wsg archive

this is keaton lamphous(e), your lefty local correspondent, bringing you news from washington on a 54 year delay. AMA! mostly somewhere to keep + share my WS/WG stuff, somewhat organized in one place archive.org list | gdrive | WPOTD + WSDD (coming soon)

[woodsteingate]

helloooo. your friendly neighborhood keaton here.

first of all, thank you for enjoying my pages #mypages and researches ^_^ there are more of you than I expected, but I'm not exactly mad about it lol

if it were up to me, I would do watergate all day—and right now, being unemployed and all, I kinda can ! alas, my landlord requires american dollars for rent, and does not accept #mypages as legal tender. SO!

if you'd like 2 support me in amateur archivism (while I try to get a job to get me in the real thing), here's some places you can do that

https://ko-fi.com/lamphouse

https://cash.app/$lmphs

[woodsteingate]

HAPPY DISABILITY PRIDE MONTH!!!!!

since every bit of dc's budget has to go thru congress, there is less + less aid available to us capital crip queers, to the point that I can no longer get even my $35 a month in snap

so, while the national guard + every chud in the country is here for the semi-whatever-tennial, maybe help a disabled person pay for AC and maybe even a popsicle ?

https://ko-fi.com/lamphouse

https://cash.app/$lmphs

[woodsteingate]

Michael Rougier for LIFE magazine, 1969

The Watergate complex and grounds

[woodsteingate]

I have a buncha images I've collected too, but I didn't save attributions etc for all of em. and sure I could post em anyway but that seems counter to the purpose of this blog, which is to obsessively document every date time detail I can possibly get my hands on. prison of my own making. and yes the door is unlocked

[woodsteingate]

woe, images be upon ye

[woodsteingate]

NOW OLD

featuring gloria steinem

[arcanemoody]

In 8-year-old girl voice: A) Carl and Bob took his daughter to see All the President's Men. (adorable). And B) the "disappointed women" are back.

[rainorsundance]

Redford at The Washington Post

[blondebrainpowered]

Marsha P. Johnson

[todaysdocument]

The tape recorder that was operated by President Richard Nixon’s White House secretary Rosemary Wood as part of the Nixon White House taping system. Wood used this recorder to create the tape of 6/20/1970, containing the infamous “18 ½ minute gap.”

File Unit: Miscellaneous Cases, 6/1972 - 1986

Series: Watergate-Related Case Files, 6/1972 - 1986

Record Group 21: Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685 - 2009

Image description: Uher Universal 5000 model tape recorder. Attached to it are two tags, one of which reads “FUNCTIONAL (ELECTROMECHANICALLY AND ELECTRONICALLY) IN BASIC TESTING CONDUCTED IN DEC, 2001” and an exhibit tag. 

Image description: Tag reading “EXHIBIT 60 / MISC 47-73 / (EXHIBITS INTRODUCED DURING HEARING TO ASCERTAIN EXISTENCE AND/OR NON EXISTENCE OF TAPES COVERING TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS BY PRESIDENT WITH JOHN MITCHELL ON JUNE 20, 1972, & MEETING WITH JOHN W DEAN ON APRIL 15, 1973; ALSO 18 ½ MINUTE ERASURE GAP, ETC., APPEARING ON ONE OF THE TAPES”

[usnatarchives]

Twelve days after the Watergate break-in, Richard Nixon held a press conference on everything but that event. In the East Room of the White House on June 29, 1972, the President touched upon the standard policy points from unemployment to social security while trying out some levity, too: when asked what areas of the world he would like to work on next, he quipped, “Well, I don’t want to go to the Moon.”

The President also joked around with a young journalist, one Dan Rather of CBS Evening News, seen here standing with his back to the camera. Join us this Friday at noon in the William G. McGowan Theater for Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News as anchor Dan Rather discusses his autobiography, including his frank accounting of his dismissal from CBS News, and shares stories of the people he has crossed paths with professionally.

Maybe we’ll even hear some new Nixon stories?

[woodsteingate]

WSNOTD – July 25, 1972

today's #WSNOTD (WDNESOTD? yikes) is the only paper in the district to carry the AP story about the tuskegee syphilis study (though not above the fold)

tomorrow, NYT and the post will both have it on the front page, though comrade wp will have it on the bottom left—prime real estate has to go to tom eagleton's mental health and, yes, the fucking london dockworker strike

what happened after is a semi familiar story—teddy kennedy holds hearings, there's a government whitewash report, someone burns tapes—better told in harriet washington's medical apartheid chapter 7, "'A Notoriously Syphilis-Soaked Race': What Really Happened at Tuskegee?"

since that book's publication, it has also come out that bill jenkins, epidemiologist and statistician at PHS who founded and edited a newsletter aimed at ending racial discrimination in HEW (Dept. of Health, Education, & Welfare, predecessor to HUD), tried to publicize the study and call for its end in 1968.

Heller, Jean. "Human Guinea Pigs: Syphilis Patients Died Untreated." The Evening Star and Washington Daily News, 25 July 1972, A-1.

[vintagelasvegas]

Sahara, January 1, 1969

Facing north; Sahara's two hotel towers out of frame to the right.

Story from McClain Bybee, 2023:

I was the Sahara Hotel Assistant Casino Credit Manager in 1969. My boss Gil Virant was killed by organized criminals that year.

Newspapers had run the story that Gil's death was a suicide. Further investigation by the local law officials, the State Gaming Control Board, the FBI, and the Del Webb Corporate officials revealed that Gil was involved in the embezzlement of a large amount of money in association with a criminal element from back east. The FBI later found that the individuals who were associated with Virant had also embezzled monies from a large Baptist Church organization. Those men were later found dead. Tom Ault, head of the FBI Las Vegas office, told us that evidence at Gil Virant's home indicated that Gil was forced to ingest Drano by the two suspects which caused his death.

The embezzlement started as a check-kiting scheme. The FBI felt that the suspects were threatening Gil with disclosing his gay lifestyle as a means of keeping him to give them more money and time to pay the outstanding markers and checks. Eventually, the dollar amount of the float became so large that Gil appeared to decide to go to corporate management and disclose what he was involved in. It was felt that his possible decision precipitated the murder. I was caught in the middle of the investigation because my name (signature) appeared on a number of markers and documents. My home was secretly staked out by the FBI for about a month, which I later learned from Tom Ault.

[Below] is a photo of Gil Virant from my files.

“$300,000 Shortage Reported From Cashier's Cage at Sahara … the R-J learned about the investigation Monday. On Nov. 6, a casino cashier, Gil Virant, 35, was found dead in his home. His death was termed a suicide. He apparently slashed his wrest and taken poison … Virant, who resided at 3020 Ashby, worked at the Sahara for the past seven years. He was single.” – Don Digilio, Review-Journal, 11/12/69

[jebbiearchive]

[toiich]

Gil Scott-Heron, a DC-based poet, shows off his side of the city (1982)

[deadpresidents]

But by far the most interesting person was undoubtedly [Henry] Kissinger. He is showing signs of strain from the Watergate scandal. He drank very little but talked somewhat indiscreetly in front of our French guests who are bound to repeat much of what he said... ...Henry talked at the table in front of everyone about Watergate. He said the people now being exposed (like Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, etc.) were small-town, middle-class politicians who were used to fixing municipal elections and thought they could do the same thing in the White House. He failed to mention that Nixon had, after all, brought them in and let them run wild. He also said it was all right to lie for "a great cause" but not for a small one.

Longtime New York Times foreign correspondent C.L. Sulzberger, on a dinner party he hosted in Paris during the Watergate scandal where Nixon Administration's National Security Advisor, top diplomat, and soon-to-be Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was a guest, June 7, 1973.

As recounted in Sulzberger's 1974 book, Postscript With a Chinese Accent: Memoirs and Diaries, 1972-1973, the fourth volume of Sulzberger's fascinating collection of journal entries, autobiographical vignettes, and reporting notes from his remarkable career and close personal and professional interactions with virtually every significant international figure of the 20th Century following World War II.

[ripple-of-hope]

John inspects the typewriter as Evelyn Lincoln watches.

[rainorsundance]

Old fashion research, All the President’s Men (1976)

[woodsteingate]

(downie new muckrackers p.10)

HEY

HEY? IS THAT WHAT THIS IS?

[woodsteingate]

Michael Rougier for LIFE magazine, 1969

Miscellaneous Republicans, including John Volpe (Photos 1–2), Mary Brooks (Photo 5), and Nancy Lammerding (Photo 6–7, seen previously). From LIFE:

Mornings and evenings the Secretary of Transportation [Volpe] prefers to work in the relative peace of the study in his three-bedroom $130,000 penthouse. One problem is the earsplitting noise of jets landing at National Airport; Volpe hopes to get it reduced soon.

Ex-assistant chairman of the G.O.P. National Committee, Mrs. Brooks will take office in September as director of the U.S. Mint. In her kitchen, which can double as an office, she dictates to secretary Maria Downes.

To Miss Lammerding, a White Hose press secretary, Watergate's main attractions are the swimming pools. Since she broke her wrist in a fall, however, she can't go near the water.