Edward M. Kennedy

Edward M. Kennedy emerges in the Watergate account as both an advocate for a wider investigation and a target of efforts to discredit its motives. He warned that federal investigators might leave crucial areas unexplored unless Congress used its subpoena power, while the White House cast his inquiry as a vendetta and a bid for future political advantage.

Senate Inquiry and Its Stakes

Kennedy’s investigation began before the larger inquiry associated with Sam Ervin. Since October 1972, Kennedy’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure had been conducting a preliminary inquiry. After the reports concerning Donald Segretti appeared, Kennedy told Bernstein that without a congressional subcommittee quickly using subpoenas to obtain records and documents in areas federal investigators seemed to be ignoring, the prospect of a truly comprehensive investigation could disappear. He said he had decided to investigate, though he professed to know little beyond what he had read in the papers. His judgment of the people around Richard Nixon was blunt: “They’re thugs.”

On January 11, Ervin agreed to lead an investigation into Watergate and the 1972 presidential campaign. That development promised investigative machinery beyond Kennedy’s preliminary inquiry, but it did not make Kennedy’s work redundant: his warning had been about the risk of leaving gaps before a fuller investigation could be established. When his subcommittee formally began, the reporters tried to maintain contact with the senators and staff, but Kennedy’s operation yielded them no leaks.

An Inquiry Under Political Attack

The White House circulated the claim that Kennedy was pursuing old grudges and positioning himself for a 1976 presidential campaign. Kennedy described the inquiry instead as a “holding action”: a preliminary investigation conducted behind closed doors by both majority and minority staff, designed to avoid the appearance of either a witch hunt or a personal crusade. He argued that there was little political gain for him in proceeding, since the White House would use whatever it could find to smear him.

He expected the attack to draw on Chappaquiddick and other damaging material. Kennedy said the President’s men would have a store of “nickel-and-dime stuff,” but that they had not produced anything really new. The account presents this not as proof that his investigation was free of political calculation, but as the political bind in which he operated: pursuing an inquiry invited accusations of self-interest, while stepping back risked leaving the investigation incomplete.

The Kennedy Inquiry in the Press and Investigations

Kennedy’s name also entered the story through the pressure on Segretti. Segretti complained that investigators from Kennedy’s subcommittee, as well as reporters, had questioned his family, friends, and acquaintances. He said people had asked his friends whether he knew Arthur Bremer, and described Kennedy as “out for blood.” These were Segretti’s allegations and perceptions; the account does not establish that Kennedy personally directed those inquiries or that every investigative approach occurred at his instruction. Their importance lies in showing how the senator’s inquiry became part of the experience of people drawn into the widening investigation.

Kennedy also figured in reporting about White House interest in his private life. When Woodward asked an informant about research on Kennedy, the reporters noted that they had already written about it the previous July. The informant recalled that Howard Hunt had gone to the Boston area under the alias Ed Warren to interview a man said to know about Kennedy’s sexual escapades, recording the conversation. The recollection links Kennedy to the White House’s political intelligence efforts, while remaining an account supplied by Hunt’s friend rather than direct evidence from Kennedy.

Role and Limits of the Record

Kennedy’s significance in these episodes rests on the collision between investigative authority and political vulnerability. He pressed for subpoenas because he believed federal investigators were overlooking records; at the same time, the White House’s portrayal of his motives and the scrutiny of his own private life threatened to shift attention from the inquiry to its sponsor. The record gives him a clear public position and a defined role in the preliminary Senate investigation, but not access to everything his subcommittee learned: its closed-door work did not leak to the reporters. Kennedy therefore appears as a force seeking a wider inquiry, but also as a politician whose own history and ambitions could be made part of the struggle over how that inquiry was understood.