The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Some campaign days began at 7:00 A.M. and ended at 3:00 A.M. the following day, only to start again at 7:00. Pat, described by the press as “always cheery, never weary,” traveled with her husband. She packed for him, readers were told, making sure he had a plaid smoking jacket to work in—“to keep his suits unwrinkled for the day’s appearances.” When Nixon got a throat infection, he pushed on with the help of antibiotics and a cortisone throat spray. When he lost his voice, Pat stepped up to the mike and finished a speech for him.

  A tour manager, press aides, and secretaries with typewriters and a duplicating machine manned the work area in Nixon’s flying headquarters. A corps of advance men ranged ahead, preparing the way at each new stop. One of them was a thirty-year-old advertising man on leave of absence from J. Walter Thompson, Bob Haldeman. It was now, he would recall, that the future chief of staff began to be “closer to Nixon than just a casual constituent.”

  As the Republicans rode to victory that November, Murray Chotiner had virtually disappeared from the scene. Forced from public view since the negative headlines in the spring, he was to function for years to come strictly from the shadows.

  Even as Nixon managed to escape the taint of the Chotiner connection, he was stepping into another snare. This time the stakes—and the dollar figures—were higher than ever before. So were the risks, and the long-term damage would be horrendous. Still, Nixon seemed especially beguiled by this new association and would return to it until it inflicted one of his most grievous wounds at Watergate. The fatal attraction in this case was the helping hand, and the money, of the man one of America’s most accomplished historians has called “the most powerful and dangerous fat cat of them all”5: Howard Hughes.

  _____

  In 1956, as Eisenhower dithered over whether Nixon should again be given the vice presidential slot, Hughes had just turned fifty. The spoiled heir of a Texan who had invented a revolutionary oil-drilling tool, he was afflicted with deafness, was hypochondriacal, drug-addicted, bisexual, and—it was evident even then—eccentric to the point of being mentally disturbed. He was also brilliant, a record-breaking flier, a prolific filmmaker, the owner of Trans World Airlines, and a major government defense contractor operating principally out of California. He had a fortune somewhere in the range of $350 million, making him one of the richest men on the planet.

  Howard Hughes was also utterly unscrupulous, concerned above all with getting his own way. Senate investigators, probing his squandering of millions of dollars in government money during World War II, had uncovered massive evidence of influence buying. One of Hughes’s targets had been President Roosevelt’s son Elliott. In 1944, when Vice President Harry Truman was on the campaign trail for the ailing FDR, Hughes had himself gone to the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to give Truman a cash contribution. Four years later he sent an emissary to New York with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash for Truman’s Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey.

  Hughes was passionately anti-Communist but otherwise apolitical. His senior aide for thirty-two years, Noah Dietrich, never learned whether his boss considered himself a Republican or a Democrat. Party affiliation mattered little to Hughes, so long as he could bend politicians to his will.

  “I can buy any man in the world,” he boasted, and operated on that principle. “He figured he could buy his way to favor,” Dietrich said years later. “ ‘Everybody has a price,’ he always said. And he was willing to offer that price. . . . He financed Los Angeles councilmen and county supervisors, tax assessors, sheriffs, state senators and assemblymen, district attorneys, governors, congressmen and senators, judges—yes, and vice presidents. . . .”

  “I never met Hughes,” Richard Nixon said in a taped interview in 1988, admitting only that he had twice spoken with the billionaire on the telephone. He had made the same claim in 1972, to Bob Haldeman, adding that one of the phone calls concerned Hughes’s suggestion that Nixon use a 707 Superjet to impress the Soviets on his 1959 visit to Moscow.

  Nixon was almost certainly lying about the extent of his relationship with Hughes. Adela Rogers St. Johns, a veteran writer who supported and advised Nixon in the fifties, said she introduced the two men. Her association with Nixon dated back to the time that the young Nixon had delivered groceries to the ranch near Whittier owned by St. Johns’s first husband. Nixon’s nephew Don, son of his brother Donald, said in 1996 that Hughes was “an old buddy of my dad’s.” He remembered, as a boy, meeting Hughes. “He was a strange-looking guy, tall, quiet, drove a white, two-door Chevy. . . . My dad used to meet him in parking lots, places like that. . . .”

  Herb Klein, the longtime Nixon press aide, told the author that Richard Nixon first “personally encountered” Hughes in either the forties or fifties. If there had ever been documentation of the relationship, though, it has long since been been removed from available files. One telltale memo, however, survives in the records of the Nixon vice presidency at the National Archives. (See facsimile on following page.) Written on January 23, 1959, by Nixon’s military aide Don Hughes (no relation to Howard), it reads: “I spoke with Howard Hughes and relayed your message. He was most happy and enthusiastic over seeing you in California. He cannot come East at this time. I’ll arrange an appointment when your California plans are firm.”

  “I don’t remember what it was about,” General Hughes said in a recent interview. “As I remember it, Howard Hughes called the vice president. They talked, and the boss put me on the phone, and introduced me to him. The vice president said, ‘Anytime you want to get ahold of me call Don Hughes.’ . . . I got three or four calls from Howard Hughes. He would call using the name Mr. Thomas. . . . He was very, very polite, had a high, whiny voice, very low-key, very solicitous. . . . I think Hughes wanted to feel that he could reach out whenever he wanted. . . .”

  Noah Dietrich, certainly the closest person to Hughes at the time, said the billionaire had supported Nixon as early as the 1946 run for Congress and contributed to every subsequent campaign. He also provided large sums for the personal use of Nixon and members of his family. Nixon, for his part, went out of his way while serving in the Senate to praise Hughes for the measures he was taking against filmmakers he believed to be Communists. “Hughes’ stand,” he said, “deserved the attention and approval of every man and woman who believes the forces of subversion must be wiped out.”

  By 1954, according to Chuck Giancana—brother of the Chicago mob boss, Sam—Hughes was telling associates that he had Vice President Nixon “eating out of his hand.” The first detailed evidence of Hughes’s help and financial largess, though, dates from 1956, during the long period of uncertainty over whether Nixon would again be Eisenhower’s running mate.

  In July that year Harold Stassen, former Minnesota governor and assistant on disarmament to the president, held a press conference. A specially commissioned poll, he announced, had indicated that Governor Christian Herter of Massachusetts would be a far more attractive vice presidential candidate than Richard Nixon. Stassen urged the Republican party to support Herter and asked Nixon to back out. His initiative gave rise to what became known as the Dump Nixon movement.

  Years later Nixon made light of this effort, saying it was the work of “wishful thinkers” from whom he “could afford to remain aloof.” At the time, however, he was not at all aloof. “He was running scared,” recalled Patrick Hillings. A push to rally support for Nixon was soon under way, boosted by a secret operation financed by Howard Hughes.

  Soon after the Stassen press conference the telephone rang in the Washington office of Robert A. Maheu Associates, a company that offered “private investigations,” that catchall term for a multitude of shadowy services. Maheu, aged thirty-nine, had been an undercover agent for the FBI during the war and was now on a monthly retainer for the CIA. He said later that his role was to perform “impossible missions.” (His exploits, indeed, are said to have inspired the TV series Mission: Impossible.)

  The agency assigned Maheu the sort of tasks it
needed to keep “deniable,” activities that ranged from providing sex services for some foreign statesmen to the sexual compromising of others, illegal wiretaps, and assassination planning. He had also worked, at Nixon’s bidding, on an undercover operation against the Greek oil tycoon Aristotle Onassis.* For some time now, too, Maheu had been handling assignments for Howard Hughes.

  The Hughes work had begun prosaically enough. The billionaire had asked for an investigation of the first husband of the woman he was soon to marry, the actress Jean Peters. Soon afterward came instructions to snoop on Ava Gardner to find out who she was seeing. Then, following Maheu’s successful handling of a would-be blackmailer, Hughes phoned to express his satisfaction. “From that point on,” as Maheu put it, “I was Howard’s man,” eventually replacing Dietrich and serving Hughes for fifteen years. First, though, came the assignment of ensuring that Stassen would fail to unseat Nixon as Eisenhower’s running mate.

  The operation to block Stassen was bankrolled by Hughes after a request by unnamed “leading Republicans.” Maheu responded by hiring an undercover man to pose as a volunteer and infiltrate Stassen’s headquarters. He thus learned that Stassen was planning to unveil a new opinion poll at the convention. It was to be a phony poll, Maheu has claimed, heavily stacked against Nixon. To preempt Stassen’s plan, Maheu used Hughes money to conduct a poll of his own, with results showing that far from lagging behind as a vote getter, Nixon was far ahead.

  The penetration of Stassen’s office, meanwhile, yielded even more ammunition. “There was a ‘cover’ placed on Stassen’s wastepaper basket,” Maheu said in the seventies, “and the results of that cover . . . well, let’s say it turned the tide.” Asked what information was found in the basket, Maheu shook his head. “It wouldn’t,” he said, “be in anyone’s best interests to discuss it.” Stassen, for his part, was still insisting years later that “the whole story cannot yet be told.”

  The 1956 convention ended in total victory for the Nixon forces. The climax came when, minutes after Stassen had regaled the press with the poll unfavorable to Nixon, a U.S. senator made him look foolish by announcing the opposite findings provided by Maheu. Stassen capitulated and wound up being forced to second Nixon’s nomination in the name of party unity.

  “Nixon knew what I had done for him,” Maheu said in 1996, “but he expressed no gratitude. . . . I saw him the day after we defeated the Stassen threat; he never even said thank you.” Hughes, for his part, was delighted that Nixon had been so well looked after. “It wasn’t that he thought Nixon was doing such a good job,” Maheu reflected. “It was more that he felt the vice president was malleable.”

  In December 1956, just weeks after Eisenhower and Nixon were returned to the White House, Hughes provided a different sort of assistance. While the Stassen episode remained a secret for nearly twenty years, this new intervention soon leaked, causing incalculable damage to Nixon’s political hopes and long-term reputation. According to Noah Dietrich, he brought the disaster on himself.

  It began, Dietrich said, with a call to Hughes’s Los Angeles headquarters by one of the millionaire’s lawyers, Frank Waters. “Look, Noah,” Dietrich quoted Waters as saying, “Nixon keeps approaching me. . . . His brother, Don, is having financial difficulties with his restaurant in Whittier. The Vice President would like us to help him.”

  “Help him in what way?” Dietrich asked.

  “He needs some cash. Actually, he needs two hundred and five thousand dollars.”

  Even Dietrich, long used to Hughes’s excesses, balked at this figure: $205,000 in 1956 was the equivalent of more than $1.25 million today. “That,” he said, “is something I’m not going to take the responsibility for.” Although he regularly disbursed some $500,000 per year for political purposes, it typically went out in relatively small amounts, never as such an enormous amount for a single individual. Dietrich explained that Hughes himself would have to authorize such a huge payment, and he subsequently did. “Hughes called me the next morning. . . . He said, ‘I don’t give a darn about the size of it. I want to do it, because it’s a chance to cement a relationship.’ ”

  The only relationship Hughes had any motive to cement was the one he had with Richard Nixon. There would have been no gain whatsoever in committing such a sum to Donald Nixon, an ebullient and overambitious middle-level businessman who was forever embarking on grandiose schemes. He was president of Nixon’s Inc., a business consisting of a drive-in restaurant featuring a sandwich called the Nixonburger, the grocery store that had once been his parents’, and a coffee shop—all in Whittier—and was building another Nixon drive-in at Anaheim. He also had major debts and faced bankruptcy if he failed to obtain major financing.

  As Dietrich put it, “The whole thing had a bad smell to it.” He was even more troubled when told that the $205,000 was to be accounted for as a loan. The Hughes Tool Company was not in the habit of making loans, let alone to businessmen totally unconnected to the oil or aviation business. The proposed loan, moreover, was to be secured with the deeds of a vacant lot and a gas station lease worth less than half its value. A transaction of this sort with the brother of the vice president of the United States, by a company holding major government contracts, would look highly suspicious.

  Dietrich, who liked Nixon and had voted for him, was so worried that he flew to Washington with a warning. “I feel compelled to tell you,” he informed Nixon, “if this loan becomes public information, it could mean the end of your political career.” Unfazed, Nixon replied, “Noah, my family comes ahead of my political career, and Don wants this and he’s got to have it to survive.”

  The loan duly went ahead, but under conditions of extraordinary secrecy. On paper it was made not by Hughes Tool but by Hughes’s attorney, Frank Waters, a former Republican politician and a friend of both Nixon brothers. Waters gave the money to Nixon’s mother, who in turn made a loan to Nixon’s Inc. Months later, to bury the transaction even deeper, the paperwork was moved out of Waters’s name into that of an accountant not on the Hughes payroll.

  Hughes’s massive cash outlay disappeared within weeks of reaching Donald Nixon. Whatever happened to the money—it was supposedly used to service old debts—Nixon’s Inc. was still drowning in a sea of red ink. Dietrich made a last-ditch effort to save it from going under, first asking Richard Nixon’s approval to bring in accountants to reorganize the business. When Donald resisted their suggestions, Dietrich again traveled to Washington to see the vice president. Richard Nixon rebuffed him, saying, “Pull ’em off. . . . my brother wants to run it his way.” Nixon’s Inc. did go under two weeks later, just as the accountants had predicted.

  The Hughes loan might well have remained secret forever were it not for the very measures taken to conceal it. By 1960, when Nixon and Kennedy were battling for the White House, the accountant holding the deeds had fallen out with Hughes officials. A Democrat, he leaked the story to the Kennedy camp, which ensured the press heard about it. Nixon would never again be free of the Hughes loan scandal. It was to be investigated and reinvestigated—in 1960, 1962, 1968, and 1972.

  When questioned, Nixon tried either to make light of the loan or to claim he had not been involved. “I had nothing to do with making that loan,” he told one journalist. “It was to my brother. . . . My mother deeded the property to the lenders. She lost everything she had. . . .” There is no evidence that Hannah Nixon “lost everything she had.” Although the vacant lot used as collateral was eventually transferred to Hughes’s proxies, she retained her house and other properties. Indeed, the conditions of the Hughes loan waived “all rights to assert any claim or deficiency against Hannah Nixon.”

  As for Richard’s insistence that he had played no role in the transaction, signs to the contrary abound. The signatory on the lease on the vacant lot, executed shortly before the loan was made, was notorized by one William Ridgeley. This was an employee of the disbursing office of the U.S. Senate in Washington, where the vice president’s office was then lo
cated. Nixon, moreover, covered up not only his exchanges with Dietrich but other compromising details. During a meeting about the loan a Hughes lawyer had gone out at one point to “call Dick” and returned saying he had spoken with “an aide to the vice president.” Thereafter Nixon was referred to in Hughes reports and correspondence in code as the Eastern Division or just plain East. “There was never any confusion,” one of the accountants said long afterward. “It was the vice president.”

  Nixon later flew to California to discuss conveyancing of the property provided as security for the loan, “to establish a capital gains situation for his mother.” It was his old law partner Thomas Bewley who drew up the documents that ensured Hannah Nixon would pay no tax on the transaction. Finally the corporation commissioners’ office in Los Angeles contained a list of proposed stockholders in Nixon’s Inc. One of the names on it was Richard M. Nixon.

  Who profited from the transaction? When Donald Nixon’s business was floundering, Dietrich said, he suggested a linkup with the Carnation Milk Company. When it finally collapsed, Donald was appointed to a lucrative post as PR executive for Carnation. The company’s president, Alford Ghormley, had been a contributor to the Nixon fund, and then Senator Nixon had been responsive to his pressure on milk quotas.*

  Did Nixon personally profit from the Hughes loan?

  Contacted in 1996, Hughes’s attorney Frank Waters refused to be drawn on whether the $205,000 went not to Donald’s business but to his brother, the vice president. “I won’t answer,” he said. “He is dead. He is gone. And I hope he is in the arms of the Lord.”

  A different reply came from Arnholt Smith, the munificent San Diego millionaire who knew Nixon from childhood and was long one of his most generous backers. “I think it was really for Richard,” Smith said, “to help him live. He was a relatively poor man.”