Howard Hunt’s Denver mission to contact Dita Beard

Howard Hunt’s Denver mission to contact Dita Beard became a link between the ITT affair and the White House covert operations later examined in the Watergate investigation. Sent by Charles Colson to visit Beard in a Denver hospital shortly before she disavowed a damaging memorandum, Hunt appeared under the alias Edward Hamilton and wore a cheap reddish wig. The mission’s importance lay not only in the disguise, but in the chain of information and influence surrounding Beard’s denial—and in the unanswered question of what Hunt himself had been sent to do.

Background: The memorandum and the White House

The episode began with the Dita Beard memorandum, which connected ITT’s promise of several hundred thousand dollars to help fund the Republican convention with a favorable antitrust settlement. Jack Anderson published the memo on February 29, 1972, sending political shock waves through the White House during Richard Nixon’s visit to China. Beard had previously confirmed its authenticity, line by line, to Anderson’s assistant Brit Hume.

The political stakes sharpened as Richard Kleindienst’s nomination as Attorney General came under doubt. On March 17, nearly three weeks after publication, Beard issued a statement from her hospital bed at Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital in Denver, calling the memorandum a forgery and a hoax. Her statement was the first indication that the document might not be genuine, but the delay itself remained unexplained. Hunt’s visit, made just before the denial, therefore acquired significance beyond an unexplained trip to see an ailing witness: it placed a White House operative at the scene as the controversy changed direction.

The mission and its concealment

A United States Department of Justice official disclosed the visit to Bob Woodward while reading from a manila folder containing a private deposition taken by Watergate prosecutors. Under oath, Colson had acknowledged sending Hunt to Denver shortly before March 17, 1972, to visit Beard. 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 it had nothing to do with Watergate, and prosecutors dropped the matter.

The official nevertheless described details that connected the Denver encounter to the Watergate operation. Hunt used the alias Edward Hamilton, the same name he used in Watergate, and wore a cheap, reddish, dime-store wig. The official said the wig appeared to be the same one found at the Watergate Hotel the day after the arrests. This evidence established a striking continuity of disguise and alias between Hunt’s visit and Watergate, while leaving the mission’s stated purpose unresolved.

Beard’s son Robert, whom Woodward reached in Denver, supplied a separate account of the visitor. He recalled that a mysterious man in a cheap wig and makeup had visited his mother in the hospital shortly before she made her statement. From photographs, he thought the man could have been Hunt, but could not identify him. The visitor had refused to give his name and seemed to know what would happen next; Robert described the red wig as crooked, as if put on in a dark car. His account supported the existence of a disguised visitor, but did not independently establish the visitor’s identity or assignment.

The information chain behind Beard’s denial

Woodward’s reporting placed the hospital visit within a larger White House–ITT strategy. The administration and ITT had initially tried to portray Beard as a drunken crackpot and discredit Anderson; that effort failed. ITT then hired Intertel, a private investigative agency that also did work for the Howard Hughes organization, to inspect 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.

Robert Bennett, who represented Hughes’s interests in Washington, passed Intertel’s findings to Hunt, his employee, for transmission to Colson. The findings made it possible to label the memorandum a forgery without establishing that it was one. Colson, who was also Hunt’s employer, sent Hunt to Denver; Beard then issued her denial. The reported route by which the statement’s news traveled ran back from Hunt through Bennett to Colson. Colson passed the news to Hugh Scott, who read Beard’s denial on the Senate floor that same day. The sequence shows how technical findings, a hospital visit, a public statement, and a Senate intervention could circulate through overlapping political and private networks. It does not, by itself, resolve what Hunt said to Beard or establish that his visit caused her to recant.

Publication and significance

Woodward could not obtain Beard’s own account. Her attorney said he would relay 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 Beard had also suffered a relapse while being questioned at her bedside by senators from the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1972. Robert Beard, reached shortly before the attorney’s call, did not mention a new relapse, though he said he would pass along Woodward’s request that his mother call.

Shortly before the next evening’s deadline, Woodward read Gerald Warren the text of a two-column re-examination of the affair based on the new information. The White House had thought the controversy settled; its reopening left the President’s men speechless for a time. Warren took three hours to respond with 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 mission thus became legible through several kinds of evidence rather than a single definitive account: Colson’s sworn acknowledgment, the alias and wig described by a Justice Department official, Robert Beard’s uncertain recollection, and Woodward’s reconstruction of the memo’s handling. The visit was a small step toward establishing what Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had done for the White House, but it exposed a broader mechanism: information that could not conclusively authenticate the memo nevertheless helped clear a path to denouncing it, while the people carrying that information remained separated by layers of employment and transmission. The Denver episode reopened a controversy that had appeared closed and made the relationship between the ITT affair and White House operations harder to dismiss.