Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  Hughes was devastated.

  “Please pull out every last stop to delay or cancel this test,” he pleaded.

  “I do not trust their promises so the commitment that this would be the last test is not too important.

  “Please push the Holy Week aspect and every other similar angle in every way,” he continued, now reduced to trading on religious sentiment.

  “I am relying on you. This is truly an all-out, end of the road necessity.”

  Rebozo kept pressing Hughes to meet with Nixon.

  “He suggests a conference which could be set up so that you and the President, backed up by Kissinger, and you by your scientists, take place immediately, because of the shortage of time before the scheduled blast,” Maheu urged.

  “Howard, you have to believe that it becomes increasingly difficult for Rebozo, the President, and even Kissinger to understand the impossibility of having a personal interview with you.

  “They truly cannot understand why you will not meet with the President himself.”

  But Hughes could not leave his penthouse seclusion.

  Perhaps if Howard Hughes and Richard Nixon had been able to meet they could have worked out the president’s “Big Play” and the billionaire’s “Big Caper,” made the big deal their agents could not make for them. Perhaps they could have consummated their long, arm’s-length affair, thus avoiding national cataclysm.

  But it was not to be. The Camp David summit died stillborn, and with it the million-dollar deal.

  At eleven A.M. on Thursday, March 26, 1970, the day before Good Friday, the Easter bombing went forward, the six hundredth nuclear explosion since the beginning of the atomic age, and one of the biggest. Once more the tremors rippled through Las Vegas and shook the naked old man whose hidden dealings with the president were to be the real fallout of the blast.

  Once again Hughes grabbed a yellow legal pad and, in one last futile gesture, scrawled a threat to leave the country, taking all his assets with him.

  “Bob,” he wrote, “I dont know where to begin.

  “You said the president couldnt care less whether I remain in Nevada.

  “This may well be true in the literal sense.

  “However, bear in mind that, if I pull up stakes here, I am not going to some neighboring state.

  “I am going to move the largest part of all of my activities to some location which will not be in the U.S.

  “The president already has the young, the black, and the poor against him. Maybe he will be indifferent if the richest man in the country also finds the situation in the U.S. un-livable, and because of the country’s intense preoccupation with the military.

  “I know one thing:

  “There is at present a violent feeling in this country against all the experimental activities of the military.…

  “So, I just don’t know how the public would react to a frank statement by the wealthiest man in the U.S. that he, also, considered he was being elbowed aside by the military.

  “I know one thing: It would, or, at least, it could be a hell of a newspaper story.”

  Before the year was out, Hughes would make good on his threat. He would leave the United States forever. And his departure would set in motion a chain of events that would, indeed, become a hell of a newspaper story. One that came under the headline “WATERGATE.”

  Richard Nixon, in bombing Howard Hughes, had unwittingly brought about his own destruction as surely as if the White House had been ground zero.

  13 Exodus

  This was not just another move. It was going to be, it had to be, the Great Escape.

  Alone in his darkened bedroom, Howard Hughes plotted each step as if he were about to break out of the most tightly guarded cellblock on Alcatraz rather than his own penthouse at the Desert Inn.

  Once more he reread the “Exit Plan.”

  “The exit plan is to divert the penthouse security guard, enter the elevator and, by using a key, proceed non-stop to the first floor,” his Mormons had written, refining days of tense scheming to a one-page master plan.

  “At a signal from us about 20–30 min. before leaving this floor, Hooper’s men will place a screen across the path that leads from the elevators to the front desk-casino area. We make a left-hand turn and proceed to the side door of the building.”

  So far so good. Out of his cell, past the guard, down the elevator, and out the door before anybody suspected a thing. Now for the big getaway.

  “We then pass through the side door, walk 50 feet or so towards the west and a limousine or conveyance will be waiting for us there,” the Exit Plan continued. “This is the point at which we have little control over people who are walking from hotel to hotel or are walking from the parking lot to the hotel or from people just windowshopping in front of this building.”

  Wait. What was this? Suddenly exposed to the outside world, for fifty unpredictable feet, with “little control.” All the warning signs started to flash as Hughes pictured himself caught in the Yard, frozen in the searchlight, halfway between the Big House and the Wall.

  “We should enter the car at 11:30 PM,” he read on, finishing the escape plan, but already certain it was dangerously flawed. “Hooper’s Cadillac could be used, as it is less conspicuous than a limousine. However, you will have to enter any car without the use of the stretcher.”

  Without the stretcher? This entire harebrained scheme would have to be scrapped. Howard Hughes was determined to leave Las Vegas the same way he arrived: unseen and carried on a stretcher.

  There would be other plans, urgent plans day-by-day as Hughes continued feverishly to plot his escape, never letting up until he finally did sneak out of town—more than a year later.

  It all began in September 1969.

  The Utopian dream that had brought Hughes to Las Vegas was crumbling, the dream that he could remake Nevada, indeed America, to his own perfect vision. It had been crumbling for years. Now the first Nixon bomb blast exploded it completely. His kingdom was no longer even safe.

  “Bob,” wrote Hughes in the grip of nuclear terror, “my future plans are in a state of complete chaos, as a result of what is happening.

  “I have things I want you to do in both New York and Washington, and thereafter, unless something surprising occurs, I will want you to come here to Las Vegas to supervise a massive sale of practically all of my Nevada assets.”

  It was time to go, and take all his assets with him. Whether he should also take Maheu was a whole other question.

  “I am sorry you dont apparently view this matter as the total defeat I consider it to be,” Hughes continued, blaming Maheu for allowing the bombing.

  “As far as I am concerned, the AEC and the bomb test program has been the #1 item on our list of projects. It has stood at the very top of the list ever since our arrival.

  “AEC—number one

  “Pollution of the lake—number two.

  “That is why I am at a loss to understand why you seem to view this situation with such coolness.

  “Anyway, unless something unforeseen happens, there will be much to do.”

  Hughes had come to Nevada to create a world he could control completely. That was his vision of paradise—a world free of contamination and competition, a world where he would not only rule, but which he would not even have to share. A world where only he existed.

  “Ever since our arrival, I have felt certain uneasy foreboding qualms about the future,” he explained, revealing a deep dissatisfaction with Nevada that went far beyond the bomb. “These qualms have centered around the AEC, the water situation, and lately a mass of miscellaneous problems which mainly seem to be the product of sharing the state with a number of other people.

  “In other words, the unions, the minorities, the threat of overabundant competition …” The list just went on and on.

  It was time to escape from the complications, the contamination, the competition, to flee Nevada, to find a new Eden.

  “I am prepared to
invest almost every cent I can scrape together in the development of an entire new community and way of life in some location where some of the restraints, incumbrances, and competition of this area are not present.

  “I want to make this new development the last and, I hope, most important project of my life.”

  Having failed to buy the government of the United States—what better proof of that than the Nixon bombing—Hughes was determined to achieve “Empire Status” elsewhere, to leave the country and make some other nation a “captive entity.”

  Hughes gazed at the globe, surveyed the imperfect world for a safe haven, for some unfallen paradise. First he ruled out the entire continental United States and all of Europe.

  Next he turned his gaze south of the border, taking Maheu on a tour of prospective paradises.

  “I cannot think of any location worthy of consideration except Mexico and the Bahamas,” wrote Hughes imperiously. “Of course, Onassis had the really ideal set up with Monaco. However, I prefer a location close enough to the U.S. so that the U.S. would never permit any hostile intervention by outsiders. I feel both Mexico and the Bahamas qualify in this respect.

  “So, lets, for the moment, compare those two. Which government do you think would be the most reliable and lasting?

  “It seems to me that the Bahamian situation is very unpredictable due to the recent change in the complexion of the government,” he continued, his racist fears aroused by the blacks’ ouster of minority white rule there.

  “I think the Mexican government is more stable, but I have less confidence in our ability to occupy a position of sufficient influence and privilege with the Mexicans.

  “In other words,” he concluded, still undecided, already fearing trouble in paradise, “I have pretty well assumed that you felt confident of a very favorable position with the new Bahamian government, whereas, I do not somehow gain that impression in respect to Mexico.”

  Hughes continued his Godlike review of the globe, ranging over the map in his search for some suitable refuge, endlessly re-analyzing the possibilities, finding fault with all. He kept coming back to the Bahamas, the last place he had visited before drifting into seclusion.

  “In the light of everything we know,” he wrote, “this is the most hopeful and very most realistic possible site for the location of the projects I have planned.

  “However, there are many other powerful entities located in the Florida, Bahama, Carribean area, and they present a deeply entrenched powerful force that may not take kindly to my entry into that area. There is no way I can estimate the strength of these competitive entities since we must keep my plans the most religiously guarded secret, or everything will really be screwed up completely.”

  Hughes was not up to a clash of the Titans. He was looking for virgin territory he could just walk into and take right over.

  “I do know that Baja has been much, much less invaded by rich American projects than the Florida-Bahamas area,” he mused, returning to the invitingly undeveloped Mexican peninsula.

  “I want to consider a development in Baja that would be similar to the all-inclusive arrangement Onassis had in Monte Carlo. I dont mean that I aspire to take over the Mexican government as he did Monaco. I mean that I want to make a deal with the Mexicans which would be somewhat similar to the deal [Daniel K.] Ludwig made with the Bahamian government when Freeport was established.

  “Please consider the problems in obtaining ‘Empire Status,’ ” he instructed his henchman.

  “It has been my hope that we could approach this project, since it is so much more important than even you realize, with a basis of three strings to the bow—the Bahama location, Baja, and Puerta Rico.

  “I put Puerto Rico last,” he added, explaining his new addition, “only because it is a little far away for the headquarters location I am seeking, but please dont encourage anyone else to move in that direction because I want to keep it as an ace in the hole.”

  Having narrowed the field to three, Hughes reiterated the absolute need for absolute one-man control.

  “It just does not work out to have more than one tiger to each hill in a situation like this,” he concluded. “In Las Vegas, everything was fine until the place was invaded by Kerkorian, Parvin-Dohrman, and a few others.”

  While Hughes juggled travel plans, he also juggled travel agents. It seemed as if everyone were in on it. He was reaching out to all his key executives, advisers, attorneys, and aides, all of them eager to control the move and thus control Hughes. It finally shaped up into a battle of Maheu versus the Mormons.

  Maheu did not want Hughes to leave at all, but if there was going to be a move, he wanted to be at his boss’s side, calling the shots.

  First he tried to scare Hughes into staying. Did he really want to go to the Bahamas, where blacks were in control—and out of control?

  He sent Hughes a twelve-page confidential report, code-named “Down-hill Racer” to appeal to Hughes’s love of cloak-and-dagger intrigue. “Blood—white blood—will run in the streets of Nassau,” the report warned. “When the axe falls, it will take an army to protect a white man in the Bahamas.”

  Hughes betrayed no fear to Maheu. He saw the chaos Maheu had described as a challenge, an opportunity:

  “If this report is even partially accurate, boy, they need a saviour down there like the poor bastards in the Middle East never needed when they were in trouble.”

  While Maheu tried to arouse Hughes’s fear of blacks, the Mormons tried to arouse his fears of Maheu.

  “It seems to me,” one of his nursemaids suggested, “that asking Bob about leaving here is like a bird asking how to get out of his cage so he can fly away.”

  Hughes hardly needed the warning. When the planning for the exodus began, Robert Maheu was already in exile. He did not know why he was in exile. Hughes would not tell him.

  He had kept Maheu away from Las Vegas ever since his unauthorized attendance at the Nixon dinner in August by giving him one mission after another that took him from Seattle to Vancouver to Dallas to Washington to New York to Los Angeles. Hughes did not try to conceal his own travel plans. In fact, he conferred with Maheu about the getaway by long-distance all the while. What Hughes did not reveal was that he intended to keep Maheu out of town until after he had made his escape.

  After more than a month of this mysterious exile, more than a bit worried about what plot Hughes might be hatching, Maheu threatened to return. With or without Hughes’s permission.

  “Howard, now that all the reasons for which I must stay away from Las Vegas have faded into the dust of oblivion, will you please let me return,” he pleaded. “There is an occasion taking place involving my immediate family which makes my presence mandatory. I intend to be there whatever the consequences may be, and however disastrously it may affect my career. It would make it so much more pleasant, therefore, for me to be there with your approval.”

  Maheu’s threatened insubordination forced Hughes to take off the wraps. He finally told Maheu why he was in exile. He had been banished before he could wrest control of the empire from Hughes.

  “I am very sure you are well aware of the fact that my reason for asking you to remain away from Las Vegas at this time is in some way related to the position of over-powering dominance to which you have climbed in the organizational structure of my business affairs,” he wrote.

  “Bob, I have no way of knowing, or even estimating accurately the extent to which you have dominated just about everybody associated with me.

  “You have succeeded in achieving a position of such strength that I just dont know how many of my people are afraid to disclose information to me or how much information is being withheld.”

  Hughes had long feared that Maheu was secretly seizing control. Now, encouraged in his paranoia by the whispering Mormons, he was certain that Maheu had in fact taken over completely and was actually planning a coup.

  “You have built an ‘organization-within-an-organization’ here in Nev
ada,” he continued, hurling the ultimate accusation, “the very thing you have so vehemently denied, and the very thing that Dietrich did to me, and which you, yourself, so violently criticized.

  “In fact, I have been told that the ‘blueprints have already been cut’ for a mass exodus of the guts of this organization exactly along the lines followed by Ramo and Wooldridge.”

  Once more his trusted alter ego was about to betray him, as Dietrich had. Once more his key men were about to defect, to set up a rival operation, as had the top scientists of the Hughes Aircraft Company. It was the same story all over again—treachery by trusted insiders, undermining him from within.

  “Bob, this capsulized organization-within-an-organization, being easily removable and capable of setting up shop elsewhere, this is a terrifying thing, and it worries me a great deal,” added Hughes with a sick sense of déjà vu.

  “I dont say you did it deliberately. I dont even say you were aware of its subtle growth.

  “I dont know exactly to what extent it exists. But whatever that extent may be, it is very dangerous to me.

  “Under these circumstances, your statement that you intend to be here tomorrow evening for a social engagement, whether I like it or not, and even if it means a severance of our business relationship of twenty years standing, this comes as a pretty severe shock.

  “Frankly this scares the hell out of me, Bob,” he concluded, despite his dark suspicions not yet ready to make the final break. “I am fearful that one of these disagreements we have may one day reach a dead end.”

  If Hughes was afraid that his relationship with Maheu was coming to a dangerous dead end, the Mormon aides who encouraged those fears were afraid that Maheu would discover their whispering campaign.

  “We hope you will consider our security as seriously as we consider yours,” the frightened attendants wrote their boss from the room next door. “The thing that really bothers us is that we gave you a confidential message about the organization that Bob has built up and you immediately pass the entire message on to Bob, and in even stronger language.