Denver’s significance in the Watergate investigation lay in a hospital visit that linked E. Howard Hunt, Charles Colson, and Dita Beard’s disputed denial of a politically damaging memorandum. What first appeared to be a trip to speak with an ailing witness became, through testimony and reporting, a point of connection between the White House’s response to the ITT affair and Hunt’s covert work. The city was not merely the setting for Beard’s hospitalization: it was where the reporters found evidence that the political story surrounding her had been deliberately managed.

Denver and the ITT controversy

Dita Beard was in a Denver hospital during the controversy over a memorandum connecting ITT’s promise of several hundred thousand dollars to help fund the Republican convention with a favorable antitrust settlement. Jack Anderson published the memorandum on February 29, 1972, creating political repercussions for the White House during Richard Nixon’s visit to China. Beard had previously confirmed the memo’s authenticity, line by line, to Anderson’s assistant, Brit Hume. Yet on March 17, from her bed at Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital in Denver, she issued a statement calling it a forgery and a hoax. Her denial was the first suggestion that the document was not genuine, and it came almost three weeks after its publication, while Richard Kleindienst’s nomination as Attorney General had been thrown into doubt.

The timing made Denver central to a question the initial denial did not answer: why had Beard changed her position then? The reporting later assembled a wider account. Colson had coordinated a White House-ITT effort that initially tried to discredit both Beard and Anderson. ITT hired Intertel to inspect the memorandum; the agency concluded it was probably typed on a machine in Beard’s downtown Washington office, though proving that would be almost impossible. Robert Bennett, representing Howard Hughes’ interests in Washington, passed the findings to Hunt, his employee, for transmission to Colson. In the account Woodward developed, the technical uncertainty helped clear the way for the memorandum to be called a forgery, and Beard’s Denver statement supplied the public denial.

Hunt’s visit and the disguised visitor

The Denver trip came just before March 17, 1972. Newsday had reported that Colson sent Hunt to visit Beard in the hospital at the height of the ITT scandal, without explaining the purpose of the visit. A United States Department of Justice official later showed Woodward a private deposition in which Colson had acknowledged sending Hunt to Denver. The official said prosecutors had taken the deposition privately to spare the President’s special counsel the embarrassment of appearing before the grand jury. Colson had not been asked why he sent Hunt; he said the matter had nothing to do with Watergate, and it was dropped.

The details of the visit made that explanation harder to separate from Hunt’s other operations. According to the official reading from the deposition, Hunt used the alias Edward Hamilton, the same name he used in Watergate, and wore a cheap reddish wig. The official said it was apparently the same wig found in the Watergate Hotel the day after the arrests. This did not by itself establish the purpose of the Denver mission, but it placed Hunt’s familiar disguise and alias inside the ITT affair as well as the Watergate story.

Woodward had also heard a recollection from Beard’s 24-year-old son, Robert, whom he reached in Denver shortly before the story was prepared. Robert Beard recalled a mysterious visitor wearing a cheap wig and makeup shortly before his mother issued her statement. He could not identify the man, though photographs made him think it could have been Hunt. The visitor refused to give his name and seemed to know what would happen next. Beard described the red wig as cockeyed, as if it had been put on in a dark car. His account corroborated the disguise without turning his uncertain identification into a confirmed sighting.

Reporting Denver back to Washington

Woodward’s account of Denver took shape through the convergence of separate sources and records. A White House official, a Republican politician with close ties to the White House, and an Intertel executive gave him essentially the same account of how information about the memorandum moved from Intertel through Bennett and Hunt to Colson. The Justice Department deposition supplied a separate, sworn acknowledgment that Colson had dispatched Hunt to the hospital. Beard’s son supplied a personal recollection of the disguised visitor. Together, these strands gave the hospital trip a context the original report of Hunt’s visit had lacked.

Beard herself remained unavailable to answer Woodward’s questions. Her attorney said he would pass them along, then called back several hours later to report that she had suffered a relapse of the heart ailment that had sent her to the hospital during the ITT affair. Woodward remembered that she had also suffered a relapse during bedside questioning by Senate Judiciary Committee members in 1972. That recurrence did not answer the questions about Hunt’s purpose, but it further limited direct inquiry into what had happened in Denver.

Shortly before deadline, Woodward read Gerald Warren the text of a two-column re-examination of the Beard affair. Warren took three hours to respond, finally offering no comment. Colson was in Russia on a trade mission when Robert G. Kaiser, the Post correspondent in Moscow, told him about the story. Colson called it a good one, grinned, and walked away. The Denver visit thus returned to public view after the White House had apparently considered the ITT controversy settled: the city’s hospital-room encounter had become evidence in a larger investigation of how political damage was managed and how covert operatives crossed between ostensibly separate projects.

Place in the Watergate investigation

Denver’s narrative role is defined by the contrast between a public act and a concealed visit. Beard’s statement from her hospital bed presented the memorandum as fraudulent; the reporting reconstructed a chain in which Hunt, disguised and using an alias, had visited her just before that statement. The sources did not eliminate every uncertainty about what was said in the room or establish Hunt’s precise purpose. They did, however, reveal that his Denver mission belonged to a White House project to show the ITT memorandum was a forgery, while his disguise linked the episode to the methods associated with Watergate.

For the reporters, Denver was a place where separate lines of inquiry met: the ITT memo, Colson’s role, Hunt’s White House assignments, and the evidence of his hospital visit. Its importance came not from a complete account of the encounter, which remained unavailable, but from the concrete details that made the trip difficult to dismiss as incidental: its timing, Colson’s acknowledgment under oath, Hunt’s alias, the reddish wig, and Beard’s sudden public disavowal. The resulting story reopened an affair the White House had thought disposed of and widened the meaning of Hunt’s activities beyond Watergate itself.