Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  At the same time, the White House focused on the notion that Beard and Anderson had somehow conspired to concoct the lobbyist’s infamous memo in the first place. This idea was first floated by an unlikely source: President Nixon’s barber, whom Anderson had opportunistically cultivated as his barber as well. “The chatty hairstylist turned out to be a two-way information channel, passing tidbits to each of us about the other,” the columnist recalled. The double-agent barber claimed that Anderson’s secretary, Opal Ginn, was a drinking buddy of Dita Beard, and that this was probably the origin of the leaked memo. “The implication,” Anderson wrote, “was that they were a pair of souses who, in their degeneracy, had formed a conspiracy to ‘get’ the Administration.” Worse, Opal later told friends, the White House “tried to make it out that she had a lesbian affair with Dita Beard.” Once again, Nixon’s men turned to homophobia as their last, best defense against their enemies. (Actually, both Beard and Ginn, though unmarried, were resolutely heterosexual—as well as equally hard-drinking and hardbitten.) In any case, Dean interviewed the barber who had passed on the gossip “to see if we could discredit Anderson’s testimony.” But the results were disappointing: the information was all secondhand; “the barber had nothing.”

  Nonetheless, Colson believed that the rumor might finally allow the White House to wiggle out of the scandal and hurried to tell the President about the “Anderson vulnerability.” Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian assigned a federal prosecutor, who normally specialized in sensitive national security cases, to investigate. With help from ITT, authorities seemed to corroborate the allegation when they located a group photo that included Beard and Ginn at a local bar. “It was so vivid,” Colson said, “actually having the photograph.” The picture, Colson told the President, was “dynamite.”

  The White House rushed the photo to Republican senator Marlow Cook and other allies on the Judiciary Committee. “Tell Cook . . . [to] call Anderson’s secretary [as a witness] and ask her about her association with Dita Beard,” Nixon instructed his staff. “If you get the secretary up [on the witness stand], you scare them to death.”

  The President was right about that. “I don’t want to get dragged into this fucking scandal!” Opal exclaimed. The very idea of testifying “makes me damn mad.”

  “Are they going to call the Ginnis [sic] girl?” Nixon pressed.

  “Well, we’re trying like hell to get them to,” Colson replied.

  “And put her under oath,” the President added.

  Colson believed that “there is a possibility of impeaching Anderson’s testimony or holding him in contempt” of Congress. But Nixon seemed reluctant to get his hopes up. “Do you really think we have a chance to prove [that Anderson forged the Beard memo]?” the President wondered. “What [is the] evidence?” A White House aide speculated that Beard might have been afraid of being fired by ITT and that her friend Opal suggested writing the memo to “help you and help ourselves at the same time.” Nixon still wasn’t persuaded but decided there was nothing to lose: “Put on Anderson’s secretary . . . she can’t do any harm” and “might be a bad witness.”

  The next day, Senator Cook interrupted the hearings “to share some facts that just came to my attention.” The senator dramatically informed the committee that “Dita Beard and another woman quite often met for drinks in the afternoon” at a cocktail lounge near the White House. The other woman, the lawmaker announced gravely, was her “drinking companion and her close friend Opal Ginn,” who just “happens to be a long-time member of Jack Anderson’s staff.” Cook expressed “outrage” that this “close relationship” was not disclosed earlier and suggested that Anderson had “been less than candid with the committee.” Furthermore, the senator said, it “casts doubt on the veracity of Anderson’s account of how he obtained the memorandum and perhaps even on the origin and content of the memorandum itself.” Cook’s statement, according to a White House lawyer who helped prepare it, “all but said Jack Anderson was a liar.”

  The President was delighted. “You know, this thing could turn [around],” he said hopefully. Colson concurred and informed his boss that the Senate panel had now decided to summon Anderson’s secretary as a witness. “She may break,” Colson predicted. At the very least, “she’ll have to break down in the sense [of admitting] that she knew Dita Beard well. I don’t think she can dare get off the hook on that one.” Perhaps feeling nostalgic for his days investigating Alger Hiss, Nixon imagined taking on a similar role now with Jack Anderson. “I wish I were a member of the Senate on that committee,” the President said wistfully.

  “Oh! Ach! Oh!” Colson exclaimed. I just wake up in the middle of the night, wishing I could get behind that bench and go after him.”

  “It’s a golden opportunity [for] a fishing expedition,” Nixon observed, “[to] go after him and bring in everything else he said: ‘Well, now you’re testifying on this, Mr. Anderson, let me ask you about some of the other stories you’ve written,’ ‘Now, Mr. Chairman, we’re just testing the credibility of this witness.’ Then you’d tackle him: ‘Is that true, Mr. Anderson?’ ‘No, it’s false.’ . . . It is relevant, always, to attack the credibility of a witness.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Colson echoed. “You’d [take] them out of there in nothing flat. Of course, he’s slippery, he’s a very clever guy, I must say . . . He’s a very slick fellow. So is Hume.”

  In the end, however, what mattered was not slickness but truth. And the truth was that Beard and Ginn were not even remotely close. Although Anderson’s secretary and ITT’s lobbyist both frequented the same cocktail lounge, they had apparently conversed only once, at a retirement party for their bartender attended by about thirty-five people; that was when the group photograph that included the two women was taken. In fact, at that very party Beard had denounced Anderson as “a son of a bitch and I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.” The columnist compiled affidavits from the bartender and other witnesses that shot down Senator Cook’s story. Anderson sent it to the Republican lawmaker along with a demand that he eat his crow publicly by introducing the evidence into the hearing record. “I don’t particularly look forward to [this],” the senator was forced to announce the next day, “but I really ought to ask that it be put in the record . . . In all fairness, if I owe Mr. Anderson an apology, I certainly would extend it to him.” According to Dean, “Senator Cook was furious. He had been made a fool of by Colson,” who never bothered to verify the thirdhand rumor before passing it on and putting Cook “on the end of a fragile limb” that quickly snapped.

  Afterward, the President once again warned his staff to make sure that he was insulated from the scandal. “It’s very important to keep ITT away from the White House,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I’m not going to comment publicly on Dita Beard’s testimony or Jack Anderson’s charges.”

  But the President soon returned to directing damage control behind the scenes. For example, when one witness, a waiter at their cocktail lounge, insisted that Beard and Ginn were not friends, Nixon had a simple if illegal suggestion: “The waiter can be bought off.”

  To discredit Anderson further, according to Assistant Attorney General Mardian, Colson actually had the photo of Beard and Ginn doctored to insert Anderson’s face to make it appear that the muckraker was partying with the lobbyist. “He wasn’t in the picture so Colson figured he’d put him in the picture,” Mardian recalled. “He actually got [it] manufactured . . . I tried desperately, when I found out what the hell was going on, to keep it out of evidence” in the Senate probe, “and I kept it” from being introduced as an exhibit in the hearing. (It was not Colson’s first dirty trick on behalf of Nixon, or his last; it was not even Colson’s only White House forgery, since he also helped concoct fraudulent government cables to falsely implicate President Kennedy in a foreign assassination.)

  The ITT scandal had now escalated to the point of political sabotage. And it wasn’t over yet.

  Dita Beard had mysteriously vanishe
d.

  13

  FROM BURLESQUE TO GROTESQUE

  After Jack Anderson published his columns about her, Dita Beard told a friend that she feared she would end up “going to jail.” The ITT lobbyist then disappeared from Washington without a trace. The Senate issued a subpoena for Beard’s testimony, but twenty-four FBI agents searching in five states were unable to locate her. “Where I am going,” she confided to an intimate, “they won’t be able to find me, and I won’t be able to talk to them.”

  But Beard’s whereabouts were no mystery to President Nixon’s men, who helped hide her in the first place. G. Gordon Liddy, the former White House operative now employed at the Nixon reelection campaign, had whisked Beard on an airplane to Denver, where the lobbyist checked into a local hospital complaining of chest pains and waited for the heat to die down in Washington. “The fact that a White House undercover man had helped—or forced—Mrs. Beard to flee, ducking a congressional subpoena and trying to elude the FBI, meant that her memo and what she had told me in my two interviews with her were considered extremely explosive,” Brit Hume later wrote.

  White House aides briefed the President about their strategy for covering up the scandal.

  “What they want to do is get Dita Beard to . . . disavow the memo,” Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman said, “and then they can blow Jack Anderson out of the water.”

  “How would she do it?” Nixon wondered. “Would she admit something?”

  “They think so,” Haldeman replied.

  The President was skeptical: “How could she admit it’s a fake memo . . . without destroying herself?”

  “She thinks she’s destroying them,” Haldeman answered.

  Nixon was not persuaded. “My view is that she wrote it,” he told his staff, although she probably “did the typical thing” and exaggerated in the memo to impress her bosses; still, she might be willing to lie and deny that she wrote it just to get herself out of this jam.

  “Does she hate Anderson?” the President asked.

  “With a passion,” Colson responded. “If we could prove this one a hoax,” the White House aide told Nixon on another occasion, “it would discourage the hell out of them on others, you know, Anderson particularly, because he’ll be after us all year long” otherwise.

  The President’s men decided to dispatch E. Howard Hunt, the ex–CIA agent working for the White House Plumbers, on a clandestine mission to persuade Beard to repudiate her memo. Colson carefully instructed Hunt on how to approach the lobbyist: he was to “assure her that her friends wouldn’t reject her” and that “she would be forgiven” if she would just change her story to “admit” that she had fabricated the document and given it to Anderson. “We wanted to establish her complicity” in having “perpetrated [a] hoax,” Colson said.

  Hunt was warned to approach Beard in a physical disguise with a phony ID because “we don’t want you traced back to the White House.” To pay for his expenses, he was handed an envelope filled with cash from Nixon’s reelection campaign; his flight to Denver was booked by a White House secretary. Hunt arrived at Beard’s hospital room near midnight wearing makeup and an ill-fitting reddish brown wig, his voice disguised by an electronic alteration device provided by the CIA. The not-so-covert operative looked “very eerie,” Beard’s son remembered, with his hairpiece on “cockeyed, like he put it on in a dark car.”

  Hunt found Beard lying in her hospital bed, “her hair disheveled, her face bloated.” He gave her a box of roses but she was not fooled by any pretense of sentimentality: she checked to be sure he hadn’t hidden electronic bugs inside the flowers. Hunt then urged Beard to sign a statement denying her “involvement in the preparation and/or release of the memorandum” that Anderson had published. He promised that “her job at ITT was waiting for her as soon as she could return” and that “she and her family would be well taken care of for life.” He added that “the most useful action” now would be for Beard to “return to Washington as soon as possible, making a brief statement, denying authorship of the memorandum . . . and then collapse” in public to garner sympathy. “Whether she was to collapse in front of the microphones,” Haldeman said, “or while riding in a cab, was not made explicit.”

  But the cantankerous Beard refused to return to Washington to disavow her memo, let alone hold a press conference and collapse on cue. She insisted that she truly didn’t know Anderson’s secretary and hadn’t concocted the memo for the columnist. Her main concern was making sure that she would receive a “Christmas bonus,” which Hunt realized “was obviously a code for hush money.”

  Hunt called Colson late that night from a pay phone to pass on the bad news. Colson told Hunt to reassure Beard that her “Christmas bonus” would soon be delivered. But the President’s advisor refused to believe her denial about Jack Anderson. “She’s lying,” Colson insisted to Hunt: “Bear down on her and get her to tell the truth.” Hunt tried, but there was no budging Beard. She “wouldn’t admit that she had faked” the memo, Colson reported unhappily. Hunt returned to Washington empty-handed.

  In the Oval Office, aides informed the President about Hunt’s secret approach to Beard.

  “She’s in bad shape physically,” Colson said. “The best thing that could happen is if she bought the farm right now . . . There’s a chance of that any day of the week.”

  “That she’ll die?” Nixon asked.

  “She might well, Mr. President.”

  Meanwhile, the FBI tracked Beard to her Denver hospital. Her doctors claimed that she was too ill to be questioned because of a possible “impending coronary.” But senators, skeptical, asked for an independent investigation by the Denver Medical Association, whose cardiologists found no evidence that Beard had any kind of heart disease. A Senate panel made plans to fly to Colorado to interview the lobbyist at her bedside.

  Colson came up with a modified “ploy” for minimizing the fallout: Beard “will say this is a goddamn smear, dirtiest politics I’ve seen anywhere,” the White House aide told Nixon, “and then when they start getting into questions, she’ll pass out. And that’ll make one hell of an emotional scene . . . She calls for oxygen, the doctors rush oxygen to her. The senators are standing there feeling awful ghoulish. God!”

  Colson laughed out loud at the prospect, especially because Beard’s questioners would include Senator Edward Kennedy, whose recent accident at Chappaquiddick had led to the drowning of his female passenger. “Here’s Teddy Kennedy,” Colson chortled, and “he doesn’t want to risk a woman dying, he’s scared to death of it.”

  The President warmed to the plan. If Beard broke down under Kennedy’s questioning, Nixon suggested, Colson should send the senator untraceable telegrams demanding: “Isn’t one woman on your hands enough?”

  The Chief Executive also proposed another dirty trick to play on Kennedy. “I have an idea,” Nixon declared, “in terms of an anonymous letter. Why not one to Kennedy—it might scare the living bejesus out of him—saying ‘Senator, get off of this . . . I work for ITT. I’m scared to death that the memo is a fake. You’d better protect yourself fast: within the next few days, it’s going to come out.’ ”

  “That’s a damn good idea,” Colson affirmed.

  At the end of March, Kennedy and the rest of his Senate subcommittee traveled to Denver to interview Beard under oath from her hospital room. “She’ll collapse at the right time,” Colson assured the President. “Mrs. Beard is well programmed for her testimony,” Colson later added. She’s also ready to grab the oxygen mask when Teddy Kennedy starts burrowing in on her.”

  “Is she programmed to die at the right time?” Haldeman joked.

  “I haven’t figured out how to do it,” Colson replied. “She might. She’s in a very hysterical mood.”

  In Denver, Beard posed for photographers with the senators who had come to question her. She lay in bed, dressed in a cotton nightgown, with an oxygen tube attached to her nose and wires connecting her to a heart-monitoring machine. Beard “alter
nately sucked on cigarettes and gulped from her oxygen mask” while members of Congress “stood awkwardly around her bed,” Kennedy remembered. “It makes you feel like some sort of ghoul,” another senator commented self-consciously, just as Colson had predicted.

  Beard now capitulated to the forces arrayed against her. “I want this committee and the world to know that the Anderson memorandum is not my memorandum,” she announced, “and that I shall spend the rest of my life, for however long that might be, in an unceasing effort to find out who did this to me.” Anderson’s memo was a “hoax,” Beard insisted, her initials on it “a forgery.” Although she admitted that parts of the memo sounded familiar, she was certain that the most damaging portions had been fabricated.

  As the White House had planned, after an hour of questioning, Beard clutched her chest, fell back on her pillows, and began moaning. Beard’s doctors rushed to her side; the senators were abruptly ushered out of the room. “They all thought they’d have her blood on their hands,” one reporter at the scene recalled, “but she was obviously faking it.” Humorist Art Buchwald wrote that the “salty woman lobbyist” deserved an Oscar “for her dramatic role in ‘The Jack Anderson Papers’ ” melodrama because Beard “won the hearts of America in the famous hospital scene.”