Patrick Gray destroys Howard Hunt's files

L. Patrick Gray destroys Howard Hunt's files became a pivotal episode in the Watergate investigation because it extended the scandal from the covert operation itself to the handling of evidence afterward. Reports that Gray had disposed of documents taken from E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe raised a sharper question than whether political operatives had acted in secret: had the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation helped keep politically damaging evidence from public view? The reporting traced an instruction passed through John Ehrlichman and John Dean to Gray, while preserving an important distinction between what Gray was told and what he later said he had done.

The documents and the first report

About 7:45 one evening, Bob Woodward heard from a Capitol Hill source that the New York Daily News was about to report that Gray had destroyed documents taken from E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe. The report described two folders. One contained fabricated State Department cables intended to implicate President John F. Kennedy in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem. The other was a dossier of information E. Howard Hunt had collected on Senator Edward Kennedy. The source said the newspaper’s account was accurate.

Woodward did not treat that first report as sufficient on its own. He called a Senate aide on the Senate Watergate Committee, who confirmed the account and added that John Dean had told Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen about it ten days earlier. That confirmation connected the reported destruction to information already disclosed within the investigation, rather than leaving it as an isolated claim from a newspaper bulletin.

What Gray was told—and what he did

Later that night, Deep Throat confirmed the report and supplied an account of the meeting behind it. On June 28, Gray had met with John Ehrlichman and John Dean, who described the files as “political dynamite” and said they should “never see the light of day.” John Ehrlichman, Deep Throat said, had earlier urged John Dean to take the files across the river and drop them in it. The reported exchange made the pressure on the records explicit: the concern was the damage the contents could cause, including damage beyond that of the Watergate bugging itself.

The account also preserved a qualification about Gray’s own conduct. Gray kept the files for about a week and then said that he put them in a burn bag in his office. He maintained that no one had directly ordered him to destroy them, but the instruction and its intended meaning had been unmistakable to him. The distinction matters: the reporting described both the powerful implication of the meeting and Gray’s account that he had understood, rather than received as a direct command, what John Ehrlichman and John Dean wanted done.

John Dean’s associate supplied a separate piece of the story. Asked whether he had heard the expression “Deep Six,” the associate said that was what John Ehrlichman had wanted done with the files. That phrase reinforced the account of a deliberate effort to make the material disappear, while adding another route by which the instruction had been remembered and reported. The evidence thus accumulated through distinct confirmations: the initial account from the Capitol Hill source, confirmation from a Senate aide, Deep Throat’s description of the meeting, and the associate’s recollection of the language used about the files.

Publication and immediate effect

With the story checked, Howard Simons ordered The Washington Post’s front page remade for the second edition. The decision gave the disclosure immediate prominence. It also marked a shift in the story’s scale: the documents were not merely files held by an operative, but records whose contents had prompted senior White House figures to discuss preventing their exposure and whose disposal implicated the acting head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The reaction inside the newsroom conveyed the force of that implication. Howard Simons, drawing on a cigarette, said quietly, “A director of the FBI destroying evidence? I never thought it could happen.” His response registered both the apparent gravity of the act and the shock of seeing an institution entrusted with investigation drawn into the alleged handling of evidence. For Bernstein, the episode was more unsettling than anything since the June 17 break-in; what troubled him was the language and context of the exchange between John Ehrlichman and John Dean, which seemed to treat the destruction of files as a means of protecting the President from harm.

The larger pattern of records and concealment

The report landed amid an investigation already finding signs that records and money were being handled to keep the Watergate operation at a distance from its principals. Earlier, The Washington Post had reported that funds for the espionage operation were controlled by senior assistants to John Mitchell and kept in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Its account described more than $300,000 for sensitive political projects, payments to G. Gordon Liddy, and destroyed records. Hugh Sloan had left because of his suspicions about Watergate. Those findings established a broader setting in which hidden funds, missing records, and the protection of senior figures were connected questions, not separate irregularities.

The same investigation had also established a chain of authorization around campaign money: Hugh Sloan said that, beginning in 1971, he called John Mitchell at the Department of Justice when money was needed, and Mitchell would tell him to distribute it. Later, authority passed to others, including Jeb Magruder. These earlier disclosures did not by themselves establish who ordered Gray to dispose of Hunt’s files. They did, however, show why each new account of records, instructions, and responsibility had to be distinguished carefully rather than collapsed into a single accusation.

That care was part of the episode’s significance. The reporters had encountered unverified allegations in Federal Bureau of Investigation interview reports, which could contain hearsay, suspicion, or grievance as well as fact; using such a report alone as the basis for a story was unthinkable. In Gray’s case, the account advanced through independent confirmations and a specific description of the meeting, while retaining Gray’s reported qualification about the absence of an explicit order. The resulting story made the destruction—or disposal—of the files a new test of how far the Watergate cover-up reached, and of whether the agencies and officials expected to investigate it had themselves been enlisted in containing it.