Howard Hunt's Red Wig

Howard Hunt's Red Wig was a cheap, reddish disguise reportedly worn by Howard Hunt during a covert visit to Dita Beard in a Denver hospital shortly before she publicly disavowed a disputed memorandum. A Justice Department official said the wig appeared to be the same one found at the Watergate Hotel after the arrests, turning an odd detail of disguise into a physical link between the Denver visit and the Watergate operation—though the surviving accounts did not establish the visitor's identity beyond doubt.

The Wig in the Denver Account

Under oath, Charles Colson acknowledged to Watergate prosecutors that he had sent Hunt to Denver shortly before March 17, 1972, to see Beard. According to a deposition read to Bob Woodward by a Justice Department official, Colson said the visit had nothing to do with Watergate, and prosecutors dropped the matter. The official added that Hunt had used the alias Edward Hamilton—the same alias he used in Watergate—and had worn a cheap, reddish wig. He said it was apparently the wig found at the Watergate Hotel the day after the arrests.

The disguise surfaced in the midst of the ITT affair. After Jack Anderson published the Dita Beard memorandum, Beard issued a statement from her Denver hospital bed calling it a forgery and a hoax. The wig therefore belonged to an episode in which the memo's credibility, Beard's public denial, and the White House's response were all in dispute. It was not merely a detail of appearance: in the official's account, it helped connect Hunt's concealed visit with the larger Watergate story.

A Disguise and a Contested Identification

Beard's 24-year-old son independently recalled that a mysterious man wearing a cheap wig and makeup had visited his mother shortly before her statement. He remembered a red wig sitting crookedly, as if put on in a dark car, and said the visitor seemed to know what would happen next. But he could not identify the man as Hunt; comparing him with photographs, he said only that it could have been Hunt. The account supports the presence of a disguised visitor, not a conclusive identification by Beard's son.

That distinction matters because the wig's evidentiary force came through converging accounts rather than a single certain recognition. The official linked Hunt, the alias, and the wig through Colson's deposition; Beard's son recalled a visitor whose disguise resembled that description. The claimed match to the wig found at the Watergate Hotel strengthened the connection, but the book presents it as an apparent match, not as a separately verified identification by the son.

The Wig Within the ITT Affair

Woodward's reporting placed Hunt's visit within a broader effort involving Colson, the White House, and ITT. After an inspection by the private investigative agency Intertel concluded that the memorandum was probably typed in Beard's Washington office but would be almost impossible to prove, the way was cleared for it to be labeled a forgery. Hunt went to Denver; Beard then denied writing the memo. Information about her denial traveled back toward the White House through Hunt, Robert Bennett, and Colson, who passed it to Hugh Scott, who read the statement on the Senate floor that day.

The wig gave a concrete, memorable form to that chain of concealed contact. The account did not establish that the disguise itself caused Beard's denial, or that the visit's purpose had been proved; it showed that Hunt had visited her under an alias while disguised, at a politically consequential moment. That contrast between the official explanation that the trip had nothing to do with Watergate and the familiar alias and apparent matching wig is what made the object significant.

Public Reappearance and Significance

Woodward's renewed examination of the affair, based on the new information, caught the White House uncharacteristically without an immediate answer. Gerald Warren took three hours to respond, offering no comment. Colson, then in Russia, heard about the story from the Post's correspondent Robert G. Kaiser and called it a good one before walking away. The report reopened a controversy the White House had thought settled.

The red wig's narrative importance lies in its double role: it was both a practical disguise and a recurring clue. First described through the deposition and the official's account, it reappeared in the son's uncertain recollection and in the reported discovery at the Watergate Hotel. That recurrence joined an otherwise separate hospital visit to the Watergate arrests without resolving every uncertainty, making the wig a small but telling piece of evidence in Woodward's reconstruction of the ITT affair.