Reported White House investigation into Ted Kennedy

The reported White House investigation into Edward M. Kennedy concerned allegations that E. Howard Hunt had been tasked with examining Kennedy’s private life while working as a White House consultant. The reporting turned scattered recollections and a confidential official’s account into a contested claim about the use of a presidential employee for political intelligence. Its significance lay not only in what Hunt was said to have investigated, but in the distinction it drew between an ostensibly ordinary consultant and a political operative—and in the White House’s efforts to deny that distinction.

Discovery and the first accounts

The lead came to Carl Bernstein shortly after Charles Colson’s name entered his reporting. A fellow reporter connected him with a woman who had worked for one of Colson’s assistants. She had known Hunt slightly and recalled him as a regular presence in the office despite his consultant title. He left for Florida from time to time and had also made trips to California. She remembered him as personable, but secretive, and said office staff had described his work as investigative, including work related to the Pentagon Papers. In her understanding, that work was not simply about declassifying documents: it concerned discovering how they had reached the press.

Her account also pointed toward Kennedy. She had seen a book about Chappaquiddick on Hunt’s desk and had heard from another secretary and a Colson aide that he was investigating Kennedy. She remembered other papers and books concerning Kennedy and the automobile accident, though she could not identify every item or the aide who had spoken to her. The material made the allegation concrete enough to pursue, but not yet conclusive: the secretary’s recollections were partial, and what she knew had come in fragments from people around Colson’s office.

Bernstein followed up with the White House librarian, who identified a likely book about Chappaquiddick. On a second call, however, she said she had no checkout card showing that Hunt had borrowed it; she could not find a card for the book at all and said she had never received a request from Hunt. When Bob Woodward contacted her, she objected to having spoken with Bernstein. That complication weakened the apparent paper trail rather than resolving it: the book was remembered, but the library’s records did not establish Hunt’s borrowing.

A confidential confirmation and a public denial

Woodward then reached a White House aide he had met socially. Speaking on the assurance that his name would not appear, the official said the White House had assigned Hunt to investigate Kennedy’s private life. He would not identify who had ordered the work, but left the reporters with the impression that Colson knew of it. He also recalled Hunt receiving Kennedy-related material from the Library of Congress. The account supplied what the secretary’s recollections and the missing library card could not: an assertion of an official assignment, from someone inside the White House, while leaving the chain of authorization uncertain.

Bernstein and Woodward went to the Library of Congress to test the reference to its holdings. A librarian first told them that White House transactions were confidential. They eventually gained access to a cooperative clerk and spent the afternoon in the reading room sorting through thousands of slips recording requests made since Hunt’s hiring in July 1971. The account establishes the scope of their search, but does not say that the slips yielded a definitive record of a Kennedy-related request. The distinction mattered: an aide’s recollection supported the allegation, while the available library evidence did not independently settle it.

The White House response was categorical. After Woodward told Kenneth Clawson about Bernstein’s conversation with the librarian, Clawson said he had spoken to her and that she denied talking with Bernstein. He also denied that Hunt had received a White House assignment concerning Kennedy, suggesting that Hunt might have pursued research independently. The competing explanations left the central question open: whether the activity was an authorized White House investigation or Hunt’s own work. The reporting did not identify the person who supposedly ordered it, and the confidential aide did not claim to know that detail.

What the reporting changed

Bernstein also contacted a former administration official, who described the White House as intensely preoccupied with Kennedy. According to this source, Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, and Colson had been focused on obtaining information that might damage a Kennedy candidacy. This testimony supplied a political context for the reported assignment, but it did not establish who had issued the instruction to Hunt. The report thus kept two propositions distinct: that Hunt had been assigned to investigate Kennedy, as the White House aide alleged, and that senior figures wanted damaging information, as the former official described.

Bernstein and Woodward wrote that Hunt had investigated Kennedy while employed at the White House. Their point was not merely that Hunt had looked at a book or collected material. They presented him as a political operative rather than an ordinary consultant, a characterization that made the alleged inquiry part of a larger question about how White House personnel and resources were being used. Harry Rosenfeld supported the story and took it to Benjamin C. Bradlee. Bradlee challenged its evidentiary weight: as he saw it, a librarian and a secretary showed only that Hunt had looked at a book. His objection exposed the tension at the heart of the reporting—suggestive fragments and a stronger confidential account had to be weighed against the absence of a confirming library record and the official denial.

Place in the wider confrontation

The Kennedy investigation report appeared amid an expanding dispute over the reach of White House and campaign political operations. The day after Richard Nixon’s remarks in Key Biscayne minimizing the Watergate break-in as a burglary attempt, Democratic Party chairman O’Brien filed a $1 million civil suit against the Committee for the Re-election of the President. O’Brien cited Colson’s potential involvement and argued that the known facts appeared to lead toward the White House. His filing was a public allegation, not proof of Hunt’s assignment, but it shows how quickly questions about particular operatives and actions were becoming claims about institutional responsibility.

The broader reporting climate grew more adversarial as the connection between Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti brought Watergate closer to the Oval Office. The White House selected The Washington Post as a target even though Time had developed damaging information of its own. After the White House attacked the Post’s credibility, newspapers reported the dispute; The New York Times then published telephone-record evidence showing calls associated with Segretti to the White House, Chapin’s home, and Hunt’s home and office. Those records concerned the Segretti operation rather than proving the Kennedy allegation, but they made it harder to dismiss the wider reporting as unsupported insinuation.

Richard Nixon’s April 30 address later acknowledged that facts had been concealed from the public and from him, accepted responsibility as the person at the top, and praised the grand jury, prosecutors, judge, and free press. The next day, Ronald Ziegler apologized to The Washington Post, Woodward, and Bernstein for his earlier criticism, saying the White House had been wrong in light of subsequent developments. Neither statement independently established the details of Hunt’s reported Kennedy assignment. Together, however, they mark the reversal in the public standing of the investigation: claims initially met with denial and attacks on the newspaper became part of a wider account of concealed activity and contested responsibility.