Dita Beard

Dita Beard was an ITT executive at the center of a controversy over a memo connecting the corporation’s promised support for the Republican convention with a favorable antitrust settlement. After the memo became public, Beard disavowed it from a hospital bed; later reporting placed that denial within a coordinated White House–ITT effort and connected it to a covert visit by Howard Hunt. Her absence from direct questioning left a consequential gap in the account: the reported strategy emerged through documents, intermediaries, and the recollections of other people.

The memo and its denial

On February 29, 1972, columnist Jack Anderson published the Beard memo, setting off political shock waves in the White House during Richard Nixon’s visit to China. The document appeared to link ITT’s promise of several hundred thousand dollars to help fund the Republican convention with a favorable antitrust settlement. Beard had previously confirmed the memo’s authenticity, line by line, to Anderson’s assistant, Brit Hume.

On March 17, after the controversy had continued for nearly three weeks, Beard issued a statement from her bed at Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital in Denver calling the memo a “forgery” and “a hoax.” The timing mattered: Richard Kleindienst’s nomination as Attorney General had meanwhile been thrown into doubt, and the statement was the first suggestion that the document was not genuine. The book records the contradiction between her earlier confirmation and her later denial, without resolving it through Beard’s own account.

The Denver visit

The Post’s reporters pursued a separate but related question: why Howard Hunt had traveled to Denver to see Beard. A Justice Department official showed Bob Woodward a private deposition in which Charles Colson acknowledged under oath that he had sent Hunt to visit Beard shortly before March 17, just as the ITT affair was unfolding. Colson had not been asked the reason for the visit; he said it had nothing to do with Watergate, and the matter was dropped.

The official also told Woodward that Hunt used the alias Edward Hamilton—the same alias he used in Watergate—and wore a cheap reddish wig. Beard’s 24-year-old son Robert recalled that a mysterious man in a cheap wig and makeup had visited his mother in the hospital shortly before she issued her statement. From photographs, he thought the visitor could have been Hunt, but stressed that he could not identify him. The man had refused to give his name and seemed to know what would happen next; Robert remembered the red wig sitting crookedly, as if it had been put on in a dark car. His account supported the report of a disguised visitor but did not establish the visitor’s identity independently.

The reported strategy and its intermediaries

Woodward found three people—a White House official, a Republican politician with close White House ties, and an executive at the private investigative agency Intertel—who gave substantially the same account of the response to Anderson’s disclosure. According to their account, Colson coordinated a joint White House–ITT strategy that first sought to portray Beard as a drunken crackpot and discredit Anderson. When that effort failed, ITT hired Intertel to inspect the memo technically. Intertel concluded that it was probably typed in Beard’s downtown Washington office, while judging that this would be almost impossible to prove.

Robert Bennett, who represented Howard Hughes’ interests in Washington, passed Intertel’s findings to Hunt, his employee, for transmission to Colson. Colson, who also employed Hunt, then sent Hunt to Denver; Beard’s denial followed. In the reported chain, information moved through investigators, an intermediary, Hunt, and Colson before reaching the White House. The reporters described this as an insulation strategy: responsibility and knowledge were distributed through intermediaries rather than exposed in a single direct instruction. The account tied the disguised hospital visit to the circulation of the denial, but the evidence presented remained a reconstructed chain of testimony, not a direct explanation from Beard.

Absence and renewed scrutiny

Woodward tried to reach Beard through her attorney, who said he would pass along questions. A few hours later, the attorney reported that she had suffered a relapse of the heart ailment that had sent her to the hospital during the ITT affair. Woodward recalled that Beard had also suffered a relapse during bedside questioning by Senate Judiciary Committee members in 1972. These reports of illness repeatedly interrupted efforts to question her; they do not, by themselves, establish why she was unavailable or what she would have said.

The Post published a two-column re-examination of the affair based on the new information. Gerald Warren took three hours to respond with “No comment.” Colson was in Russia on a trade mission when the story appeared; when the Post’s correspondent in Moscow told him about it the next day, Colson called it “a good one,” grinned, and walked away. Beard remained absent from the reporters’ account of the unfolding controversy, while the hospital visit, the changed status of the memo, and the testimony of intermediaries brought the affair back into public view.