Milwaukee entered the Watergate investigation through Arthur Bremer’s apartment, a place where competing claims about political influence, evidence, and an alleged covert operation converged. After Bremer shot Governor Wallace, the apartment was described as a source of material that might link the would-be assassin to left-wing causes. More than a year later, testimony attributed to E. Howard Hunt placed Milwaukee at the center of an alleged order from Charles Colson to search the apartment. The connection remained an allegation, not a substantiated link between Bremer and the Watergate suspects.

The apartment after the shooting

On May 15, 1972, Bremer shot Wallace at a Maryland shopping center at about 4:00 p.m. By 6:30, a Washington Post editor had learned the would-be assassin’s name from White House official Kenneth Clawson. Clawson said literature found in Bremer’s dingy Milwaukee apartment showed a connection to leftist causes, possibly the campaign of Senator George McGovern. Bob Woodward, who was working on the story, rejected that interpretation: the apartment contained both left-wing and right-wing propaganda.

Reporters’ accounts made the apartment’s handling another source of questions. Milwaukee journalists told Woodward that reporters had been allowed inside during a 90-minute period soon after the shooting. Many took papers and other belongings. Two reporters from Milwaukee newspapers said they entered after Federal Bureau of Investigation agents had visited and left; an hour and a half later, the agents returned and sealed the apartment. The Federal Bureau of Investigation never explained why Bremer’s belongings had been left accessible to reporters.

An alleged return to Milwaukee

In interviews after he was brought from jail to Capitol Hill, Hunt disclosed an instruction he said he had received from Colson about an hour after Wallace was shot: fly to Milwaukee immediately, break into Bremer’s apartment, and bring back anything that might help connect Bremer to left-wing political causes. The allegation transformed the apartment from a place reporters had entered into the intended target of a purported covert search. Its stated objective also echoed the earlier claim that material in the apartment could associate Bremer with the political left.

The account was partly corroborated and partly uncertain. The next morning, Woodward called Hunt’s attorney, William O. Bittman. Bittman said there had been testimony that Colson asked Hunt to go to Milwaukee and enter the apartment, but he could not clearly recall the reason and did not remember whether the testimony used the word break-in. That distinction mattered: the reported instruction to go there was affirmed, while its precise purpose and character were not firmly recalled.

Suspicion without substantiation

The prospect of a political connection had already prompted skepticism. In late 1972, before the first Watergate trial, Washington Post editor Howard Simons raised the possibility of an ultimate dirty trick; Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein remained doubtful, even as Simons observed that events once thought unthinkable had occurred. The reporters never found evidence linking Bremer to the suspects. Months later, another Washington Post reporter traveled to Milwaukee and also found nothing.

Milwaukee therefore occupies a charged but unresolved place in the investigation. The apartment’s contradictory political literature, its brief accessibility to reporters, and Hunt’s account of an alleged order to search it all invited suspicion. Yet the inquiry described in the book produced no evidence substantiating a connection between Bremer and the Watergate suspects. The city’s significance lies in that gap between the proposed explanation and what reporters could verify.