Joseph Rodota’s new book The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address(William Morrow) presents the story of a building complex whose name is recognized around the world as the address at the center of the United States’ greatest political scandal—but one that has so many more tales to tell. In this excerpt from the book, the author looks into the design and construction of a building The Washington Post once called a “glittering Potomac Titanic,” a description granted because the Watergate was ahead of its time, filled with boldface names—and ultimately doomed.

On the evening of October 25, 1965, the grand opening of the Watergate was held for fifteen-hundred guests. Luigi Moretti, the architect, flew in from Rome. Other executives came from Mexico, where the Watergate developer, the Italian real estate giant known as Societa Generale Immobiliare, was planning a community outside Mexico City, and from Montreal, where the company was erecting the tallest concrete-and-steel skyscraper in Canada, designed by Moretti and another Italian, Pier Luigi Nervi.

Earlier that year, Moretti, on his way back from Montreal, stopped in Washington to celebrate the “topping off” of the first building, Watergate East. He stepped out of a champagne reception at the sales center to share his thoughts with a Washington Post reporter.

On April 1, 1967, the Watergate Hotel opened to the public. The interiors of the 213-suite “apartment hotel” were designed by Ellen Lehman McCluskey of New York, a daughter of a Lehman Brothers partner and a debutante, presented at the Court of St. James. According to a Watergate press release, she selected “period pieces” to “soften” the hotel’s modern interiors. Her lobby design was “oriental in feeling,” with leather sofas, antique Chinese chairs and a European commode. She placed abstract paintings throughout the common areas. “The curvature of the exterior walls, the vast expanse of windows and the fact that all the supporting members of columns extend into the rooms posed a number of interior designing problems,” according to Interior Design, “which Mrs. McCluskey has solved by presenting 89 different furniture arrangements to satisfy each irregularity of plan….”