E. Howard Hunt Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Everette Howard Hunt Jr., widely known as E. Howard Hunt, was born in 1918 in New York State and grew up in a family that encouraged reading, discipline, and public service. He attended Brown University, where he studied English and developed the literary interests that would later sustain a long parallel career as a novelist. Before and after his formal education he wrote fiction, laying the groundwork for a prolific output that would accompany his decades in government service.

World War II and the OSS
During World War II he served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States wartime intelligence agency. His work in the OSS exposed him to clandestine tradecraft, political warfare, and the discipline of covert operations. These experiences shaped his worldview and prepared him for the newly created Central Intelligence Agency after the war. Like many of his generation who moved from the OSS into the CIA, he carried forward a sense of mission animated by the early Cold War.

Career in the CIA
Hunt joined the CIA in its formative years and spent the next two decades in covert action. He worked in stations overseas, including Mexico City, and was involved in the planning and execution of political and psychological operations. In the early 1950s he took part in efforts aimed at influencing events in Latin America, and he played a noted role in the 1954 operation in Guatemala. Within the agency he operated in the orbit of senior figures such as Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell and worked alongside officers including Tracy Barnes on paramilitary and propaganda programs.

Cuba became a central focus. In the lead-up to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Hunt helped with political action efforts designed to support Cuban exile groups and to prepare a post-Castro political structure. He interacted with exile leaders as the CIA attempted to build a credible alternative to Fidel Castro's government. Though the operation failed militarily and politically, it set a template for Hunt's later belief that covert operations required unified political, propaganda, and paramilitary planning.

Writer Under Cover
Throughout his CIA career, Hunt published novels at a remarkable pace, sometimes under pen names such as David St. John and Robert Dietrich. His books drew on his knowledge of clandestine work, Cold War atmospherics, and crime, and they gave him a second identity in American letters. Writing became both an outlet and a second profession, allowing him to translate the ambiguities of espionage into popular narratives without disclosing classified details.

From the CIA to the White House
Hunt retired from the CIA around 1970 and soon reentered public life in Washington. He was drawn into the Nixon White House orbit through political operatives including Charles Colson and joined the Special Investigations Unit, informally known as the "Plumbers", created under John Ehrlichman to plug leaks and conduct sensitive inquiries. Working closely with G. Gordon Liddy, Egil "Bud" Krogh, and David Young, he undertook operations that blurred the line between national security and domestic politics.

One of the most controversial was the 1971 break-in at the Beverly Hills office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. Hunt helped assemble a team that included Cuban exile veterans such as Bernard Barker and Virgilio Gonzalez. The episode foreshadowed methods and risks that would soon culminate in the Watergate affair.

Watergate and the Burglary Team
In 1972, Hunt, Liddy, and a crew including James McCord, Eugenio Martinez, Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, and Virgilio Gonzalez became involved in a series of break-ins at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. While not all members were inside the DNC suite during every operation, Hunt served as a coordinator and was in communication with the team. Their objectives included electronic surveillance and political intelligence-gathering for the president's reelection campaign.

The operation unraveled on June 17, 1972, when several burglars were arrested inside the DNC offices. The arrests set off a chain reaction. Documents from Hunt's White House safe later became the subject of controversy when acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray acknowledged destroying materials he received via White House counsel John Dean. Within weeks, the Committee to Re-elect the President's efforts to provide legal fees and financial support to the arrested men drew scrutiny, and the term "hush money" entered the record as prosecutors and congressional investigators traced payments.

Hunt's personal life collided with the scandal when his wife, Dorothy Hunt, herself a former CIA employee and a trusted partner in his affairs, died in a commercial air crash in December 1972. Her death and reports that she had been carrying cash fueled speculation and added human tragedy to an already explosive political scandal. In early 1973, James McCord wrote to Judge John Sirica, alleging political pressure on the defendants and perjury, which shattered efforts to contain the case and pointed to higher-level involvement. The cascading revelations implicated senior Nixon aides such as H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and drew in Charles Colson and John Dean as central witnesses in the unraveling of the cover-up.

Conviction, Imprisonment, and Aftermath
Hunt eventually pleaded guilty to charges related to conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping in connection with the Watergate break-ins. Judge John Sirica presided over the proceedings. Hunt's sentencing fell within an indeterminate range that reflected the gravity of the crimes and cooperation by some defendants; he served prison time before being paroled. His case, alongside those of G. Gordon Liddy and the Cuban-American operatives, became emblematic of the hazards of politicized clandestine action on domestic soil. While in custody and afterward, he sought financial assistance for his family, a point highlighted in investigative reporting and congressional testimony.

Later Years, Family, and Writing
After his release, Hunt settled in Florida and returned full-time to writing. He published a memoir about his intelligence career and later revisited his life in additional autobiographical works. He continued to produce spy and crime fiction, relying on story structures he knew intimately: conspiracies, double agents, and moral ambiguity. He remarried and sought a more private existence, though the notoriety of Watergate followed him. His children, including St. John Hunt, periodically figured in public discussions of his legacy, particularly when family members released or discussed recordings and papers related to his recollections.

In his later years he spoke and wrote about the limits of covert action and the ways political leadership can misuse secrecy. He defended some of his Cold War work as consistent with U.S. policy at the time, while acknowledging the profound damage caused by the Watergate operations. The lingering controversies around Cuban exile politics, the Bay of Pigs, and the Nixon White House ensured that Hunt remained a figure of fascination. Late-life claims and interpretations of events beyond Watergate circulated widely, but many of these assertions were disputed by historians and journalists, and Hunt's own accounts often carried caveats shaped by memory, secrecy, and the passage of time.

Death and Legacy
E. Howard Hunt died in 2007 in Florida, closing a life that traversed the secret wars of the Cold War and the most consequential political scandal of modern American history. Friends from his intelligence years remembered a disciplined operator and skilled propagandist; critics saw in him the embodiment of the perils of covert methods translated into domestic politics. Figures who had once been allies or counterparts across his career, Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell in the CIA, Josue-led Cuban exile organizers, and later G. Gordon Liddy, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, James McCord, and John Dean in the Watergate drama, mark the arc of his associations.

His novels endure as artifacts of a certain era's sensibility about spies and statecraft, while his role in the Plumbers and Watergate stands as a cautionary tale about the corrosion of democratic norms when secrecy is misapplied. Hunt's life illustrates how the tools of clandestinity, honed overseas against adversaries, can become dangerously misaligned when turned inward. He remains a central character in the intertwined histories of the CIA, Cold War covert action, and the fall of the Nixon presidency.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by Howard Hunt, under the main topics: Truth - War - Career - Retirement.

Other people realated to Howard Hunt: Richard M. Nixon (President), William F. Buckley, Jr. (Journalist)