed and was there, anticipating this daily run the length of the building and back as I scanned the Watergate headlines,” Pat wrote later. “The arrival of the Post was the alarm that awakened us both.”

  One evening, Watergate East resident George Arnstein went down to the pool for a dip. When he got back to the apartment, his wife asked, “Who else was there?” “Oh,” he replied, “only three or four people. But I was the only one who wasn’t under indictment.”

  IN 1968, AT AGE SIXTY-ONE, LUIGI MORETTI MARRIED Maria Teresa Albani, a secretary in the offices of Studio Moretti. She had arrived in the office earlier that year, and junior architects and other staff considered her to be “very aggressive.” Adrian Sheppard, a young Canadian architect who worked briefly in Moretti’s studio at the Palazzo Colonna, visited the couple when he returned to Italy after a long absence. Their relationship, he thought, appeared to be “not particularly cordial.”

  Moretti’s diabetes had gravely affected his heart and liver, and he suffered a major heart attack. He convinced his doctors to allow him to cruise the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the western coast of Tuscany, telling them it would be good for his recovery. In fact, according to his nephew Tommaso Magnifico, a young architecture student and Moretti�
�s surrogate son, Moretti knew he was fading.

  Maria Teresa chartered a boat and invited several close friends, including Moretti’s personal physician, to join them. A few days into the voyage, a storm approached and they were forced to drop anchor a few hundred yards off the island of Capraia, a penal colony. In the middle of the storm, Moretti died.

  According to Italian law, Moretti’s body could remain on the boat only seventy-two hours. Under no circumstances did Maria Teresa want her husband buried on a prison island. She managed to get word to Tommaso to come at once and bring his uncle’s body back to Rome.

  Tommaso hurried to Piombino, on the mainland, and convinced a local fisherman to take him out to the boat. Together they lifted Moretti’s rapidly decomposing body into a coffin and returned to shore—all in the middle of a raging storm. More than fifty years later, as Tommaso told the story to a visitor, his eyes filled with tears. “It was one of the most horrible experiences of my life,” he said.

  Back in Canada, Adrian Sheppard, like millions of people all over the world, was glued to his television set watching the Watergate Committee hearings in Washington, DC. Suddenly, on the bottom of the television screen, scrolled a news flash: Luigi Moretti . . . architect of the Watergate . . . has died in Italy. . . .

  There had long been friction between Maria Teresa and the architects who had worked for her husband. After he died, she became “molto, molto, molto volitiva” (“very, very, very volatile”). Under the name Studio “Moretti”—the quotation marks were intentional—junior architects who had worked for Luigi Moretti finished whatever jobs could be completed. Other projects were simply abandoned, including a villa commissioned by Moretti’s longtime friend and client Aldo Samaritani. The young architects salvaged whatever files, drawings and models they could. Maria Teresa threw out everything else and closed the studio.

  In his hospital room in Rome, before he died, Moretti confided to his nephew that the Watergate scandal in America had caused him great anguish. How could something he had created to be so positive, Moretti asked, be associated with something so negative?

  “It is a cruel joke of destiny,” he lamented.

  AT THE AUGUST 1973 SGI BOARD MEETING IN ROME, DIRECTORS were informed that all 260 apartments in Watergate South had been sold; of the 241 garage spaces available, only four remained on the market.

  In September, Watergate Improvements Inc. formed a new company, named West Alexandria Properties, to develop the Watergate Landmark. The proposed project would include four sixteen-story towers, each with four hundred residential units, in “a completely closed community with attended gate houses and private security guards.” “Why live next door to Watergate at Landmark when you can live in it?” asked a full-page ad in the Washington Post:

  Live in the most exciting condominium community on the East Coast. A 90 million dollar, 37 acre residential park totally enclosed with gatehouse entrances and private streets. A quiet, secure community with 22 acres reserved as private parkland. A 2 million dollar recreation meadow with indoor-outdoor everything: golf, tennis, swimming. A fabulous water complex, party island, sand beaches, clubhouse, and too many other features to list.

  Security would be “tight” in the new development, a Washington Post real estate writer predicted.

  IN OCTOBER, SALLY QUINN MOVED INTO THE WATERGATE apartment of Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post. He had left his wife of twenty-two years for Sally, he wrote later, “spang in the middle of Watergate, the most important story of a generation.”

  Bradlee and Quinn had started seeing each other secretly in June, and he knew he was at risk of blackmail by “the Nixon people,” whom he assumed were following him around town. He did not want to compromise the paper, so he moved out of his house and into the Georgetown Inn briefly, before renting a Watergate South apartment in mid-September. Sally started as an on-air correspondent for CBS Morning News in the beginning of August, but when they emerged as a couple, she quit CBS and moved into the apartment.

  “It was wild,” she recalled of her brief stay at the Watergate. Ben and Sally would run into Bob Dole in the elevator or in the lobby, she recalled, “and it would be, ‘Hey, Ben.’ ‘How are you, Bob?’ or ‘Hi, good to see you’—as if nothing was going on, as though the country wasn’t falling apart.” Dole and Bradlee were both veterans of World War II and shared a mutual respect. Seemingly every day, however, brought another Watergate story in the Washington Post, followed by a denunciation by Dole, who was then chairman of the Republican National Committee. But within the Watergate, “it was all very congenial.”

  Ben and Sally kept a log cabin in West Virginia as a weekend escape from around-the-clock pressure at the Post. “Ben was a woodsman,” she recalled, “and he had an axe and a chainsaw. That was his way of dealing with Watergate—just disappear into the woods for eight hours a day and chop wood.” In preparation for a weekend project, Bradlee purchased a gigantic chain to attach to his Jeep tractor. He stepped into the Watergate elevator with Sally; she was in jeans, he was in jeans and a workshirt, with the huge chain hanging over his shoulder. Nixon aide Victor Lasky stepped into the elevator. He looked first at Sally, and then at Ben. “Jesus, Bradlee,” Lasky asked, “are you into that?”

  ON OCTOBER 17, 1973, ANNA CHENNAULT THREW ANOTHER party at her Watergate East penthouse and presented $50,000 raised at the National Air Force Salute to three charities. Guests included her Watergate neighbor Arthur Burns of the Federal Reserve. Tommy Corcoran identified himself to a reporter as “the butler.” It was a windy evening, but guests still climbed the marble spiral staircase to the roof, where her “dancing room” was filled with blooming chrysanthemums and geraniums.

  Anna was introduced to her guests as the “queen of the Watergate.” That may be true, she said, smiling, but “we’re still taking orders from a man.” Women at the party cheered.

  The guest of honor was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, and Vice President Spiro Agnew’s recent resignation hung in the air. “This is the first time a Republican has been welcomed back to the Watergate,” Goldwater joked.

  AFTER WATERGATE SPECIAL PROSECUTOR ARCHIBALD COX issued a subpoena to the Nixon White House for taped conversations, Nixon offered to allow Senator John C. Stennis, a Republican from Mississippi who was notoriously hard of hearing, to listen to the tapes and summarize them. Cox rejected the offer, and on Saturday, October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused, as did his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, and both men resigned. Solicitor General Robert Bork was summoned to the White House, sworn in as acting attorney general, and fired Cox. The events of that evening became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

  On November 4, Republican senator Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts appeared on ABC’s Issues and Answers program. Brooke said he hoped Nixon had not committed an impeachable offense, but in the wake of the Saturday Night Massacre the president was “too crippled to lead” and should resign. Nine days later, Brooke was summoned to the family quarters of the White House, with a handful of other Republican senators, to meet with Nixon. “This Watergate thing has gotten out of hand,” Nixon said, and asked them for advice. “Mr. President,” Brooke said, “I think you have lost the trust and faith of the American people. For the good of yourself and your family, for the good of the Republican Party, and more important, for the good of the American people, I think you should resign.” The president stared straight into Brooke’s eyes. “That would be taking the easy way out, the cowardly thing to do,” Nixon said.

  With one exception, the other senators present jumped to Nixon’s defense. “Stick it out, Mr. President,” said one. “Don’t listen to Ed,” said another.

  After Brooke returned to his Watergate East apartment late that evening, he heard a knock on the door. It was his neighbor from down the hall, Rose Mary Woods. She was livid and unleashed a “profanity-laced tirade.”

  “You don’t understand,” he protes
ted. “I don’t have anything against the president personally. I only said what I believed, and I only gave him advice I would give myself. It was not mean-spirited.” Woods continued “to take vehement exception,” Brooke later recalled.

  “I’m sorry you feel this way,” he said. “I hope you will understand.” She gave him what he called “one last choice epithet” and walked away.

  The next morning in the Watergate garage, Brooke found a long, deep scratch on the door of his prized 1973 Mercedes-Benz convertible.

  That Christmas, Shelley and Pat Buchanan attended a party at Rose Mary Woods’s apartment, one floor above theirs in the Watergate. Pat told his fellow White House aides he felt the president had made “a grave mistake” in not releasing the transcripts of his conversations with former White House counsel John Dean. The situation was now terminal, Pat said.

  A former White House speechwriter who was at the party leaked Pat’s conversation to the Washington Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which quoted an unnamed “speechwriter” as saying, “It’s like the Titanic . . . when the iceberg hit, passengers up on deck barely felt the ship shudder. But down below, the damage control men computed the flooding rate, consulted their charts, and told the captain, ‘Never mind how things look now—she’s going down.’”

  “Unfortunately,” Pat wrote later, “the quote was accurate. Nixon could not have missed it.”

  PETER SHADDICK’S TRADERS AT FRANKLIN NATIONAL BANK were inexperienced in dealing with floating exchange rates and in January 1973, expecting the U.S. dollar to continue to rise, took short positions in various currencies. By November 1973, Franklin had bet $62.6 million shorting other currencies; by May 1974, the bank’s net short position was over $230 million. Shaddick and Bordoni concealed trading losses in part by entering into fictitious contracts with two Sindona-owned banks, Banca Unione of Milan and Amincor Bank, A.G., of Zurich. In September 1973, for example, Franklin’s international division lost $244,000, but reported $1.5 million in foreign exchange profits. In the first five months of 1974, as the U.S. dollar fell against other major currencies, Franklin’s traders lost $33 million.