Capitol Hill is presented as a congressional setting where the Watergate investigation widened beyond the break-in itself: interviews with Howard Hunt raised the prospect of further undercover operations, while Alexander Butterfield’s testimony made the White House taping system public. The book gives the location significance through these encounters with investigators rather than through a description of its buildings or geography.

Interviews and the Hunt disclosure

About a week before John Dean testified before the Senate committee in June 1973, Bob Woodward spoke with a Senate attorney who believed Hunt could shed light on additional undercover work. Hunt had been brought from jail to Capitol Hill for lengthy interviews. In those interviews, he disclosed an instruction he said he had received from Charles Colson shortly after Alabama Governor Wallace was shot: Hunt was allegedly told to fly to Milwaukee, break into Arthur Bremer’s apartment, and retrieve anything that might connect Bremer to left-wing political causes.

The disclosure connected Capitol Hill’s investigative work to an earlier episode in the campaign: the effort to interpret Bremer’s political affiliations after the shooting. The book notes that reports about material in Bremer’s apartment had already circulated, but Woodward had rejected the claim that the evidence pointed exclusively to the left; the apartment contained both left-wing and right-wing propaganda. Hunt’s account therefore raised a different question from what the material itself established: whether Colson had directed an attempt to obtain documents for political use.

Butterfield’s public testimony

Capitol Hill becomes the setting for a second disclosure when the Senate committee moves quickly and Alexander Butterfield reluctantly describes the White House taping system on national television. The testimony carries the inquiry beyond accounts supplied by campaign operatives and into the existence of recordings made inside the White House. The account emphasizes the reach of the revelation: Butterfield laid out the story of the tapes before both the committee and the country.

Role in the investigation

These two episodes give Capitol Hill a procedural and evidentiary role in the narrative. Hunt’s interviews produced an allegation about a proposed break-in and the retrieval of politically useful material; Butterfield’s televised testimony exposed a recording system with implications for the investigation’s access to evidence. The location thus marks a transition from gathering accounts behind closed doors to a disclosure made in public, before a Senate committee and a national audience.