How the Watergate’s New Owners Are Turning a Presidential Scandal Into Smart Marketing

Having fun with Nixon break-in 44 years later

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When Euro Capital Properties, owner of Washington, D.C.'s legendary Watergate Hotel, was putting the final touches on its $125 million renovation of the 1967 landmark by the Potomac, it had a delicate piece of business to consider. Marketing the hotel's glamorous new interiors—which architectural firm BBGM reinvigorated to reflect the hotel's jet-age heritage—would be pretty straightforward. But another part of the hotel's heritage posed a problem.

Nixon after his 1974 resignation  Getty Images

The Watergate Hotel once housed the Democratic National Committee, the offices that men working for President Richard Nixon's re-election committee broke into on the night of June 17, 1972.

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