Charles Colson

Charles Colson, special counsel to Richard Nixon, was described inside the White House as a political hatchet man and appeared repeatedly in the reporting on E. Howard Hunt, campaign operations, and Watergate. The picture that emerges is consequential but not simple: Colson had access to the President and a documented role in sending Hunt on assignments, while accounts of his involvement in the Watergate operation ranged from forceful accusations to denials and unresolved questions about what could be proved.

White House Role and Public Image

When Bob Woodward asked a Washington Post editor who Colson was, the editor identified him as special counsel to the President and characterized him as the White House hatchet man. The label captured Colson’s reputation for handling political dirty work, but the reporting also showed why reputation alone could not establish responsibility for a particular operation. A 1971 profile of Colson, written by former Post reporter Kenneth Clawson, had quoted an anonymous source describing him as one of the behind-the-scenes brokers who fixed problems and did dirty work when necessary. Woodward included that characterization in his story on Hunt, alongside the concrete fact that Hunt had worked as a White House consultant for Colson.

Colson’s public role was combative as well as confidential. After Richard Nixon’s reelection, Colson led a post-election political offensive against the press. At a gathering of New England newspaper editors in Kennebunkport, Maine, he mocked the political geography of his home state, Massachusetts, which had voted for George McGovern, then attacked the Post as McCarthyist and criticized its executive editor, Ben Bradlee. His remarks turned the paper’s investigation into a public political target, even as its reporters continued to pursue the relationships surrounding Hunt and the campaign.

Hunt, Kennedy, and the ITT Affair

The Hunt connection first became visible through the practical trail of White House employment and contact information. After learning that Hunt had been a consultant working for Colson, Woodward asked Clawson about Hunt’s duties. Clawson said Hunt had worked on declassification of the Pentagon Papers and, later, a narcotics intelligence project; he also said Hunt’s last consulting payment had been made on March 29 and that Hunt had done no White House work since. Clawson emphatically denied that Colson or anyone else at the White House knew of or participated in the Watergate break-in. The denials did not settle what Hunt had done under the broader consulting arrangement.

A White House aide later told Woodward that Hunt had been assigned to investigate Edward M. Kennedy’s private life. The aide would not identify who ordered the investigation, but left Woodward with the impression that Colson was among those who knew about it. The aide also recalled that Hunt received material about Kennedy from the Library of Congress. Reporters searched the Library’s records for White House requests, examining thousands of slips dating back to July 1971, when Hunt had joined the White House staff. Clawson subsequently said Hunt had never received a White House assignment concerning Kennedy and suggested that he might have researched the subject independently. The competing accounts left Colson’s precise knowledge and responsibility uncertain, while making the Kennedy inquiry part of the reporters’ investigation of Hunt’s White House work.

A separate assignment was more directly traceable. In a private deposition, Colson acknowledged sending Hunt to Denver shortly before March 17, 1972, to visit Dita Beard during the ITT affair. The deposition, which the reporters learned about through a Justice Department official, did not establish why Colson sent him: Colson had said the visit had nothing to do with Watergate, and prosecutors had not pursued the reason. Yet Hunt used the alias Edward Hamilton and wore a cheap reddish wig, reportedly like the wig found at the Watergate Hotel after the arrests. The details did not prove the purpose of the Denver visit, but they connected a documented Colson assignment to methods associated with Hunt’s covert work.

The Fund and the Problem of Responsibility

The reporting set Colson’s name against competing explanations of how the campaign’s secret fund was controlled. Hugh Sloan described receiving telephone authorization from John Mitchell, then Attorney General, to distribute money. Mitchell had initially been the sole person authorized to approve expenditures and later passed that authority to others, including Jeb Magruder. The account helped the reporters understand that a small group could control payments without every person in the chain physically handling cash.

When the reporters proposed that Colson might have been one of the White House figures controlling the fund, Sloan rejected the idea. He thought Colson too careful to expose himself in that way, and said that if Colson had been involved he would have acted through someone else. This was not proof of Colson’s innocence; it was Sloan’s judgment about the way Colson operated, and it sat uneasily beside later allegations. Deep Throat told Woodward that Colson had played an active role in the Watergate operation, while describing Mitchell’s role as less active: Mitchell had given approval but had not conceived the scheme. Deep Throat also stressed that the evidence was, at most, weakly circumstantial, and made insulation from responsibility central to understanding why it was hard to develop.

The reporters’ broader account of H. R. Haldeman’s methods sharpened that difficulty. Haldeman was known to implement controversial decisions through intermediaries so he could deny direct involvement; the reporters believed he would have used Colson or John Ehrlichman as an employer of record rather than hire Hunt himself. They also knew that Gordon Strachan, rather than Haldeman, usually dealt directly with the Committee for the Re-election of the President. These structures of delegation made a person’s proximity to an operation significant, but not by itself conclusive. Elsewhere, accounts linked Hunt by telephone to Donald Segretti, who said Hunt gave him instructions, though the specific events were not identified. That connection widened the picture of overlapping covert activity without establishing that Colson directed Segretti.

Accusations, Denials, and the Cover-Up

As the investigation continued, Colson’s associates offered sharply different accounts of his conduct after Watergate. One associate described Colson as alarmed by John Dean’s approach to prosecutors and claimed Colson had told Nixon as early as December that people around him were deeply involved in Watergate and that an organized cover-up was under way. According to this account, Colson had urged Nixon to act against people including Dean and Mitchell. A separate White House source told Woodward that Colson had, on at least three occasions that winter, advised the President to get rid of people involved in Watergate; the warnings were said to have focused chiefly on Dean and Mitchell.

Colson denied warning Nixon about Dean, Mitchell, or a cover-up. He refused to discuss private communications with the President, including with the press, the grand jury, or the Senate committee. Soon afterward, a second associate told Woodward not to believe the denial and confirmed that Colson had warned Nixon that his men were implicated in both the bugging and the cover-up. The associate offered two reasons for the denial: acknowledging the warnings would mean acknowledging that Nixon had been forewarned, and Colson feared that Dean might retaliate by implicating him before the grand jury. The Post published the allegation that Nixon had been alerted in December; the White House declined to comment. The accounts made Colson’s alleged warnings important evidence in the question of what Nixon knew, but they remained attributed claims, contradicted by Colson’s refusal to confirm them.

The reporters also encountered allegations about other covert work associated with Hunt and Liddy, including the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Dean’s associate said Dean knew of illegal activities reaching back beyond Watergate and that what he had told prosecutors had checked out. This enlarged the investigative context around the White House operations, but did not, by itself, establish Colson’s participation in each project. The distinction between what the sources alleged about the network and what they could specifically attribute to Colson remained essential to the reporting.

Political Warfare and Narrative Significance

The most striking late episode came when Woodward called Colson about an allegation that the White House had considered a firebombing connected to the Brookings Institution. Colson answered that the account was mistaken about the target: he said the target had been the Washington Post, not Brookings, and described having told people to use a wrecking crane against the Post building and Newsweek as well. Woodward stressed that the allegation was serious, not a joke. Colson’s response did not confirm the alleged firebombing plan; it did, however, place an explicit threat against news organizations in his own account of political retaliation.

Across these episodes, Colson is presented both as a recognizable political combatant and as a difficult figure to place within chains of command. His title, his association with Hunt, his dispatch of Hunt to Denver, and the repeated reports that he warned Nixon all give him a substantial presence in the story. At the same time, the record distinguishes those documented actions from disputed claims about the Watergate operation and its cover-up. The result is not a single verdict but a portrait of how influence could operate through assignments, intermediaries, private warnings, and public attacks—and how the same distance that protected decision-makers could frustrate efforts to prove who had authorized what.