Still, Beard’s doctor declared the incident “a harbinger of possible” cardiac distress; she “will probably never be able to testify as long as she lives.” Beard’s lawyer, a Republican activist paid by ITT, claimed that her “near” heart attack was a “direct result of Anderson and Hume’s cruel harassment and persecution of this lady.” Reading from a previously prepared statement, Beard’s attorney blamed the “irresponsible . . . ruthless . . . vicious” columnist who uncovered the scandal:
That a sick and distraught woman responsible for the upbringing of five children has been driven to the point that she would risk her life to ensure that the truth be made public is a sad and disgusting commentary on the almost untrammeled power of Jack Anderson, an arrogant and brazen journalist, and his pathetic muckraking investigator Brit Hume . . . Sadly the alleged journalist Jack Anderson doesn’t want to report the news—he wants to get someone.
“At last we’ve turned the corner,” Colson exulted. “We’ve started to reverse the bad news.” Soon, the scandal would be “all over.”
But Beard’s belated disavowal faced a skeptical audience. Four other witnesses, including Republicans who were close to the lobbyist, publicly testified that she had acknowledged writing the memo; even ITT officials admitted privately that the “memo was hers.” Beard’s sudden new denial “seemed at best peculiar,” Time pointed out, “since Anderson’s assistant had showed her the memo three weeks before, giving her plenty of time to denounce it,” which she had notably failed to do. “If the memo was a fake,” the magazine asked, “why did ITT go to the trouble of shredding its documents?” Besides, “ITT’s defenders went to some lengths to portray Mrs. Beard as a sometimes irrational incompetent. Having first tried to discredit her, they are hard pressed to defend what she says now.”
In response, Colson “scrambled to rehabilitate her image in the media, an image he himself had sought to discredit by leaking stories that she was a sad old drunkard,” White House counsel John Dean wrote. “Suddenly, stories appeared concerning her distinguished career at ITT.” As Anderson put it, “ITT’s transformation of Beard from boozy perpetrator to stricken victim had begun.”
Less than a week after senators were told that Beard was too sick to answer their questions, she sneaked out of the hospital to a nearby apartment for an interview with the CBS program 60 Minutes. To emphasize her infirmity, Beard put a medical gown over her clothes while her lawyer monitored her TV performance. “The ground rules she established,” correspondent Mike Wallace told viewers, were that “we would not press her, because of her heart condition, on matters that she or her attorney might find sensitive.” Congressional Republicans were even more pliant. “The pro-ITT senators, who two weeks before had been setting up Mrs. Beard as a zombie, now embraced her as the sole repository of truth,” Anderson wrote. “Democrats smelled a rodent.” Even Haldeman conceded that Beard’s newly minted denial was “greeted with general derision.” Commentator Nicholas von Hoffman thought that the “case has long since passed from scandal to vaudeville.” The headline over a Washington Post editorial suggested another evolution: FROM BURLESQUE TO GROTESQUE.
For his part, at least in public, Anderson was charitable about Beard’s sudden change in position. “The only explanation I can give is that she is fifty-three, divorced, and has five children and hospital bills to pay,” the columnist told reporters. “She is at ITT’s economic mercy.” Privately, Anderson expressed a different view. “This is the stupidest thing they could have done,” he said to Hume. “They’ll never get away with this.” If the other side was going to engage in such obvious flimflam, Anderson decided to try some himself. He had Hume hooked up to a polygraph machine to test whether his legman was telling the truth that Beard had admitted writing the memo. Not surprisingly, Hume passed the exam. “We had fun brandishing those tests and demanding that the other witnesses follow suit,” Anderson recalled, “but none of them, patriots that they were, wanted any part of that revolution.”
In the Oval Office, the President and his aides worried less about the columnist’s promotional theatrics than about his continued digging into the administration’s cover-up.
“Now, Anderson is an unscrupulous son of a bitch,” Colson told Nixon, so “we had Secret Service [checking] on our phones all week just because we’re concerned about Anderson.”
“You mean maybe he’s got an operative in your office?” the President asked.
“I don’t think in mine,” Colson replied.
“Does he have a tap?” Nixon wondered. “Does he have a tap on the White House phones?”
“Well, Secret Service checked and said no.”
In fact, the only taps were the ones the White House itself was secretly making at the President’s direction. But Anderson’s history of bugging still worried Nixon and his men.
The President and his aides plotted what to do next. “The plan,” Haldeman wrote in his diary, was to get Senate “Republicans [to] say they won’t go any further, this is a fraud” and “we should investigate Anderson” instead of ITT. A White House advisor revived the idea of prosecuting Anderson for receiving stolen property, since the ITT memos were “pilfered documents.” The legal “proof is not difficult” to establish, the aide noted, though Anderson’s “martyrdom might not be worth it.”
Ultimately, the Chief Executive decided that the only possible way to wiggle out of the scandal would be to produce an independent scientific analysis concluding that the Beard memo was fake. The lobbyist’s self-interested statement “discrediting Anderson,” the President recognized, “of course won’t do it, you’ve got to have the hard thing.” Nixon recommended that the FBI’s well-regarded laboratory investigate whether the font and ink on Beard’s memo matched that of her office typewriter. “It’s so reminiscent of the Hiss case, where the typewriter broke the case,” the President mused.
Colson was enthusiastic. “Oh, God!” he exclaimed to Nixon, the FBI director hated Anderson “with a passion.” Clearly, his lab would produce the results the White House wanted. “I don’t think J. Edgar Hoover has any scruples at all, when it comes to getting Anderson,” Colson added. “If the memo is proven a fraud, then [Senator] Eastland will close the hearings down and then—”
“Well, he’s got to do more than that,” the President interrupted. “He’s got to go after Anderson.”
“Well, that’s right,” Colson agreed. “That’s what I want to do. But we’ve got to prove it’s a fraud first . . . and then let’s go after Anderson.”
Because Hoover disliked the abrasive Colson, White House counsel Dean said, “I was sent to enlist the director’s cooperation, a delicate mission.” Hoover—“immaculately dressed [and] perfumed”—welcomed the young lawyer to his Justice Department office. “Mr. Hoover,” Dean told the director, we “have good reason to believe the so-called Dita Beard memorandum is a phony, and we’d like to have your lab test it because we are sure that your test will confirm that it is a forgery.” Dean added that “Jack Anderson started it all with the memo, and if we can show it’s a forgery—”
“I understand exactly, Mr. Dean, what you need,” Hoover interrupted, “and I’m delighted to be of service. Jack Anderson is the lowest form of human being to walk the earth. He’s a muckraker who lies, steals, and let me tell you this, Mr. Dean, he’ll go lower than dog shit for a story.” The FBI director was not being metaphorical. It turned out that when Anderson’s staff went through Hoover’s trash the year before, he had retaliated by instructing his butler to put his dog’s feces in the garbage to soil the reporter’s hands. “Lower than dog shit,” Hoover repeated, his jowls shaking with anger.
Dean suppressed a chuckle because it was obviously no laughing matter to Hoover.
“Mr. Dean,” the FBI director added, “if you’d like some material from our files on Jack Anderson, I’d be pleased to send it over.”
The President’s counsel returned triumphantly to the White House, “confident Hoover would supply the
report” that Nixon needed to discredit Anderson and his memo.
Anderson did not know that the FBI offered to forward his dossier to the White House, but he was understandably alarmed when he learned that Hoover’s laboratory would conduct tests to determine the authenticity of his memo. “I thought we were sunk,” the usually cheerful columnist said. “Hoover would surely be delighted to get his hands on evidence that he could turn against me.” The fact that Anderson had received the memo anonymously in the mail meant that he could not be certain it was genuine. Indeed, he had taken a substantial risk by publishing his story and distributing the explosive document to Congress and the media when he had no idea who sent it to him in the first place.
But Anderson had learned long ago to bluff his way to victory. He announced that he would not “drag” his (unknown) source in to testify publicly and asked reporters: “Do you think we would give the committee a document we didn’t know was authentic?” In truth, Anderson was more rattled than he let on. “In the past, I had tended to laugh off attacks by high officials as a kind of public validation of my prowess, a sign I was really getting to ’em,” he later wrote, “but as the barrage kept up, my bravado was wilting. In public relations as in physics, there is such a thing as the accumulation of a critical mass that, once formed, will blow all before it.” Nevertheless, Anderson’s account seemed more believable than the ever-changing White House dodges. “Is it seriously contended that columnist Jack Anderson forged the memo,” New York Times columnist Tom Wicker inquired incredulously, “and if so, why and how?”
Still, Anderson had only himself to blame for the FBI probe. Why? Because he had voluntarily given his memo to Senator Eastland in the first place as part of his early effort to gin up congressional hearings to publicize his story. But without notifying Anderson or even other senators on his committee, Eastland had then passed the memo to top Justice Department officials, who delivered it to the White House. “The principal piece of evidence in the case, submitted formally by Jack and myself, had, in effect, been slipped secretly to the defendant,” Hume realized, and the slipshod chain of custody “left open the possibility it could be tampered with along the way.” Anderson publicly denounced “the extreme impropriety of allowing a party in interest in a congressional investigation to take possession of a vital piece of evidence.” He also complained that Eastland had not asked his permission before doing so.
“His permission,” Nixon snorted in response. “That’s the most arrogant thing I’ve ever heard of . . . Well, I would certainly think, though, that Eastland would get stirred up about that goddamn remark of Anderson’s.”
“Isn’t that outrageous?” Colson agreed.
Despite their bluster, Anderson and Hume recognized all too well that they now had no real power to stop the administration from doing whatever it wanted with the memo, although they hoped their public protests “would discourage any funny business” from the FBI lab and “prepare the way” for them to “denounce a dishonest report, if one were made.”
Perhaps because of his own history of dirty-trick forgeries, Colson truly believed that the Beard memo had been faked. “It’s more than a gut feeling, damn it,” he told the President. There are “too many things that just don’t add up and we’re going to find, somewhere, a nigger in the woodpile.”
The next day, Colson told Nixon that he feared the FBI was conducting only a “cursory analysis” of the memo. “Kick them in the ass, the President instructed.”
Nixon’s men did what they were told and exerted pressure to prevent FBI scientists from reaching unwanted results. With White House approval, ITT “flooded the FBI with documents” arguing that Beard’s memo was fake. Dean also suggested that FBI lab technicians meet with ITT’s document experts for guidance. “They are persistent, aren’t they?” Hoover marveled. With the help of Justice Department prosecutors, an ITT representative even sneaked into the FBI to see how its laboratory was analyzing the memo.
Meanwhile, ITT demanded physical possession of the document so that the corporation’s not-so-independent experts could conduct their own tests on the document. This request made Dean “nervous,” the White House counsel said, because “the FBI never touched evidence analyzed by anyone else. Hoover had an iron rule against competition [to prevent] the possibility of contradiction. I was afraid of what Hoover might do if he found out we had sent the original to an outside expert.” But Colson decided “it was vital” for ITT to analyze the memo and “assured” Dean that “no one would know” about it. With the aid of Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray, Dean smuggled the document out of the FBI laboratory. ITT’s analyst removed two small corners of the original Beard memo to perform chemical tests and then, unsurprisingly, once again announced that the memo was phony.
Nonetheless, on March 18, Hoover’s deputy, W. Mark Felt, informed Dean that the FBI concluded that the Beard memo was “probably authentic.” Dean read the draft of the Bureau’s report with “dismay. It was worse than I had expected.” Dean tried to argue that the FBI’s verdict should be “modified” so it wouldn’t conflict with ITT’s. But Felt replied that such a change was “completely out of the question.” Dean insisted that Felt “check with Hoover. Tell him the request comes from the White House.” Hoover exploded at the demand. “Call Dean right back and tell him I said for him to go jump in the lake!” the FBI director told his underling. “I want to cooperate when I can, but this request is completely improper!” Felt “would not budge,” Dean said, “because the director would not budge.”
The President was irate. “At least they could say ‘We can’t tell,’ ” Nixon fumed. That, at least, would establish enough doubt for the White House to keep insisting that the document was forged. Colson said he “had never before seen the President so furious.”
And so—“oblivious to unfavorable developments and undaunted by failure,” Dean said—Colson “kept coming back again like a battering ram.” He even went behind Hoover’s back to try to get FBI lab technicians to “falsify their findings,” Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian recalled. Colson’s “machinations” were so “unbelievable,” Mardian said, that he “had to go to [presidential confidant John] Mitchell and get him to go to Nixon to tell Colson to stop it.”
On March 21, the President received more bad news. “We need your help with J. Edgar Hoover,” Ehrlichman told Nixon. White House aides had made “a bad judgment call” and given the original Beard memo to ITT without informing the FBI. “This could be very, very embarrassing all the way around,” Ehrlichman feared, “because this damn document was floating around [ITT’s corporate headquarters] with no government people anywhere near it.” Ehrlichman recommended trying “to cover that” by getting Hoover’s retroactive permission to forward the memo to ITT. “This is an extraordinary thing for the Bureau to have to do,” Ehrlichman realized, and it would require the President’s personal intervention to pull off.
Nixon was skeptical that Hoover would go along: “I just got to say, this is a long shot.” Ehrlichman didn’t disagree but asked the President to “call Hoover and simply say he will be getting a call from me and that you would personally appreciate his cooperation in the request that will be made. You don’t even have to use the words ITT.”
“Oh, I won’t,” Nixon assured his aide.
Ehrlichman thought the argument most likely to persuade Hoover would be that “this is in his best interests because it’ll be in the direction of getting Anderson.” The next day, Ehrlichman informed the President that he had talked to Hoover and explained that it would be to their “mutual advantage” to discredit Anderson. “Yeah,” Hoover replied, “I’d do anything to get that son of a bitch.”
But as much as the FBI director disliked Anderson, he hated even more being played for a fool. Hoover was livid when he learned that the White House had sneaked the Beard memo from the FBI lab to ITT without his knowledge or approval. “Ehrlichman could not budge the director an inch,” a discouraged Dean repor
ted. Indeed, instead of helping the White House cover its tracks, Hoover threatened to have ITT’s document expert indicted for “tampering with FBI evidence.”
As the final coup de grâce, the FBI sent the White House its promised dossier on Anderson. “Chuck, you are going to be amazed what’s in Hoover’s famous files,” Dean told Colson. “Well?” Colson asked. “Newspaper and magazine clippings,” Dean replied. “Shit!” Colson exclaimed. In fact, the FBI had amassed more than fifty bulging files on Anderson that were filled with unsubstantiated allegations of impropriety that went back decades and totaled thousands of pages. But Hoover now decided not to share them with the Nixon White House. “I don’t understand Edgar sometimes,” the President told his staff. “He hates Anderson.”
On March 23, the FBI director sent Senator Eastland a letter stating that the font and ink on Beard’s memo were “substantially similar” to other documents from her typewriter and that the margins and indentations of her memo were “closely similar” to others that the lobbyist wrote at the time. Hoover concluded that there was “nothing . . . to suggest” that the document was faked or that Anderson had manufactured it.
“In other words,” the President asked, “it supports Anderson, right?”
“It supports Anderson,” Colson had to concede.
The story was front-page news around the country. The FBI was “unable to prove” that the memo “published by columnist Jack Anderson is a phony,” the Associated Press reported. Senator Edward Kennedy issued a triumphant statement proclaiming that the FBI report “confirms unequivocally” that the document “submitted by Jack Anderson” was genuine. Not even the President’s fiercest loyalists dared challenge the FBI findings.
Poisoning The Press Page 30
