“Why are we hesitant?” the billionaire demanded. “The U.S. Supreme Court has issued injunctions many times on a thinner case than we have. I am sure the Supreme Court is out now because of the late hour, but lower courts have issued injunctive relief in the middle of the night many times.”
Trying to calm his commander’s rage, Maheu counseled that going to night court could not block a major atomic weapons test and cautioned that the attempt “would place the President in a position of having to fight us.”
More resigned than convinced, Hughes reluctantly agreed to forgo a midnight legal maneuver. “If you dont want to seek an injunction until the President gives an answer, OK,” he replied. “Since we have the 3 hour time spread, there is just a very microscopic chance the President might be persuaded to intervene.
“One thing is sure, we have nothing—but nothing to lose—so we dont have to pussy-foot around anymore,” he added, with the reckless abandon of a man down to his final hours. “You know Johnson has just a few other things going, and if his cabinet does not want to see this favor granted, maybe we have to have somebody get into that White House and shake things up a little.”
But who? Suddenly, from the depths of his desperation, came the answer. Hughes knew just the man for the job. He could certainly get into the White House, he would have no trouble shaking things up, and he was no stranger to Hughes.
“I just thought of something,” he wrote excitedly. “Clark Clifford!!
“He was under retainer to me for 25 years and did practically nothing. And he needed the money.”
Hughes had in fact been one of Clifford’s first clients, having personally called him just a day or two after he had gone into private practice. Now Clifford was Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, and his Washington law firm still represented Hughes. It was the perfect setup.
Just a month earlier, Clifford had persuaded the president to pull back from Vietnam, explaining that the war was bad for business. Obviously he could block a mere bomb test.
“Maybe we ought to have Long* see Clifford or Sawyer see him,” suggested Hughes, “and point out that here is an ideal situation where he could be of assistance to me and have my truly undying devotion and gratitude, and where it will not cost the Defense Dept. one solitary cent.
“If our representative in Washington could make it clear to Clifford,” he continued, “that although there is no monetary gain involved, this explosion is a matter of absolutely top importance to me, and that if Clifford will intervene in this affair, I will give him my most solemn pledge never, so long as he may be in office, to call upon him for assistance of any kind, if I make this kind of a promise, I think Clifford might take this on.
“It would only take one phone call for Clifford to pull the plug on the AEC’s claim that this explosion is necessary for national defense.”
Yes, Clark Clifford could do the job. How could he refuse so reasonable a request? Why, in the old days, Hughes had often spoken to him directly, sometimes calling at three or four A.M.
Over the years, Clifford had come through time and again. As Washington’s premier lobbyist, a man with unique access to every national administration—indeed every president—since Truman, Clifford had once pushed through a Hughes land grab in Nevada vigorously opposed by the Interior Department. His firm had succeeded in blocking a 1966 congressional probe of the billionaire’s Pentagon influence-buying. And, of course, it was Clifford’s law partner, Finney, who had hand-carried Hughes’s bomb plea to the president.
But neither their past telephone relationship nor their continuing business relationship now carried any weight.
Abandoned by his natural allies, Hughes now counted the dwindling hours, his last hope the letter he had sent to Lyndon Johnson. The yellow pages of his handwritten first draft lay beside him on the sweat-soaked bed.
Meanwhile, in the predawn blackness of the Nevada desert, a calmer countdown continued. Bad weather had briefly threatened a postponement, but by three A.M. the weather had cleared, and now test-site workers—ignorant of the Hughes-Johnson drama—made final preparations to explode the hydrogen bomb at sunrise. “Boxcar” was in the hole, stemmed, and ready to go.
At first light, a two-man team entered the red shack on ground zero, arming the thermonuclear device buried 3,800 feet below in a steel-lined, cement-filled shaft.
Alone in his bedroom, Hughes scrawled a final fevered memo in a desperate bid to reach the president and escape the impending holocaust.
“It is vital that somehow you prevail upon Mr. Johnson that this is an emergency and persuade him to read my letter,” he begged. “There is about 20 minutes left.”
Johnson, of course, had seen the letter almost as soon as it arrived at the White House, and was right now in his own bedroom, weighing the needs of national security against the words of Howard Hughes. Still undecided, he received a final bomb report from his top science adviser, Donald Hornig.
“There is still time to act in the next 15 or 20 minutes,” Hornig informed the president. But, joining Rostow and Seaborg, he urged Johnson not to halt the scheduled blast.
“A complete cancellation seems inadvisable,” his message read. “The test will furnish a calibration point for the ABM warhead, and is needed for that purpose and as a proof test for a Polaris warhead. I recommend that we do not change the test plans.”
That made it unanimous. The president could not, against the strongly worded advice of all his experts—against the entire national-defense establishment—cancel a major nuclear weapons test at the demand of one private citizen, even Hughes.
Johnson decided to detonate the bomb.
At precisely seven o’clock on Friday morning, April 26, 1968, a 1.2 megaton explosion roared through the Nevada desert and set the ground trembling in four states. It blew a gigantic dust cloud high above Pahute Mesa and vaporized the bedrock below, carving out a seven-hundred-foot-wide subterranean cavern with so much force that the shock waves registered on seismographs from New York to Alaska. At ground zero the earth bulged ominously, then slowly settled back until it finally collapsed, leaving another huge crater in the arid moonscape. One hundred miles away, hotels along the Las Vegas Strip shuddered, water splashed out of the swimming pools, and the carpeted floors of the gambling casinos vibrated, but the dice continued to roll without interruption.
Up in his penthouse, Howard Hughes gripped the sides of his suddenly unstable bed, bracing his wasted body against the blast.
A Mormon aide kept watch in the next room. “The motion I experienced lasted well over one minute,” he reported to his shaken boss. “The first tremor was followed a few seconds later by a substantially stronger tremor, then gradually started to dampen out. The chandelier swayed well over four minutes.”
Hughes himself waited half an hour for the aftershocks to subside, then reached for his yellow legal pad.
“You can take my word for it that this blast produced more than twice the yield [anticipated],” he wrote in a hand that still showed the full effects of the bombing. “They deliberately deceived us and everyone else about the size of the blast. This would explain Johnson’s refusal and the terrific importance placed on this one shot.”
Hughes’s bedroom had actually swayed only a few centimeters, but for him the explosion itself was the shattering climax of a ten-day trauma. The countdown alone had left him in ruins.
“I just know I was physically very ill and emotionally reduced to a nervous wreck by the end of the week, and life is too short for that,” he told Maheu, bleakly assessing the damage. “Now, Bob, I dont know how you reacted to the last week. You seem to be one hell of a lot better conditioned than I am, and you probably survived in much better shape than I did. All I can say to you, Bob, is that if I ever have to go thru another week like the last one, I simply will not take it, and this will mean an awful lot of work and planning shot down the drain. I am sorry, but that is the way I am.
“I would not repeat last week for all the money
in the world.”
Right down to the final minutes Hughes had hoped that his personal appeal to Johnson would save the day, but now it seemed clear that summit diplomacy had failed. The president had not even bothered to answer his letter.
Finally, two weeks later a double envelope, the inner one marked “Personal & Confidential to Mr. Hughes,” arrived at the Desert Inn. Inside was a two-page message from Lyndon Johnson. It was hardly a welcome surprise.
“I received the letter from the President,” Hughes noted bitterly, “and was it ever a disappointment!!
“He gloats over the fact that the explosion did not vent, there was no significant damage, and, in fact, the blast bore out the most minute forecasts of the AEC scientists, and satisfied the President, beyond any most microscopic doubts he might have had, that the AEC scientists have the atom under such complete control that they can make it turn a sommersault, jump thru a hoop, and say: ‘Uncle!’ any time they are of a mind to do so.
“Further, the AEC, with his complete support, is going right ahead full-steam to conduct their major high-yield explosions at Pahute Mesa in the N.T.S. [Nevada Test Site].
“Why would the President have gone out of his way to rub it in?” wondered Hughes, nearly as shaken by Johnson’s reply as he had been by the blast. “I did not expect anything with a hint of future assistance. I realize this would have been too much to expect, but Jesus! he did not have to spend two full pages of deliberately hostile provocation.”
In fact, the president’s response, while formal and a bit distant, was hardly hostile. “I personally considered your letter and discussed it with my advisers, before coming to a final decision,” it read in part. “I approved execution of this test only after considering its importance to our national security—and only after receiving the Atomic Energy Commission’s assurances that extensive safety checks had clearly demonstrated that there was no cause for concern.”
The entire tone was respectful and reassuring. And if Johnson also let Hughes know who was president, still he had gone to extraordinary lengths to deal with the billionaire’s protest. Certainly few other private citizens, if any, could have caused the commander in chief to withhold until the last minute approval of a nuclear test deemed vital to national defense.
To Hughes, however, the president’s letter was a deliberate slap in the face. Not only had Johnson failed to stop “Boxcar,” not only had he refused to move all future blasts elsewhere, but he had kept Hughes waiting two weeks for a reply.
Perplexed and indignant, Hughes studied Johnson’s response, reading and rereading it to find hidden meanings, his outrage mounting. By the next day he was certain his original interpretation had been correct.
“There was nothing in the President’s letter to suggest any decision beyond the one taken when they went ahead with the last explosion,” pronounced the frustrated exegete. “I read the letter with microscopic care. I looked minutely for some in-between-the-lines meaning. I could find none at all. Everything he said seemed to be an elaborate, over emphatic defense of his position.…
“Now, Bob, this entire affair is becoming more puzzling every day.…
“When I say ‘puzzling’ I mean this:
“He did not answer my letter until 2 weeks after he received it.
“This, above, coupled with the strange tone of his letter, suggests two things to me—Either (a.) that he waited the two weeks for me to contact him and work out a straight-forward ‘deal’ on this problem, and then became angry when I failed to respond and let me have the hostile letter, or (B.) that during the two week period he was negotiating with representatives of R.E.E.Co. or E. G. & G. [the test site’s two private contractors] and finally made a deal with them.…”
Of course. It was all so obvious. How could he have missed it? The president had been expecting a bribe, and when the billionaire failed to come through, turned instead to the opposition for his graft.
Hughes’s memo was a diatribe of lost innocence.
He had taken the high road in his letter to Johnson, offered a reasoned and restrained case pleading the dangers and uncertainties of unchecked nuclear testing. And the president had ignored his plea, dismissed him as a fool or a skinflint, and pocketed a payoff.
Well, no one would ever catch Howard Hughes napping again. No more romantic illusions for him. He had seen the light.
“You see, Bob, some people feel I have unlimited power and absolutely no scrupples,” he explained to his veteran bagman and fixer. “You and I know this is not true, but they dont know it.…”
So be it. From now on, Hughes would do what was expected of him, and he would bring the bombing to an end.
“I urge what I have urged from the beginning: Down to earth, brass tacks, bargaining with the A.E.C. and the White House—in Washington,…” he wrote.
“I urge we get down off the soap box and quit trying to make over the morals of the world and focus on a bought and paid for compromise settlement of this issue.
“I feel we may find that, at a price we can afford, we can buy a settlement.…”
The president’s perfidy had given Hughes some very definite ideas about where such a settlement could be bought.
“I think you should try to determine who is the real, honest-to-God, bagman at the White House,” he urged Maheu. “And please dont be frightened away by the enormity of the thought. I have known for a number of years that the White House under this particular Democratic administration is just as crooked as it can be. Now, I dont know whom you have to approach, but there is somebody, take my word for it.”
Finally, in a casual postscript to his somewhat chilling memo, Hughes took the true measure of the man he had tried to reach by honest reason.
“P.S. One thing I should have told you, in connection with my assumption that the Pres. may have waited the two weeks to hear from me on some kind of a hard-cash, adult, basis. I should tell you that I have done this kind of business with him before. So, he wears no awe-inspiring robe of virtue with me. I gave him some critically needed funds when he was in the Senate. He remembers this as he spoke of it to Finney. This is why he may very realistically have waited the two weeks for me to send somebody to him before he replied or took a stand. Anyway, I think this is one very plausible explanation of everything, including the hostillity when he did write.…”
Plausible or not, Hughes was now convinced that he must put his relationship with Johnson back on a “hard cash, adult, basis.” After all the hope that Hughes had placed in his masterful letter, Johnson’s rejection of his earnest appeal had a cataclysmic impact. It marked a turning point in Hughes’s approach to politics and politicians in general. It removed his last remaining inhibitions to use his private wealth to buy public power. Eventually, it would convulse the entire nation.
“Now,” concluded Hughes, in a classic expression of free-enterprise morality, “I think there is a market-place, somewhere, where the things we want can be bought or sold, and I urge that instead of spending any more time begging for a free hand-out, we find the right place, and the right people and buy what we want.”
Hughes clearly believed that Johnson was one of the right people. As for the right place, it turned out to be not the White House but the LBJ Ranch. And the right amount, Hughes figured, was $1 million.
It was Maheu who first suggested the approach. Three months after the bomb test, in a memo to the penthouse, he inquired, “As long as I am going to be in Washington next week—what do you think of my calling on the President as your personal representative? It might buy us insurance on the AEC program as well as the Stardust. I could tell him that you are interested in his future plans and want to help him in any way possible. His answer might prove to be very interesting—indeed.”
By the time Maheu proposed the parley, Hughes had become enmeshed in a battle with the Justice Department over his plans to acquire yet another major hotel-casino, the Stardust. Justice had moved to block the deal the same day the “Boxcar” blast w
as announced and despite pressure from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland, both of Nevada’s senators, and Governor Laxalt, Attorney General Ramsey Clark refused to allow the recluse to continue his Las Vegas Monopoly game.
Now Maheu was heading to Washington for a showdown with antitrust chief Edwin Zimmerman and hoped to meet with the president as well—to buy some insurance. The trip was less than a complete success. Zimmerman curtly informed Maheu that the Stardust deal was “a cut-and-dried violation of the Clayton Act.” As for getting to Johnson, he was ailing and had left the White House to recuperate at his Texas ranch.
“I strongly suggest we call off this caper and take another look at it six months hence—after the elections,” a subdued Maheu counseled his master.
Hughes, however, was unwilling to wait. “Now, Bob, I realize that if we emerge from the forthcoming election with the kind of political strength we anticipate, there will be no need for a negotiated settlement of this matter,” he replied. “I dont question your ability to win this game on a political basis in an open contest. But I am afraid I will be a nervous wreck by the time it is over.”
Fuming and boiling over the Stardust, in terror of the bomb, Hughes could not wait until Johnson had been replaced by a more pliable president.
And there was one other thing the billionaire wanted. He had already mentioned it in his letter to Johnson, although only as an example of one of the many urgent matters he had been too altruistic to call to the president’s attention.
“The last of these,” Hughes had told Johnson, “was when I undertook the manufacture of a small helicopter for use in Viet Nam. I lost in excess of 1/5 of everything I possess in the world on this one project, purely because the price was miscalculated.
“The loss was far greater than I have ever suffered in my lifetime. The price we collected for these machines was less than the bill of material alone.”
Citizen Hughes Page 25