DC Might Be Getting a Watergate Museum

DC attorney Keith Krom was walking his dog outside his residence about four years ago when a passerby posed a question he couldn’t answer: “Where’s the museum?” Krom and his family have lived in the Watergate since 2018, and he’s grown used to fielding inquiries about its famous history. But this particular query stuck with him. “After a while, I started to think, well, why isn’t there a Water­gate museum?” So he decided to create one.

Developing a new museum from the ground up is far from an easy undertaking. Krom has already assembled an expert advisory board, which will help ensure that the facts are right—and give the project an air of legitimacy as it tries to raise the money to make this actually happen. It’s an impressive list of experts, including former Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum director Timothy Naftali, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein, Yale history professor Beverly Gage, and Watergate prosecutors Richard Ben-Veniste and Jill Wine-Banks. The Design Minds, a museum consulting firm, has signed on to oversee the creation of the exhibits, which will be onsite at the Watergate complex. Now funding will have to be raised from private donors and other sources.

While it will probably be years before the nonprofit project can open to the public, plans have already started coming together. Two permanent exhibits will tell the story of the ten-acre property, with one focused on the Watergate scandal and the other telling the broader history of the building and its midcentury design. “To some people, the Watergate is not an attractive building, but I just love the unique architecture of it,” Krom says. “It definitely stands out. This complex is a part of what makes this city so amazing to me, and I really liked the idea of adding something to it.”

Krom hopes to acquire some artifacts—he has his eyes on the original door from the hotel room where the break-in occurred, for example—and he plans to include interactive elements. He also intends to recruit his own neighbors as docents, drawing from a well of community knowledge that spans decades. “That’s a very personal experience,” he says, “that you wouldn’t find at any other museum.”

This article appears in the May 2025 issue of Washingtonian.

Omega Ilijevich

Editorial Fellow