Howard Hunt's Safe Documents

Howard Hunt's Safe Documents were files taken from Howard Hunt's White House safe that became evidence of a concealment effort reaching beyond the Watergate break-in. Reported to include fabricated cables about President John F. Kennedy and a dossier on Senator Edward Kennedy, the files were described within the White House as politically explosive. Accounts traced how Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III came to place them in a burn bag after John Ehrlichman and John Dean made clear they should not surface. Their story joined two kinds of political danger: information gathered for covert purposes, and the attempt to suppress the evidence of that gathering.

Contents and Political Significance

A report reaching Bob Woodward identified two folders among the documents taken from Hunt's White House safe. One contained bogus State Department cables, fabricated by Hunt to implicate President John F. Kennedy in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem. The other was a dossier of information Hunt had collected on Senator Edward Kennedy. These were not presented as authentic evidence against either Kennedy; the cables were explicitly described as fabricated. The documents instead showed the kinds of politically damaging material Hunt had assembled and preserved.

The files' importance lay not only in what they contained but in how senior officials regarded their potential exposure. Deep Throat told Woodward that, during a June 28 meeting with Ehrlichman and Dean, Gray was told the files were political dynamite and should never see the light of day. Ehrlichman had earlier pressed Dean to dispose of them in the Potomac River. The reported language made the files more than a cache of sensitive papers: they became a test of whether officials would preserve evidence or make its disappearance an objective.

From the Safe to the Burn Bag

The account first reached Woodward through a Capitol Hill source, who said that the New York Daily News was about to report that Gray had destroyed documents taken from Hunt's safe. The source identified the two folders and said the newspaper's account was accurate. Woodward then called an aide to the Senate Watergate Committee, who confirmed the report and added that Dean had told Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen about the matter ten days earlier. This sequence supplied more than one route of confirmation, while leaving the reporters to establish what had happened to the files and who had directed their handling.

Deep Throat supplied the central account of Gray's role. He said that at the June 28 meeting, Ehrlichman and Dean described the files as dangerous and made clear that they should disappear. Gray kept them for about a week, then, according to his own account as relayed by Deep Throat, put them into a burn bag in his office. Gray was said not to have received an explicit order to destroy them, but to have understood what Dean and Ehrlichman wanted. The distinction matters: the account described an understood instruction and a reported act of disposal, not a direct written order.

Dean's associate offered a separate phrase for the desired outcome, saying that Ehrlichman had wanted the files subjected to a process known as Deep Six. Bernstein's associate was therefore corroborating the reported intent to get rid of the material, while Deep Throat supplied the account of Gray's handling of it. Together, the reports linked the White House's concern about the contents to the files' transfer into a disposal process; they did not turn the missing documents themselves into surviving physical proof.

Exposure and the Evidence Trail

Woodward and Bernstein moved quickly to check the initial report rather than treating it as established fact on the strength of one source. The Senate aide's confirmation and the report that Dean had already told Petersen strengthened the account. Deep Throat then gave a specific meeting date, participants, the approximate interval Gray retained the files, and Gray's claimed method of disposal. The accumulating detail made the story publishable, but its central physical evidence was unavailable: the files had reportedly been destroyed.

The disclosures changed the scale of the episode. A story about files taken from Hunt's safe became a report that the acting head of the FBI had disposed of material after White House officials warned that its exposure could cause more damage than the Watergate bugging. Bernstein was especially shaken by the reported exchange between Ehrlichman and Dean, which he understood as a conversation about protecting the President from harm. At the newsroom, Howard Simons reacted to the allegation that an FBI director had destroyed evidence with disbelief, and ordered the front page remade for the second edition.

Significance in the Watergate Investigation

The documents connected Hunt's covert political work to the White House's response when the products of that work threatened to become visible. Their reported contents pointed toward efforts to collect or manufacture politically damaging material about the Kennedys; the disposal account raised a different question, concerning the treatment of records after officials knew of their existence. Those issues were related but not identical: the files' contents illuminated the operation, while their reported destruction implicated the handling of evidence and the chain of authority around it.

The account also illustrates the investigation's dependence on corroboration when the object under scrutiny could no longer be examined. The reporters had descriptions, sources who confirmed parts of the story, and Gray's reported explanation of what he had done, but not the folders themselves. The files thus remained consequential through both their contents and their absence. As the effort to conceal them became news, the attempt to remove evidence generated a further line of evidence about how senior officials responded to the danger of exposure.