A novelist named E. Howard Hunt died today. Of course, E. Howard Hunt won’t go down in history as a novelist, despite the fact that Amazon lists six (6!) pages of spy thrillers and non-fiction books he wrote, like Maelstrom, a potboiler from 1948. Howard Hunt will be remembered because he, along with G. Gordon Liddy, planned and executed the break-in at the Watergate national democratic headquarters in 1972 that eventually brought down the Nixon Presidency.

E. Howard Hunt, a dapper but dour CIA agent, lived an interesting life. The fight against Communism was his obsession, and in this capacity he holds the remarkable distinction of being involved in not one but two (2) major failures of American politics, having also played a leadership role in the disastrous anti-Castro Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Looking back, it’s fairly clear that he should have stuck to writing novels. But history had its way with him, and today we can only reflect on his death.

How were his novels? I’ve looked at his later ones but none caught my interest; I’d love to look at one of his earlier pulp-style novels but you can’t even find a title with a cover image on ALibris‘s long list of his books. The earliest one appears to be called East of Farewell, published in 1942 — if anybody out there has read any of these books, please share your observations by posting a comment below.

Only in the ancient Hindu sense of all-universe acceptance can I say that I think E. Howard Hunt was a good man. But he did America a big favor in the summer of 1972: he got caught. As anybody who’s read All The President’s Men knows, he and Liddy were across the street at the Howard Johnson hotel watching with binoculars as the police burst in on the spies, and one of the men arrested had E. Howard Hunt’s name and phone number at the White House listed in the phone book in his pocket. Thus did a President fall.

Coincidentally, Howard Hunt died on a day when Watergate is on many people’s minds. If you haven’t been paying attention, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff Lewis Libby is on trial for obstruction of justice in a case related to the pre-war search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Libby’s defense is pointing a finger at President Bush’s close advisor Karl Rove, and it’s all starting to remind me of those good old days of John Dean, Bob Haldeman and … E. Howard Hunt.

Farewell to a hard-working American patriot and writer, E. Howard Hunt.