Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  “So, as I point out, thru this long-standing feeling of jealousy and personal enmity, I have become fairly well informed about the organization of people that sprung up, first around Jack, and then around Bob. Essentially the same group. They just moved over. But think of the experience they have had in the two campaigns combined!”

  These were the men he needed, and now they were vulnerable. Hughes was not so blinded by hate as to miss the opportunity.

  “Now, I am positive that all of these people (and dont forget the Convention and victory was virtually within their grasp) that all of these people, after they come- to following a 48 hour effort to drink themselves into oblivion, will feel awfully and terribly alone and frightened. Of course, they might make it again with Ted, but that is a long and uncertain road. Now, Bob, just try to visualize how it would feel,” continued Hughes, imagining the horrible shock his own death would cause his gang. “I have a group of people who have remained loyal to me, or so I have chosen to believe, and I have worried sufficiently about them being faced with such a situation, that I have gone to extreme lengths in furnishing them protection against any such adversity.…

  “Also, there is some similarity between the group who assisted the Kennedy brothers and my organization,” he added, comparing the Irish Mafia to his strange crew of Mormons, “although, unfortunately, I do not have the lovable qualities of Jack and Bob that led to their famous popularity.

  “Anyway, I do feel competant to judge the feelings of fear and lonliness which I am certain must have consumed the Kennedy group by now. I have experienced these emotions myself and I know how powerful they can be. So, I repeat that I am positive this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire a ready-made political organization, all trained and ready to go.…”

  Hughes sensed that he had to move fast, before the Kennedy gang sobered up and found new patrons.

  “So, Bob,… instead of waiting until somebody else grabs these people, let’s move first!”

  Bobby Kennedy was not yet buried as Hughes plotted to steal his legacy. His body lay in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the men Hughes planned to hire formed an honor guard around his coffin, while tens of thousands of mourners filed past the bier in silent tribute.

  At a solemn high-requiem mass that Saturday, Teddy Kennedy stood above the coffin to deliver his eulogy:

  “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

  “As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him, ‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say, why not?’ ”

  And then Bobby Kennedy’s body was carried out through the great bronze doors of the cathedral and placed aboard a train to Washington, for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

  Howard Hughes watched the funeral rites on television, also dreaming of things that never were. Yet even as he plotted to hire the Kennedy machine and with it seize national power, he could not resist one last jab at the sole surviving brother of the hated first family.

  “I just saw Ted Kennedy campaigning from the tail end of the funeral train,” wrote Hughes. “If that isn’t the all time high in bad taste, I dont know what you may chose to call it. While I am all in favor of the effort to latch onto the Kennedy organization at this propitious moment,… I urge you not to do anything that might identify us as being in any way associated with Kennedy or his campaign. I am afraid that whoever has been acting as Mrs. Kennedy’s guiding light since her husband’s death has not been as shrewd or as clever as everybody anticipated. Personally, I think the entire funeral operation since the Good Samaritan has been one ghastly over-played, over-produced, and over-dramatized spectacle. I think that this whole deal is going to erupt into one horrible shambles. Mrs. Jack Kennedy was criticized badly for over-doing Pres. Kennedy’s funeral activities and I think this operation is many times worse, if such a thing is possible.”

  Larry O’Brien was on that funeral train, feeling awfully alone and terribly frightened. He had quit Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet to manage Robert Kennedy’s campaign, as he had managed John Kennedy’s eight years before, and now Bobby lay dead in a flag-draped coffin in the last of the twenty-one cars, en route to a grave beside his brother’s.

  At first O’Brien watched the crowds along the tracks, but as the crush of mourners blocked the way and the train slowed to a crawl on its eight-hour journey from New York to Washington, he just sat in a daze, recalling the nightmare flight of Air Force One that had brought another Kennedy back to the capital, from Dallas. The president’s widow had been on that plane, her pink dress still splattered with blood, and now, pacing the aisle of the train, O’Brien again encountered Jacqueline Kennedy. “Oh, Larry,” she said in a whisper, “isn’t it terrible for us to be together again like this? It’s unbelievable.” Night had fallen by the time the train reached Washington. Finally, in the darkness of Arlington National Cemetery, O’Brien watched Bobby’s casket being lowered into the ground next to the grave where he had seen Jack buried. And then, it was all over.

  After sixteen years in service to the Kennedys, from Jack’s first Senate race to Bobby’s last campaign, Larry O’Brien was suddenly left without a job, without a patron, with no idea how to support his family or what to do next.

  He was sitting home in Washington when Robert Maheu called.

  “Larry O’Brien—He is coming here on Wednesday next for a conference as per our request after the assassination of Senator Kennedy,” Maheu reported to the penthouse. “He is prepared to talk employment and has received a commitment (without any obligation whatsoever) from the four or five key men in the Kennedy camp that they will not become obligated until they hear from him.”

  The leader of the Irish Mafia arrived in Las Vegas on the Fourth of July. He was put up in style at the Desert Inn and had the run of the town, compliments of Hughes, but he never met his would-be boss in the room upstairs. O’Brien had sat with presidents and moved in the highest circles of power. Jack Kennedy had personally recruited him, old Joe had welcomed him into his home, Lyndon Johnson had begged him to stay on at the White House, and Bobby had called to woo him away. But now O’Brien would have to settle for a surrogate. He never even got a peek at Howard Hughes.

  “I’ve never met him myself,” explained Maheu as the job negotiations got under way at his home next door to the hotel. Since that was hardly reassuring, Maheu reached into his desk and pulled out a memo handwritten on yellow legal-pad paper. “I don’t want you to have any doubts that everything I’m saying comes directly from Hughes himself,” he said, presenting his boss’s sacred scrawl to O’Brien.

  Incredibly, the proof Maheu offered was almost certainly Hughes’s “thorn in my guts” diatribe. O’Brien’s own account makes that clear. Except that instead of expressing hatred of the Kennedys, the memo—as O’Brien read it in his eagerness to take the job—was a heartfelt eulogy in which Hughes poured out his sorrow over Bobby’s death and the continuing tragedy of the Kennedy family.

  Maheu said nothing to disillusion his guest. Instead, he presented the job offer in a code both men understood. He told O’Brien that Hughes had a problem—he didn’t think that his “good works” were sufficiently appreciated by the American people! O’Brien, one-upping his host, said he understood exactly what Maheu meant. Both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had felt the same way.

  It was a perfect meeting of the minds. Over the next two days Maheu mentioned some of the good works in which Hughes was now engaged. They were manifold. First, there was his stalled Monopoly game in Las Vegas. Then, his legal battle over TWA. And that very weekend, Hughes had extended his benevolence to a television network in financial distress and a struggling new airline. He hatched his plot to take over Air West and launched his sudden raid to seize contr
ol of ABC. That particular act of munificence required immediate attention.

  As it happened, O’Brien was simultaneously dickering with the three television networks. They too felt unappreciated and wanted O’Brien to help improve their public image. In fact, it was James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s former press secretary and now vice-president of ABC, who had proposed the deal. Since both Hughes and Hagerty were concerned only with good works, O’Brien apparently felt no conflict of interest.

  And, according to Maheu, he was quite encouraging about the ABC raid. “He feels that we have no insoluble conditions before the FCC and/or the Dept. of Justice,” Maheu reported to Hughes. “Whether or not we work out a deal with Larry O’Brien, I surely believe we should tap his brain before making ‘the big move’ in Washington.”

  Hughes was eager to put O’Brien right to work. Indeed, he wanted to send him right into the Oval Office. “It seems to me, Bob, there is a comparatively easy way to get an immediate answer to the network decision,” he wrote. “I think such an answer should be obtainable by Mr. O’Brien marching in and collaring Johnson and saying: ‘Look, my friend, my client Mr. Hughes has initiated the machinery to acquire control of ABC.’

  “It seems to me that such a meeting would certainly give us an indication of which way the wind blows across the White House lawn.”

  Maheu had his doubts about collaring LBJ, but he was very high on O’Brien. “I don’t know of one person to whom the President is more indebted and who could unravel this whole mess as quickly as he,” replied Maheu. “I just happen to know that when O’Brien left the administration to become involved in the Kennedy campaign, he did so with the full blessing of the President. Furthermore, I know that the President and Humphrey are most anxious to get him involved in the Humphrey campaign.”

  In fact, when O’Brien returned to Washington he discovered that Humphrey had called while he was meeting with Maheu in Las Vegas. The vice-president had moved almost as quickly as Hughes to snare O’Brien, but just a bit too late. O’Brien had already more or less agreed to join the billionaire. With Maheu’s approval, however, he put off the Hughes job to see Humphrey through the Democratic convention, and then, after forcing Humphrey personally to beg Maheu’s permission, until after the November election.

  But O’Brien never stopped his job negotiations with Hughes. He met with Maheu for a second round of talks in Washington at the end of July, just two days after Maheu delivered $50,000 to Humphrey in the backseat of a limousine. It was a busy weekend for the bagman. Now, in their meeting at the Madison Hotel, he gave O’Brien the $25,000 Hughes had promised Bobby Kennedy just before the assassination. O’Brien passed on the cash-filled manila envelope to Kennedy’s brother-in-law Steve Smith, who gratefully accepted Hughes’s unusual expression of condolences.

  And at that same Washington meeting, Maheu and O’Brien came to terms. Howard Hughes would become a client of the newly formed O’Brien Associates, and its proprietor, Larry O’Brien, would get $15,000 a month, $500 a day, for at least two years, a $360,000 secret contract.

  Hughes had done it. He had captured the leader of the Kennedy gang, hired its top gun.

  Now the man who had managed the 1960 Kennedy campaign, the 1964 Johnson campaign, and Bobby’s aborted 1968 race, the man who had just taken command of Humphrey’s presidential drive, would also handle campaigns for Howard Hughes. Now the man who had lobbied Congress for the White House—for the New Frontier and the Great Society—would instead lobby Washington for the penthouse. Now the country’s premier political operative would handle politics for a madman secretly determined to buy America.

  Only the details remained to be worked out.

  Right after the November election, O’Brien returned to Las Vegas to strike the final deal. By now he was also chairman of the Democratic National Committee. But that was no problem. He would simply serve simultaneously as unpaid leader of the Democratic party and as Hughes’s very well paid Washington representative.

  O’Brien was not scheduled to start work for Hughes until New Year’s Day, but in fact he jumped right in. Even while he managed Humphrey’s campaign, he was already secretly doing odd jobs for his new boss.

  When Hughes announced his bid to take over Air West, plotting to swindle its stockholders—“This plan necessitates that the stock edge downward, and then that we come along with a spectacular offer”—Maheu conferred with O’Brien.

  “I don’t believe there is a living person who knows more about handling campaigns than Larry,” he reported. “Although our present situation is not in the political arena, I look forward to receiving invaluable guidance from him in the motivation of stockholders to come our way.”

  When Hughes got hit with a judgment of $137 million on TWA, Maheu plotted with O’Brien to strike back at the bankers with a congressional investigation.

  “The Establishment unfortunately does exist and, in fact, would make the Mafia look like a Sunday school picnic,” he wrote his boss. “We happen to be victims of this group, and I sincerely believe we should not take all this lying down. In 30 days O’Brien will be available. I have discussed this entire situation with him and he can’t wait to get going. We still have time to create a situation whereby these bums will come to us on bloody knees.”

  And when Hughes sent Maheu to offer Lyndon Johnson a million-dollar bribe to end the bomb tests, it was O’Brien who set up the big meeting at the LBJ Ranch. Although he succeeded, he was not the best go-between. Despite Maheu’s assurances, Johnson was still bitter about O’Brien’s defection to Bobby Kennedy.

  “Poor Larry,” the president told his appointments secretary Jim Jones. “First he jumps to Bobby, now to Hughes. He’s making a big mistake. Hughes will just chew him up, then spit him out.”

  O’Brien had not even officially joined Hughes, however, when a threatened new bomb test set the stage for his first big mission.

  It was December 12, 1968. The Atomic Energy Commission had just announced another megaton blast, the first since “Boxcar” started Hughes on his ban-the-bomb crusade eight months earlier. He had hoped to stave off the holocaust until a more pliant president took office. Now, with an unbought LBJ still in the White House and a bought Nixon elected but not yet sworn in, Hughes was faced with a real problem: he didn’t know whom to bribe.

  “Please press to reach Humphries, or let O’Brien take my offer to the Democratic chief of finance,” wrote a frantic Hughes. “I implore that we pull out all the stops.”

  Once more Hughes demanded that Maheu offer a million dollars—to Johnson again, to the defeated Humphrey for his campaign deficit, to the depleted treasury of the Democratic party, to the victorious but still powerless Nixon—to anyone who could block the impending blast.

  The AEC’s sneak attack caught Maheu down in the Bahamas, hobnobbing with the Nixon gang. While he continued to work on the incoming administration, he called in his new recruit to pull out ’the stops in Washington.

  “Larry O’Brien will meet with the top man tomorrow morning,” Maheu reported to Hughes. “Howard, I have thought of going to Washington but after serious consideration I cannot think of anything I could do there more effectively than O’Brien.”

  While O’Brien prepared to meet with Lyndon Johnson, the man he had helped make president, Maheu shuttled between Miami and the Bahamas in an effort to reach the president-elect, and also reached out to the still cooperative vice-president.

  “I have a call in right now for Humphrey,” he assured Hughes. “I really want to tap his brain in great depth before making any further moves, so please bear with me, Howard.

  “On the other side, [Lee] DuBridge, who will be Nixon’s top scientific advisor, is behind us but recommends very strongly to the new administration that they, definitely, take a hands off policy insofar as this particular blast is concerned.

  “Nixon’s closest advisors informed me that the president-elect in no way will stick his nose in this matter until, in fact, he has taken over.

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bsp; “Howard,” Maheu concluded, “this leaves us pretty much with the Democrats at this particular time, and that is the reason why it is so important for me to exhaust every possibility insofar as Humphrey and LBJ are concerned.”

  Up in his penthouse, sweating out another grim countdown, Hughes was dismayed by the failure of his henchmen to find a taker for his million-dollar payoff.

  “I am heartbroken that you propose a hands off policy,” he wailed, “and that we have not even come close thus far in delaying this test.

  “You say we should accept this one because it will be successful. I dont question that it will be successful in terms of visible evidence.

  “However, now I feel our prestige and entire public image will be most seriously damaged if we permit this one to proceed, or if we have not the political strength to stop it.

  “I implore you to reverse your attitude and pull out all the stops. I have received no indication that my offer of support (20 times Humphries)* has ever been put to anyone who was in a position to accept it or negotiate.

  “I agree with concentrating on the Democrats. My message of yesterday urged it.”

  Maheu was quick to assure Hughes that he was not once more playing the reluctant bagman.

  “I am continuing the battle to the fullest extent,” he reported to the command post. “As to the offer, I am happy we did not proceed too quickly, because it is obvious that it would have done no good, for instance, to make it to the Republicans.

  “I had a very long talk with Vice President Humphrey. He will make one more big try at delaying the blast, but admitted that he was not necessarily encouraged. He is most appreciative of our offer to help in the deficit, but would prefer not to accept it unless he is capable of causing the delay, or after we are fully convinced that his efforts will produce the necessary results as to future and bigger blasts.”

  Meanwhile, back in Washington, Larry O’Brien was also waging an uphill campaign. While Maheu confronted a Nixon gang not yet open for business and a vice-president too high-minded to accept payment for unfinished business, O’Brien was apparently getting the business from the man who had his finger on the button, Lyndon Johnson. He had made no headway at all.