The Watergate

by Joseph Rodota

  Deborah Davis, in Katharine the Great, her 1979 biography of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, speculated Richard Ober was “Deep Throat.” Her reasoning: Ober and Bradlee had known each other for three decades, since they were both members of the Hasty Pudding social club as Harvard undergraduates; Ober had “a small office in the basement of the White House,” which offered “unlimited access” to Nixon; Ober was present “during Nixon’s mental deterioration, as his obsession with his enemies began to push him to the limits of rational thought”; and Ober had a motive to bring down Nixon: to protect the secrecy of Operation CHAOS and other CIA covert operations. After the first edition of her book appeared in 1979, Ober told Davis he never had “any personal contact” with Nixon. She included his denial in the second edition of her book, which came out in 1987, but noted Ober “never denied being Deep Throat.”

  Ober’s past was unknown to Palladin, who twisted the mint between his thumb and forefinger, inhaled its scent and pulled off a leaf to taste. “Did God send you to me?” he exclaimed. “You are exactly what I’ve been looking for!”

  Richard Ober won his bet.

  EVER SINCE THEODORE WHITE’S THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968, Anna Chennault had been threatening to write another memoir. Over six days in November 1979, Chennault’s twenty-first book, The Education of Anna, was excerpted in the Washington Star, and it landed on bookshelves in January 1980, the start of a presidential campaign year. “From Exotic Peking to the Corridors of Power,” read an advertisement for the book, “this stunningly beautiful woman, Anna Chennault, was friend to six presidents, a correspondent in World War II, a mother, writer, the confidante of world leaders who also played a secret role in the Vietnam peace talks. . . . Anna’s life reads like a romantic novel and an international thriller.”

  Chennault dedicated her book “to all my teachers, and to the best teacher of them all, Thomas G. Corcoran.” But the inspiration for writing, she said, came from “a very dear friend.” She did not identify him by name but dropped a few clues. “We have been close since we first met,” she wrote, “though we knew from the beginning there would never be marriage. Perhaps that is what has made the stolen moments over the years so precious, the moments when it is enough to be alone with each other, just to say, ‘I miss you.’” She had known this man only ten years, which ruled out her longtime friend Tommy Corcoran. The anonymous “very dear friend” sometimes flew “ten or fifteen thousand miles just to spend a day with me.” Each time they met, he asked only one thing: “Please write your book.”

  Anna may have had other reasons for writing her memoir. She was still upset with Nixon for denying her role in his successful 1968 campaign. Chennault’s recurring failure to earn a top appointment in a Republican administration, one Washington insider observed, had made her bitter. “What she really wanted was undersecretary of state for far eastern affairs and was very upset when she didn’t get it.” Chennault told the Washington Star she turned down several jobs under Nixon, and declined an offer to become U.S. treasurer in the Ford administration. “Politics is a very cruel game,” she said. “After twenty years in Washington you learn to have a pretty strong stomach.”

  “If I were not an Asian, I would have been in the Nixon White House, but there was no one to speak for me,” she told a reporter from W magazine. “The blacks have members in Congress, the Jews have a strong lobby, but who do the Chinese have? We don’t have anyone in Congress to talk for us.”

  “What Anna fails to realize,” said an unnamed source, “is that her contacts are perishing. A lot of them are no longer around.”

  Chennault’s memoir gave her side of the 1968 “October surprise.” At the height of the campaign, she wrote, she spoke with Nixon’s campaign manager John Mitchell at least once a day. This “close contact” generated “considerable discontent” among other campaign aides, whom she dismissed as “the ranks of the frustrated.” She could no longer recall whether it was Nixon or Mitchell who first suggested a meeting with Bùi Diem, the South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, but the meeting took place at Nixon’s Manhattan apartment. “Anna is my good friend,” Nixon told Diem at that meeting. “If you have any messages for me, please give it to Anna and she will relay it to me and I will do the same in the future.” Mitchell nodded “like a school teacher pleased by a pupil’s performance.”

  A week after Election Day, on Wednesday, November 13, she flew to New York to meet with Maurice Stans in the morning and John Mitchell in the afternoon. “Mitchell was quick to the point,” she wrote.

  Nixon, he said, had agreed with Johnson to come out with a joint statement announcing a Vietnam policy. And so, “We need to do something about our friends in Saigon.”

  “Do what about our friends in Saigon?” I asked, not yet understanding.

  “Well, persuade them to go to Paris,” he said.

  “You must be joking,” I said, flabbergasted. “Two weeks ago, Nixon and you are worried that they might succumb to pressure to go to Paris. What makes you change your mind all of a sudden?”

  Mitchell just shook his head. “Anna, you’re no newcomer to politics. This, whether you like it or not, is politics.”

  I gathered up my coat. “I don’t play that kind of politics. You go and tell them yourself,” I said, and left in a rage.

  “The election had been a bitter lesson,” she wrote, “leaving me with no desire to serve in the new administration.”

  Elsewhere in her book, she criticized Jimmy Carter for relations with China. He acted with “high-handed secrecy and unnecessary haste,” she wrote, and the recognition of the Beijing government was a “betrayal of a loyal ally”—Taiwan. In a note to Chennault’s publisher, Senator Barry Goldwater praised the book for shedding important light on the “abrogation of our treaty responsibilities with Taiwan . . . and what the results are liable to be.” Goldwater also sent a note to his friend Anna, congratulating her for making “a great contribution.”

  Anna’s readers also learned that she once saw black-and-blue marks on Martha Mitchell’s arms; that Henry Kissinger had an “immature and threatened ego,” a “compulsion to impress” and committed the sartorial sin of wearing socks that were too short, exposing his bare shins whenever he sat down; and that legendary Washington hostess Perle Mesta once looked her over and sneered: “So what’s a Chinese woman going to do in Washington?”

  Chennault also wrote about life at the Watergate. When she bought her penthouse in early 1966, “the strange riverfront structure with its toothy balconies already bore the stamp of elitism in Washington.” After the Nixon crowd arrived, “Watergate came into its own as the residential seat of power, becoming to the Nixon era what Georgetown had been in the Kennedy years.” At the Watergate, Chennault began to entertain “in earnest,” even though formal entertaining—“as the Merriweather Post generation had known it”—was on the decline, “a casualty of recession.” Anna’s formula rarely varied: she invited more men than women; served Chinese food that was “pleasing to the eye, fragrant to the nose, and appealing to the palate”; and provided after-dinner entertainment, including “parlor games” or “dancing lessons given by an instructor hired for the evening.” And she limited “cocktail hour” to exactly sixty minutes. It was simply fair, she wrote, because she believed guests who arrived on time should not be penalized. It was also sensible, “because it minimizes premature drunkenness.”

  “There have been other distractions,” began one review, “so we tend to forget that people actually live in that jagged heap of cement called Watergate, and one of the grandest dwellings there is the penthouse occupied by a mysteriously powerful woman named Anna Chennault.” The reviewer called the book “intriguing” and “startlingly skillful” in light of Chennault’s “bashful claims that she has difficulty speaking English.”

  Not all reviewers were enthusiastic. “She emerges as a somewhat naïve Dragon Lady, a socially bent Republican survivor,” wrote Robert Shaplen in the New
York Times. He found the book “sometimes disarming but often strident and self-serving” and “readable but rather shallow.”

  The Education of Anna failed to be the last word on Chennault’s role in Nixon’s 1968 campaign. In 1987, former South Vietnamese ambassador Bùi Diem released his memoir, In the Jaws of History, and gave his version of the events.

  One night in June 1968, he wrote, “when I was having dinner at the Georgetown Club with Corcoran, Senator John Tower, and Chennault, Anna suggested I get together with the Republican presidential candidate.

  “. . . I told her I would think it over,” he continued. “That was an enticing prospect, but also a dangerous one. Any meeting with Nixon would carry the inevitable implication that I was somehow dealing behind the Democrats’ back.” Diem decided to meet with Nixon, but only “independently, without reporting to Saigon,” so that President Thieu could later repudiate him if necessary. Diem met with Nixon and John Mitchell in New York on July 12 at the Hotel Pierre; Anna Chennault met Diem in the lobby before the meeting. Diem did not inform Chennault that prior to the meeting, he had reached out to McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson’s national security advisor, and promised not to discuss the Paris Peace Talks in anything but the most general terms.

  At the end of the meeting, Diem wrote, Nixon thanked him “and added that his staff would be in touch with me through John Mitchell and Anna Chennault. I left the hotel quite pleased with the encounter, happy to have made contact with the Republicans and happy, too, that I have been candid about it with the Democrats.”

  After the election, and the reporting by Teddy White and others about Chennault’s role in the Nixon campaign, Diem felt there were “uncomfortable ambiguities” about her role. “My impression was that she may have played her own game” by encouraging both the South Vietnamese and the Republicans.

  Anna reviewed Diem’s draft chapter and offered suggestions, many of which Diem appears to have accepted, including deleting a promise “to tell the whole story.” “I don’t think anyone really has the knowledge to tell the whole story,” she wrote Diem, “because so many people were involved.”

  “What messages went to what people during that hectic and confused time are certainly beyond recovery at this point,” Diem wrote in his memoir, “and the so-called Anna Chennault affair will doubtless remain a mysterious footnote to history, although one that could easily have had greater consequences.”

  Chennault also asked Diem to drop a reference to her as the “Dragon Lady.” “That name was given to me by people who dislike the Asians,” she wrote. “Since you are a friend, I don’t think you want to use that name in reference to me.” He deleted the phrase from his book.

  DAVID BRADLEY RETURNED TO WASHINGTON AFTER A YEAR in the Philippines as a Fulbright scholar, teaching economics and exploring the fringes of political life under the Marcos regime. Funded by a modest grant, he interviewed political prisoners in Quezon City and Marxist guerrillas in the mountains of central Luzon and studied whether multinational corporations preferred martial-law governments over democracies (the answer was yes). It was an unusual way to spend one’s first year after graduation from Harvard Business School—most of his peers from the Class of 1978 went immediately into finance or consulting.

  Terry Bradley, David’s mother, lived at 301 Watergate West. David’s father, Gene, lived in Watergate East. The couple had divorced fifteen years after moving into the Watergate. Terry enjoyed buying, remodeling and selling apartments in the Watergate. In fact, she had found Gene’s apartment for him: 705-S, the former apartment of Rose Mary Woods.

  David narrowly escaped being tarred personally with the Watergate brush. At age sixteen, he was an intern with a White House conference on children and youth, and met White House aides John Ehrlichman and Egil “Bud” Krogh through church. As a student at Swarthmore in 1973, Bradley was offered a summer internship at the Nixon White House Office of Political Affairs, reporting to Charles “Chuck” Colson. David’s father discouraged him from taking any job at a White House under siege. Father and son negotiated a compromise. David took a job in the White House Visitors Office in the East Wing, a world away from the tsunami that would eventually swamp the West Wing and the Executive Office Building next door, where Nixon kept his hideaway office.

  Five years after Nixon’s resignation, David was living in the spare bedroom of his parents’ Watergate West apartment. Tourists were still dropping by the Watergate to look around and pose for pictures, which gave him an idea: Why not buy one of the stairwell doors that had been taped open the night of June 16, 1972, carve it into squares, and sell pieces to tourists and other history buffs? He reached out to the building management and asked to buy a door, but they turned him down.

  David thought his future was in politics, not business. He wanted to be a United States senator from the time he was fourteen years old and planned to run as a moderate Republican—from Maryland, now one of the bluest states in the Union—so he enrolled at Georgetown Law School. He took a summer job working for a lawyer named Kenneth Starr. David liked and admired Starr—the two would remain lifelong friends—but decided three years of law school, on top of two years he had just spent at Harvard Business School, was impractical. David cut his legal education short after a year.

  After Gene Bradley retired from General Electric, he started a nonprofit think tank, run out of the Watergate Office Building, hosting conferences on international trade and finance for high-level executives from the federal government and the private sector. David remembers his father as “a terrifically elegant man—and perfect for convening high-end dignitaries.” David thought he would enjoy doing similar work, but as part of a for-profit company. Washington was packed with information, he thought. If that information could be found, packaged and distributed, it could be a decent business.

  David persuaded his mother to allow him to convert the den in her Watergate West apartment into the offices of his new company: Research Counsel of Washington. Companies hired the firm to answer questions such as: Who makes uniforms for the National Football League? His first employee, Bonnie Williams, sometimes arrived at the “office” in the morning while David was still ironing his shirt. After David hired his fifth employee, the team spilled out of the den and into the dining room. The table groaned with books, papers and reports. A few hires later, David and his team were spread all over Terry’s living room, with its chintz-covered sofas. Terry wanted her apartment back and ordered Research Counsel of Washington to find a real office.

  “We had it coming, of course,” David recalled.

  ACCORDING TO NICOLAS SALGO, HIS NEW PARTNERS IN THE Watergate—Wendy Luscombe and the National Coal Board pension funds—left him alone for about a year. After that, they started to “meddle.”

  Luscombe had a different take: She and Salgo simply had “very different ways of doing things.”

  Shortly after acquiring Continental Illinois Properties and its entire portfolio, Luscombe brought her boss, Hugh Jenkins, and a few trustees of the pension funds to the United States to see their new investments. As they arrived at the Watergate Hotel, they discovered the bar had been demolished at Salgo’s direction. She knew nothing about his planned changes and was unaware the bar, which of course provided significant income to the hotel, would be closed until renovations were completed. She prided herself on having a hands-on management style and was distressed to be caught flat-footed, especially in front of Hugh Jenkins and the pension fund trustees. Salgo, she decided, would from now on need closer supervision.

  From that point forward, Luscombe checked in with Salgo regularly, questioning every aspect of Watergate operations and insisting on approving major expenditures and contracts, as befitting a fifty-fifty partner. After a few months of this, Salgo was fed up. He reached out to a friend, a lawyer in New York, to rant.

  “Did you tell me you had a crazy contract with Continental Illinois?” the friend asked.

  “Yeah,” Salgo replied.

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p; “Read your contract,” the friend said. “If it has in it what you were telling me, you had better get yourself a lawyer—a real smart one, a young one.” He gave Salgo the name and number of Sidney Dickstein, the founding partner of Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin, one of Washington’s powerhouse law firms. Dickstein was both a tough litigator and a smooth behind-the-scenes consigliere to the firm’s corporate clients. “He was equally comfortable in the courtroom and in the boardroom,” recalled Michael Nannes, a young lawyer who would eventually become chairman of the firm.

  Salgo met Dickstein in Washington and together the men reviewed the partnership agreement with Continental Illinois Properties, which had been absorbed into Pan-American Holdings, the U.S. real estate arm of the National Coal Board pension funds.

  Salgo had not agreed in advance to allow Continental to transfer their Watergate shares to Wendy Luscombe and Pan-American. In fact, he originally heard about Luscombe’s takeover plans only by reading about them in the Wall Street Journal.

  “They are doing exactly what the contract says neither of us should do,” Salgo said.

  Sidney looked up from the contract. “I think you have a point.”

  Dickstein directed Nannes and a first-year associate with the firm, Mark Packman, to dig around for cases which could persuade a court that the acquisition of Continental Illinois Properties amounted to a “transfer” of the Watergate assets, and was therefore subject to the terms of Salgo’s original agreement. If a court agreed with that interpretation, then Luscombe’s half-ownership of the Watergate was a violation of the original agreement. If a court disagreed, Salgo was stuck with his new partners. Nannes and Packman turned up a single case, PPG Industries, Inc. v. Guardian Industries Corp., that seemed to fit the situation. It was a narrow opportunity, “a very long putt,” Nannes advised, using a golf analogy. “We’re going with it,” said Dickstein.