Howard Hunt's plan to break into Arthur Bremer's apartment

Howard Hunt's plan to break into Arthur Bremer's apartment was a reported allegation, not a confirmed operation. Hunt told a Senate attorney that Charles Colson had instructed him to fly to Milwaukee shortly after Governor Wallace was shot and search Bremer's apartment for material linking the would-be assassin to left-wing politics. Colson denied ordering the break-in and said he would swear to that denial under oath. The dispute turned a proposed burglary into a revealing contest over evidence, political damage control, and the limits of what could be proved.

The allegation and its setting

About a week before John Dean testified before the Senate committee in June 1973, Bob Woodward spoke with a committee attorney who believed Hunt might know about additional undercover work. Hunt had been brought from jail to Capitol Hill for lengthy interviews. In one of them, he disclosed an instruction he said he had received from Colson about an hour after Wallace was shot.

According to the attorney, Hunt said Colson wanted him to go immediately to Milwaukee and break into Bremer's apartment, retrieving anything that might connect Bremer to left-wing political causes. The alleged objective was therefore not merely to investigate the assassin: it was to find political material that might shape how the shooting was understood. The account placed Colson, a senior White House figure, at the point of instruction, and Hunt, a covert operative, at the point of execution. It did not establish that Hunt made the trip or entered the apartment on Colson's orders.

The apartment had already become a contested space. Wallace was shot by Bremer at a Maryland shopping center on May 15, 1972, at about four in the afternoon. By 6:30, a Washington Post editor had learned Bremer's name from White House official Ken Clawson, who suggested that literature in Bremer's Milwaukee apartment connected him to left-wing causes and possibly George McGovern's campaign. Woodward, who had been working on the story, rejected that political conclusion: the apartment contained both left-wing and right-wing propaganda.

The first hours after the shooting complicated any later claim about who searched the apartment and why. Milwaukee reporters told Woodward that they had been allowed inside for a 90-minute period after the shooting. Some journalists carried off papers and other belongings. Two reporters said they entered after Federal Bureau of Investigation agents had visited and left; about an hour and a half later, the agents returned and sealed the apartment. The Bureau offered no explanation for permitting Bremer's belongings to be looted. This history did not prove Hunt's alleged assignment, but it showed that access to the apartment and its contents had already been irregular and politically sensitive.

Checking the account

Woodward tested the allegation against a second source: Hunt's attorney, William O. Bittman. Bittman confirmed that testimony on the subject existed and said Colson had asked Hunt to go to Milwaukee and enter Bremer's apartment. But Bittman did not clearly recall why Hunt was to go, or whether the testimony had used the word “break-in.” His confirmation strengthened the report that an instruction had been discussed while leaving important details uncertain.

On June 19, Woodward went to Colson's law office, a few blocks from the White House, to speak with David Shapiro, Colson's law partner and principal legal adviser on Watergate matters. Shapiro called the allegation absurd. He brought in another lawyer, Judah Best, who argued that publishing even a mention of it would be unfair because Hunt was under pressure and unstable. For about 45 minutes, the lawyers tried to make Woodward doubt the account before Colson joined the meeting.

The scene was a prolonged effort to contest not only the allegation but the reliability of its source. Woodward listened, asked questions, and recorded Colson's eventual denial in his notebook. The interview lasted almost two hours, leaving no time to get the story into that day's paper. Near the following evening's deadline, Woodward told Shapiro that the story was going ahead, as he had promised.

Denial and competing explanations

Colson called the charge absolutely untrue and said he would swear to that under oath. Shapiro and Colson also offered an argument about what would have made sense: Colson, they said, was in close contact with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that night and urged a speedy, thorough investigation. Colson asked whether it would have been logical to press the Bureau to act while simultaneously ordering Hunt to go to Milwaukee. The account thus set an alleged covert instruction against Colson's asserted cooperation with investigators; the juxtaposition created a contradiction for readers to assess, not independent proof resolving it.

Colson explained his contact with the Bureau by saying Richard Nixon had been agitated and wanted political background on Bremer. The President, Colson said, was immediately worried that the shooter might have ties to the Republican Party or, worse, the re-election committee; such a connection could cost Nixon the election. That concern gave Colson a stated reason to seek information quickly. It also underscored the political stakes surrounding the search for Bremer's motives, without confirming that Colson sent Hunt to conduct one.

After Woodward notified Shapiro that the story would appear, Colson telephoned Carl Bernstein to protest. He called the allegation preposterous and questioned whether it accurately represented testimony the Senate committee had received. When Bernstein said it did, Colson argued that publication would still be irresponsible because Hunt had been under great duress during his committee interviews. Bernstein said the story would include Colson's objections. Colson then appealed to Bernstein's civil-libertarian instincts and, when Bernstein refused to hold the story, called him a vicious hypocrite. His objections became part of the confrontation surrounding publication, but they did not erase the separate confirmation that testimony about the instruction existed.

What the episode establishes

The reporting establishes that Hunt told a Senate attorney about an instruction he attributed to Colson, that the attorney relayed the account to Woodward, and that Bittman confirmed testimony concerning Colson's request while expressing uncertainty about its purpose and wording. It also establishes that Colson categorically denied ordering a burglary and offered his FBI contacts as evidence against the allegation's logic. It does not establish that Hunt carried out the proposed entry, that any recovered material existed, or that the competing accounts were conclusively reconciled.

The allegation resonated in a broader environment where access to facts was often constrained by fear, legal advice, and instructions to remain silent. In separate reporting, Hugh Sloan said that campaign personnel were not explicitly ordered to keep quiet, but understood the message to be to hold ranks and keep the ship together; he had left because he suspected matters were worse than had been disclosed. A committee employee told Bernstein that people had already lied to the grand jury before it knew what questions to ask. Those accounts do not verify the Bremer allegation or establish a direct connection to it. They help explain why the reporting depended on comparing testimony, lawyers' recollections, and official denials rather than treating any single account as conclusive.

The episode's significance lies in that distinction. The charge was serious enough to expose the possibility that political operatives might seek to shape the interpretation of an assassination attempt by searching for partisan evidence. Yet the reporters' account preserved the gaps as well as the accusation: Bittman's uncertainty, Colson's denial, the chaotic earlier access to the apartment, and the absence of proof that Hunt performed the proposed task. The story made the allegation visible without converting it into an established fact.