“If that is so, we really shouldn’t go onto a boat where we would be much more vulnerable than we are here, or elsewhere on land.”
The unwelcome reminder that the jilted Maheu was still on the loose—and still dangerous—quickly deflated Hughes’s yacht fantasy. He settled back into his Barcalounger, back to his movies and his codeine, and once more forgot about the world beyond his bedroom.
But the struggle for control of his empire—the battle between Maheu and the Mormons still raging back in Las Vegas—was steadily feeding Richard Nixon’s paranoia and steadily becoming intertwined with the covert activities the president was plotting from the White House.
Chuck Colson was excited. Nixon’s bullyboy had just heard some incredible news.
Larry O’Brien was out. He had been replaced by the Mormons with a fellow Mormon. Howard Hughes had a new man in Washington, Robert Foster Bennett. He was a solid Republican, and best of all Bob Bennett and Chuck Colson were old buddies.
“I’m sure I need not explain the political implications of having Hughes’s affairs handled here in Washington by a close friend,” crowed Colson, spreading the good word through the White House. “This move could signal quite a shift in terms of the politics and money that Hughes represents.”
Like the rest of Nixon’s gang, Colson was unaware that the president already had a private pipeline to the billionaire, that he wasn’t looking for a new way to get Hughes money but for some way to hide the cash already in hand.
And there was also a great deal Colson didn’t know about his pal Bob Bennett. Such as the fact that Bennett had another big client. The Central Intelligence Agency. An obscure bureaucrat in the Department of Transportation until he was brought into the Hughes orbit by the Bahamas nerve-gas affair, Bennett had suddenly become the pivot for three powerful forces—Hughes, Nixon, and the CIA— and it would never be clear where his true loyalties lay. But the mysterious Mormon would never be far from the events that finally drove Nixon from office.
The president, however, remained fixated on O’Brien. His ouster changed nothing. Nixon still wanted him nailed. Haldeman had not assigned that mission to his rival Colson, as Nixon had suggested. Instead he had given the O’Brien hit to a new recruit, an ambitious young White House counsel, John Dean.
But Dean was getting nowhere. He called Bebe Rebozo, but Rebozo only repeated what he had already told Nixon. Nothing really solid. And the president’s pal added a disturbing note: “He [Rebozo] requested that if any action is taken with regard to Hughes that he be notified because of his familiarity with the delicacy of the relationships as a result of his own dealings with the Hughes people.”
Puzzled and a bit nervous, Dean turned to the White House gumshoe, Jack Caulfield. A former New York City police detective hired on to handle jobs too dirty to entrust to government agencies—wiretapping newsmen, spying on Teddy Kennedy, keeping watch over the president’s brother—Caulfield failed to find proof of the O’Brien-Hughes connection.
But the street-wise cop did smell trouble. Big trouble. Digging for dirt on O’Brien, he was coming up instead with dirt on Nixon. He tried to warn Dean off the case.
“The revelation that an O’Brien-Mahew relationship exists poses significant hazards in any attempt to make O’Brien accountable to the Hughes retainer,” cautioned Caulfield. “Mahew’s controversial activities and contacts in both Democratic and Republican circles suggests the possibility that forced embarrassment of O’Brien in this matter might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.
“Mayhew apparently forwarded Hughes’s political contributions, personally, to both parties over the last ten years. Former FBI agent Dick Danner has been an aide to Mayhew. Danner professes a friendship with Bebe Rebozo.
“As one gets closer to Mayhew’s dealings, it becomes evident that his tentacles touch many extremely sensitive areas of government, each one of which is fraught with potential for Jack Anderson-type exposure.
“There is a serious risk here for a counter-scandal if we move precipitously.”
Dean was all but ready to bail out entirely when Chuck Colson arrived with the mysterious Bob Bennett in tow. Colson was not about to be frozen out of this intrigue, and his pal Bennett had the inside story on O’Brien.
Dean reported it to Haldeman: “Bennett informs me that there is no doubt about the fact that Larry O’Brien was retained by Howard Hughes. He felt confident that if it was necessary to document the retainer with O’Brien he could get the information through the Hughes people, but it would be with the understanding that the documentation would not be used in a manner that might embarrass Hughes.”
Urged on by Nixon, afraid that Colson would grab all the credit, Haldeman ignored the danger signs and demanded action.
“Once Bennett gets back to you with his final report,” he ordered Dean, “you and Chuck Colson should get together and come up with a way to leak the appropriate information. Frankly, I can’t see any way to handle this without involving Hughes, so the problem of ‘embarrassing’ him seems to be a matter of degree. However, we should keep Bennett and Bebe out of it at all costs.”
But Bennett’s final report was not what the White House expected. Instead of delivering the goods on O’Brien, he returned to Washington from a meeting with the new Hughes command in Los Angeles to suggest a criminal investigation of Robert Maheu.
The O’Brien deal was “straightforward,” said Bennett, and exposing it would only revive the old Nixon scandals. O’Brien probably knew everything that Maheu knew, and Maheu knew everything. It was Maheu who had handled all of Hughes’s political activity, and now he was involved with notorious gangsters. Maheu, not O’Brien, was the real problem.
Bennett’s convoluted monologue left Dean confused. Was he trying to use the White House to get Maheu on behalf of the Mormons, as it seemed on the surface, or was he subtly playing on Nixon’s paranoia: forget about O’Brien, he knows too much.
But Dean had heard enough. He told Haldeman they were “treading in dangerous waters.” And Haldeman was also ready to let the whole matter drop.
Nixon, however, was not. All the president’s men were now queasy about the Hughes probe—even Rebozo seemed nervous—but the president himself only pushed harder. All his worst fears about O’Brien had been confirmed. If O’Brien indeed knew about the Hughes-Nixon dealings, then he certainly had to be neutralized.
“O’Brien’s not going to get away with it,” Nixon once more told Haldeman. Everybody always went after him over any possible Hughes connection—even taking that “cheap shot” at his poor brother—yet nobody was trying to expose O’Brien. Nixon wanted the proof, the full story, all the dirt, and he wanted it now. It became a constant refrain.
While Nixon waited impatiently for his gang to nail O’Brien, the Hughes gang, unable to get White House assistance, made its own move to nail Maheu—and unwittingly caught the president in a deadly crossfire.
Out in Las Vegas, Intertel instigated an IRS probe against Maheu. It was a fateful move. The IRS investigation that began as a plot against Maheu soon mushroomed into a full-scale audit of the entire Hughes empire, turning first against Hughes himself, and finally against Richard Nixon.
Maheu, however, was aware only of his own IRS problems. He was certain that the investigation had been ordered from the White House. Convinced that Nixon had joined forces with Hughes, that the president was conspiring against him, that the FBI and the CIA were also poised to attack, Maheu fired a warning shot at the Oval Office.
Jack Anderson’s column appeared on August 6, 1971.
“Howard Hughes directed his former factotum Robert Maheu to help Richard Nixon win the presidency ‘under our sponsorship and supervision,’ ” Anderson reported. “Maheu allegedly siphoned off $100,000 from the Silver Slipper, a Hughes gambling emporium, for Nixon’s campaign. The money was delivered by Richard Danner, a Hughes exec, to Bebe Rebozo, a Nixon confidant.”
Nixon’s worst nightmare had come true. Th
e Hughes payoff was out in the open.
Rebozo immediately called Danner, angrily demanding to know how Anderson found out. Danner’s answer was the final blow. Anderson had called him for comment, and said, “Don’t deny it, because I have seen the memo describing this in detail.” Maheu had shown it to him.
Anderson had documentary evidence. There was no way out. Still, he had called the payoff a “campaign contribution.” Obviously a trick. Nixon waited in horror for the full story to explode.
And nothing happened. Nothing that day, nothing that week, nothing that entire month. The story was simply ignored.
Then, without warning, late in September Maheu’s pal Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, brought it back sharply to Nixon’s attention. The president had stopped off in Portland, Oregon, to meet with West Coast newspaper editors, on his way to Alaska for a meeting with the emperor of Japan. Greenspun approached White House press aide Herb Klein. He said he had a story that could “sink Nixon.” He had heard that a contribution of $100,000 from Hughes had been used to furnish the president’s San Clemente estate.
When word of Greenspun’s bombshell reached John Ehrlichman back in Washington, he immediately sent the president’s personal lawyer, Herb Kalmbach, flying out to Las Vegas. Kalmbach checked into the Sahara and met there with Greenspun for nearly four hours. He was slow to get to the Hughes money, as if he didn’t want the publisher to realize that was his real concern. And when Kalmbach finally did bring it up, it was only to vehemently deny that any of Hughes’s money had gone into San Clemente. “I know where every nickel came from,” said the lawyer, “and I can assure you none of it came from Hughes.” That done, Kalmbach started pumping Greenspun for dirt on Larry O’Brien.
Kalmbach himself didn’t know it, but Greenspun had come uncomfortably close to the truth. He just had the wrong house. Nixon had spent at least some of the $100,000 for improvements at Key Biscayne.
The noose was tightening, and a few weeks later Bob Bennett mentioned to Chuck Colson that Maheu had stolen Hughes documents stashed in Hank Greenspun’s safe.
Then, early in December, the same IRS probe that Intertel had instigated against Maheu began to turn against Nixon. An audit of John Meier’s mining-claim scam revealed that the president’s brother had been involved in the swindle. And worse yet, an informant had told the revenue agents that “Bebe Rebozo advised John Meier not to be available for IRS interview because of Don Nixon’s involvement.”
Soon a series of IRS “sensitive case reports” started coming into the White House, slipped to John Ehrlichman by Nixon’s man in the commissioner’s office. Donald’s escapades with Meier were detailed—not merely the bogus mining claims but land deals and stock deals with organized-crime figures, Hawaiian vacations paid for by Meier with Hughes ultimately picking up the tab, trips to the Dominican Republic for shady joint ventures with the island’s top government leaders.
Meier, now known to have stolen millions from Hughes, even claimed secret meetings with the president himself. “An analysis of expense vouchers submitted by Meier to Hughes Tool Company,” one IRS report noted, “shows that Meier and his wife accompanied by Donald Nixon and his wife traveled to Washington for consultation with president-elect Richard Nixon on November 21, 1968.”
Ehrlichman kept Nixon informed as the IRS probe zeroed in on the White House. On one such occasion, the president told his domestic-affairs chief the “true story” of the old Hughes “loan” scandal. Nixon, who had personally arranged that entire transaction, now said he had nothing whatever to do with it. He was never even aware that the money had come from Hughes. All he ever knew was that his mother had borrowed some money for his brother from an accountant.
Ehrlichman understood. The president was giving him the official line, rehearsing it, getting ready for the scandal that had cost him the 1960 election to resurface.
Nixon was clearly upset. He railed on and on about his “stupid brother” getting involved all over again with Hughes. Never once did he mention his own $100,000. But Nixon now knew that Rebozo had already been drawn into the IRS investigation. And he had to wonder how long it would be before the revenue agents followed Jack Anderson’s lead and opened up Bebe’s little tin box.
But it was not Bebe or his brother, not Anderson or the IRS, not Maheu or Bennett or Greenspun who triggered the final series of events that led to Nixon’s downfall.
It was Clifford Irving.
Off in Ibiza, the expatriate novelist had been following the lurid story of the struggle for control of the secret Hughes empire. He decided that the billionaire was either dead or disabled—certainly in no shape to make a public appearance—and that gave him an idea. He would concoct his own epic and present it to the world as the autobiography of Howard Hughes.
The coup was announced December 7, 1971. McGraw-Hill said it would soon publish Hughes’s personal memoirs, his true life story as told to Clifford Irving.
It became an immediate worldwide sensation. The Hughes organization branded the book a hoax, but with the billionaire himself unseen and silent, that only added to the hoopla. And nowhere did the book arouse more intense interest than at the White House.
Haldeman told Colson and Dean to find out what was in Irving’s manuscript. Bennett soon made contact, once more pushing a criminal investigation of Maheu, who he was sure had put Irving up to it, supplied inside information on Hughes, and orchestrated the entire caper.
“Is the book hard on Nixon?” asked Dean. “Yes,” replied Bennett, “very hard on Nixon.”
Haldeman started getting FBI reports on the Irving affair directly from J. Edgar Hoover, and finally the White House managed to obtain a copy of the still secret manuscript from a source at McGraw-Hill.
It came as quite a shock. Irving claimed that Hughes had passed $400,000 to Nixon when the latter was vice-president, in return for fixing the TWA case. It was an inspired guess, the $400,000 figure probably not far off the mark.* To Nixon it must have looked as if Irving had the real story, and it hardly mattered whether he had it from Maheu or Hughes.
And the imaginative Irving had just begun. Next came his tale of the big double-cross. It was Hughes himself who had sabotaged Nixon in 1960. Angry that Nixon had not come through on TWA, the disgruntled recluse had intentionally leaked the “loan scandal” story to columnist Drew Pearson.
“Nobody was raising a hand to help me,” Irving quoted Hughes as saying. “So I leaked the details to Drew Pearson. I got someone to whisper it into Mr. Pearson’s ear, where to look. Now whether it actually turned the tide of the election or not, I don’t know.”
And there sat Richard Nixon, reading that in the Oval Office—having just bombed his benefactor in Las Vegas and gassed him in the Bahamas—and now holding another $100,000 in secret cash from Howard Hughes.
Friday, January 7, 1972. A day like any other day in the Paradise Island penthouse. Except that on this day Howard Hughes would break more than fifteen years of public silence and speak to the world.
He had been awake since 11:30 the night before, not preparing for his big debut, but sitting in his Barcalounger and watching a spy movie, Funeral in Berlin. He watched it twice in a row, meanwhile picking at a piece of chicken, interrupting his meal and his movie for frequent but futile trips to the bathroom.
At 12:45 P.M., the double feature finally over, Hughes reached down to his black metal box, pulled out a drug bottle, and counted his codeine tablets. He had fifty left. He took eight of the precious white pills, dissolved them in pure bottled spring water, and shot the big fix into his long spindly arm.
He then eased back into his lounge chair, feeling again that wonderful warm rush, and called for a third showing of Funeral in Berlin.
It was 6:45 P.M. when the hopped-up recluse finally reached for his telephone and prepared to meet the press. A month had passed since Clifford Irving made him the unseen center of global attention, and now the mystery man himself was about to speak. Three thousand miles awa
y, at the other end of the line, seven carefully selected reporters waited expectantly in a Hollywood hotel.
The disembodied voice quickly disposed of Irving: “I don’t know him. I never saw him. I never even heard of him until a matter of a few days ago when this thing first came to my attention.”
A few days ago? Where had he been? And by now there was another big question. Was Hughes still alive, did the phantom exist, or was this voice on the phone some imposter?
Most of the press conference was devoted to “identification questions.” At first hesitant, ill at ease, Hughes soon began to enjoy the big quiz game. Off in his isolation booth, not quite sure what these reporters were after, asking all these arcane questions about his past exploits, Hughes nonetheless didn’t wish to be stumped. He did very well on the airplane questions, but missed a lot of easy ones about people.
Sitting there naked, with his hair halfway down his back, and his fingernails protruding, Hughes casually dismissed tales of his bizarre appearance.
“I keep in fair shape,” he replied when asked about his physical condition, and then launched into a lengthy discussion of his daily manicures. “I have always kept my fingernails at a reasonable length,” he said. “I take care of them the same way I always have, the same way I did when I went around the world and at the time of the flight of the flying boat. I cut them with clippers, not with scissors and a nail file the way some people do.”
To the press he promised photos, but when his aides later suggested he actually do it—“you should make every effort to get your hair and nails attended to as soon as possible, and if you can bring yourself to do it, have a photograph taken”—Hughes recoiled in horror.
“This is not a beauty contest,” he scribbled. “I am only required to demonstrate that I am alive and competent.”
But at the press conference, only once did Hughes display any real anger. It was directed not at Clifford Irving, but Robert Maheu. Asked why he had fired his regent, Hughes flew into a rage. “Because he’s a no-good, dishonest son of a bitch, and he stole me blind,” he shouted. “The money’s gone, and he’s got it.”
Citizen Hughes Page 45