Nixon White House's fixation on damaging Kennedy

The Nixon White House's fixation on damaging Edward M. Kennedy was described by a former administration official as an obsession shared by Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, and Charles Colson: they wanted information that could damage a Kennedy candidacy. Reporting on Howard Hunt's White House work gave that appetite a concrete form. Hunt, presented publicly as a consultant, was reportedly assigned to investigate Kennedy's private life, including the Chappaquiddick automobile accident. The inquiry's precise authorization remained unclear, but the evidence made the search for political ammunition visible as part of the White House's wider political activity.

A Political Appetite for Kennedy Material

In summer and early fall 1971, Hunt worked at the White House almost every day, though he had been hired as a consultant. A former employee of Colson's office remembered him as secretive and said colleagues had described his work as investigative. She understood that he was looking into how the Pentagon Papers had been leaked, rather than simply working on their declassification. She also saw material on his desk concerning Senator Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, including a book about the accident, and heard from another secretary and a Colson aide that Hunt was investigating Kennedy. Her account placed the Kennedy inquiry alongside the White House's scrutiny of the Pentagon Papers, while the substance of the two investigations remained distinct.

A former administration official gave the clearest account of the political purpose. The official told Carl Bernstein that the White House was intensely preoccupied with Kennedy and that Nixon, Haldeman, and Colson were determined to obtain information that could damage a Kennedy candidacy. In a separate, confidential conversation, a young presidential aide told Bob Woodward that Hunt had been assigned by the White House to investigate Kennedy's private life. The aide would not identify who had ordered the work, but left Woodward with the impression that Colson knew of it. He also recalled that Hunt had received material about Kennedy from the Library of Congress. Together, these accounts connected a reported assignment to a broader desire for damaging political information, without establishing a specific order from Nixon or Colson.

Traces, Denials, and Uncertainty

The reporters tried to test the account against the paper trail. At the Library of Congress, they found the office that handled White House requests; a librarian initially said those transactions were confidential. Bernstein and Woodward then searched thousands of request slips in the reading room, covering requests since July 1971, when Hunt had been hired. The search itself showed the difficulty of converting a reported intelligence assignment into documentary proof: the material available to the reporters included a recollection of a library book and an aide's statement that Hunt had obtained Kennedy material, but the evidence here does not establish what the slips ultimately demonstrated.

The account of the Chappaquiddick book was specifically disputed. The librarian who had first been contacted could not find a card showing that Hunt had borrowed the book and said there was no card for it at all; she also said she had never received a request from Hunt. White House press secretary Kenneth Clawson later told Woodward that the librarian denied speaking with Bernstein and that Hunt had never received a White House assignment concerning Kennedy. Clawson proposed that Hunt might have been doing research on his own, noting that he had written forty-five books. These denials and gaps did not erase the separate aide's account of an assignment, but they left the documentary basis contested and the chain of authorization unresolved.

From Consultant to Political Operative

Bernstein and Woodward reported that Hunt had investigated Kennedy while employed at the White House. Their central distinction was between the public description of Hunt as a consultant and the role suggested by the reported Kennedy inquiry: he was not merely a White House researcher, but a political operative. The distinction mattered because it placed the search for material on a potential opponent within the machinery of presidential politics, rather than treating it as detached research.

The story also encountered a sensitive editorial judgment. Harry Rosenfeld supported it and took it to Benjamin C. Bradlee, whose friendship with President Kennedy made him particularly attentive to stories involving the Kennedy family. Bradlee's reaction marked the reporters' first encounter with him over a Watergate story and underscored that the allegation carried consequences beyond its claims about Hunt: the reporting implicated the White House in a politically charged inquiry, while requiring the newspaper to weigh evidence that included both firsthand recollection and disputed records.

Significance and Limits

The fixation became legible through a chain of partial disclosures: a former employee's observations of Hunt's work and Kennedy materials, a presidential aide's account of a White House assignment, and a former official's description of Nixon, Haldeman, and Colson's shared interest in damaging a candidacy. The sources did not identify the person who ordered the investigation, and the conflicting statements about the library book prevented that particular trace from serving as straightforward confirmation. The account therefore supports a distinction between evidence of a reported White House investigation and proof of its precise authorization.

Its significance lies in the political purpose attributed to the inquiry. Hunt's reported work on Kennedy's private life made the White House's interest in damaging information more than a general characterization: it connected that interest to an investigator operating under a consultant's title and to material about Chappaquiddick. The episode revealed both the reach and the limits of the available evidence: a strong account of the appetite for adverse information, a reported assignment directed at Kennedy, and no definitive answer in these reports about who set that assignment in motion.