Walking toward the White House recently, I was saddened to see construction under way on the facade of a building never hailed as an architectural triumph or a historical landmark, but which nonetheless occupies an important role in the story of our nation.
The building was 1701 Pennsylvania Ave., an undistinguished late-’60s Bauhaus-style chunk of concrete and glass best known for the Caribou Coffee shop that now occupies its bottom floor.
Long ago, however, in a time of war and conspiracy, this was the home of the Committee to Re-elect the President: “CRP” to the Nixon White House staff, “CREEP” to its detractors.
Here at 1701, as insiders called it, ambitious young men such as John Dean and Jeb Magruder prowled the fourth floor, conspiring to cover up the origins of the break-in and wiretapping operation that ended so abruptly in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, when Washington policemen arrested five covert operatives inside Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex.
By 1974, the ambitious young lawyers at the Watergate Special Prosecution Force were listing 1701 in federal indictments as the site of numerous Watergate crimes: where Gordon Liddy frantically shredded documents and hundred-dollar bills; where the scheme of paying “hush money” to the arrested burglars was supposedly hatched; and where the plan to ask the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation — the very idea President Nixon embraced on the “smoking gun” tape — was purportedly conceived.
Now, amid 1701’s renovation, comes word that Suite 610 at the Watergate, one of the very offices targeted by the burglars, is available for lease. For $42 per square foot, tenants can, as the listing broker put it, “lease a piece of history.” The complex will get a new retaining wall, new carpets and new elevators.
If the Watergate scandals marked “a major modern metamorphosis,” as Harper’s pronounced in 1973, or, as a British essayist wrote, a “great black cloud [that] seemed to settle over America like a kind of grand judgment, not just on Nixon himself, but on the whole of postwar America,” why do we not show the same dedication to preserving these sites as we would, say, the battlefield at Gettysburg, or Oswald’s sniper nest?
Although the DNC vacated the Watergate in 1973 — and subsequent tenants have gutted the site of the fateful arrests — the scandal actually unfolded at “dozens” of places, in and out of Washington. The Howard Johnson’s motel across Virginia Avenue, where the DNC wiretap was monitored, is now a university dormitory. At the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, John Mitchell supposedly commenced the cover-up with orders to spring the burglars from jail. Then there’s Bob Woodward’s old P Street balcony, from which he supposedly signaled his reclusive source, “Deep Throat,” with a flag and flowerpot.
That Americans do not memorialize Watergate with physical monuments is, of course, no real surprise. For one thing, the most momentous crimes in the scandal are widely thought to have occurred in a place that transcends landmark status: the Oval Office.
As well, “Watergate” was not an event, per se, but rather a complex series of events, thousands of them, that transpired over several years. Most important, nations erect monuments to honor bravery, heroism, and sacrifice, not dark and amoral intrigues.
The collapse of the Nixon presidency saw few heroes, and even fewer “concrete and sweaty acts,” as John Dean once described his feeding of incriminating evidence into a shredder.
Watergate was a classic Information Age scandal: an endless clash of memories over the substance of meetings and telephone calls featuring a revolving cast of self-interested men, mostly lawyers, whose accounts emerged in hearing and trial testimony, declassified documents and tapes, gossipy memoirs and scholarly studies, appearances on courthouse steps and “The Mike DouglasShow.”
No shots fired, or braved, there. This also helps explain why Watergate — unlike Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, the Civil War, or even the Kennedy assassination — inspires no re-enactments. No one will be knitting costumes anytime soon to recreate Archibald Cox’s firing in the Saturday Night Massacre.
Small wonder, then, that Thomas Green, a defense lawyer in U.S. v. Mitchell — the prosecution of former President Nixon’s top aides, a kind of Nuremberg trial for the Vietnam era — argued to Judge John Sirica: “[T]hese are basically word crimes, Your Honor. We are talking about how something is said out of a particular defendant’s mouth and the connotation that is placed on it.”
Such is the stuff of conspiracy convictions, but not of monuments.
James Rosen is a Fox News correspondent whose book, “The Strong Man: John Mitchell, Nixon and Watergate,” is forthcoming from Doubleday.
