Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture by Mark Feldstein

Author:Mark Feldstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: mom 04/05/2014
ISBN: 9780374235307
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

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.

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