One day last fall, Kathy Kretman looked out at the street in front of her apartment and gazed at a rip in space and time. On her side of Virginia Avenue NW, Joe Biden was president. On the other side of Virginia Avenue, Richard M. Nixon was president.

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       The street was lined with old Camaros and Impalas. Milling on the sidewalk were men with wide ties and sideburns, women wearing polyester and bouffant hairdos. The tall building facing Kathy was again a Howard Johnson’s, where in 1972 she would stop for ice cream.

       “The whole thing was very surreal,” Kathy said.

       A film crew was shooting a scene from “The White House Plumbers,” an HBO miniseries about the Republican operatives who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s office in the Watergate building in June 1972. It was a summer Kathy will never forget.

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       She was Kathy Postel back then, 20 years old, from Dallas, between her sophomore and junior years at the University of Texas. “I wanted to come here because this was where things were happening with politics,” Kathy told me. “I wanted to get involved.”

       She told her parents she’d find an internship in D.C. and live in a George Washington University dorm while taking a class at GWU. Her mother said Kathy could go if she promised not to talk to strangers or wear halter tops and hip-hugger jeans that showed her belly button. (She would quickly break those promises.)

       Kathy arrived in D.C. on a Braniff International Airways flight on June 8. She lived in Thurston Hall with two roommates. One was on Weight Watchers. The “refrigerator is so full that I don’t have any room for my Tab,” Kathy wrote to a friend back in Texas.

       She’d done poorly on her civil service typing exam but still managed to land a spot at the Air Force civilian personnel office in the Forrestal Building near the National Mall. The professional secretaries often sent her across the street to treat herself to popcorn, since she couldn’t really be trusted with the typing. After work, Kathy took an international politics class at GWU.

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       On June 18, The Washington Post carried a story on the arrest of five men in the Watergate. Their base of operations turned out to be in the Howard Johnson’s hotel across the street.

       “Remember how I wanted to be where history is happening?” Kathy wrote to a friend. “At least twice a week I walk to Howard Johnson’s to reward myself after another insufferable class. I always get the same thing — a double scoop of butter brickle ice cream. I wasn’t actually at Howard Johnson’s when the break-in happened. Darn.”

       In another letter she wrote: “Can you believe everything that is coming out now about Nixon’s connection to the Watergate break-in? I thought D.C. was going to be exciting, but I never thought like this. And, it’s all happening just a few blocks from me! I feel like I’m in a movie, with really evil players. ‘Manchurian Candidate.’ ”

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       Then as now, D.C. was full of people like Kathy: young men and women interested in politics, in serving the country, in making the world a better place.

       “I was both idealistic but cynical at the same time,” she told me. The scandal energized both those qualities.

       “The excitement was palpitating,” she said, “like, ‘We can’t wait till the next chapter. What’s going to happen next?’ ”

       For Kathy, the next chapter meant returning to Texas, graduating from college, then coming back to Washington to work in the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Then more degrees, and jobs in urban policy and in support of the First Amendment. She married a TV journalist — Les, who died in 2018 — and they had two sons.

       Today Kathy, 70, is a professor teaching public service at Georgetown University, where she directs the Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership.

       And not long ago — stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic — Kathy came across her scrap book from that summer 50 years ago: the letters she received in 1972, copies of the letters she sent, photos of her getting ready to go to Blackie’s House of Beef on a date …

       Strangest of all to her, Kathy now lives in the Watergate. Last fall, she walked out the lobby and into the past.