With skillful research from old newspapers and magazines, oral histories from presidential libraries, and a few interviews, Rodota has fashioned an interesting story about the white concrete edifice that looks like a giant clamshell ... Yet the author does a good job of mixing historical facts with personal anecdotes to tell the story of what was both the most famous and most infamous hotel in Washington, DC, until the presidential election of 2016. Perhaps Rodota will follow this book with another hotel story entitled Tales from the Trump International, which might indeed provide some needed wowza.
Not surprisingly, the book is at its strongest when it re-creates the location’s most notorious episode. Indeed, Watergate—the scandal, not the building—was a much wilder story than we remember, taking place during an era when the nation’s capital was more village than city, with small, elite circles entertaining themselves with dinner parties and gossip ... The Watergate suffers at times from a suffocating level of detail, with lengthy digressions into Historic Preservation Review Board controversies and unnecessary asides like refinancing the mortgage on one of the buildings. Elsewhere, Mr. Rodota recounts the dozen or so Watergate residents who attended Tricia Nixon’s wedding, and the buildings themselves aren’t even fully constructed in the first 100 pages. Still, Mr. Rodota offers an informative, comprehensive account of one of America’s most famous building complexes.
Sure to appeal to architecture and political junkies alike, Rodota’s history provides a thorough and thoroughly engrossing insider account of this legendary Washington address.
The political consultant has compiled an encyclopedic tome on . . . well, everything one could possibly want to know about the buildings and habitants, and then some. And then even more. For students of Washington’s architectural and social history, there are nuggets to mine. For the average reader, it’s Overkillgate.
As author Joseph Rodota shows in his excellent new book The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address, life in the Watergate didn't always match the hype of its developers, although the intrigue inside the buildings often outstripped anyone's imagination ... Rodota goes further than the scandal, taking readers inside the hulking buildings to show the people and characters inside.
Journalist and political aide Rodota makes his literary debut with an entertaining, gossip-filled history of the architecturally innovative structures along the Potomac River ... The author profiles the personalities and interior design choices of many famous, and sometimes notorious, Watergate residents: politicians, lawyers, doctors, diplomats, and businessmen ...
A richly detailed history of a site awarded landmark status.
Rodota includes innumerable anecdotes about both ordinary and rich and powerful Watergate dwellers, among them cabinet members, senators, and political operatives. He also devotes energy to the Watergate’s controversial architecture and the zoning battles that surrounded its planning and construction, as well as the high-wire financial challenges faced by the development’s Watergate Hotel. This account mixes history, finance, and high-level political gossip to evoke the Watergate complex’s mystique.
