Image courtesy of Warner Brothers

Deep Background, Deep Demolition

By R. Alan Clanton | published June 16, 2014 |
Thursday Review editor

If you live long enough, you see that nothing is eternal. Stuff gets torn down to make way for newer, bigger, better stuff. When it comes to the buildings where important moments of history took place, the same canon applies. Only the luckiest of structures get placed on one of those registries which the federal and state governments maintain, and that means the building in question gets one of those handsome historic markers—basically a big bronze sign.

And so it goes for the greatest of all political scandals, Watergate, and the long shadow it has cast over every presidency since. Stuff gets torn down.

The unnamed parking garage adjacent to office buildings in Rosslyn, Virginia—where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met with assistant FBI director Mark Felt (then known only as “Deep Throat”) to discuss the Watergate investigation—is scheduled to be torn down next year. A company called Monday Properties has bought the existing area, and received approval from the Arlington County Board last Saturday to demolish the infamous structure.

The site will be the home of a new high rise apartment complex, which the developers hope to begin construction on in January or February 2017. Demolition of the old structure will take about one year. The new building will be 28-stories in height and contain 274 residential units. It will also contain commercial and retail venues.

Arlington County had, back in 2011, erected a historical marker on the sidewalk outside the garage. The county and the developers say they intend to honor the significance of the site by placing a more elaborate sign and other historical materials in the same area.

Woodward, along with reporter Carl Bernstein, was among the first reporters to cover the Watergate break-in in the days after the burglars were arrested. Woodward and Bernstein spent thousands of hours investigating the story, which broke after five men were arrested inside the Watergate office complex, where the Democratic National Committee had its offices at the time. Among the things police collected the night of the arrest were address books and notepads with names and phone numbers of employees of the White House.

The story eventually became major national news, but when the investigation stalled or faltered, Woodward would seek assistance—often in the form of clues, hints, and vague forms of guidance—from his top secret source. Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons dubbed Woodward’s shy source Deep Throat, because the information gathered through Felt was “on deep background”—meaning, in the newsroom vernacular of the day, a secret but reliable non-quotable source.

Concerned that they might each be followed, Felt and Woodward arranged to meet in dark corners of the Rosslyn parking garage. There, Felt mentored Woodward on the direction their newspaper reports were going. Felt, the number three agent at the FBI, sensed that the White House was engaged in a cover-up, and over the course of several conversations with Woodward, Felt nudged Woodward’s own reporting along with tidbits regarding the possibility that the White House was obstructing justice.

Woodward and Bernstein agreed to keep the identity of their source a secret as long as that person remained alive. Over the years, many analysts, historians and writers have weighed in on the question of Deep Throat’s identity, and Felt was often on some of the short lists. But when Felt became ill in 2005, suffering from the after effects of a severe stroke, he gave Woodward permission to reveal his role in the Watergate scandal. Weeks before, the magazine Vanity Fair had already broken the fact that Felt was Deep Throat, but not everyone was convinced. Woodward and Bernstein confirmed the connection in the spring of 2005.

Felt died in 2008.

In the book All The President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein say that some of the key breakthroughs in their investigations came about by way of those meetings between Woodward and Deep Throat in the parking garage. In the widely acclaimed film version, directed by Alan Pakula, the scenes depicting the garage encounters are presented as pivotal to the story, and are considered masterful in the use of light, darkness and shadow. In the movie version of the story, Hal Holbrook portrays Deep Throat.

A few historians have pointed to the irony that Watergate began—and in a way ended—in a parking garage. The Watergate burglars might not have been caught had they not left masking tape visible on a basement door which led to a stairway. The stairway led from the parking garage level of the Watergate Office Complex into the office above. A security guard named Frank Wills, while making his rounds on foot, happened to see the tape on the door. Wills said he thought it was from contractors and workmen who had been in the building earlier that day, so he removed the tape. But later, well after midnight, he returned on foot to the parking garage level and found the door taped again.

Wills called the Washington metro police and the rest, as they say, is history.


Related Thursday Review articles:

The Best Newspaper Movie Ever Made?; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review; January 19, 2014.