Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  The early signs were good, and within a year Hughes would get nearly everything he wanted from Nixon: a green light for his Las Vegas Monopoly game, approval of his illegal reentry into the airline business, a vast increase in his already great cost-plus no-competitive-bidding business with the Pentagon, even an end to federal financing for the dreaded Nevada water project.

  But still Hughes was not satisfied.

  First there was the Wally Hickel problem. “I sent word to you a couple of days ago that the confirmation of Hickel as Sec. of the Interior would not be consistent with the best interests of my various entities,” Hughes complained to Maheu, although there was no apparent reason for his objection to the former Alaska governor. “I was therefore certainly surprised to note today that he was confirmed.”

  In fact, Hughes was displeased with the entire cabinet selection process. “Not one of the Nixon appointees was given to me for consideration and none such nominee was made in my behalf with my approval,” he continued. “I consider this shocking in view of my involvement and dependency upon this Administration. Now to top it off, a new AEC Commissioner has been appointed without any information to me in advance.”

  As if that was not sufficiently outrageous, the president was about to reshape the Supreme Court, again without consulting Hughes. “[T]he new Supreme Court Justice to replace Fortas could be the most urgent item before us with the TWA suit coming up,” Hughes wrote Maheu. “You know I have been disappointed in the very meager voice I have had in the consideration of various opointees for cabinet and other lesser administrative posts.…

  “You remember I told you the sky was the limit in campaign contributions and I really expected, as the result, to have some small chance to propose a few people for consideration for these positions in government, all of which were re-selected as a part of the new incoming administration.

  “So, please, please, Bob, let us have some small voice in the selection of the new justice.”

  Nixon’s failure to clear his government with Hughes should have prepared the recluse for the next blow, but it caught him by surprise.

  “Jesus what next!” he wrote in a fevered scrawl. “The news just announced that now Nixon is going to buy $10,000,000,000 (billion) worth of long range conventional manned bombers.

  “Bob, that means Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, Lockheed, or Convair—nothing for us at all.”

  Part of the new military budget was going to someone other than Hughes, and while he became a top-ten defense contractor for the first time under Nixon, having to share the Pentagon with other corporations left him shaken.

  “When Nixon ran for President I told you I wanted to go just as far as necessary to have some voice in the new administration,” he concluded in bleak despair, “but I just have no assurance at all as to what the future holds.”

  The new president was turning out to be something of a disappointment. And the real shock was yet to come.

  Hughes, in fact, had grown quite disillusioned with Nixon long before most of the nation. Not over Cambodia or Kent State, not over Vietnam or the Christmas bombing, certainly not because he knew that Nixon was, of course, a crook. No, Howard Hughes was appalled by Nixon’s first major act of statesmanship.

  In March 1969, less than two months after the inauguration, Hughes expressed his pained disappointment in the new president.

  “The news just reported that Nixon will go ahead with the ABM,” he wrote Maheu, full of dismay. “Bob, this is an awful mistake. It would perhaps be to my best interest selfishly to do nothing and let the system proceed, but it is a ghastly mistake for the country and for Nixon, whom I want to grow in stature.”

  Hughes voiced his sad disillusion in the high moral tones of a James Reston or a Walter Lippmann, without mentioning his true objection to the antiballistic missile system.

  Building the ABM meant big money for Hughes the defense contractor, but it also meant more big bomb blasts in Nevada, the nuclear nightmare Hughes thought had ended with the election of a man who “knows the facts of life.”

  One month later, Hughes’s disappointment turned to shocked outrage when White House communications director Herb Klein made a speech in Las Vegas backing the nuclear tests.

  “Who is this bastard Klein?” Hughes demanded. “I am really seriously worried about the Nixon administration’s apparent intention of turning loose all the expensive forces of the government publicity machine to bring public opinion into an attitude favoring the test program.

  “This is shocking, Bob,” he continued. “I always have assumed that you had the Nixon administration committed to our side. It is urgent that something be done to bring this Nixon Nuclear Test Campaign to your well known screeching halt.”

  Hughes, in fact, was so shocked that he could hardly believe Nixon’s ingratitude:

  “Sometimes I wonder if Nixon is aware of the donation, which I hope was made, or did somebody possibly forget to make it?”

  No one had forgotten. Even as Hughes wrote his pained memo, Bebe Rebozo and Richard Danner were finally arranging the long-delayed $100,000 donation to Nixon’s private slush fund.

  Danner was now working for Hughes, hired on shortly after the inauguration to be his Nixon connection. Danner was in regular contact with Rebozo, who was now quite comfortably handling his role as the president’s Hughes connection. Several times a month, Danner visited his old friend in Key Biscayne or Washington, and Rebozo often flew into Las Vegas, sometimes on a private Hughes jet.

  “On several occasions we transported Rebozo when the White House did not want a record of his movements,” Maheu reported, making clear Nixon’s continued fears of being publicly linked to Hughes.

  But if fear had overcome greed before the election, greed overcame all as Nixon settled in at the Oval Office. By the spring of 1969, Rebozo was needling Danner about Hughes’s apparent favoritism toward the Democrats. Somehow the president had learned of the $100,000 Hughes had given Hubert Humphrey, and Rebozo wondered why there had been no contribution to Nixon.

  Maheu sent a reminder of the $50,000 donated to Nixon campaign committees, but Rebozo dismissed that money, and said it was “not comparable” to what Hughes had done for Humphrey.

  Maheu, who had delivered $50,000 in cash to Humphrey in the backseat of a limousine, understood. He immediately offered Rebozo the $50,000 that had been similarly earmarked for Nixon but never actually passed. Rebozo turned it down.

  But he kept right on needling Danner about the Humphrey money, softening him up before finally asking for the Hughes cash he had twice spurned. Not the $50,000 originally discussed, but twice that amount, $100,000.

  Everyone called it a “campaign contribution,” but there was no campaign, and Rebozo made it clear that the contribution should be delivered directly to him—in cash—rather than to any campaign committee.

  The request for $100,000 came to Hughes as he was battling Nixon over the ABM, fighting the president for votes in a closely divided Senate. It was the first major congressional battle of the new administration, and one that pitted Nixon against his hated foe Teddy Kennedy, who was leading the opposition.

  So Nixon coupled his request for the money with a plea that Hughes back off from the ABM fight. “The President sent an emissary to ask me if we could relent some of the pressures on the ABM program,” Maheu informed his boss, shortly after Rebozo visited Las Vegas late in May.

  Hughes replied in kind. He readily approved the payoff, sending word of his benevolence along with a twelve-page meticulously drafted and closely reasoned appeal to Nixon that he drop his support of the ABM. The memo would help the president to recognize his “ghastly mistake,” but if Nixon failed to “grow in stature,” surely he was still a man who knew “the facts of life.”

  “Bob,” wrote Hughes, “you asked me recently if I had any thought as to what reply might be given to Mr. Nixon on the ABM question.

  “Bob, I want you to tell Pres. Nixon this: I am aware of the many, many conflicting
viewpoints that have been pressed through to him from right and from left. However, there is one very important difference between a message from me on this subject and the many persuasive inputs which I am sure he is receiving constantly from others.

  “This is the difference:

  “1. My technical information is absolutely accurate.

  “2. My personal monetary selfish interest would be benefited in every way by an immediate, definite, final ABM go-ahead, with no further after-thoughts.”

  Having established his credentials and his altruism, Hughes presented his arguments—very similar to views Nixon had already secretly received from former President Eisenhower.

  “I do not argue in any slightest degree the wisdom or imprudence of spending X billion dollars for an increased defense capability,” wrote Hughes. “I argue only that the proposed ABM is not the way to obtain the maximum defense for the X billion.

  “It is logical to assume that if the U.S. builds an ABM, then the enemy will do likewise.… Any ICBM’s saved from destruction by the ABM would not be completely effective, since they would have to run the gauntlet of enemy ABM’s before they could reach their targets.

  “Now, on the other hand, if the same X billion dollars were expended for an increased fleet of Polaris Submarines, it would be an expenditure for a known and proven product, instead of an experimental, unproven, completely unpredictable weapon system of fantastic complexity.

  “The U.S. will never know, really, whether the ABM will work until a real, true enemy missile is actually launched and in flight on its deadly course through the upper regions of space headed for its target in the U.S.

  “No matter how it is tested, it will never really be known whether or not it is going to work.”

  Hughes concluded his ABM memo without mentioning the $100,000, but he had Danner deliver it to Rebozo with word that $50,000 was available immediately and that a like bundle of cash would soon follow.

  “Danner is meeting with his friend Rebozo on the ABM situation in Washington, D.C. on Monday,” Maheu reported late in June. “Depending on the results of that meeting, we may decide, subject to your approval, to have a personal meeting with the President.”

  In fact, it was not until June 26 that Danner finally caught up with Rebozo in Miami. The next day Maheu withdrew $50,000 from Hughes’s personal bank account for “nondeductible contributions,” the code word he used to cover political payoffs.

  The deal went down on the Fourth of July.

  The president had spent that morning reviewing a parade in Key Biscayne, performing his public duty with obvious discomfort, sweating profusely in a heavy suit on a sweltering hot day, telling parade spectators they were “proof that the great majority of people haven’t lost faith in this country.”

  Then Nixon boarded a helicopter and flew off with Rebozo to a private island in the Bahamas owned by his other millionaire crony, Robert Abplanalp, celebrating this weekend, as he did so many others, drinking martinis with his two old pals. Finally alone, having escaped his wife, having escaped the press, having escaped even Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the president got down to private business.

  Rebozo gave Nixon the Hughes memo, undoubtedly also brightening the festivities with word that the long-sought payoff had finally been arranged. Then the Cuban placed a call to Las Vegas.

  “Howard, Rebozo has transmitted your message on the ABM to the President,” Maheu reported that same day to the penthouse. “He was very appreciative but Rebozo could not tell from the reaction whether or not the President was ready to countermand the position of his Secretary of Defense.”

  Nixon, however, was prepared to immediately show his appreciation to Hughes in another way.

  “Howard,” Maheu added in the same report, “our present intelligence indicates that the President’s approval of Air West and that of the CAB will come down next week.”

  Hughes was, at long last, back in the airline business. Air West was not, of course, TWA. But it was an airline, and Hughes, who had first gained fame as an aviation pioneer, very much wanted to own one again. He had been plotting to take over the struggling little carrier for a year.

  “This plan necessitates that the stock edge downward,” he had written at the outset, outlining his scheme to swindle the stockholders, “and then that we come along with a spectacular offer.”

  At first it had gone according to plan. When the stock had tumbled to sixteen dollars a share, depressed by a spate of adverse news stories secretly orchestrated by Hughes publicists, the recluse made his offer—twenty-two dollars a share. More than half of the stockholders voted to accept.

  But then a stubborn Air West board of directors voted 13–11 to reject Hughes’s bid. “I do not think these selfish bastards are ready to change their position,” Maheu reported. But he had a plan, a phony stockholders’ lawsuit against the directors leading the opposition and a plot to have three front men dump tens of thousands of Air West shares on the market, setting off a panic.

  Maheu reported the entire illegal scheme to Hughes:

  “As I am sure you know the derivative actions were filed today in Deleware. Tomorrow there will be further actions filed against the 13 Directors in Federal court in New York. The unions will serve notice tomorrow reflecting their complete disgust, and certain machinery has been put into motion to depress the stock so that the Directors who voted against the deal will recognize their individual obligations to the fullest extent.”

  The campaign of stock fraud and intimidation was a complete success. The opposition capitulated. And when Hughes finally closed the deal, a loophole in the agreement allowed him to pay not the twenty-two dollars a share promised, but only $8.75.

  He had cheated the Air West stockholders of nearly $60 million. And now the airline was finally his, courtesy of Richard Nixon. (As promised July 4 in the message from Rebozo, the CAB approved the takeover July 15, and the president made it final July 21.)

  Almost two weeks went by, however, with no response from Nixon on the ABM. Hughes was getting impatient.

  “I am disappointed because, since I have no report of the President’s reaction to the paper I wrote, I can only assume he did not ask anybody to read it,” Hughes complained, hardly satisfied with an airline.

  “Bob, I have given you unlimited resources financially with which to operate, and I have given you absolute freedom to choose anybody under the sun you might wish to assist you.

  “Since I consider I have given you carte blanche, financially, executively. and every other way, I think I am entitled to receive some kind of a report, setting forth in specific terms just what has happened and by whom it was done, and what is being attempted at this time and what is expected to result from same.

  “I didn’t spend about 6 hours on that paper just to have it wind up in somebody’s waste basket. If the President could not be bothered to consider this matter, it seems to me it should have been pursued thru somebody else.”

  But the president had not forgotten about Hughes. He had asked somebody to read the ABM memo—Henry Kissinger. On July 16, 1969, the same day that the Apollo 11 astronauts blasted off for man’s first walk on the moon, Nixon huddled with his national security adviser. That morning in the Oval Office, just before they shared the historic moment watching the launch together on television, the president told Kissinger to go see Hughes.

  Kissinger returned to his White House basement office angry and incredulous. He told his deputy, Alexander Haig, that Nixon had just ordered him to give the billionaire a private top-secret briefing, not only on the ABM but also on the general strategic threat, on the balance of nuclear power—and, as a final outrage, to solicit Hughes’s own views on defense policy.

  Although he regularly briefed his own patron, Nelson Rockefeller (who secretly slipped him $50,000 just before he joined the White House staff), Kissinger always bristled at having to service Nixon’s patrons, and he had never before been asked to do anything remotely like this. The Hughes mission re
ally had Kissinger fuming.

  “Henry was not particularly impressed with the thought of it,” Haig later recalled. “He was rather cynical about it, somewhat skeptical, wondered whether this sort of activity was the right thing to do.” Others who overheard Kissinger’s tirade say he questioned both the president’s motives and his mental health.

  “He’s out of his mind,” yelled Kissinger. “He can’t sell this! I can’t hold private peace talks with Howard Hughes.”

  Haig himself seemed to find it all amusing. He emerged from Kissinger’s office waving the Hughes memo in his hand, and told Larry Lynn, a senior aide who handled the ABM, “Guess what’s up now—Howard Hughes is in the act!”

  Maheu meanwhile immediately flashed word from Nixon to Rebozo to Danner to the penthouse.

  “Howard, we have just been informed that the President will be writing you a letter in the next several days to thank you for your comments on the ABM in your memorandum delivered by Rebozo.

  “More importantly, however, is the fact that the President chose to discuss said memo with Dr. Kissinger, his number one technical advisor. Kissinger was very much impressed and admitted that you had covered some concepts which had not come to their attention previously.

  “As a result, the President would like to know if he could send Kissinger to Las Vegas to brief you on some new developments and to get the benefit of your thinking.

  “As you know, Howard,” added Maheu, dealing delicately with a sensitive point, “because of the direct line from my home to your office (which is 100% secure) such a briefing could take place without the necessity of your having a personal confrontation with Kissinger.”

  It was shuttle diplomacy of a new order. Nixon dealing with Hughes as if negotiating nuclear policy with a sovereign power. But the prospect of Kissinger’s visit terrified Hughes. He simply could not deal with an outsider, not even Kissinger, not even by telephone.