Fred Maroon, 77; Photographed Nixon Era, Drama of Watergate

He meticulously snapped photos in the secretive seat of power for five years, and then reluctantly locked away his 576 rolls of film for a quarter-century “until passions cooled.”

That never happened. So, fearing his time was waning, he retrieved them and in 1999 published “The Nixon Years 1969-1974: White House to Watergate.”

Fred J. Maroon, freelance photographer extraordinaire whose magazine layouts and coffee-table books were such perfection that he gained access to the inaccessible Richard Nixon and documented visually the ex-president’s decline and fall, has died. He was 77.

Maroon died Nov. 5 of multiple myeloma in his home in the Georgetown section of Washington. He had memorialized the city and the prestigious residential area in separate books, “Washington, Magnificent Capital” in 1965 and “Maroon on Georgetown” 20 years later.

An artist and a perfectionist who could set up lighting for two days to achieve a natural glow, Maroon spent the last half of the 20th century documenting life for such prestigious magazines as Life, Look, Holiday, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Paris Match, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Time and Newsweek.

At the time of his death, he was working on his 13th book, a collection of photos he made as a student in Europe, “Sorrow and Splendor: Europe 1950-51,” which will be completed by his wife, Suzy, for publication next year.

Maroon was known for such classic scenes as the Supreme Court viewed through the final golden leaves of an autumn-denuded tree, or a snowy Wisconsin Avenue around the corner from where he lived.

But for history, he recorded Nixon.

He started clicking the saga he called “the greatest political tragedy our country has known” when nobody else was interested in photographing Nixon--way before Watergate was anything but a housing complex.

Maroon’s first major feature on the White House was for Look magazine, “Jacqueline Kennedy’s New Look in the White House.” Other photo layouts followed on the glamorous years of the Kennedys’ Camelot and then the robust administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. During the 1960s, Maroon was publishing some 100 magazine pages of photos annually taken around the executive mansion.

But when Nixon moved in, Maroon was surprised to find that magazine editors had no interest in the White House’s dour, non-colorful new occupant--and that Nixon returned their disdain.

Intrigued, Maroon assigned himself to do a book on the Nixon administration and posed the idea to presidential press secretary Herb Klein. Nixon was a fan, as it turned out, of Maroon’s book on Washington, so within a few months the photographer and his cameras were in the Oval Office.

Watergate Photos Seen as Historical

The early Nixon book, “Courage and Hesitation” with text by Allen Drury, was published in 1971. Later, with continuing access to the Nixon staff, Maroon was working on a story for Life on the Committee to Reelect the President when the Watergate break-in occurred.

“With my coverage of the major players in the Nixon White House and the CRP, I realized I had the beginning of an important historic photographic document, and I felt that I had no choice but to continue following the story as it unraveled,” Maroon wrote in the introduction to the 1999 Nixon book. “I canceled all other assignments and dedicated myself to covering the Senate Watergate hearings in their entirety in 1973.”

He followed with the House of Representatives impeachment hearings in 1974, and as events marched toward Aug. 9 when Nixon became the only president in history to resign, Maroon went back to the White House. Amazingly, he still found himself welcome.

“You’ve got to give Nixon credit,” Maroon told the Washington Post in 1999 when the book was published. “I think he always had his eye on history.”

But a year after the resignation, Maroon was startled by the negative and angry reaction to his Nixon photos he displayed during a lecture at Philadelphia’s Temple University.

He vowed then, he later wrote, to keep his film “under wraps until passions had cooled, and people could look at the photographs objectively and with historical perspective.”

By 1997, three years after Nixon’s death, Maroon still felt discouraged by politically charged public perceptions of the Watergate era. But then into his 70s, he decided to go ahead with his book rather than die and leave the task to others.

The book, with text by veteran New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, was published two years later along with a companion exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution.

Maroon began dabbling in photography at age 12 when he bought his first camera and a developing set. But the boy from Brunswick, N.J., served in the Navy in World War II, and studied architecture at Washington’s Catholic University--a profession he chose when he arrived by train at Union Station and saw the architecturally magnificent Capitol.

Nonetheless, he became editor of the college yearbook, contributing many of his pictures. Coincidentally, the yearbook shared a printing press with Life magazine, and Maroon soon was invited to become a trainee.

A scholarship to study art in Paris took him away from photography again, but when he returned to Washington, architecture quickly lost out to his camera. His first professional photograph, the capital city at night, was published by Look magazine in 1954.

Maroon’s books, which have sold more than half a million copies, reflected his wide range of interest in travel, architecture, food and wine--among them “These United States,” “The Egypt Story,” “Keepers of the Sea,” “The English Country House,” “Century Ended, Century Begun: The Catholic University of America” and “Jean-Louis: Cooking with the Seasons.” He also produced two books about Washington seats of government, “The United States Capitol” and “The Supreme Court of the United States,” with text by his wife.

In reviewing the cookbook in 1989, Times food writer Barbara Hansen commented that the recipes were so complicated the book appeared to be for “admiration, not cooking” and that Maroon’s efforts were “more interesting” than the chef’s.

A visiting professor at Syracuse University Newhouse School of Communications and a frequent lecturer at the Smithsonian, Maroon earned four first prize awards from the White House News Photographers Assn. and Gold Medals from the Art Directors clubs of Washington and New York. His work is in the permanent collection of the International Center of Photography in New York.

In addition to his wife of 37 years, Maroon is survived by four children, Marc, Sophia and Paul of New York, and Anne of San Francisco, and three sisters, Sylvia, Marie and Celestine.