Dita Beard memorandum

The Dita Beard memorandum was a disputed document at the center of the ITT affair, connecting the corporation’s promise of several hundred thousand dollars to help fund the Republican convention with a favorable antitrust settlement. Its significance lay not only in what it appeared to say, but in the effort to undermine its credibility after it became politically damaging. The account follows the memorandum from publication and Beard’s initial confirmation of its authenticity to her later denial, while tracing how information about the document moved among ITT, private investigators, Howard Hunt, Charles W. Colson, and the White House.

The memorandum and the political stakes

On February 29, 1972, columnist Jack Anderson published the Dita Beard memorandum, sending political shock waves through the White House during Richard Nixon’s visit to China. The document connected a promised contribution of several hundred thousand dollars toward the Republican convention with a favorable antitrust settlement. In a controversy where the relationship between corporate support and government action was central, the memorandum offered a concrete piece of writing around which competing accounts could form.

Beard had previously confirmed the memo’s authenticity line by line to Anderson’s assistant, Brit Hume. That earlier confirmation became important when, on March 17, she issued a statement from her bed at Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital in Denver disowning the memo as a forgery and a hoax. Her denial was the first suggestion that the document was not genuine. It arrived nearly three weeks after publication, with no explanation in the account for why she had waited so long; in the meantime, Richard Kleindienst’s nomination as Attorney General had been thrown into doubt.

The memorandum therefore occupied two roles at once: it was a document cited as evidence of a connection between ITT and the administration, and an object whose authenticity was itself contested. The shift from Beard’s earlier line-by-line confirmation to her public repudiation did not resolve the dispute. Instead, the reversal made the circumstances surrounding the memo—and the interests invested in either validating or discrediting it—part of the story.

The effort to discredit it

According to three people Woodward found—a White House official, a Republican politician with close White House ties, and an executive of the private investigative agency Intertel—Charles W. Colson coordinated a united White House-ITT strategy. At first, the administration and the corporation tried to portray Beard as a drunken crackpot and discredit Jack Anderson. That effort failed, prompting a more technical inquiry into the memorandum itself.

ITT had hired Intertel, which also did work for the Howard Hughes organization, to examine the memo. Intertel determined that it was probably written on a typewriter in Beard’s downtown Washington office, but that proving this would be almost impossible. The finding was therefore suggestive rather than conclusive: it offered a basis for challenging the denial, but not a readily demonstrable resolution of authorship. The uncertainty itself mattered, because the technical examination could be used to support a public claim of forgery even though its conclusion, as described, stopped short of proof.

The reported sequence shows how the technical finding became politically useful. Robert Bennett, who represented Howard Hughes’ interests in Washington, passed Intertel’s information to Hunt, his employee, for transmission to Colson. Colson was Hunt’s other employer. After the findings cleared the way for the memo to be labeled a forgery, Colson sent Hunt to Denver, where Beard issued her denial from the hospital. Her statement then traveled back toward the White House through Hunt, Bennett, and Colson. The document’s meaning was thus contested not only through public statements, but through a chain of private intermediaries linking a corporate investigation to political messaging.

Hunt’s Denver visit and the disputed account

Woodward learned from a Justice Department official that Colson had acknowledged under oath sending Hunt to Denver just before March 17, 1972, to visit Beard. Colson had not been asked why he sent him, the official said, and Colson claimed the trip had nothing to do with Watergate. But Hunt used the alias Edward Hamilton, the same one he used in Watergate, and wore a cheap reddish wig. The official said it apparently was the same wig found at the Watergate Hotel the day after the arrests. These details connected the Denver visit to Hunt’s covert methods without, by themselves, establishing the purpose of the visit.

The book also records an account from Beard’s 24-year-old son, Robert, whom Woodward reached in Denver. He recalled that a mysterious man wearing a cheap wig and makeup had visited his mother in the hospital shortly before she issued her statement. Based on photographs, he thought the man could have been Hunt but said he could not identify him; the visitor refused to give his name and seemed to know what would happen next. His recollection supported the reported circumstances of Hunt’s visit while preserving an important limit: Robert Beard did not claim certain identification.

Woodward could not obtain Beard’s own account. Her attorney said he would pass along questions, then called back to report that she had suffered a relapse of the heart ailment that had brought her to the hospital during the ITT affair. Woodward remembered that she had also suffered a relapse during bedside questioning by Senate Judiciary Committee senators in 1972. These repeated interruptions left the person whose name was attached to the memorandum unavailable for direct questioning in the account, even as other people described her statement, the visitors to her hospital room, and the routes by which information reached political figures.

Evidence, circulation, and consequence

The memorandum’s public life was shaped by circulation among people and institutions with different stakes in the controversy: Anderson published it; Beard had confirmed its authenticity and later disowned it; ITT hired Intertel to inspect it; Bennett passed Intertel’s findings to Hunt; and Hunt transmitted information to Colson. The account’s three sources then supplied Woodward with a common explanation of how the denial had been prepared and relayed. Their account connects the memo’s technical examination to its political use, while the reported limits of the examination leave its authenticity unresolved rather than definitively settled.

That distinction is central to the document’s significance. The report does not treat the typewriter finding as proof that Beard wrote the memorandum, nor does it treat the later denial as proof that she did not. Instead, it shows how an uncertain technical result could clear the way for a categorical public label, and how a statement issued from a hospital bed could carry political consequences far beyond the room. The memo became a test of competing claims about evidence, credibility, and responsibility: a written link between a corporate promise and an antitrust outcome, then the target of an organized effort to recast that link as a fraud.