Then, on the way back, in March 1972, Hunt visited International Telephone and Telegraph lobbyist Dita Beard. Before he spoke with her, he disguised himself in a red wig. He also used a voice modulator.
So Howard Hunt was sent to cajole Beard into claiming she’d never written such a memo.
“Who exactly do you represent?” Dita Beard’s daughter asked of the redheaded stranger who appeared on her doorstep.
“High Washington levels who are interested in your mother’s welfare,” he replied.
Beard’s public recantation clamped the lid on what Nixon feared was the biggest threat to his reelection so far. Convention plans were shifted to the island city of Miami Beach: same palm trees and ocean vistas, with the added advantage of placating the networks, which would be able to keep their equipment in place from the Democrats’ convention in July.
Still and all, through spring, the ITT lid threatened to blow.
Which was why G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt brainstormed their own solution to the problem. Liddy [doubling work at CREEP] suggested, at a meeting with Hunt and a physician who once specialized in nondetectable “accidents” for the CIA, was that Jack Anderson be assassinated—a car crash, perhaps, or a drugging; or, Liddy suggested, Anderson could “just become a fatal victim of the notorious Washington street-crime rate.” Their consultation completed, Liddy pulled out a $100 bill from Committee to Re-Elect the President funds to pay the good doctor for his time.