David asked her to return the following summer, luring her with a new research project. But his real agenda was personal: Were she ever to become single again, he hoped to work up the courage to ask her out on a date. They had lunches in the office, then went out for lunch. They met for dinner at restaurants around town. They went for horseback rides on weekends. “Either he’s the nicest man in the world,” Katherine confided to her mother one day on the phone, “or he’s interested in me.”
Katherine broke up with her boyfriend and delivered the good news to David in person. He asked her out on a date. “We could talk all night,” she recalled with a smile. “He was kind, interesting, and had an engine inside to change the world.” She thought they could be real partners, in love and work. “I don’t think that combination happens very often.” Within a year, they were engaged.
David by now owned a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of Watergate East, with a large terrace overlooking the Potomac River. “It was the best bachelor pad in the District,” Katherine recalled years later with a laugh. But as a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate in a building filled with older women, she was self-conscious. She channeled her frustration into a gift for David: a book of collages, inspired by another young woman who felt like a fish out of water—Eloise, the girl on the “tippy-top floor” of New York’s Plaza Hotel, made famous in a series of books written by Kay Thompson and illustrated by Hilary Knight. She titled her book: Katherine at the Watergate.
David and Katherine married in 1986. After a dozen years on Capitol Hill, their company, the Advisory Board—they had renamed it in 1986—needed a new home. Employees were scattered among several townhouses on Capitol Hill. Interoffice mail was delivered between buildings in a red wagon.
Katherine, pregnant with their first child, took charge of the move. She toured potential offices around Washington while David attempted to nudge her toward the Watergate. She was skeptical but willing to listen. He presented his case: The Watergate, with its mix of buildings and open spaces, felt like a campus—an updated version of the “city within a city” marketed by developers of the complex decades ago. Watergate 600 had a space for a large conference room to host briefings and other events for their expanding client list of health care executives. Out-of-town clients could be put up easily in the Watergate Hotel. “The Watergate is perfect,” he told her. Katherine, however, thought the complex was “too old” for their young workforce.
After their son Carter was born, Katherine went on maternity leave and David saw his window of opportunity. He began negotiating with the owners of the Watergate office building at 600 New Hampshire Avenue and signed a lease for four floors, plus half of the lobby level.
ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1995, ROCCO FORTE, THE CHAIRMAN OF Trusthouse Forte, the British catering and hotel giant whose holdings included the Watergate Hotel, became Sir Rocco. Queen Elizabeth II named him a knight bachelor for “services to tourism,” joining Sir Ian Maurice Gray Prosser (“For services to the Brewing Industry”) and Sir Robert Graham Stephens, the voice of Aragorn on a BBC Radio serialization of Lord of the Rings (“For services to Drama”) on the New Year Honours list.
Rocco’s father, Lord Forte, had surrendered the company chairmanship three years earlier, but remained on the board. Now that Rocco was finally in charge, he was intent on transforming the family business into “a modern company.” He sold off the contract catering business in order to concentrate on hotels and roadside restaurants. Profits were up sharply in London and Trusthouse Forte—known as THF, once mocked as “Truly Horrible Food”—appeared to have weathered the worst of the recession.
At 7:45 A.M. on November 22, 1995, Gerry Robinson, CEO of Granada Group, a conglomerate with a range of interests from television and theme parks to catering and bingo, called Rocco at his London home. A butler answered the phone and informed Robinson the master of the house was away at the moment—“on the Yorkshire moors, shooting.” Sir Rocco, Robinson thought, should be at his desk managing his company.
Robinson was the ninth of ten children born to an Irish father and a Scottish mother. He considered becoming a Catholic priest, but switched to accounting, beginning his career as a clerk with Matchbox Toys at age seventeen. He joined Granada as CEO in 1991 and became chairman the following year. He had a reputation in some circles as a vicious cost-cutter. Monty Python’s John Cleese dismissed him as “an upstart caterer.” But under Robinson’s leadership, Granada’s stock price soared 444 percent in just five years.
Robinson wanted to expand Granada’s catering business by purchasing the catering division of Trusthouse Forte, but Rocco refused to let him even submit a bid. “We simply couldn’t get a look in,” Robinson said. Rocco dismissed Granada for thinking “too short term” and sold the division to its senior managers. Robinson believed Sir Rocco was acting out of emotion, not in the interests of shareholders, and launched a “covert operation” to investigate the entire Trusthouse Forte empire. He sent teams into the field to investigate every asset, from the Travelodge budget hotel chain in the United States to the Savoy Hotel in London. Based on these reports, Robinson concluded, the shareholders of Trusthouse Forte would benefit from a new owner.
When Rocco got back from the moors and returned Robinson’s call, he was informed Granada Group had launched a takeover bid. “I was quite taken aback,” Rocco recalled.
According to Robinson’s presentation to shareholders, Trusthouse Forte’s management had repeatedly failed to deliver profits, earnings and dividends. As a result, over the past five years, the value of Granada Group shares soared, while Trusthouse Forte’s stock price was flat. Robinson also gleefully leaked to the press that he had tried to reach Sir Rocco at home, but was informed he was out hunting grouse. “It was a good talking point,” sniffed Olga Polizzi, Rocco’s sister.
“Robinson doesn’t have one quality business in his portfolio,” Rocco declared. “He doesn’t talk about style or service—he doesn’t believe in them—which is why he’s such an inappropriate person to run this business.”
The battle lasted nine weeks. On January 23, 1996, Robinson announced a majority of Trusthouse Forte shareholders had accepted his $5.9 billion bid for the company. It was the worst day of Rocco’s life, said one of his close friends. “He has effectively lost everything his father built.”
Rocco tried to buy the Watergate and sixteen other luxury hotels back from Granada. His offer—which some sources said was 30 percent below the value Granada placed on them—was rejected.
Rocco and his sister formed a new hotel company and started over. Gerry Robinson became Sir Gerrard Jude Robinson, knighted by the queen for “services to the Arts” on the 2004 New Year Honours list.
AS THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WATERGATE break-in approached, Jim Herrald decided the time had come to part with a piece of history.
A year after the break-in, in 1973, he had started work at the Watergate as the building superintendent. One day, he called in a locksmith to do some work and listened intently as the man reminisced about changing the locks after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee. The man, James Rednowers, still had the old lock.
“A little light went on in my head,” Herrald recalled. He badgered the locksmith and finally got him to part with the lock and to sign a notarized statement that the lock was taken from Suite 600 of the Watergate Office Building.
Herrald visited a Smithsonian curator in the early 1980s to see if there was interest in purchasing the lock, but the curator said only that the museum could accept the lock as a charitable donation. “Thanks, but no thanks,” Herrald said.
After her husband passed away, and her children grew up and left for college, Gail Wolpin grew increasingly lonely and bored. She played tennis and opened a designer store for children, which caught fire the first day and burned to the ground. She rebuilt, but the clothing business was not a fit. She wrote herself a letter, which read in part: “I’m doing nothing with my life.” She decide
d to become an auctioneer—to this day, she says she is not sure why—and attended the Mendenhall School of Auctioneering in High Point, North Carolina, “America’s Top Quality Auction School since 1962.” She found an old building in the nearby town of Phoebus, Virginia, and opened the Phoebus Auction Gallery in 1992. Auctioneering, Gail became fond of saying, was the world’s second-oldest profession. Unlike the oldest profession, however, about 90 percent of the auctioneers at the time were men.
Herrald had sold other items from the Watergate through another auction house and was unhappy with the results. He called Wolpin, explained how the lock had come into his possession and asked her if she might be interested. She arranged to meet him at the food court of a nearby shopping mall. He brought along his wife, who was also in her seventies and very frail. He opened his briefcase and took out the four-pound brass lock. Wolpin inspected it and suggested the lock could fetch as much as $25,000.
Phoebus Auction Gallery scheduled the sale for May 26, 1997. A few days before, the Wall Street Journal picked up the story, and it instantly became worldwide news. The day of the auction, ABC, CBS and CNN arrived. More than three hundred bidders and Watergate buffs crammed into the room—probably the biggest turnout, employees said, since the “erotic art” auction held there the previous October. Wolpin opened the bidding at $1,000 so a “whole lot of people” could get a shot at history. Pete Peterson, an antiques dealer and insurance salesman from Yorktown, Virginia, had the highest bid in the room, at $10,000. “You know, it brings you immortality if you give it as a gift to the Smithsonian,” Peterson said.
Wolpin had an absentee bid of $13,000, from a man in Boston who did not wish to be identified. She turned to Herrald and advised him to hold out for a better offer. “There are a million bells, but there’s one Liberty Bell,” she said. “There are a million locks, but there’s one Watergate lock, the one that was taped.” (Actually, the Washington Post reported from the auction, the Watergate burglars taped open the locks to three doors. Herrald said the other doors were long gone. “They could be in a junk pile, for all I know,” he told the Post.)
Herrald took Wolpin’s advice and rejected the absentee bid. THINGS JUST DIDN’T CLICK AT SALE OF HISTORIC LOCK, read the Washington Post headline.
Five years later, according to Bill Welch, the information officer for Phoebus Auction Gallery, Jim Herrald’s lock was sold for more than $20,000. Welch delivered it to a lawyer’s office and agreed to terms of sale that protected the sales price, as well as the identity of the buyer, who identified himself only as “a former manager at the Watergate.”
ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 21, 1998, THE LOBBY CLERK IN Watergate South made his rounds through the building, distributing the morning’s edition of the Washington Post. On the front page—in a story headlined CLINTON ACCUSED OF URGING AIDE TO LIE—the Post reported Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr had expanded his investigation of the president “to examine whether Clinton and his close friend Vernon Jordan encouraged a 24-year-old former White House intern to lie to lawyers for Paula Jones about whether the intern had an affair with the president.”
From that moment forward, Monica said, “it just went crazy.”
Photographers, camera crews and reporters camped out on the New Hampshire Avenue sidewalk near the entrance to the Watergate South lobby in an around-the-clock “Monica Watch.” A building manager warned Monica and Marcia against venturing outside, because reporters and film crews had taken positions on balconies overlooking their terrace.
According to one cameraman, whenever Lewinsky appeared, “It’s like a Chinese fire drill.” According to Phil Rascona, who managed the Watergate Barber Shop, “This place was surrounded by photographers. It was like the old Westerns, when the Indians went around the covered wagons.”
On January 26, speaking from the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing, President Clinton addressed the matter for the first time, famously saying: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false.” That day, Lewinsky was seen in public for the first time since the story broke, as she left the Watergate underground parking lot in a black car, seated next to her lawyer, William Ginsburg.
Lewinsky stayed mostly indoors, curtains drawn, writing letters, knitting and watching movies. “She might as well be in jail,” said Ginsburg. “The isolation for her is very tough.” The curtains shut out photographers—and sunshine. The Baltimore Sun called the Watergate her “Gucci prison.”
“More than 25 years after it first gained infamy,” one wire service reported, “the Watergate complex is again at the center of a firestorm that could bring down a president. . . . The free world’s axis of power no longer runs along Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Capitol to the White House. For the next few days or weeks, it runs from the office of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr . . . across town to the Watergate.”
“The ghost of Watergate has been rattling through the Lewinsky scandal like some chain-dragging Dickensian spirit,” the San Jose Mercury News reported.
Watergate residents and shopkeepers alike banded together to protect what remained of Lewinsky’s privacy. Watergate Pastry delivered her favorite chocolate mousse cake. Friends and relatives became “surrogate shoppers” at the Watergate Safeway. Jose Capestany, the owner of Watergate Florist, refused to speak to the press. “Monica’s mother is a customer of ours,” he said.
Lewinsky’s next-door neighbor, Senator Bob Dole, just two years after his stinging presidential defeat, greeted the mob of reporters outside the lobby of Watergate South. “Look, I won! I’m back!” He sent reporters boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts, for which he was employed as a spokesman. Dole said he had not engaged his famous neighbor in conversation—because he did not want to be subpoenaed. “Where was Gordon Liddy when I needed him?” Dole wisecracked. The scandal, however, gave Dole an idea. If Monica and her mother ever moved out, he told the New York Times, he was interested in buying their apartment and merging it with his own.
Monica eventually stopped working out at the Watergate Hotel gym, fearful other guests might surreptitiously take her photograph. She did not attend her mother’s wedding that summer to New York businessman Peter Straus.
On September 11, 1998, Kenneth Starr reported to Congress, listing eleven impeachable offenses, including perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and abuse of power, in a 445-page document forever known as the Starr Report. The report contained graphic details of the sexual relationship between the president and the former White House intern. Internet traffic doubled from the previous day; 20 million people read the report online over forty-eight hours.
In mid-October, Lewinsky moved out of the Watergate. She sent her neighbors a printed, hand-signed farewell note:
As I depart 700 New Hampshire, I wanted to apologize for the inconveniences of the past nine months. To those of you who have passed along your kind words, I greatly appreciated your support during this difficult time; and I thank you. I hope you all know how very sorry I am that so much attention was brought to this building.
The Doles bought Apartment 114 from the owner—Giuseppe Cecchi, who had acquired it as part of another transaction. When Bob Dole first saw the unit shortly after Monica’s departure, he thought it was “not too well-kept.” Monica had taped to her bedroom wall a photograph of a man—Dole would never identify him by name. Someone had written a “vulgar word” across the bottom of the image. “We probably should have kept the picture,” Dole said with a shrug years later, “and showed it off.”
After the remodel, Senator Dole gave a tour of their expanded apartment. He gestured toward the kitchen and dining room, where the former Lewinsky apartment once began. “See all that back there?” he asked with a smile. “That’s all ‘Monicaland.’”
Chapter Ten: Done Deal
The impact of the Watergate scandal has been so significant that it made a permanent imprint on the American psyche and earn
ed “Watergate” a place in the American lexicon as synonymous with scandal and corruption.
Nomination of the Watergate for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, August 2005
IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, EDWIN “E.C.” SCHROEDER, WHO managed acquisitions for the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, arrived at Walter Pforzheimer’s duplex apartment on the seventh floor of Watergate East, accompanied by a half-dozen colleagues.
Walter had suffered a stroke a few years earlier and was in a wheelchair. He was as sharp and quick-witted as ever, but tired easily and could no longer climb the stairs to check on the books stored on the upper level of his apartment. He did not allow a stroke to interfere with the standing orders he had with a number of rare book dealers, so books continued to arrive at the Watergate every week. They were stacked in corners or against walls, waiting for the day he would be well enough to catalog them and place them exactly where they needed to be. That day never came.
As Walter watched from his wheelchair at the foot of the stairs, E.C. poked around the upstairs sitting area. It was filled with rows of shelves that reached nearly to the ceiling, completely filled with books. Between the shelves, books were stacked knee-high on the floor. A leak had sprung in the ceiling many years ago—long after Walter made his last climb up the flight of stairs before his stroke—and the piles of books stacked on his desk were now covered with mold.
Incredible, E.C. said to himself as he surveyed the apartment. There were fifteen shelves of “French Royal Bindings”—450 volumes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, bound in red leather. Another fifteen or sixteen shelves held the world’s finest collection of the writings of Frank Stockton, an American author of adventure and fairy tales that were wildly popular in the late-nineteenth century. There were twenty-eight shelves of Molière and another forty-seven shelves of books inspired by Molière, totaling 2,200 volumes—the most extensive collection of its kind outside France. Walter’s seventh-floor duplex also held twenty-five shelves of rare first editions of English and American literature, known as “high spots” among librarians. Another eight shelves of various books were downstairs, in his fourth-floor studio apartment. The two apartments contained 133 feet of speeches and correspondence and 100 volumes of newspaper clippings. Walter’s library of espionage-related books included 9,746 volumes—including three books by Aline, the Countess of Romanones.
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