The Watergate

by Joseph Rodota

  The book sold well, becoming a Book of the Month Club alternative selection, and inspired a twenty-five-book “Capital Crimes” series, including Murder at the Watergate, published in 1998, in which the Watergate became a crime scene from top (a researcher fell to her death from the roof) to bottom (when a union organizer is shot in the basement garage).

  Warren Adler closed his Washington public relations firm shortly after he helped launch the Watergate in the 1960s and moved to New York. He wrote more than forty novels, including War of the Roses, the epic account of an acrimonious divorce, which was adapted into a film starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito in 1989. Adler returned to the Watergate in 1992. In The Witch of Watergate, Adler sent his heroine Fiona Fitzgerald, a homicide detective, to investigate the murder of a lonely and miserable Washington Post reporter, whose body was discovered hanging over the balcony of her Watergate apartment from a noose around her neck.

  IN HIS THIRD AND FINAL EDITION OF Safire’s Political Dictionary, William Safire listed more than a dozen scandals with the “-gate construction,” including Koreagate, Lancegate (involving Jimmy Carter’s budget director, Bert Lance), Applegate (involving the suppression of a report on the finances of New York City), Floodgate (after Daniel Flood, a congressman), Billygate (Billy Carter), Pearlygate (televangelists), Irangate (the Iran-Contra affair), Iraqgate (grain credits and rocket technology), Travelgate (the White House travel staff dismissed in the early days of the Clinton administration), Rubbergate (bounced checks at a bank in the U.S. House of Representatives) and Scalpgate (the delay of Air Force One at Los Angeles International Airport while Clinton received a $200 haircut). “Clearly,” Safire wrote, “the -gate construction is too useful to be slammed shut.”

  Safire died in 2009, but the “-gate construction” lives on.

  The 2013 closure of the George Washington Bridge by appointees of former New Jersey governor Chris Christie became Bridgegate. There were two Deflategate scandals in 2016, one involving the rear tires of British Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton, the other involving New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte’s fabrication of events that took place late one evening during the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro became Lochtegate. In season five of HBO’s Veep, a newspaper reports a member of President Selina Meyer’s staff called her a “c**t.” The episode was named “C**tgate.” The 2016 release of an audio recording of Access Hollywood correspondent Billy Bush and Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump became Pussygate.

  AT THE END OF GEORGE W. BUSH’S SECOND TERM, Karen Johnson rented out her tenth-floor apartment in Watergate South to a senior member of Hillary Clinton’s team at the State Department and returned to Texas. Karen’s tenant signed a two-year lease, the maximum allowed under the building’s rules.

  As the end of the lease approached, Karen caught up with Karl Rove, a friend from the 2000 campaign. Rove had recently divorced his wife and was renting a house in Georgetown that turned out to be an utter disaster. Every time it rained, he heard water cascading inside the walls, and black mold sprouted throughout the house. He told Karen he needed to find a new place—fast.

  “Why don’t you take my apartment at the Watergate?” Karen offered.

  Rove abandoned Georgetown and moved into Watergate South. He made a few changes, turning the dining room into a study and installing bookcases. From the balcony, he watched crew teams glide down the Potomac River in the early-morning hours. Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of one of the presidential helicopters circling overhead on training flights.

  Karl and Karen kept in touch and met often for drinks or dinner. He confessed he was absolutely inept at organizing his own social life, so Karen and another mutual friend set him up with one woman after another. “Each date was a disaster,” Karl said, laughing.

  After a “strikeout” with one woman, whom an exasperated Karen considered her “best and highest offer,” there was only one arrow left in her quiver. “Well, Karl,” she said, “I guess you’re gonna have to take me out.”

  They married the following year and kept their Watergate apartment until 2016.

  Martha and John Mitchell’s former duplex apartment, 712-N in Watergate East, went on the market at about the same time. Clark Bason, nephew of Carolyn Bason Long and Senator Russell Long, put the property on the market after his aunt died. Clark removed Martha Mitchell’s telephone from the master bathroom before the sale, and displays it in his Palm Springs home.

  MONUMENT REALTY AND MICHAEL DARBY BOTH SURVIVED the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The National Association of Broadcasters announced plans to move from downtown Washington to a new ten-story headquarters, to be constructed by Monument Realty, in the District’s Capitol Waterfront neighborhood. Monument broke ground in January 2017 on a 171-unit condominium building nearby. Lenders had been leery of financing large condominium projects after the recession, Darby said, but the Washington rental market was oversupplied. “People are looking to buy,” he said. “So the logical thing is to build condos.”

  As he reflected on his recovery from the Lehman Brothers collapse, Darby offered another analogy from his youth in Australia. “It’s like if you’re a surfer and you’re out on the waves, riding six foot waves and having a great time,” he said to a reporter, “and all of a sudden a 15-foot wave comes out of nowhere and hits you and smashes you on the head and you say, ‘I’m never going back out there again because there may be a 20-foot wave that hits me.’ The answer’s no, I surf. I’m going to surf again.”

  Wendy Luscombe lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. She retired as an active real estate investor and now serves on a number of corporate boards and trains Fjord horses. She never forgot her years as the owner of the Watergate. “It wasn’t a real estate project,” she recalled years later. “It lived and breathed.” She stays in touch with Hugh Jenkins, who hired her in her twenties to build a U.S. real estate portfolio for the National Coal Board.

  Giuseppe Cecchi, now in his nineties, runs his development firm, IDI Group, from the twentieth floor of an office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, with his three sons, Enrico, Carlos and John. He tried to buy the Watergate Hotel from PB Capital, but they rejected his offer. From his desk, he can look across the Potomac and see the Watergate. In September 2016, Cecchi and his wife, Mercedes, hosted a fund-raiser in their Virginia home for the presidential campaign of another real estate developer: Donald J. Trump.

  JACK OLENDER STILL LIVES ON THE TWELFTH FLOOR OF Watergate East. He has no regrets about his fight to stop the conversion of the hotel to apartments. “Some people have good sense and are nice.” He smiles. “And then there are other people.”

  Audrey Wolf lives in the duplex apartment she shared with her late husband. She says the new health club at the Watergate Hotel is “so expensive that nobody can use it.” She is working with her neighbors in Watergate East to figure out where to put their own gym somewhere in the building.

  For nearly fifty years, Anna Chennault’s activities during the final days of the 1968 presidential campaign continued to fascinate historians and other researchers. Six months after LBJ’s death in January 1973, his former national security aide Walter W. Rostow sent an envelope to Harry Middleton, the director of the LBJ Library. “Sealed in the attached envelope,” Rostow wrote, “is a file President Johnson asked me to hold personally because of its sensitive nature.” Known as the “The ‘X’ envelope,” the files contained documents concerning “the activities of Mrs. Chennault and others” in the 1968 election. Rostow recommended the file be sealed for fifty years, but ordered the documents unsealed after twenty-one years, in July 1994.

  In 2014, Ken Hughes published Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate, in which he argued that Nixon was paranoid over the possibility the Chennault affair—a possible violation of the Logan Act, which bars private citizens from conducting foreign policy—might eventually be revealed. Nixon’s reaction to the publicatio
n of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times in June 1971, one year before the Watergate break-in, was to direct to the creation of the Special Investigations Unit—“the plumbers”—to prevent additional leaks that might reveal the truth of Chennault’s activities.

  On January 2, 2017, Anna Chennault made the front page of the New York Times. While working on a new biography of Nixon, John A. Farrell found notes taken by H.R. Haldeman from a phone call with the Republican candidate on October 22, 1968. Haldeman wrote Nixon’s instructions, which included “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” or South Vietnam, and “Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN can do.”

  Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, said the notes “remove any fig leaf of plausible deniability” of Nixon’s involvement in the incident. “This covert action by the Nixon campaign,” Naftali told the Times, “laid the ground for the skulduggery of his presidency.”

  In 2015, Anna Chennault celebrated her ninetieth birthday. She has lived on the fourteenth floor of Watergate East for more than fifty years, surrounded by a lifetime of photographs showing her with presidents and other officials from around the world, as well as her extensive collection of Chinese art and artifacts. She sometimes eats her meals facing an easel that holds a large painting of her late husband, General Claire Lee Chennault. She was one of several residents appearing in a 2016 Wall Street Journal story about the Watergate. From the day she first appeared in the American press, initially on the arm of her husband, and later as a hostess in her Watergate penthouse, she was perfectly coiffed, dressed in furs and evening gowns, or wearing elegant cocktail dresses and business suits, often of her own design. When she appeared in the Wall Street Journal, however, she wore an ill-fitting cotton dress. Her hair was in mismatched plastic curlers.

  Down the hall from the Doles, Ruth Bader Ginsburg lives in the ground-floor duplex apartment in Watergate South she and her husband, Martin, purchased shortly after she joined the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in 1980. Martin followed her to Washington from New York, taking a position on the faculty of the Georgetown University law school and becoming “of counsel” to Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, on the sixth floor of the Watergate 600 office building next door. The Ginsburgs and the Scalias—Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a Reagan appointee, and his wife, Maureen—celebrated many New Year’s Eve dinners at the Ginburgs’ Watergate apartment with their families and a few friends, including fellow Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and former solicitor general Ted Olson, who represented the presidential campaign of George W. Bush before the United States Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, and his wife Lady Booth, a lifelong Democrat. Until his death in 2010, Martin Ginsburg generally took charge of the cooking. He was very skilled in the kitchen: While stationed in Oklahoma with the U.S. Army, he worked his way through the Escoffier guide to French cooking. The main course was often something Scalia had shot on a recent hunting trip, such as elk or wild boar.

  Residents at the Watergate’s three apartment buildings—Watergate East, Watergate West and Watergate South—share tips and advice via a Google group managed by Patricia Moore, the elegant wife of Arthur Cotton Moore, a prominent Washington architect. Residents suggest doctors or pet-sitters, or sell items they no longer need—“a lot of crap,” Patricia laments. She monitors the group closely; she can tell if a Watergate resident might be fading, she said, based on the frequency and tone of their communications.

  Patricia and Arthur live in a Watergate South penthouse, with sweeping views of the Potomac River. “Moretti was extremely great,” said Arthur, reflecting on the Watergate’s original architect, Luigi Moretti. “He gave so many apartments views of the river, which was very unusual for the time. Moretti appreciated the value of the river. He was way ahead of American architects at that time.”

  “But the teeth,” as Arthur called the unusual balconies throughout the Watergate, “the teeth were a mistake.”

  ACCORDING TO TINA WINSTON, THE WIDOW OF HENRY WINSTON, the longtime Watergate manager, a stairwell door that had been taped open the night of June 16, 1972, disappeared mysteriously from a locked storage room in the Watergate sometime in the late 1990s. Years later, Mrs. Winston saw the door again—in the collection of the Newseum in downtown Washington, DC. A Newseum guide told her the door was donated to the museum. “Maybe one of the engineers, or somebody working in the building, took it,” she speculated. “I don’t think the guy who took it, kept it for twenty years, gave it away for nothing.”

  Carrie Christoffersen, the Newseum’s chief curator, explained how the door ended up in their collection. The FBI removed the door in 1973 and returned it after concluding the investigation into the break-in, and the door ended up in storage. According to Stephen Pace, who worked at the Watergate as an engineer, the maintenance area was about to be moved and he decided to rescue the door, rather than let it be thrown out. He took it home and put it in his apartment. When Washingtonian magazine ran a small item about the door, Newseum curators tracked Pace down. He loaned it to the museum, and it became part of the permanent exhibition in 2008. The Newseum purchased the door from Pace in 2012.

  JACQUES COHEN, A FRENCH-SPEAKING ORTHODOX JEW from a Canadian hotel family, attended the 2009 auction in the offices of Alex Cooper Auctioneers but did not bid. After the Watergate Hotel failed to sell, he negotiated privately with PB Capital, and a year later, his family firm, Euro Capital Properties, bought the hotel for $42 million.

  On June 14, 2016, the Watergate Hotel reopened after a $125 million, four-year renovation. The transformation of the hotel was an international effort: Austrian craftsmen created the wood-slat walls; furniture in the lobby came from Italy; rugs were manufactured in Spain.

  In 1965, Arturo Pini di San Miniato created colonnades and other devices to disguise the low ceilings in the model apartment for Watergate East. Fifty years later, Israeli designer Ron Arad, facing the same problem as he renovated the Watergate Hotel, gave the ceilings in each room a reflective polish near the walls, transitioning to a matte finish in the center of the rooms. The overall effect meant the walls are reflected on the ceiling, making them look taller. Just as Luigi Moretti had introduced curves to the Watergate, to evoke the waves of the Potomac River, Arad imprinted a ripple effect into the granite floors. In another nod to the water, the fittings and furnishings in the hotel’s 336 rooms are similar to those found on a yacht.

  Before the 1972 break-in, said Rakel Cohen, Jacques’s wife and the director of design for Euro Capital Properties, the Watergate Hotel “was a glamorous place, was a playground for famous people. We’re trying to bring that back to life.” She set out to address the scandal “in a delicate way and a fun way.” Room keys instruct guests “No need to break in.” The hotel’s media kit included a USB port disguised as a cassette tape. The overall effect, according to one reviewer, was “a theme-park version of All the President’s Men.”

  Because the Watergate is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the new owners are eligible for a 20 percent tax credit on the renovations, which were approved in advance by the Commission of Fine Arts, the Historic Preservation Review Board and the National Park Service.

  Elizabeth and Bob Dole attended the hotel’s black-tie opening. The Doles still live in Watergate South, in the apartment Bob purchased more than forty years ago and expanded after Monica Lewinsky and her mother moved out. Elizabeth’s office is next door, at Watergate 600.

  Michael Santoro, the executive chef at the Watergate Hotel, served a dinner at the hotel’s Kingbird restaurant in July 2017, in honor of Jean-Louis Palladin. A team of chefs created a five-course dinner. Robert Wiedmaier, who first met Palladin in 1986 and succeeded him as executive chef of the Watergate Hotel after Palladin’s departure, prepared a gauteau of foie gras, with California squab and a bordelaise sauce.

  Jimmy Sneed, who worked side by side with Jean-Louis Palladin at the Watergate, now helps his daughter run a vegetarian restaurant in Richmo
nd, Virginia. “I wouldn’t have traded those five years of being screamed at for anything,” he says, laughing.

  THE WATERGATE OFFICE BUILDING WAS IN NEED OF RENOVATION when Penzance, a local real estate investor, purchased it for $76 million in 2011. Penzance was drawn to the Watergate by its location—with easy access to northern Virginia, Georgetown and the suburbs of Maryland, without having to fight downtown traffic. “It was also an oasis in the heart of the society,” said a sales broker involved in the transaction. “Where else could you find a park like that, right outside your office?

  “Penzance saw an opportunity,” he added.

  The company remodeled the office building, opening up suites to take advantage of the sweeping views of the Potomac. New tenants signed leases, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Kipp DC, the nonprofit public charter school network. The sixth floor has been renovated many times since the Democratic National Committee moved out. The current tenant, an academic publishing company, recently installed a small exhibit to commemorate the Watergate break-in and aftermath, including a timeline of the scandal and a commemorative plaque and a copy of the August 7, 1974, Washington Post, with the headline NIXON RESIGNS.

  Research Counsel of Washington, the company David Bradley started in his mother’s den in Watergate West, eventually grew to become two separate, publicly traded companies, which were later acquired for a combined $5 billion. Katherine and David both work out of Watergate 600. From his office on the eighth floor, David runs Atlantic Media Group, which owns The Atlantic and National Journal, as well as the CityLab news service, which reports on urban innovation. Upstairs, Katherine runs CityBridge Education, a nonprofit she and David founded in 1994 to apply “best practices” research to the nonprofit sector. Carter Bradley, the third generation of entrepreneurs in the family, works downstairs in the offices of the Ivy Research Council, a start-up he created as a Princeton sophomore, with John Plonk and Nicholas van der Vink, to figure out better ways to manage on-campus college recruiting. In 2003, the Bradleys bought the Watergate 600 office building; they sold it in 2017.