Being Nixon: A Man Divided

by Evan Thomas

Two days after Nixon returned, columnist Jack Anderson reported what appeared to be a scandalous payoff of the Nixon administration. In his Washington Post column, the muckraker claimed to have a memo proving that the global conglomerate, International Telephone and Telegraph had given the Republican Party $400,000 for its upcoming convention expenses. The quid pro quo was a favorable resolution in a federal antitrust case that threatened to break up the company. Led by Larry O’Brien, the Democrats jumped on the story as a way to diminish Nixon’s China triumph. Senator Edward Kennedy began Judiciary Committee hearings on the scandal, which the establishment press duly hyped. Or so it seemed to Nixon, who was furious. In fact, the president had tried to quash the antitrust case—but not in return for a political contribution. As Nixon later explained in his memoirs, he had intervened because Justice Department bureaucrats had defied his order not to break up a company simply because it was big.22 The White House was sure that the incriminating payoff memo, supposedly written by an ITT lobbyist named Dita Beard, was a forgery. To prove it, E. Howard Hunt was dispatched to confront Beard in her hospital bed, where she had collapsed in the midst of the scandal. Wearing a red wig and a voice-altering device supplied by the CIA, the Plumber grilled the lobbyist, who protested her innocence in the whole affair (she had been bragging, exaggerating her clout). The case quickly devol...