Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  Almost in passing, toward the end of the three-hour interview, there was a question about his reported dealings with Nixon and Rebozo.

  “Certainly none with Rebozo,” replied Hughes, handling this as calmly as the inquiry about his fingernails. “Now, regarding Mr. Nixon, I have tried not to bother him since he’s been in office, and I’ve made no effort to contact him.”

  The press conference over, Hughes settled back to watch another movie, Topaz, shot up four more grains of codeine, then stayed up all night for a fourth and fifth screening of Funeral in Berlin. Finally, at eleven the next morning, he swallowed four blue bombers and fell asleep.

  All the while his paranoia over Hughes mounted, the president had been pushing his men to set up a covert intelligence operation for his 1972 reelection campaign.

  Nixon already had a secret police force operating out of the White House basement, but that gang, the Plumbers, handled “national security leaks.” What the president now wanted was a team targeted on the Democrats. The failure of his staff to nail Larry O’Brien showed the need for some real professionals.

  To lead the new gang, Nixon’s campaign manager, Attorney General John Mitchell, chose a former FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy. A gun fanatic who liked to watch old Nazi propaganda films, Liddy had already made his bones as a Plumber, staging a break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

  He reported for work at the Committee for the Re-election of the President on December 8, 1971, the day after Clifford Irving’s book was first announced. And now, as Liddy prepared his espionage plan, the fallout from the Irving caper brought Nixon’s paranoia to full boil.

  The billionaire’s bizarre press conference had only focused yet more attention on Irving, on Hughes himself, and on Nixon.

  It all came together January 16, 1972, in a headline on the front page of the New York Times: “HUGHES-NIXON TIES DESCRIBED IN BOOK.” The story said that Hughes had told Irving all about his Nixon connection, but gave no details.

  A week later the Times revealed that Bobby Kennedy, as attorney general, had secretly investigated the Hughes-Nixon dealings and considered prosecuting Nixon himself, as well as members of his family. That story particularly enraged the president, and he called Bobby “a ruthless little bastard.”

  “He wanted to bring criminal charges against my mother!“ exclaimed Nixon, adding that it was typical of the Kennedys.

  And that same day, January 24, the equally feared and hated Jack Anderson repeated his allegation that Nixon had received $100,000 from Hughes through Rebozo, this time adding that he had “documentary evidence” to back it up.

  Still, nothing happened, and the president maintained his tortured silence about the payoff, waiting once more for the full story to explode. The press and the Kennedys were clearly out to get him again, to ruin him with another Hughes scandal.

  And the ammunition they needed might right now be locked inside a huge green safe, sitting in a Las Vegas newspaper office, under an autographed picture of Richard Nixon.

  On February 3, the New York Times reported that Maheu’s pal Hank Greenspun—who was also known to be close to Jack Anderson—had two hundred secret Hughes memos, some handwritten by the billionaire himself, giving “precise instructions on approaches to be taken in delicate matters.”

  At eleven o’clock the next morning, G. Gordon Liddy presented his espionage plans to John Mitchell in the attorney general’s office. Also at the big meeting were John Dean and Mitchell’s deputy campaign chief, Jeb Stuart Magruder.

  They had all been there a week earlier to hear Liddy outline a million-dollar operation code-named “Gemstone,” for which he had already recruited safecrackers, wiremen, call girls, thugs, and professional killers (“twenty-two dead so far,” noted Liddy), a team assembled to carry out his program of kidnapping, blackmail, mugging, bugging, break-ins, and black-bag jobs, all aimed at the president’s political foes.

  Mitchell had not approved it. “Gordon, that’s not quite what we had in mind,” said the attorney general. “The money you’re asking for is way out of line. Why don’t you tone it down a little, then we’ll talk again.”

  Now Liddy was back. He presented a scaled-down version of the same plan, one that concentrated more on burglaries and wiretaps. It would cost half a million.

  Mitchell did not give it his final approval—the price still seemed high—but he did suggest two targets. Larry O’Brien’s office at Democratic National Committee headquarters. And Hank Greenspun’s safe.

  Liddy immediately began to plan the Greenspun job, plotting it with his partner in the Ellsberg break-in, a former CIA agent named E. Howard Hunt, who was already working for both Chuck Colson at the White House and Howard Hughes’s man in Washington, Bob Bennett.

  Indeed, Bennett played a central role in the Greenspun caper. He apparently suggested the burglary to Hunt a few days before Mitchell approved it—as a kind of joint venture—and now he introduced Hunt and Liddy to Hughes security chief Ralph Winte.

  They met again the weekend of February 20, in a plush suite at the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles. Winte had prepared a hand-drawn diagram of Greenspun’s office, the location of his safe marked by a big X. Liddy had the job all figured. The Nixon gang would handle the break-in, bust open the safe, throw the stolen Hughes memos into a canvas bag, and hop on a waiting Hughes jet that would fly them directly to some secret Central American rendezvous point, where the Nixon men and the Hughes men would meet to divide up the booty.

  “Gee!” said Winte. “Suppose you get caught?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” replied Hunt. “We’re professionals!”

  The Hughes high command, however, had no interest in the plot and refused to supply the getaway jet. Liddy was crestfallen. He continued to case Greenspun’s office, but without the airplane the mission did not have the same appeal, and it appears that the break-in was never attempted.

  Nixon was getting impatient. Months had passed since he first ordered a covert intelligence operation, and still there were no results. In fact, Mitchell still had not approved Liddy’s overall plan.

  The president called Haldeman into the Oval Office. “When are they going to do something over there?” he demanded, drumming his fingers on the desk.

  Haldeman told his expediter, Gordon Strachan, to get action, and Strachan called Mitchell’s deputy, Jeb Magruder.

  “The president wants it done, and there’s to be no more arguing about it,” Strachan told Magruder, and the pressure from the White House continued.

  More and more the pressure focused on Larry O’Brien.

  A new scandal had erupted, and O’Brien was leading the attack. Late in February, Jack Anderson revealed that Nixon had killed an antitrust suit against ITT in return for a donation of $400,000 to the Republican convention. It was O’Brien who first made the accusation months earlier, and Nixon believed that he was somehow behind the Anderson exposé. If the two of them could make this much trouble over ITT, imagine what they could do with the Hughes hundred grand.

  Day after day O’Brien kept the ITT scandal in the headlines, and an enraged Nixon turned to Chuck Colson. Colson was his ass-kicker, the man who would do anything, the man with whom Nixon shared his darkest fantasies. “One day we will get them,” he would tell Colson, speaking of all his enemies. “We’ll get them on the ground where we want them. And we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist—right, Chuck, right?” And Colson would reply, “Yes, sir, we’ll get them.”

  Now the president called Colson into his hideaway rooms at the Executive Office Building and railed at him about ITT and Larry O’Brien. It was an outrage, said Nixon. O’Brien of all people making noise about ITT underwriting the Republican convention. Shit, Howard Hughes was underwriting the Democratic National Committee. O’Brien was on his damn payroll!

  At about that same time, Howard Hunt, who was on Colson’s payroll, brought his partner Liddy in to see Colson. Liddy complained that he couldn’t
get anyone to approve his espionage plan. Colson immediately picked up his phone and called Jeb Magruder.

  “Why don’t you guys get off the stick and get Liddy’s budget approved?” demanded Colson. “We need information, particularly on O’Brien.”

  Jeb Magruder was tense as he headed over to the attorney general’s office to see his boss, John Mitchell. They had been meeting regularly, two or three times a week, ever since Magruder had been named deputy director of the Committee for the Re-election of the President a year earlier, and the young man’s open, easy manner had enabled him to develop a close working relationship with his usually reserved boss.

  But now in late February, Magruder was troubled. All this pressure from the White House was getting to him. And he didn’t want to go ahead with Liddy’s intelligence operation.

  Magruder met with Mitchell, as always, in a small, cluttered room just off the huge, ceremonial attorney general’s office that Mitchell rarely used, and handled some routine campaign business.

  Finally, Magruder brought up “Gemstone.”

  “Why do we even have to do this?” he asked.

  “The president wants it done,” said Mitchell. “We need to get information on O’Brien.”

  Magruder already knew that, and not just from Colson or Strachan. He had been in Mitchell’s office a few weeks earlier when Nixon himself called. While he could hear only Mitchell’s side of the conversation, it was clear that the president was pushing his attorney general to nail O’Brien.

  Still, Magruder asked why. Why O’Brien? Everybody knew that party headquarters was a useless place to go for inside information on a presidential campaign.

  Mitchell, who rarely showed any emotion, remained impassive as he revealed to Magruder the true motive for Watergate. His disclosure, the only one by anybody directly involved, has never before been made public.

  There was some concern about a contribution, said the attorney general. The $100,000 that Howard Hughes had given Nixon through Rebozo, the transaction Jack Anderson had already reported. The money had not gone into the campaign, added Mitchell. Rebozo still had it. In fact, some of the money had already been spent.

  And Larry O’Brien knew.

  Mitchell said he had heard from Hank Greenspun—it wasn’t clear whether he meant directly from Greenspun or through others—that O’Brien knew all about the $100,000 and also knew that it had been passed to Rebozo long after the 1968 campaign.

  It was important to find out what else O’Brien knew, and to get solid information on his own Hughes connection—to keep him quiet about Nixon.

  A few weeks later, on March 30, at a meeting with Magruder in Key Biscayne, John Mitchell approved Liddy’s espionage plan. And he also approved the first target—Larry O’Brien’s office at the Watergate.

  The first break-in was a great success. On Memorial Day weekend a team led by Liddy and Hunt entered Democratic National Committee headquarters, bugged O’Brien’s telephone, photographed papers from his desk, and made a clean getaway.*

  But the O’Brien bug never worked, and Mitchell ordered Liddy back in. None of the burglars was ever told the true purpose of the break-in—no one ever told them about the Hughes connection—but this time Magruder did tell Liddy to photograph O’Brien’s “shit file” on Nixon, to find out what dirt he had on the president.

  They never found out. At 2:30 Saturday morning, June 17, 1972, the police rushed in and broke up the second attempt at a third-rate burglary.

  Richard Nixon was with Bebe Rebozo on Robert Abplanalp’s private island in the Bahamas when his burglars were caught at the Watergate, just as he had been three years earlier when he first received word that Howard Hughes had approved the $100,000 payoff that led to the break-in.

  He returned to Key Biscayne early the next day, Sunday, June 18, and apparently learned of the big bust from his morning newspaper. He called Haldeman at the nearby Key Biscayne Hotel.

  “What’s the crazy item about the DNC, Bob?” asked the president, affecting a lighthearted tone. “Why would anyone break into a National Committee headquarters? Track down Magruder and see what he knows about it.”

  The president maintained his bemused air with Haldeman through the long weekend but meanwhile made a frantic series of phone calls to Colson, at one point so agitated he threw an ashtray across the room. On his first day back in Washington, Nixon finally revealed his terror to Haldeman as well.

  The tape of their June 20 Oval Office conversation was later erased, creating the famous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. But according to Haldeman, it was in this talk—the one some “sinister force” was later so desperate to obliterate—that Nixon himself revealed the Hughes connection to Watergate.

  The following account of their meeting is Haldeman’s reconstruction.

  “On that DNC break-in, have you heard that anyone in the White House is involved?” Nixon asked his chief of staff.

  “No one,” replied Haldeman.

  “Well, I’m worried about Colson,” confessed Nixon. “Colson can talk about the president, if he cracks. You know I was on Colson’s tail for months to nail Larry O’Brien on the Hughes deal.”

  Nixon feared it was Colson who had triggered the break-in. He had been pushing all his men to get to the bottom of O’Brien’s Hughes connection, and now he seemed not to know which of them had actually sent the burglars into O’Brien’s office at the Watergate. He first thought it was Colson, not Mitchell, apparently because he had conspired most directly with his hatchetman.*

  “Colson told me he was going to get the information I wanted one way or the other,” said Nixon. “And that was O’Brien’s office they were bugging, wasn’t it? And who’s behind it? Colson’s boy Hunt. Christ.”

  Haldeman wasn’t so sure. “Magruder never even mentioned Colson,” he noted.

  “He will,” replied Nixon. “Colson called him and got the whole operation started. Right from the goddamn White House. With Hunt and Liddy sitting in his lap.”

  The president was scared. “I hate things like this. We’re not in control. Well, we’ll just have to hang tough. In fact, we better go on the attack.”

  *Counting the $205,000 “loaned” to Donald, the cost of Maheu’s covert action to crush the “Dump Nixon” movement in 1956, and unreported campaign contributions, including the “all-out support” Hughes secretly gave Nixon in 1960, Irving’s claim of $400,000 was probably just about right. And nobody knew about most of that money. Except Hughes.

  *A second phone was also bugged. It belonged to Spencer Oliver, one of O’Brien’s deputies, whose father happened to work for Robert Bennett and was assigned to the Hughes account. A remarkable coincidence, especially given the fact that Hunt also worked for Bennett, but it seems that this phone was picked by pure chance. Transcripts of that wiretap were passed to both Mitchell and Haldeman but revealed only that a secretary in Oliver’s office had an incredibly active sex life.

  *In fact, a Colson aide, Ken Clawson, would later tell Haldeman that Colson had secretly recorded phone calls with Nixon both before and after the break-in, and was using his tapes to blackmail the president. “He’s got Nixon on the floor,” said Clawson. “He’s got on tape just what Nixon said all through the whole Watergate mess.” What makes these still hidden Colson tapes special, of course, is that Nixon did not know he was being recorded.

  Epilogue II

  The Final Days

  Howard Hughes awoke at precisely the same moment that Richard Nixon’s nightmare began.

  It was still Friday night, July 16, in Vancouver, Canada, when the Watergate bust went down. At 11:30 the naked billionaire got up out of bed in his new penthouse hideaway at the Bayshore Inn. He made his way from the bed to his Barcalounger, reached for his remote-control instrument, turned on his television, and started to watch a late movie, The Brain That Would Not Die.

  He soon switched to a western, Billy the Kid Outlawed, and began picking at a piece of chicken that would take him nearly three hours to get d
own.

  Bored with TV, he called for his Mormons to show him a movie on the screen set up in his bedroom. He watched The Mad Room, followed it with The Silencers, and stayed up all that night, all through the next day, and all through the next night, alternating showings of Shanghai Express and Captain Newman, M.D., before finishing his thirty-four-hour weekend film festival with The World of Suzie Wong and falling asleep at 10:30 Sunday morning.

  It would be more than a year before Hughes discovered there was a Watergate crisis, and he would remain forever puzzled by reports that he might somehow be involved in it.

  But Hughes had not merely been watching movies while his specter drove Nixon to Watergate. He had been through quite a few adventures of his own on his way to this new blacked-out bedroom.

  Back in February he had been forced to flee Paradise Island when Bahamian immigration authorities raided his penthouse. It was another fallout of the Clifford Irving affair. The publicity triggered an official inquiry and, rather than face it, Hughes left by the fire escape while the local lawmen pounded on his door.

  The escape, however, led to the first revelation of his bizarre appearance. The skipper of a yacht chartered to smuggle Hughes off the island got a good look at his strange cargo and some weeks later told his tale to the press.

  It was not that the billionaire had hair down past his shoulders or that he was wearing only a bathrobe that struck the captain as weird. It was his toenails. “They were so long they curled up,” he told a Miami newspaper. “Never seen anything like that in my life. I had to look twice. Craziest thing I ever saw.”

  Hughes next took refuge in Nicaragua, under the personal protection of the country’s dictator, General Anastasio Somoza. After his narrow escape from the Bahamas, however, Hughes was taking no chances. He decided to offer the general a friendly bribe.