Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  First Nevada’s two United States senators, Howard Cannon and Alan Bible, deserted. Finally, even Governor Laxalt announced his neutrality.

  Nothing enraged Hughes quite so much as politicians who refused to stay bought. “I want you to meet with Laxalt, Bible and Cannon,” he instructed Maheu. “They are going to have to make a difficult choice. They are going to have to support our stand in Washington or we will be forced to find someone else to represent us. And that is final.

  “I want you to bear down on them immediately demanding that they take a position without another moments delay.

  “Bob, when the time comes, and they begin crying on your shoulder for support, and you come to me, and I say OK, as I have in the past, then once more, it will be the same story all over again: Unlimited support, and not one God Damned thing in return for it!”

  It was an outrage. Still, perhaps they could be brought around. For the two wayward senators, the usual inducement might do: “Bob, cant you make a promise of support to Cannon and Bible—I mean real support beyond anything to date, and thereby obtain their absolutely undiluted sponsorship?”

  As for the normally obliging Laxalt, “if we can truly convince the Governor that his future destiny lies with me,” wrote Hughes, “then I am positive that, with a little coaching from me, he will have no difficulty in accomplishing our AEC objective.”

  In fact, Hughes had already worked out a bold scheme for the governor. A plot to have Laxalt seize control of all federal land in Nevada, of course including the nuclear test site.

  “Do you realize how much of this state is so-called ‘owned’ by the Fed. Gov.?” wrote Hughes. “Well, I think it requires only the slightest little effort by Laxalt to have all or nearly all of that land returned to the State.

  “If we could persuade Laxalt to make such a request, it would not have to be linked by Laxalt to the bomb testing. We could get somebody else to focus attention on the Test Site, if we could only persuade Laxalt to ask the return of all land taken from the state by the Federal Gov.

  “Now, Bob, lets face it, Laxalt is not going to do even this meager act of assistance unless we motivate him. I urge that, since he is not running for office this year, we ask him to designate a candidate he would like us to support in a big way—Nixon, or Senate or Congressional candidates.”

  Obviously, however, Hughes could not wait around for Laxalt to perform that meager act, nor could he any longer depend on the other local politicians.

  He would have to take his fight directly to the people.

  “Anything the AEC can do in brain-washing, we can do better,” he declared, plotting his public-opinion campaign. “The advantage always favors the one who is trying to create fear, over the one who is trying to erase it.

  “Bob,” he went on, “it is essential that we cast fears in the public’s mind—real fears—as to water pollution, earthquakes, damage to the tourist trade.

  “We must draw the public’s attention to the plight of the sheep in Utah to destroy the simple all-out faith that people seem to have in any info released by the government.

  “I dont give a damn how much it costs or what extremes must be resorted to.”

  Should the blast be detonated, all was lost. Having survived the holocaust, the populace would assume a stance of false bravado, ignorant of the real, hidden peril, ready to accept continued bombing without question. The whole awful scenario was all too clear:

  “People love to be near danger and tell their friends about it, saying, ‘Oh, it was nothing, really.’

  “I can picture the local residents writing to friends in other cities, and saying: ‘Well, we had another Nuclear test today, we are all beginning to get used to them now, so that we just take them in stride.’

  “And Bob, when that attitude prevails, I assure you more and more people will be swung over to the N.T.S. supporters. Those people will lose confidence in us because we were unable to stop the blast. They will reason that it must be safe or the U.S. Government never would have allowed it.”

  There was only one answer. To stampede public opinion now and block the impending test. No approach was off limits, no conceivable ally was to be ignored.

  “Bob, I see this as a proposition where all the peace seekers, beatniks, etc. could be carefully persuaded by a skillful publicity campaign, that this explosion would benefit only big business—the big corporations, the Establishment,” wrote Hughes, willing now to denounce capitalism and consort with welfare mothers to end the bombing.

  “The protestors are saying: ‘If you have money enough to send men to the moon, how about taking care of the poor on earth.’

  “Well, this same logic can be used, I believe, to generate a protest against the testing of nuclear weapons here in Nevada.

  “In other words, all your efforts have been channeled toward the hazards of bomb testing in terms of earthquakes, pollution, etc.,” he concluded. “But, maybe, without lessening in any slightest way your efforts in this direction, you can generate added protest against the nuclear tests here, on the basis that the expenditure of funds should be directed instead toward domestic anti-poverty causes.”

  Of course, no such high-minded appeal would reach the jaded citizens of Las Vegas. For them, an entirely different approach was necessary.

  “I think it will take a campaign that hits at the pocket book to carry any weight,” lamented Hughes. “In this short-sighted community, where everybody lives for today, people are not very interested in morallity. They have been sold the bomb program on the basis that it provides jobs. I think that only by suggesting that the bomb is taking jobs away from Las Vegas will we make any headway.”

  That was it: he would announce that the bomb threat had caused him to abandon the “New Sands”—a one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar futuristic hotel complex he had long ago promised but never actually intended to build.

  To this scheme, Maheu added his own inspiration. Perhaps they could convince archrival Kirk Kerkorian to join the antibomb campaign by halting construction of his International Hotel. It was a classic three-cushion billiard shot. Hughes had originally announced the “New Sands” only as a ploy to prevent Kerkorian from securing needed funds for the International.

  “The more I think of your Kerkorian strategy, the more I like it!” the billionaire exclaimed. “I think the idea of telling him we postponed the 4000 room Sands because of the tests is terrific.

  “Now, I think you should tell K I at no time announced to anyone that our reason for cancelling the hotel was related to the bomb tests,” he continued. “However, now with the resumption of testing (and at an even greater level) I feel it is my firm duty to tell K the whole story.”

  Still, the primary appeal must be to gut fear. To arouse mass hysteria.

  “We must make a real stink, and accuse the AEC of all kinds of perfidy and incompetence,” wrote Hughes. “We must have some headlines. Let me see them right now, please!

  “We must go further than you will want to go, Bob, but if we are to make headlines, we must make accusations—serious ones.”

  Maheu was wary. “To start hurling accusations at this time will necessarily cause the AEC, Dept. of Defense, and the Administration to join forces and really take us on—but big,” he cautioned. “Howard, they simply have larger armies and we can end up being clobbered.”

  Clobbered? The Hughes empire? Never! “I dont agree that we should back off into a state of inactivity, just because the government is big and rich,” Hughes objected. “Bob, if we are going to be afraid to challenge [the government], on the theory that ‘they have bigger armies than we have,’ I just dont want to live in this country any longer.”

  Maheu’s caution was well founded, however. Hughes was single-handedly reviving the nuclear protest movement, and with his success came a growing counterattack.

  AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg charged that the billionaire was “creating an atmosphere of harassment in our national security programs,” and James Reeves,
the director of the Nevada Test Site, appeared on local television to denounce the Hughes campaign.

  “Did you see ch 13 at 10:30 tonight?” a worried Hughes asked Maheu. “Reeves really made us look terrible. I tell you Bob, in 30 min. tonite he wiped out everything you have so painstakingly accomplished toward giving me a new image. 18 months of effort shot down the drain by a bumbling, doddering old fart who looks so stupid you feel sorry for him.

  “I tell you, when he shoots that blast off and no buildings fall down, then the wreckage of our little red wagon will be complete.”

  Finally the counterattack grew so intense that Hughes was threatened with a congressional subpoena.

  “What is this I just saw on TV news where some ass-hole said that some congress committee might hold hearings and ask me to come to Washington and tell what I object to in the test program?” the recluse demanded.

  Yet as terrified as he was of being forced out of hiding, Hughes remained defiantly determined to stand firm against the bomb.

  “I dont agree with your fear that a strong campaign and embarassment of the AEC will lead to a subpeona,” he told the fainthearted Maheu.

  “I think the only way to win this battle is to discredit the AEC and emerge with public opinion on our side. I think it is defeat and loss of public favor that could lead to a subpeona. They dont want to force me to come to Washington if we are forging a successful campaign.

  “Bob, where is your ‘lead from strength’ philosophy?

  “I didn’t win the Senate hearing conflict by a defensive attitude,” continued Hughes, recalling his “Spruce Goose” triumph twenty years earlier. “I did it by charging Sen. Brewster with corruption—with trying to bribe me in a room in a Washington hotel.

  “Bob, if you dont take some measures to debunk the present attempt to reduce the issue to a simple question of whether to support the red white and blue, national defense, patriotism, etc., or whether to follow Mr. Hughes and be a traitor, I am sure we will not only lose the battle, but I will be subpeonaed.

  “And if that subpeona is ever issued, all hell will not help me then. If we attempt to have the subpeona withdrawn in a red-hot controversy like this, I will lose every shred of stature that I may possess in this country, and everybody will charge that I bought the subpeona off.

  “You are not the one who may be dragged out of bed and subjected to embarrassment, public disfavor, and disparagement.

  “I want something done about this.”

  Maheu killed the subpoena threat in Washington, but he could do nothing to halt the relentless countdown in Nevada.

  As his battle against the bomb entered its final days, the frantic recluse, sleepless in his penthouse bunker, wavered between fevered extremes, one moment gripped by visions of doom, the next worried that the explosion would prove anticlimactic.

  “I am positive this blast is not going to leave any visible damage whatever,” he fretted. “The dam is not going to break, and the movement of ground and buildings is bound to be less than people expect after all of the dire predictions we have been making.

  “I can just see the newspaper interviews after the blast: ‘Why, I hardly noticed it at all!’ ‘I stood there waiting for the earth to come to an end, and all of a sudden it was all over. I hardly felt it at all!’

  “Then they will have pictures of the dam with a caption: ‘The same old dam!’ ‘No cracks at all! Not even one little crack!’ ”

  Those fools, those blind fools. The bombing would, of course, be awful. Every bit as horrible as Hughes had ever dreamed. It was just that it might not have the visible effects ordinary people could see, only the hidden impact apparent to him alone.

  “I am afraid our stock is going to fall after that blast,” wrote Hughes, now distraught over the anticipated dud. “We are going to look like the old lady alarmists of all time.”

  Precisely. It was a question of potency. Hughes had come to identify so completely with his feared rival, the bomb, that he could now no more accept a fizzle than a holocaust. If he failed to block the impending blast, not only would his fears be ridiculed—even as he suffered its unseen horrors—but his own invisible power would be deemed as feeble as the bomb’s.

  “If the explosion goes ahead, we will simply be chalked up as a failure,” wrote Hughes. “It will simply be said that we do alright on small issues, but when the chips are really down, like the Bomb-test, then the hair on our balls is simply not long enough to accomplish a winning result.

  “So, that makes it even more important than ever that we leave no stone unturned in our efforts to stop it.”

  With just forty-eight hours to go before the doomsday detonation, ambassadors from the Hughes empire descended on the nation’s capital, talking tough with the AEC, conspiring with the vice-president, seeking an audience with the commander in chief.

  “I suppose you know I have not been to sleep at all,” scribbled the exhausted recluse. “So, I am going to wait up now until we hear something.”

  All day Wednesday and into the predawn hours of Thursday, Hughes continued his grim vigil, frantically maneuvering to block the blast still scheduled for Friday morning.

  “I am no peacenik and I dont want to champion that cause,” he wrote. “I just want to delay this blast long enough to bring some really heavy pressure to bear in Washington so we can obtain a 90 day delay in this one explosion. I dont care to scuttle the whole program, I only want the 90 days.”

  The news from Washington, however, was bleak. “There is no way we can get even a one day delay from the AEC,” reported Maheu. “The only way this can be accomplished is at the White House. Now is the time to bring in another force.”

  Another force? Hughes was in no mood to find a new emissary, to send another hat-in-hand diplomat to Washington. He was through with go-betweens. He was through with peace talks. He would handle the final bomb offensive himself, and he would use his own ultimate weapon.

  For the past nine days, Hughes had played many roles—mad prophet, naked general, movement leader—but here again he would deal with his bomb obsession the way he dealt with all other matters: by looking for someone to bribe.

  “We must find a way to close them down,” he wrote as the moment of doom neared.

  “So, how do we acquire enough political strength to accomplish something like this? Well, there is only one way I know, and fortunately this is an election year.”

  He would not, like the peaceniks or the old ban-the-bomb crowd, reject America and take to the streets. He would embrace America and buy nuclear peace. Unique in the annals of corruption, Hughes would try to bribe the government to do what was right.

  But now, just one day before the big blast, Hughes would make one last appeal to reason. At T-minus-24 and counting, he would personally take his plea to the man who had his finger on the button.

  At the zero hour, it would be Howard Hughes and Lyndon Johnson alone at the summit.

  7 Mr. President

  “Mr. President,” wrote Hughes. The time had come for direct action. Sovereign to sovereign.

  It was in the odd predawn hours of Thursday, April 25, 1968. At first light the next day, the most powerful underground nuclear explosion in history was set to be detonated. One hundred miles from ground zero, “physically very ill and emotionally reduced to a nervous wreck,” the exhausted billionaire remained determined to block the scheduled blast. He had just over twenty-four hours. And there was only one man who could still halt the relentless countdown.

  So now, in sleepless terror, Howard Hughes drafted his letter to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the president of the United States.

  “You may not remember it,” he began, “but years ago when you were in the Senate, you and I were acquainted, not intimately, but enough so that you would have recognized my name.”

  Restrained. Dignified. Tactful. No need to mention the nature of their relationship. Johnson would remember.

  “So, when you became President,” Hughes continued, “I was str
ongly tempted to communicate with you, as one occasion after another developed in which I urgently needed your help.…

  “However, I decided you were too busy for me to disturb you for anything with a purely selfish purpose.”

  Right. Put it all on a higher plane.

  “Now, something has occurred that only you can alter from its present course.

  “Based upon my personal promise that independent scientists and technicians have definite evidence, and can obtain more, demonstrating the risk and uncertainty to the health of the citizens of Southern Nevada, if the megaton-plus nuclear explosion is detonated tomorrow morning, will you grant even a brief postponement of this explosion to permit my representatives to come to Washington and lay before whomever you designate the urgent, impelling reasons why we feel a 90 day postponement is needed?”

  A bit vague, perhaps, but surely there was no need to name the scientists or cite the evidence. Hughes was offering his “personal promise.” And armed with an absolute certainty of the claimed danger—the “definite evidence” was in the pit of his stomach—the billionaire now barreled ahead.

  “I am certainly no peacenik,” he declared. “My feelings have been well known through the years to be far to the right of center.

  “It is not my purpose to impede the defense program in any way, and I can positively prove that if my appeal is heeded”—he started to write “it will have no deliterious effect,” then decided on a more positive approach—“the nuclear test program will proceed more rapidly than at present.”

  A nice touch. Now for a strong finish.

  “If the A.E.C. technicians did not consider the nuclear explosions at the Las Vegas Test site to be of marginal safety, then why did they make a firm agreement with me, 11 months ago, to move the large explosions … to some more remote place?” Hughes demanded, reminding Johnson of the nonexistent broken treaty, assuming the stance of an outraged sovereign.