Dita Beard and the ITT affair

The Dita Beard and the ITT affair joined a disputed account of a corporate contribution to the Republican convention with an effort by the White House and ITT to discredit the account’s author. Its significance sharpened when reporting established that Charles Colson had sent E. Howard Hunt to visit Dita Beard in a Denver hospital just before she repudiated her memorandum. The episode revealed an operation built around intermediaries and deniability, while showing how a controversy once thought contained could return through testimony, records, and renewed investigation.

The memorandum and its sudden repudiation

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 described a connection between ITT’s promise of several hundred thousand dollars to help fund the Republican convention and a favorable antitrust settlement. Before the dispute escalated, Beard had confirmed the memorandum’s authenticity line by line to Anderson’s assistant, Brit Hume. Its publication therefore put both the corporation and the administration under pressure: the issue was not simply what the document alleged, but whether Beard’s account could be discredited.

The administration and ITT initially tried to portray Beard as a drunken crackpot and to undermine Anderson. That effort failed. ITT then hired Intertel, a private investigative agency that also did work for the Howard Hughes organization, to conduct a technical inspection of the memorandum. Intertel concluded that it was probably typed on a machine in Beard’s downtown Washington office, but that proving this would be almost impossible. The finding offered a narrow opening: the document’s origin might be difficult to establish conclusively, even though the inspection did not establish that it was forged.

On March 17, after nearly three weeks had passed since Anderson published the memorandum, Beard issued a statement from her hospital bed at Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital in Denver disowning it as a forgery and a hoax. Her reversal supplied the first suggestion that the document might not be genuine, but did not explain why she had waited. The timing mattered politically: Richard Kleindienst’s nomination as Attorney General had been thrown into doubt during the intervening period, while Beard had earlier affirmed the memorandum’s authenticity to Anderson’s assistant. The account therefore contained a consequential contradiction, not a settled resolution of the document’s provenance.

Hunt’s visit and the chain of intermediaries

The Washington Post’s reporters were especially interested in Hunt’s Denver trip. A report by Newsday had already said that Charles Colson sent Hunt to visit Beard in the hospital at the height of the ITT affair, without explaining the reason for the visit. A Justice Department official later showed Bob Woodward a private deposition in which Colson had acknowledged under oath that he sent Hunt to Denver shortly before March 17. The official said the deposition had been taken 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 visit had nothing to do with Watergate, and the matter was dropped. Yet the circumstances were striking: Hunt used the alias Edward Hamilton, the same name he had used in Watergate, and wore a cheap reddish wig. The wig apparently matched one found at the Watergate Hotel the day after the arrests. These details did not, by themselves, establish the purpose of the Denver visit. They did connect the operation surrounding Beard to a figure and disguise already associated with Watergate, making the separation between the two matters harder to take for granted.

Woodward’s reporting traced a further chain behind the public repudiation. According to three sources—a White House official, a Republican politician with close White House ties, and an Intertel executive—Colson coordinated a joint White House and ITT strategy. Robert Bennett, who represented Howard Hughes’s interests in Washington, passed Intertel’s findings to Hunt, then his employee, for delivery to Colson. Colson was also Hunt’s employer. Once the technical assessment made the document’s authorship difficult to prove, Beard’s denial could be presented as a forgery claim. Her statement traveled back through Hunt, Bennett, and Colson; Colson then passed the favorable news to Hugh Scott, who read Beard’s denial on the Senate floor that same day. The route mattered as much as the denial: information and action moved through intermediaries rather than a transparent chain of public responsibility.

What the witnesses could establish

Beard herself was unavailable when Woodward tried to question her. Her attorney said he would pass along the questions, then called back to report that she had suffered a relapse of the heart ailment that had sent her to the hospital during the ITT affair. Woodward recalled that she had also suffered a relapse while senators from the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned her at her bedside in 1972. The recurrence complicated attempts to obtain her direct account but did not resolve the conflicting evidence about the memorandum or Hunt’s purpose.

Beard’s 24-year-old son Robert gave the reporters a separate, limited account. He recalled that a mysterious man in a cheap wig and makeup had visited his mother shortly before she issued her statement. From photographs, he thought the visitor could have been Hunt, but he could not identify him. The man had refused to give his name and, Robert said, seemed to know what would happen next. He remembered a red wig worn crookedly, as though put on in a dark car. His testimony supported the report of a disguised visitor, but its limits were explicit: he could not confirm the visitor’s identity, and his account did not establish what the visitor had discussed with Beard.

Taken together, the deposition, the disguise, the son’s recollection, and the sources’ account of the strategy made the story more substantial than an inference based on the denial alone. They still left important questions unanswered, including the precise reason for Hunt’s visit and Beard’s own explanation. The reporting preserved those gaps while showing how a contested memorandum, a hospital statement, and a series of private exchanges could be assembled into a documented account of political coordination.

The controversy returns to public view

Shortly before deadline, Woodward read Gerald Warren the text of the Post’s two-column re-examination of the Beard affair, built on the new information. The White House had considered the matter disposed of; the renewed reporting brought it back into public view. Warren took three hours to respond, ultimately offering no comment. Colson was in Russia on a trade mission. When the Post’s Moscow correspondent told him about the story, Colson called it a good one, grinned, and walked away.

The episode also belonged to a wider contest over the credibility of the press and the administration. After the connection between Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti brought Watergate nearer the Oval Office, the White House selected the Post as a target even though Time magazine had developed similarly damaging information. White House counterattacks gave the Post’s allegations more attention rather than settling them. In October, telephone records published by The New York Times showed that Segretti’s telephone or credit card had been used for calls to the White House, Chapin’s home, and Hunt’s home and office, making it harder to dismiss the reports as hearsay or innuendo. The renewed Beard investigation followed the same pattern: denial did not end scrutiny when documents, testimony, and independently obtained accounts continued to circulate.

The affair’s force lies in the contrast between an official claim that the memorandum was false and the complicated machinery used to support that claim. Intertel’s inspection made proof difficult; Hunt carried information between employers and intermediaries; Beard’s public denial supplied the visible conclusion; and the evidence about how that conclusion had been prepared reopened the question. In the broader Watergate investigation, the Denver visit was not proof by itself of a Watergate purpose. It was a concrete instance of the insulation strategy the reporters were tracing: consequential actions could pass through people who connected agencies and employers while leaving the reasons for those actions difficult to establish.