Washington Post bids farewell to office where it broke Watergate

Journalists gather for ceremony to mark decommissioning of building where
newspaper uncovered political scandal that forced President Nixon to resign

David Smith
Monday 14 December 2015 07.00 GMT

Carl Bernstein surveyed the newsroom of the Washington Post for the last time. He began to address hundreds of fellow journalists but his microphone was not quite working. He repeated himself, stumbling momentarily over the words. Quick as lightning, Bob Woodward interjected: “You want me to rewrite it?”

The quip evoked a scene in the 1976 film All the President’s Men in which Woodward, played by Robert Redford, takes umbrage at Dustin Hoffman’s Bernstein rewriting one of his stories. It triggered a roar of laughter on what might otherwise have been a wistful day at this grand old American institution.

The Post’s building, where Woodward and Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal and brought down president Richard Nixon, was being “decommissioned” after 43 years and will soon be demolished. By Monday, about 1,500 staff and 4,000 crates will have moved a few blocks across the US capital to a new, leaner office designed for the digital age, in which the Post claims to be enjoying a renaissance.

Like many purpose-built newspaper headquarters, the building at 1150 15th Street NW has served its time. A functional low-ceilinged box, it earned comparisons with Soviet architecture rather than the stately art deco landmarks of other American cities, or London’s Fleet Street. “I hated it,” wrote Katharine Graham, whose family owned the paper for 80 years, deriding it as “plain, dowdy and full of compromises”

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