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She married a fighter pilot, Benjamin Atwood, in 1945. She declines to talk about the marriage except to say that they had three children. Atwood died in a plane crash in 1967, many years after they were divorced. In 1952, she married Cameron Randolph Beard, a flag manufacturer, and they had two children. He was "very wealthy, very wonderful, and also, he was an alcoholic. So there's me and five children, a drunk husband and two dogs." One son was injured in an automobile accident ("You can still see the tire prints across his chest"), and she tried to nurse them both. That, she says, was when her heart began to bother her. (She and Beard are divorced, and he now lives in retirement on a Tennessee farm, where he is a successful member of Alcoholics Anonymous.) "With no father or husband to get in the way, the kids and I did very well. I knew a woman had no right to bring up boys, so I put the two older boys into military schools. Then I had a housekeeper who was like a member of the family—just wonderful."
That brought Dita up to the point of becoming a lobbyist for ITT. Throughout her reminiscing, she remained good humored and spoke with a strong voice. "When my health was good, I wasn't afraid of anything," Dita said in parting. "Not even of that bunch of little bums coming out here. But I don't know how I'm going to face it."
On a ground-floor conference room of the hospital, workmen were setting up tan folding chairs from which Dita Beard would be quizzed by seven members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She would be wheel-chaired to the room and face them from a bed. A nurse with emergency equipment would be stationed outside the door.