Howard Hunt

Howard Hunt emerges as a covert investigator whose work connected the White House’s response to press leaks with political intelligence-gathering. The account traces him from investigations begun after the Pentagon Papers became public to the Watergate trial, where his conduct alongside Gordon Liddy and his resistance to a defense suggesting a broader conspiracy gave a visible human form to the dispute over how far responsibility might reach.

Identity and White House Role

Hunt was one of the four people identified as the White House Plumbers: Hunt, Gordon Liddy, David Young, and Egil Krogh. Kathleen Chenow, the group’s secretary, told the reporters that the Plumbers investigated leaks to the news media and reported to John Ehrlichman. Their office was in the basement of the Executive Office Building, across from the White House. Chenow had technically served as David Young’s secretary; Young was on loan to Ehrlichman’s staff from Henry Kissinger’s office, and he regularly reported the progress of the investigations to Ehrlichman. Krogh was one of Ehrlichman’s principal deputies.

Chenow’s account placed Hunt’s work within an operation that had developed from the administration’s attempts to trace the Pentagon Papers. The initial assignment was to compare the version published by The New York Times with the original documents and then determine how the papers had been leaked. The inquiry broadened to State Department leaks: investigators examined embassy cables and tried to identify whose desks they had crossed. Chenow said that most of Hunt’s work she had seen consisted of State Department cables he had reviewed concerning the Pentagon Papers.

Political Intelligence and the Kennedy Inquiry

Hunt also pursued material about John Kennedy’s private life. In July 1971, within a week or two of being hired at the White House, he visited a former public-relations director of the Yachtsman Motor Inn in Hyannis Port, where Kennedy had used the hotel as a press and staff headquarters during his presidential campaign. Hunt used the name Ed Warren. He asked whether the man knew of womanizing or scandalous material involving the Kennedy family and wanted him to investigate Chappaquiddick.

Hunt gave the former hotel publicist a copy of Jack Olsen’s The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, a book Hunt had checked out of the White House library, hoping it might prompt a memory. The source recalled no useful information from the book and described what he offered Hunt as hearsay about Kennedy staff members’ past behavior. He said Hunt claimed to represent a group he could not identify and presented himself as a writer. The episode shows the political inquiry operating through assumed identities, an undisclosed sponsor, and requests to turn old recollections into potentially damaging material; the account does not establish that the inquiry produced substantiated evidence.

Watergate Trial and the Limits of a Unified Defense

On the opening morning of the Watergate trial, Hunt appeared gray and gaunt in a black topcoat with a small, worn fur collar. He puffed on his pipe and paced the courthouse corridors, often whispering to his partner, Gordon Liddy. As the two walked down the hall talking, Hunt held an arm high around Liddy’s neck, apparently seeking support. Hunt’s wife had died in a plane crash a few weeks earlier. Liddy, by contrast, arrived smiling, waving, and strutting confidently, a sharp contrast to Hunt’s strained appearance.

Before the trial, the Miami defendants had discussed supporting their not-guilty pleas by arguing that high government officials had assured them the Watergate raid was authorized. The proposed account placed the operation within a chain of approval above the defendants. Hunt wanted a unified defense, but he was vehemently opposed to any courtroom strategy that might suggest the conspiracy extended beyond the seven accused men. His position exposed the boundary he sought to maintain: collective defense among the defendants, but no courtroom argument carrying the alleged conspiracy further up the government’s hierarchy.

Wider Connections and Significance

Hunt’s connection to the Watergate affair also reached into the handling of money after the arrests. In reporting on James McCord’s testimony, the account says that Dorothy Hunt, Howard Hunt’s late wife, was identified alongside attorney Kenneth Parkinson as a conduit for payments to the conspirators. The testimony sharpened an unresolved question about whether money from the Committee for the Re-election of the President’s continuing secret fund had been used to buy silence. It linked the household around Hunt to the post-arrest payment network, without by itself establishing the full route or amount of the money.

Taken together, these episodes show Hunt operating across two related but distinct kinds of covert work: the White House investigation of leaks and the pursuit of politically useful information about an opponent. At the trial, his resistance to extending the defense beyond the seven defendants echoed the larger struggle over whether Watergate would be treated as an isolated break-in or as part of a wider operation. The account leaves that boundary contested rather than resolved through Hunt’s courtroom stance.