Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  So what was the “thorn”? What terrible thing had old Joe done to young Howard that Hughes would hold so strong a grudge for forty years? Apparently nothing. Nothing at all.

  All Howard Hughes held against the Kennedys was the simple fact that they too had money and power. That was the thorn shoved into his guts. Relentlessly.

  In the beginning, they had more money. Now that he had far more money,* they had more power. They always seemed to have what Hughes wanted. Back in Hollywood, it was RKO. Later, it was the White House. Old Joe had not only bought it for his son Jack, he had stolen it from Hughes. The billionaire had not forgotten or forgiven that either.

  “You can see how cruel it was, after my all-out support of Nixon, to have Jack Kennedy achieve that very, very marginal so-called victory over my man,” wrote Hughes, bitterly recalling the Kennedy gang’s “theft” of the White House in 1960.

  Both he and Joe had set out to buy America. Kennedy had succeeded. But it was more than that. Over the years there had been a strange reversal of roles. In their Hollywood days, Hughes had been the newsreel hero, Joe the cynical operator. Now the Kennedys had escaped the curse of their father to become royalty, while Hughes had taken his place as the troll under the bridge.

  And now, in 1968, just as Hughes finally seemed to have it all in the bag, his drive to buy the government of the United States all but guaranteed, certain of victory, having bought both Humphrey and Nixon, old Joe was about to snatch it away again. With Bobby.

  On Saturday, March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy suddenly entered the race, announcing his bid to reclaim the throne from the same Senate room his brother had used to launch his campaign eight years earlier.

  “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies,” he declared, looking very young and very vulnerable, his long hair falling across his forehead, his famous Kennedy voice halting and uncertain, yet striking fear into older, more powerful men. “I cannot stand aside from the contest that will decide our nation’s future, and our children’s future.”

  Neither could Hughes. Alone in his penthouse, with a fortune far greater than old Joe’s but without an heir, the billionaire watched Bobby’s televised speech, saw Joe about to put another son in the White House, and grabbed for his yellow legal pad.

  “Re: Kennedy, I want him for President like I want the mumps,” he wrote. “I can think of nothing worse than 8 years under his exalted leadership. God help us!

  “However, lets face it. It could happen, so lets cover our bets both ways.”

  Hughes was not about to be denied the Oval Office. Not this time. He would own the next president even if he had to buy every candidate in the race, even if that meant backing Bobby. But how could he buy a Kennedy?

  The question took on new urgency just one month later when the Atomic Energy Commission declared war. Facing the big blast, unable to move Lyndon Johnson, doubtful that Humphrey could block it, Hughes reviewed his strategy.

  “I am afraid there are only two people strong enough to stand up to the AEC,” he wrote. “They are Kennedy or Johnson.

  “I can see no way to motivate Kennedy except by a truely meaningful gesture of assistance.”

  Reluctant to join forces with Kennedy and far from certain that Bobby could be bought, Hughes still saw a way he could use the Kennedy threat to end the nuclear threat. It was at this time that he sent word to Johnson that he would back Humphrey “to any extent necessary to match the funds expended by Kennedy.” At the same time he ordered Maheu to throw a real scare into the needy vice-president: “sit down with Humphries and tell him I have been propositioned by Kennedy in the most all-out way.”

  It was a bare-faced lie. But less than two weeks later it came true.

  Before Hughes could move to cover his bets, before Bobby had won his first primary, Kennedy sent an emissary to Hughes. Even Kennedy.

  Maheu reported the contact: “Pierre Salinger called me asking if he could have a conference in Las Vegas immediately after the results of the Indiana Primary which is being held tomorrow. He stated that ‘Bobby’ agrees with our position of delaying these AEC tests and they want to confer with us before taking any ‘overt’ position.

  “Howard, you and I both know that this is the overture to financial help for their campaign—and I would like some guidance from you as to how we play the music.

  “If our only concern were of a ‘political’ nature, I would be tempted to forget about Kennedy—because I truly believe ‘Hubert’ has enough ‘due bills’ from the political pros to assure him the Democratic nomination. However, we have other things at stake for the present and it might be wise to buy some ‘insurance.’ ”

  Hughes was not surprised by the approach. He had been expecting it. The overture might be from Camelot, but to him it was an old familiar tune.

  “I dont know what it is that Sallinger and Kennedy want, but I have a pretty good idea what they will want before too long,” replied Hughes, with the satisfaction of a cynic watching the last idol fall.

  “I am not in favor, at the moment, of contributing any $$ unless he can and will make some kind of a half-assed promise to help us postpone or abort the bombing. Now, if he gets the nomination, then I think we are forced to contribute no matter what he does about the bomb.

  “So, to summarize, until either some promise re: the bomb, or his nomination, I recommend a stalling operation inlaid with beautiful dialogue and all sorts of encouragement for the future, but involving no hard spending money.

  “But, I repeat, I would try not to make an enemy of him.”

  Pierre Salinger came to Las Vegas early in May, just after Kennedy’s first primary victory. He reminded Maheu that Bobby had called for an end to all nuclear tests in his maiden Senate speech three years earlier, assured him that Kennedy would now help Hughes battle the bomb, and asked for a contribution. Maheu stalled but promised to run it by his boss.

  It was all quite friendly. Maheu and Salinger had known each other for years, and Maheu had even served as cochairman of Salinger’s own 1964 Senate campaign in California.

  Bobby Kennedy also knew of Maheu. From the Castro assassination plot. He had learned of that CIA-Mafia murder conspiracy in May 1962, when he was attorney general and his brother was president. The Agency had to tell him. There was no other way to block Maheu’s prosecution for wiretapping comedian Dan Rowan, rival for the affections of singer Phyllis McGuire, girlfriend of Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana. Kennedy was shocked. Not about the failed attempt to kill Castro, which he and his brother almost certainly approved in advance, but about the CIA’s choice of hit men. Especially Giancana. Kennedy had to tell J. Edgar Hoover, knowing all the while that Hoover knew that brother Jack had only recently ended a White House affair with another of Giancana’s mistresses, Judith Campbell.

  And Maheu had been right in the middle of it all. Now Kennedy had to assume that Maheu—and therefore Hughes—knew the darkest secrets of Camelot, and had to wonder if Maheu knew something darker still: who killed his brother.

  The possible connections between the Castro plot and Dallas had long anguished Kennedy. And just a year earlier the entire ugly story had started to surface with a column by Drew Pearson that virtually branded him with the mark of Cain.

  “President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb,” it began, “an unconfirmed report that Sen. Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother.” It was Bobby’s worst nightmare, the fear he confided to a few close friends that Castro or the Mafia or the CIA itself had ordered his brother’s murder.

  Lurking in the background of this tangled nightmare was Maheu’s boss—the mysterious billionaire with a burning hatred of the entire Kennedy family.

  Bobby could not have known the full extent of Hughes’s hate, but he knew quite well the dangers of taking Hughes’s money. He himself had singled out a scandal over funds Nixon received from Hughes as a decisive factor in his bro
ther’s 1960 victory, and later as attorney general secretly investigated the Hughes-Nixon dealings.

  But now, in 1968, the need for campaign money was urgent, and Kennedy apparently solicited Hughes’s contribution in the same spirit in which it would be given: business as usual.

  Maheu called Salinger a couple of weeks after their Las Vegas meeting to say that Hughes would give Kennedy $25,000. Not a real investment, but a good hedge. Salinger, in Portland for the Oregon primary, said he would return to Las Vegas to pick up the cash right after the next contest, in California. It was only a week away. But by then it was too late.

  At first the cheers drowned out the gunshots.

  Bobby Kennedy had just won the big one. California. It looked like he might actually go all the way. In twelve incredible weeks he had helped force Lyndon Johnson to abdicate, he had beaten Hubert Humphrey in his home state, South Dakota, and now he had defeated his antiwar rival Eugene McCarthy in California. At midnight on Tuesday, June 4, 1968, he entered the packed ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to claim his victory.

  Smiling and exuberant, Kennedy joked with his cheering supporters, flashed a V-sign and declared, “Now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there!” Then he left the podium, looking like the next president of the United States.

  Minutes later he lay dying, shot through the head.

  Howard Hughes watched it all. He saw it happen live and in color, and he stayed up through the night to watch the replays—the victory speech, the sound of gunfire, Bobby lying in a pool of blood—over and over again. He listened to the hospital bulletins, watched the random and collective scenes of shock and horror—people running, crying, screaming, kneeling silently to pray—he saw the Kennedy family gather for another grim death watch, and he kept his own TV vigil.

  News reports and solemn commentary blared in his bedroom all night: “There was only one assailant … this was not a conspiracy … a sense of guilt for all Americans … it was clearly the act of one man … the crisis of violence in this country … just weeks after the King assassination … brother of the martyred president … there is no doubt, this was not a conspiracy.…”

  While TV commentators once more rushed to reassure a shocked nation, Hughes began to conspire. He reached for his bedside legal pad and, while Kennedy’s life still hung in the balance, wrote:

  “It seems to me that this particular moment in the historical passage of time may be the very most ideal to launch our anti-anti-trust campaign.

  “In other words, I cannot imagine another time, if we waited a year, when public sentiment will ever again be so violently and passionately focused on the need for measures to control crime.

  “Surely this is the truely perfect background to support our appeal to the criminal division of Justice, pointing to what we have already done in clearing the atmosphere here, and the extreme disadvantage of permitting the Anti-Trust Division to jeopardize this unique opportunity, which in all likelyhood, will never again be available—that is to say, the opportunity, with the public aroused as it presently is, of eliminating completely force and violence as significant factors bearing on the way of life in this community.

  “Bob, I urge you contact Justice at once. I just dont want you to miss the opportunity of mobilizing this intense feeling.”

  A golden opportunity to get on with his Monopoly game in Las Vegas. That was all the assassination meant to him. At first. But Hughes maintained his TV vigil for almost twenty-six hours while Kennedy clung to life, and by the time Bobby died he had come to see the deeper meaning of the tragedy.

  He watched a dazed Frank Mankiewicz walk into the makeshift press room of the Good Samaritan Hospital one last time to tell the world that Bobby Kennedy was dead. It was the moment Hughes had been waiting for through two sleepless nights.

  “I hate to be quick on the draw,” he wrote, barely able to restrain himself, “but I see here an opportunity that may not happen again in a lifetime. I dont aspire to be President, but I do want political strength.

  “I mean the kind of an organization so that we would never have to worry about a jerky little thing like this anti-trust problem—not in 100 years.

  “And I mean the kind of a set up that, if we wanted to, could put Gov. Laxalt in the White House in 1972 or 76.

  “Anyway, it seems to me that the very people we need have just fallen smack into our hands.”

  The suddenly leaderless Kennedy gang was up for grabs. He would hire the Kennedy machine and make it the Hughes machine. He would buy the Kennedy magic, and with it place a man of his own creation in the White House. A man like Paul Laxalt.

  But Kennedy’s murder had deeper meaning still. It had removed from the 1968 race the one candidate Hughes did not want and could not control. He had to move quickly to consolidate his gains.

  Maheu was confused. The memos came at him so fast and furious in the middle of a night of national cataclysm, the missions proposed were so bold and outrageous, that not even Hughes’s veteran bagman could immediately comprehend that his boss actually wanted him not only to pick the next president, but also to buy Camelot.

  “I get the impression from your note that you want to confine this activity to someone within the ‘Kennedy’ people,” Maheu replied. “I am sure my impression must be wrong because, naturally, to accomplish your purpose, we must think outside of this particular realm.

  “Obviously Sen. Ted Kennedy will be their heir apparent. I expect to see some very strange alliances. In any event, Howard, will you please clarify my impression.”

  Strange alliances? Hughes was not interested in making any alliances, and certainly not with the Kennedys. What he had in mind was a simple business transaction.

  “I want us to hire Bob Kennedy’s entire organization,” he explained with some impatience. “They are used to having the Kennedy money behind them and we can equal that. I dont want an alliance with the Kennedy group, I want to put them on the payroll.”

  Hughes fired all that off to Maheu within hours of Kennedy’s death but was now so excited he could not sleep. Instead, he continued to watch the replays of the assassination and the film clips of Bobby’s life, his eyes fixed on the TV screen until past dawn. Then, finally satisfied that he had seen the full meaning of the tragedy and all its opportunities, he went to sleep, just as most of the nation woke up in horror to discover that Bobby was dead.

  Hughes himself arose Thursday afternoon still excited.

  “I have just awakened,” he immediately scrawled, dashing off another memo to Maheu. “I was up all night Monday and Tuesday nights.* I heard Mankiewicz make the fateful announcement and, since our ch 8 was still on the air, I stayed up all night to watch in amazement as we continued to achieve absolutely exclusive coverage of his death and obituary material etc.”

  Hughes was thrilled by the coup his own television station, the local CBS affiliate, had scored.

  “The other two networks, ABC and NBC were not on the air in Sou. Nevada during the entire night.… ABC and NBC had just closed down their broadcasts from the hospital for the night and ch 13 and ch 3 had just gone dark for the night. This was understandable, as the doctors had just announced that there would be no more regular bulletins until morning.

  “I believe it was sheer accident that CBS was still on the air when the bomb fell. Of course they (CBS) made the most of it, and I thought how lucky we were to have been on the air and achieved this historic news broadcast.…

  “Anyway, Bob, please do not say anything to anybody about our achieving this TV exclusive,” Hughes cautioned, suddenly serious, recognizing how unseemly and even dangerous it might be to boast about their small triumph when things so much more important were at stake. “It occurred to me you might mention it by way of gently needling your friends in ch 13. But please do not. I am very desirous that we retain the late night movie programing exclusively here in Sou. Nevada. I hope eventually to extend this into an all-night, every-night show, and I dont want any competition. I
dont think the market can support 2 such shows.”

  My God! That would be a real tragedy. It could imperil his own private “Late-Late Show,” his beloved “Swinging Shift.” Having taken the necessary precautions on that vital front, Hughes moved on to other business.

  “Returning to this morning, I am certain that you, at no time, really understood what I was urging you to do. Bob, it is true that I have discussed another project with you: The proposal to select one Repub. and one Demo, candidate and then to give that candidate full and all-out support. This project I still want carried out. Just as I still want the Reno TV project carried out. However, the item set forth in my first message of Thursday morning was something entirely different.”

  That was his plan to buy the Kennedy gang and place his own man in the White House. He had to make sure that Maheu understood the mission. Yet not even that megalomaniac vision could still his hatred of the Kennedys. It had been building all night while he watched TV chronicle their whole damn glorious and tragic saga. Now, on the day of Bobby’s death, it all came boiling up out of Hughes, even as he continued to coldly calculate the opportunities presented by the assassination.

  “I am mor[e] familiar than you realize with the history and the remaining entity of the Kennedy family,” he wrote, thinking now of old Joe and letting loose his long-nurtured grudge. “… The Kennedy family and their money and influence have been a thorn that has been relentlessly shoved into my guts since the very beginning of my business activities. So you can see how cruel it was, after my all-out support of Nixon, to have Jack Kennedy achieve that very, very marginal so-called victory over my man.