Nixon is, of course, famous—or infamous—as the first president to resign for his activities related to the Watergate break-in. That would be the focus of our Nixon visit.
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In mid-December of 2021, we were still avoiding flying as the new omicron variant swept across the country. So, we decided that the best thing to do would be to visit places associated with Watergate.
Now, this particular adventure didn’t sound too promising. Our itinerary: Drive from our Maryland Beltway home into downtown Washington, D.C., look at an office building, head across the Potomac River into Arlington, look at a parking garage.
Sounds fun, right?
But it actually turned out to be a really fun day trip, almost like a leg of Cathy’s favorite TV show, The Amazing Race. We dragged our ever-suffering friend, Dottie, who was already a three-time veteran of our presidential visits.
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Nixon grew up poor in a house in Yorba Linda, CA without running water or electricity. His entire life he felt looked down upon by those who were better off, the “elite.” He felt like he had to work harder than anyone to prove himself. He attended a small college nearby, Whittier College, and went out for football, not an obvious sport for his lean frame. But again, he needed to prove himself. But he could not excel in the sport and didn’t earn a letter.
But he did well in law school, graduating 3rd of 25 from Duke Law School in 1937.
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Nixon is known as a fervent anti-communist, which is ironic because outside Watergate, Nixon is best remembered as president who opened the West to Red China when he made his historic visit there in 1972.
His anti-Communist views helped him win his first political fight against incumbent California Rep. Jerry Voorhuis in 1946. Nixon hinted at ties between Voorhuis and Communists. The ploy worked and Nixon won his seat 57 percent to 43 percent.
Rep. Nixon was placed on the House Un-Americans Committee and worked closely with Sen. Joseph McCarthy ferreting out “Communists” from American government and industry. Nixon achieved instant fame by promoting Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time, in his testimony against Alger Hiss, a former State Department official and president of the Carnegie Endowment, regarding allegations of spying for the Soviets. (Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury in 1950.)
Soon Nixon was on his way to the Senate.
In the election of 1950, he was paired against fellow Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former actress. Nixon again used allegations of Communist ties to weaken his opponent. He also hinted that her husband, Melvyn Douglas, was Jewish. He won with 59 percent of the vote, but his tactics earned him the nickname, “Trickie Dickie.”
Sen. Nixon didn’t spend much time in the Senate. His reputation as a fervent anti-communist prompted Dwight Eisenhower to choose him as his vice-presidential running mate in 1952. But first, Nixon had to survive the “Fund Crisis.” He was accused of having a secret fund to buy himself and wife, Pat, luxurious items such as a fur coat. He was pressed by Eisenhower to take his case to the nation. Nixon went on TV and said that Pat had a “respectable cloth coat.” He also said that the family had been given a cocker spaniel named Checkers as a gift. He said his daughters loved the dog, and he wasn’t giving it back. His “Checkers” speech, heard by about 60 million Americans, garnered sympathy for Nixon and he was cleared to run.
As vice president, Nixon was given broad responsibility including foreign assignments. He advocated for a space agency after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. And he kept up his anti-communist obsession. When he visited Uruguay, he debated the communist leader of students and had a respectable showing. But when he tried a street “debate” with 2,000 demonstrators in Lima, Peru, it didn’t go as well. The demonstrators became threatening, and he had to take refuge in his car. Things got worse in Venezuela when crowds violently attacked his car.
He was never close to Eisenhower and was having invited to Eisenhower’s Gettysburg farm home. When Eisenhower was asked by a reporter about Nixon’s accomplishments as vice present, Eisenhower famously replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”
When it was Nixon’s turn to run for president, he went head-to-head with rising Democratic star, Sen. John F. Kennedy. They held the nation’s first televised debate on Sept. 26, 1960, before a huge audience of 70 million. (The debate is available on YouTube.) Kennedy appeared self-assured and he opened the debate by attacking Communism, one of Nixon’s signature issues. Nixon was defensive throughout but came across better than had been expected. Sometimes Nixon appeared nervous, but he generally gave a strong showing. It is interesting to learn that Nixon had a severe blood infection during the debate. Nixon was better on substance than style; critics said that Nixon had a 5 o’clock shadow and that his shirt collar was too big.
Nixon pushed as hard as he always did becoming the first presidential candidate to campaign in all 50 states.
In the end, Nixon could not overcome Kennedy’s good looks and charisma. He lost a close popular vote race (a difference of 118,000 votes out of nearly 69 million cast). But he lost the Electoral College vote by a larger margin: 303-219.
JFK’s campaign was accused of stealing votes, including having Chicago Mayor Richard Daly find “ways” of increasing the vote count in Illinois. (But winning Illinois would not have flipped the election.) Nixon, to his credit, refused to contest the results because he didn’t want to harm the democratic process. “I will not give this nation’s enemies an opportunity to downgrade democracy and to say that our elections were fraudulent. Those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win,” he said.
In 1962, Nixon took a shot at the California governorship but lost decisively to Edmund Brown (52 percent to 47 percent). His political career was seemingly over. Nixon whined to the press, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
But he was back in 1968. The Republicans had built a solid base in the South, partially due to the backlash against LBJ’s Great Society civil rights initiatives. The Republicans had courted the Southerners who had been solidly Democratic since before the Civil War. But now many Whites resented the gains Blacks had made. Nixon ran on a “law and order” platform, an often-used racial scare tactic, and recruited Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew as his running mate because Agnew had a tough-on-Blacks “law and order” image.
Much later it became clear that Nixon’s staff had illegally become involved in foreign policy during the election. Henry Kissinger had leaked information regarding the Paris Peace Talks to the Republicans. The Republicans sent messages to President Thieu of South Vietnam that he should stall the Paris Peace talks because he would get a better deal from Nixon than Democratic candidate Hubert Humphry. (It was never proven that Nixon was personally involved in these tactics.) Nixon won the election with 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191 votes. (Segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace collected 46 electoral votes as a third-party candidate.)
With Nixon’s election, the Republican Party was virtually flipped ideologically with the Democratic Party of the 1800’s. The Republicans now stood for limited government and resentment of minorities. The proud party of Abraham Lincoln was no more.
Unlike LBJ, Nixon preferred to focus on foreign rather than domestic policy. (He and Foreign Policy Advisor Henry Kissinger worked closely, generally excluding the State Department from their activities.) He would make major breakthroughs with China and the USSR. But Vietnam was the tar baby that he could never shake.
His major domestic policy achievement was signing landmark environmental legislation. Of course, he was pressured into it by a Democratic-controlled Congress. 1970 was the year of the first Earth Day, and Congress passed environmental protection bills one after another. These laws were passed and signed by Nixon: the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Coastal Zone Management Act. Nixon vetoed the Clean Water Act, but Congress overrode it. The most important bill (which
was signed prior to Earth Day) was the National Environmental Policy Act, which guaranteed environmental review of all major projects. In December 1970, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
It’s ironic that the anticommunist crusader, Nixon, warmed to the idea of opening relations to China. It was a gradual process that included China inviting the U.S. ping pong team to play in China in April 1971. Next, Kissinger a made secret trip to China in July 1971 to arrange the next visit—President Nixon’s. Nixon and a delegation visited China for six days in February 1972. Nixon met with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and even met with Chairman Mao. The intent was to keep China from becoming too close to the Soviet Union. (The cost was acknowledging China’s claim that Taiwan is a part of China—a troubling issue to this day.)
In May 1972, Nixon traveled to the Soviet Union to hold a summit with Leonid Brezhnev. During the meeting, the U.S. and Soviets agreed to peaceful coexistence and signed an antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty. (While there, Nixon had the opportunity to speak on Russian TV directly to Soviet citizens.) During his term, Nixon would hold three summits with the Soviets.
Like LBJ, Nixon did not want to be the first president to lose a war. He worked toward what he called “peace with honor.” But to pressure North Vietnam toward peace, he needed to escalate the war—secretly. In May 1969, the New York Times revealed that the United States had taken the war into Cambodia earlier in the year, bombing North Vietnamese positions there. (Nixon retaliated against the media by authorized illegal wire taps of some of his aides and some journalists—a slippery slope to Watergate.)
In April, ground troops were authorized in Cambodia. Mass demonstrations followed in the United States. On May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen shot dead four protesting students and bystanders at Kent State University.
The appetite for war was gone, but it would take until March 1973 to pull out the last of the troops and for Congress to cut all funding for the war. In two more years (April 30, 1975), the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam.
With the illegal bugging noted above, Nixon was on the road to Watergate. His team used “bugging, following people, false press leaks, fake letters, cancelling campaign rallies, investigating campaign workers’ private lives, planting spies, stealing documents, planting provocateurs in pollical demonstrations” as political tactics (Bernstein and Woodward, 1974).
When Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers were printed in the New York Times on June 13, 1971, Nixon was determined to stop the leaks. His team created a team of “plumbers” operating out of the Executive Office Building. They were directed to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on Labor Day weekend 1971 and dig up dirt. E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former CIA agent, were in charge. In addition, Nixon’s aides created an “enemies list” that included 20 names such as Representative Ron Dellums of California, journalist Daniel Schorr and actor Paul Newman.
The actual Watergate break-in took place on June 17, 1972. The buildings were described as a “futuristic complex, with its serpent’s-teeth concrete balustrades…” (Bernstein and Woodward, 1974). The five plumbers, dressed in business suits and wearing Playtex surgical gloves, entered the building carrying walkie-talkies, film, cameras, tear gas and wiretaps. Their target was the Democratic National Committee Headquarters located on the sixth floor. A security guard noticed that some door locks had been taped over and called police. The police found and arrested the five plumbers. One of the arrested men carried an address book that included the phrases “W.House” and “W.H.”
It would take years for the entire plot to be revealed and traced directly to the Oval Office. The story included hush money, firings, resignations, congressional hearings, a special prosecutor, missing tapes, a Supreme Court decision, three articles of impeachment and finally Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. Much of the early sleuthing and exposure of the scandal came from the hard work of two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward (29) and Carl Bernstein (28). Their work is chronicled in their excellent book, All the President’s Men (1974).
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Despite being a lifelong Washington-area resident, Cathy always thought the Watergate complex consisted of two buildings — the residences and the infamous office building. She was wrong. Situated along the Potomac River and next to the Kennedy Center, the massive complex consists of six curved buildings, with several of them encircling a big courtyard. The buildings were constructed between 1963 and 1971, with the first two, the hotel and office building, opening in 1967. It was the first mixed-use development in D.C., and the buildings’ curvature was considered a good example of the new modern architecture. It was designed by Luigi Moretti, an Italian architect who was a favorite of Mussolini’s and had been jailed briefly during World War II, according to Washingtonian.
Fun fact: The Italian company that owned the property at the time, SGI, was partially owned by the Vatican.
Fifty-odd years later, the buildings don’t look so modern, with their gray exteriors and thousands of teeth protruding from every floor’s balcony. Still, they look better than the boxy, brutalist design of many of the federal buildings downtown.
While we were hunting down the office building and wandering through the courtyard outside the Watergate Hotel, we found Watergate-themed private plastic people pods on the terrace. Excited about this bit of unexpected Watergate-themed nostalgia, we were able to explore them unencumbered, since they were still closed for the morning.
These are called “Scandalous Igloos” and are offered by the Next Whisky Bar inside the hotel. Each igloo features a comfy sofa and chairs with blankets, table, typewriter and Victrola. The floors are the best part: They are made of a collage of newspaper front pages about Nixon’s resignation. The igloos also offer books about the scandal and historical quotes hanging on the igloo’s walls.
They would be a great place — though pricey — to take out-of-town guests during the fall, winter or early spring. (It would be an oven in the hot Washington summers.) On weekends, renting an igloo will set you back $300, with an additional $75-per-person minimum for food and drink, according to the hotel website. But for a true D.C. historical splurge, it might be worth it.
After we left the Watergate, we drove across the Teddy Roosevelt bridge into Rosslyn to hunt down the parking garage where a mysterious Watergate leaker nick-named Deep Throat and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met late at night between October 1972 and November 1973.
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Deep Throat set up an intricate system to arrange meetings with Woodward. Woodward had a flower pot on his balcony in which someone had once planted a small red flag. Woodward was to move the pot to the back of the balcony when he wanted a meeting with Deep Throat. Deep Throat would circle page 20 of Woodward’s morning copy of the New York Times and indicate the time of the meeting. Woodward never figured out how Deep Throat got to his newspaper. Woodward was required to take several modes of transportation to the late meetings, often taxiing to one part of town before switching taxis to make his way to the garage in Rosslyn, VA. Woodward and Deep Throat would spend hours in the garage, sitting, standing, pacing, as they traded information.
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And yes, we parked in space D32. That level of the garage was completely empty, and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
The inside of the garage is dark and dingy and now rundown — in fact, the office building and garage are slated to be torn down. You can see why they chose here to meet. You can also see why Woodward was a bit scared walking down the stairs to the back of the garage in the middle of the night.
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After our garage trip, we walked a mile toward the Court House Metro station and had lunch at a Corner Bakery. That was a mistake, although we do like Corner Bakery. On the way back, we took a different street with locally owned restaurants that likely would have been better choices.
(After our visit we watched the movie version of All the President’s Men, an Academy Award-nominated firm starting Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. We were disappointed that the garage depicted in the movie is not the same as the original. The details of the garage location had not yet been revealed by Bob Woodward when the movie was made in 1975-1976.)
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Within a month of taking office, President Gerald Ford issued Nixon a full pardon—to allow the nation to move on.
The irony is that Nixon didn’t have to resort to these illegal tactics to win the 1972 election. Nixon won a landslide victory with 520 electoral votes, with Democrat George McGovern winning only 17. (McGovern won Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.)
Nixon spent the rest of his life rehabilitating himself. He became an elder statesmen with respected foreign policy views. He wrote more than a dozen books with poignant observations of world politics. In his last op-ed published in the New York Times in 1994, he warned about the danger that Russia could pose in the future when he presciently wrote: “The independence of all the former Soviet states is important. The independence of Ukraine is indispensable. A Russian-Ukrainian confrontation would make Bosnia look like a Sunday-school picnic. Moscow should be made to understand that any attempt to destabilize Ukraine -- to say nothing of outright aggression -- would have devastating consequences for the Russian-American relationship. Ukrainian stability is in the strategic interest of the United States. To the extent that Kiev is prepared to proceed with economic reforms, supporting these efforts should be a national security priority for the U.S.”
Directions
The Watergate is located at 2600 Virginia Avenue NW in Washington, DC.
The “Deep Throat” garage is located at 1816 N Nash St, Arlington, VA beneath the Oak Hill Office building.
References
Bernstein, Carl and Woodward, Bob. 1974. All the President’s Men. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. New York, NY.
Bradlee, Ben. 1995. A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. Simon & Schuster. New York, NY.
Bradlee, Ben. 1975. Conversations with Kennedy. W.W. Norton & Company. New York, NY.
Dallek, Robert. 2003. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. Little Brown and Company, New York, NY.
Drew, Elizabeth. 2007. Richard M. Nixon. Henry Holt & Company. New York, NY.
Nixon, Richard. 1994. Moscow, March '94: Chaos and Hope. New York Times. March 25, 1994
Rubenstein, David. 2019. The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians. Simon & Schuster. New York, NY. Bob Woodward on Richard Nixon.
Thomas, Helen. 1999. Front Row at the White House; My Life and Times. Scribner. New York, NY.
Wicker, Tom. 1991. One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream. Random House. New York, NY.
Websites
Watergate.info
