Charles Colson—E. Howard Hunt

The relationship between Charles Colson and E. Howard Hunt came under scrutiny over an alleged covert assignment: that Colson instructed Hunt to enter Arthur Bremer’s Milwaukee apartment and bring back material that might connect Bremer to left-wing politics. The claim placed a possible break-in beside the White House’s immediate concern about the political meaning of Governor Wallace’s shooting. Hunt’s reported testimony and Colson’s documented contact with him made the connection consequential, but the accounts of its purpose and even its precise wording remained disputed.

The allegation and its setting

About a week before John Dean testified before the Senate committee in June 1973, Woodward discussed Hunt with a Senate attorney. Hunt had been brought from jail to Capitol Hill for lengthy interviews, and the attorney said Hunt had described an instruction from Colson received about an hour after Wallace was shot. According to the attorney, Hunt said Colson wanted him to fly immediately to Milwaukee, break into Bremer’s apartment, and retrieve anything that might help link Bremer to left-wing political causes.

The allegation concerned events on May 15, 1972, when Bremer shot Wallace at a shopping center in Maryland. By 6:30 that evening, a Washington Post editor had learned Bremer’s identity from White House official Ken Clawson, who suggested that literature in Bremer’s Milwaukee apartment connected him to left-wing causes and possibly the campaign of Senator George S. McGovern. Woodward had investigated that suggestion and rejected it: the apartment contained both left-wing and right-wing propaganda, and he found no basis for the proposed political connection.

The apartment’s handling sharpened the questions without answering them. Reporters had been allowed inside during a period after the shooting, and some carried away papers and other effects. Two Milwaukee reporters told Woodward that Federal Bureau of Investigation agents had entered and left before returning about an hour and a half later to seal the apartment. The Bureau offered no explanation for allowing Bremer’s belongings to be taken. This disorderly access formed the backdrop to Hunt’s alleged assignment, but did not itself establish that Colson ordered a break-in.

What the testimony and response established

Woodward contacted Hunt’s attorney, William O. Bittman, the morning after hearing the Senate attorney’s account. Bittman confirmed that testimony had been given concerning Colson asking Hunt to go to Milwaukee and enter Bremer’s apartment. He was less certain about the details: he did not clearly remember the stated reason for the trip and could not recall whether the testimony had actually used the word break-in. His confirmation supported the existence of testimony about a Colson-Hunt instruction, while preserving uncertainty about exactly what had been alleged.

On June 19, 1973, Woodward went to Colson’s law office to discuss the report with Colson’s partner and chief legal adviser, David Shapiro. Shapiro and another attorney argued that the allegation was implausible because Colson had been in close contact with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that night and had urged the Bureau to conduct a speedy, thorough investigation. Colson posed the same apparent contradiction: “Would it have been logical for me to push in the FBI and simultaneously order Hunt to Milwaukee?” Woodward answered that the Watergate case was already crowded with illogic. Colson then denied the charge in emphatic terms: “The charge is absolutely untrue and I’ll swear it is untrue under oath.” Woodward recorded the denial rather than treating it as resolution of the claim.

The materials Colson’s lawyers supplied bore on different parts of the dispute and required careful distinction. They showed that Colson had voluntarily taken a lie-detector test that cleared him of complicity in the Watergate bugging; that result concerned the bugging, not the separate allegation about Bremer’s apartment. Colson also gave Woodward a memorandum dated June 20, 1972, the day the Washington Post first identified Hunt as a suspect. Under the heading “Howard Hunt,” it described a telephone call to Hunt on the night Wallace was shot, supposedly made to ask for Hunt’s views on what might have caused the attempted assassination. The memorandum characterized Hunt as knowledgeable about psychological warfare and motivation from his CIA service. A covering memorandum qualified Colson’s recollection: “I cannot be sure that my memory is all that precise.” The document substantiated that Colson said he had spoken with Hunt, but did not independently settle whether he had also issued the alleged instruction.

Publication and continuing dispute

The meeting with Colson and his lawyers lasted almost two hours, leaving too little time for that day’s edition. Just before the following evening’s deadline, Woodward told Shapiro that the story would run, as he had promised. Later, Colson called Bernstein to object, calling the allegation preposterous and disputing that it could accurately reflect testimony received by the Senate committee. Bernstein said the account was accurate. Colson then argued that publication would be irresponsible even if Hunt had testified to it, because Hunt had been under great duress during his Senate interviews. Bernstein told him the story would include his observations. Colson appealed to what he described as Bernstein’s civil-libertarian instincts and, when Bernstein refused to withhold the report, called him a “vicious hypocrite.”

The exchange made the relationship visible in two incompatible forms. In the Senate attorney’s account, Colson used Hunt as an intermediary for a politically sensitive retrieval operation soon after the shooting; in Colson’s account, his contact with Hunt was a telephone conversation about the assassin’s possible motives, alongside his cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The June 1972 memorandum offered a record of contact but included an express warning about the precision of Colson’s memory. The available evidence therefore established that the two men were in communication and that testimony attributed a specific assignment to Colson, while leaving the alleged order, its purpose, and the extent of their operational relationship unresolved.

Significance of the connection

The allegation mattered because it proposed a link between White House political concerns and an operation outside ordinary investigative channels: acquiring material from the would-be assassin’s apartment to suggest a partisan connection. Yet the evidence did not permit that proposed chain of command to be stated as proven fact. Hunt’s reported account, Bittman’s qualified confirmation, Colson’s denial, and the memorandum’s caveat each carried a different evidentiary weight. The conflict between them is central to the relationship’s significance: Colson’s acknowledged access to Hunt was not itself proof of the alleged order, but it made the question of what he asked Hunt to do a matter of public and investigative consequence.