154 pieces of history: Santa Rosa man collects Watergate-related autographs

Asked if he’s got John Dean’s autograph, Brett Stein seemed vaguely insulted.

Stein has what he believes to be the world’s largest private collection of Watergate-related autographs. Of course he’s got John Dean’s John Hancock.

“John Dean is easy to get,” said Stein, of Santa Rosa. The same cannot be said, however, of Maureen Dean, who sat stoically behind her husband throughout the Watergate hearings. Hers was a much more difficult signature to collect. But Stein snagged it. From a nearby bookshelf he plucks “Mo: A Woman’s View of Watergate,” its inside cover signed by the author.

Lots of young boys collect trading cards and sports memorabilia. Stein marched to the beat of a different drummer.

Even as a child, he was fascinated by the Watergate scandal that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. “It was a tale of police and thieves and leaks,” said Stein. “I was intrigued. How could it bring down a president?”

Now 51, he’s spent much of his life collecting autographs of the characters in that saga, which began 50 years ago Friday, on June 17, 1972, with a “third-rate burglary,” as it was spun by White House press secretary Ron Ziegler, whose autograph also graces Stein’s collection.

Despite its location some 2,800 miles west of Washington, D.C., Santa Rosa is oddly, inextricably linked to Watergate — the scandal and the building.

Watergate connection

Following his successful career as a political consultant, Montgomery High School graduate Joseph Rodota Jr. wrote “The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address.” That 2018 book, published by William Morrow, is not an account of the crime and cover-up, said Rodota, who is also a playwright and podcaster, but rather “a biography of a building.”

Stein’s collection, which he’s decided to put up for sale — interested parties may reach him at Fotophinish@aol.com — features 154 autographs, including 94 signed books. Among his most prized pieces is a program from the 2008 funeral service of Mark Felt, who was associate director of the FBI at the time of the break-in.

Felt, a special agent who’d risen to the No. 2 job in the bureau, came clean in a 2005 Vanity Fair article as the anonymous source known by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as “Deep Throat.”

By a remarkable coincidence that boggles Stein’s mind to this day, Felt had been living in Santa Rosa since 1992. By then a widower, he moved in with his daughter Joan and her three sons, whom he helped raise, she said.

Upholding democracy

Joan Felt recalls sitting with her father, by then in his late 80s, watching something about Watergate on the television. Mark Felt had not yet shared with Vanity Fair or even his family that he was, in fact, Woodward’s key, confidential source. But Joan had long suspected he was. So she periodically tried to trip him up. On this night, she declared, “Dad, do you realize that Deep Throat brought down Nixon?”

“I wasn’t trying to bring him down,” blurted Felt, finally outing himself to his daughter. “I just thought the public needed to know the truth.”

Mark Felt’s motivation “was not to bring a president down,” said his grandson, Nick Jones, a lawyer in Los Angeles. “It was more to uphold, to preserve, our democracy itself — our system, our institutions.”

“He could not let this pass,” agreed Joan. “It was just so wrong. But his hands were tied because even the guy just above him in the FBI — L. Patrick Gray — was doing the presidents bidding. There was nobody he could turn to, except Woodward.”

Her father was the subject of the 2017 movie 'Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House,' starring Liam Neeson. Joan recalled watching a monitor near the set of that movie and seeing Neeson film a courtroom scene in which he was being accused of illegal break-ins and wiretapping of the Weather Underground.

Never having seen her father in that light, she started to cry. “I felt for the first time how difficult it was for him, and how amazing it was that he could handle everything that was on his plate,” she recalled. “And he was being mistreated so much by the system.”

Joan Felt was still in tears when director Peter Landesman brought Neeson over to her. “Liam just held me,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I had no idea what my Dad was up against.’ He was so compassionate. He just said, ‘How could you have?’”

Shortly after Mark Felt died in 2008, at the age of 95, Stein visited Joan’s house, and read a speech he’d written, commending the former G-man for his bravery — “for going against the grain and standing up for what was right,” said Stein. “I mean, what a tough guy, to take on the establishment, and go one-on-one with Nixon.”

Joan invited Stein into a room where her father’s body still reposed. Along with some other family members, they joined hands and said a brief prayer, Stein remembered.

“So I did, in a sense, meet him.”

H20GATE

Stein’s autographs range from the disgraced 37th president himself to the machismo-addled G. Gordon Liddy, a leading member of “The Plumbers,” dedicated to plugging leaks to the media, to Warren E. Burger, who as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1974 delivered the court’s decision that Nixon must turn over tape recordings of White House conversations to a special prosecutor.

That Liddy autograph, incidentally, is affixed to a 10-by-12-inch glossy photo of the mustachioed ex-felon standing by a red Corvette whose vanity plate says “H20GATE.”

The collection includes Rose Mary Woods, the president’s personal secretary who admitted she erased — inadvertently, she insisted — at least 5 minutes of the infamous 18½-minute gap in those recordings; all five of the burglars arrested for breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel; and Frank Wills, the 24-year-old security guard who called the cops on them.

Long before Woodward and Bernstein tied those burglars to the Nixon White House, the Watergate’s blueprints triggered a different scandal.

The Watergate’s wavy, modernist design, conceived by prominent Italian architect Luigi Moretti, sparked wide criticism, long before ground was broken.

“It was the NIMBY fight of the decade,” said Rodota.

At the time of the break-in, residents of that luxurious enclave included Attorney General John Mitchell, pugilistic Nixon speechwriter and future presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, and Rose Mary Woods.

More recently, recalled Rodota, “you had Bob Dole living next door to Monica Lewinsky, and down the hall from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

Rodota was back in the nation’s Capitol this week for a series of events commemorating Watergate’s golden jubilee. He was there while the Congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol presented its findings.

Asked what those hearings brought up for him, a half century after the most seismic political scandal of the last half century, Rodota replied by email that “I didn’t flash back to Watergate. I thought of Reagan.”

Rodota was a young aide in the Reagan White House during the Iran-Contra crisis. Those events sparked hearings on Capitol Hill, “with which the Reagan administration cooperated fully,” recalled Rodota — drawing an implicit contrast between that willingness, and the refusal of many Republicans to participate in the Jan. 6 inquiry.

“Reagan trusted the American people with information. He felt that if the facts came out, the people would sort through them and reach their own conclusions.

“He understood these activities might reveal things that would embarrass him. But he thought the country, and the presidency as an institution, would be better served by disclosure than by stonewalling.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.