Good call: WaPo building no landmark

Not a landmark

A leading preservation group in Washington, DC, has quietly decided against seeking landmark status for the Washington Post building, saying the structure isn’t distinctive enough, architecturally.

And that’s a good call.

I had suspected that landmark status would be proposed for the building because of the newspaper’s reporting of the Watergate scandal, which over the years has become a subject of a towering media myth.

The myth has it that the Post’s dogged reporting on Watergate forced Richard M. Nixon to resign the presidency.

That, of course, is a simplistic and superficial interpretation of Watergate — an interpretation not even embraced by the sometimes-arrogant Post. One of the newspaper’s lead reporters on Watergate, Bob Woodward, has declared, for example:

“To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”

Had the Post building been designated a landmark, a likely upshot would have to deepen the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate. Landmark status could have further entrenched the erroneous notion that the Post was the place where Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein wrote the stories that exposed and ended a corrupt presidency.

As I discuss in my mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, the Post’s contributions to unraveling Watergate were very modest and not at all decisive.

To roll up a scandal of the complexity of Watergate, I write in Getting It Wrong, “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.”

And even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the forced disclosures about the audiotape recordings he secretly made of his conversations in the Oval Office of the White House.

Only when compelled by a Supreme Court ruling did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting to cover up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in in June 1972 at headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

The Post reported this week that the non-profit DC Preservation League has decided that the building’s design “did not rise to a level worth preserving, despite the fact it served as the workplace for journalists who pursued stories such as the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.”

The Post building is pretty bland.  Without landmark status, it may be easier to sell to a developer. The Post said early this year that it was exploring the building’s sale.

Over the summer, the Post was sold to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, who agreed to pay $250 million for the newspaper, a deal that’s expected to close in a few weeks. Bezos did not acquire the building.

Meantime, the garage in suburban Virginia where Woodward occasionally met a secret Watergate source, codenamed “Deep Throat,” may be torn down in the next few years and an office building put up in its place.

If that happens, then the historical marker next to the garage ought to be removed, too.

The marker, which was put up a little more than two years ago, errs in describing the information Woodward received from his “Deep Throat” source, who in 2005 revealed himself as W. Mark Felt, formerly the FBI’s second in command.

The marker says: “Felt provided Woodward information that exposed the Nixon administration’s obstruction of the FBI’s Watergate investigation.”

Not so.

As I’ve pointed out, such evidence “would have been so damaging and explosive that it surely would have forced Nixon to resign the presidency well before he did, in August 1974.”

Felt didn’t have that sort of information — or (less likely) he didn’t share it with Woodward.

Given the historical inaccuracy the marker ought to go.

WJC

More from Media Myth Alert:

• Arrogance: WaPo won’t correct dubious reference to Nixon ‘secret plan’ for Vietnam
• Correction or clarification needed in WaPo reference to Nixon’s ‘secret plan’ on Vietnam
• Landmark status for WaPo building? Watergate reporting ought not be a factor
• The ‘newsroom where two reporters took down a president’? Sure it was
• The Post ‘took down a president’? That’s a myth
• Mythmaking in Moscow: Biden says WaPo brought down Nixon
• Pumping up Watergate’s heroic-journalist myth
• Inflating the exploits of WaPo’s Watergate reporters
• WaPo, Bezos, and owning up to errors ‘quickly and completely’
• No ‘rock-em,’ no ‘sock-em’: What ails WaPo
• Recalling who gave us the ‘manufactured heroism’ of Jessica Lynch
• ‘Getting It Wrong’ goes Majic