This obit from the Miami Herald raises troubling questions. Hunt no doubt saw himself as a patriot. So did Liddy. So do the others who do so many ethically questionable things in your name. Is it possible to be a good man in a bad cause? Of course it is. Possible to be a bad man in a good cause? A good man in a good cause? A bad man in a bad cause? Choose your perumutation. The thing is, though, you had better be prepared to continually re-assess your judgment, for we are only as good or as bad as our actions — aren’t we? Or are there other standards to judge by?
But what if our opinion of the actions changes? Hunt is considered to have failed at Watergate and, previously, at the Bay of Pigs invasion, but to have succeeded as a “long-serving CIA spymaster involved in the successful Guatemalan coup.” But what business did he have — did the CIA have — in overthrowing a government merely because it didn’t like that government’s principles and feared where it might lead?
Hunt helped overthrow Arbenz, and the result was decades of savage persecution of the Guatemalan poor. He failed in his attempt to overthrow Castro, and the result was decades of savage persecution of Castro’s political enemies. Was one action right and the other wrong? If so, which?
I do not pretend that any of these questions would have troubled Hunt, any more than they would have troubled Liddy. These are men apparently untroubled by ambiguity. But they ought to trouble the rest of us.
E. Howard Hunt, 88: Led break-in of Watergate
A former CIA officer, Hunt was best-known for recruiting the ‘plumbers’ who broke into the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel.
BY NICHOLAS SPANGLER
nspangler@MiamiHerald.com
E. Howard Hunt, who stumbled into history after helping organize a botched break-in at the Watergate Hotel that brought down a president, died Tuesday at North Shore Medical Center. He was 88.
The cause of death was pneumonia, said his wife, Laura Hunt.
If Watergate doomed Richard Nixon’s presidency, it was, too, a reversal of fortune for a dashing, decorated World War II soldier, Hollywood screenwriter and long-serving CIA spymaster involved in the successful Guatemalan coup and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Hunt had watched through binoculars on June 17, 1972, as five men — four of which he had recruited as so-called ”plumbers,” whose job it was to plug information leaks from the White House — were arrested as they searched the offices of the Democratic National Committee for evidence of illegal campaign contributions, some possibly from Fidel Castro. They found none but were arrested, in business suits, carrying thousands in $100 bills and an address book containing Hunt’s name and phone number.
Twenty-six months later, Nixon resigned.
Hunt faced 35 years but spent 33 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy. He was financially ruined and lost his first wife, Dorothy, to a plane crash.
Finished in Washington, he eventually moved to Biscayne Park and made his living writing more than 80 novels, many of them spy thrillers with titles like Guilty Knowledge and The Paris Edge.
All told, 25 men were sent to prison for their involvement in the break-in, which left Hunt perplexed.
”My reaction was, whatever the president wants to have done, we’ll do it,” he told The Miami Herald in 1997. ‘ Believe me, if someone had come to me and said, `Hunt, we want you to join an assault on the Constitution,’ I would have said, ‘Hey, you’re crazy.’ ”
Hunt maintained a lifelong bitterness toward Nixon, who he felt “should have come forward for me and my compadres. There’s a long tradition that when a warrior is captured, the commanding officer takes care of his family. That goes back to the Revolutionary War.”
”He loved George Bush, both of them, and Reagan,” said Laura Hunt.
Everette Howard Hunt was born Oct. 9, 1918, graduated from Brown University in June 1940 and entered the U.S. Naval Academy two months after the United States entered World War II.
While a gunnery officer on the USS Mayo, Hunt was wounded and honorably discharged. In the hospital, he wrote his first novel, East of Farewell. For a while, he worked as a correspondent for Time and Life magazines.
In 1943, Hunt enlisted in the Army Air Force and became in instructor in the Air Force Intelligence School.
He volunteered for duty with the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA, and was sent to China — where he operated with Chinese guerrillas behind Japanese lines.
At the end of the war, Hunt won a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing and worked as a Hollywood screenwriter. Warner Brothers had paid $35,000 for his fourth novel, Bimini Run, when Hunt joined the CIA in 1949.
That was the year he married his first wife, Dorothy Wetzel De Goutiere, with whom he had four children.
For the next 21 years, Hunt served as a covert counterintelligence officer in Latin America, Asia and Europe.
In 1954, Hunt helped organize the overthrow of the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz.
In 1961, Hunt was assigned to create a provisional government in Cuba to rule after the U.S. invaded the island.
He retired from the CIA in 1970 and went to work for a PR firm in Washington.
There he met fellow Brown alumnus Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, at a college reunion. Colson offered Hunt a $100-a-day job to do intelligence work for the White House.
In 1972, Hunt was tasked with bugging the telephone lines of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergatel. Hunt reached out to Bay of Pigs vets Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis. But the job went bad.
Hunt was not reticent about his deeds, granting interviews and writing a soon-to-be published memoir, American Spy, but he came in for occasional criticism.
”We learned to let things just roll off,” Laura Hunt said. “He was serving his country.”
In his later years, Hunt was an avid hunter and tennis player before losing a leg to bad circulation. He read prodigiously and kept the TV tuned to Fox News.
In 1997, Hunt declared bankruptcy.
Martinez, one of the ”plumbers” Hunt recruited to help plug leaks from the Nixon White House, learned of Hunt’s death Tuesday. ”We spent a lot of time together, all the way back to the Bay of Pigs. He was a very good man,” Martinez, 84, said Tuesday from his Miami Beach home. “I’m not proud of what happened, but I have tried to move past it.”
Martinez received a pardon from President Ronald Reagan in 1983. But Reagan, Hunt’s hero, rejected a pardon for Hunt.
Gordon Liddy, who organized the Watergate job, has a less sanguine take.
”I did have contact with him after Watergate, up to the moment he decided to spill his guts,” Liddy said. “After which point I have never since spoken a word to him. Testifying was a betrayal of his principles. I think he’d stayed in the game too long. He was old and weak. We’d been friends, prior to that. But that pissed me off.”
Hunt also is survived by children Lisa Hunt, Kevan Spence, St. John Hunt, David Adams Hunt, Austin Hunt and Hollis Hunt.
Services will be Monday, but are private. Flowers can be sent to Cofer Funeral Home, 10931 NE Sixth Ave.
Bernard L. Barker, another of Hunt’s Miami recruits, was on his way to a florist Tuesday night to send a bouquet to Hunt’s family.
”My good friend died today,” said Barker, 89. “He was part of the history of the United States.”
Miami Herald staff writer Evan S. Benn contributed to this report.
January 28th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Thank you for a very complete and fair accounting of my fathers life. He was a patriot and I will miss him dearly.
David Hunt