Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  “I think Nevada has become a fully accredited state now and should no longer be treated like a barren wasteland that is only useful as a dumping place for poisonous, contaminated nuclear waste material, such as normally is carefully sealed up and dumped in the deepest part of the ocean.

  “The A.E.C. technicians assure that there will be no harmful consequences, but I wonder where those technicians will be 10 or 20 years from now.

  “There are some sheep lying dead in nearby Utah.”

  Ah, the martyred flock. It was the perfect clincher.

  The four-page letter had taken Hughes all night and half the day to write and rewrite, and now, with the dreaded blast less than twenty-four hours away, there was no time to send it to the White House.

  Instead, one of the Mormons dictated it over the telephone to Washington attorney Thomas Finney—law partner of Johnson’s newly appointed Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford—who hand-delivered Hughes’s impassioned plea to the president’s office.

  Lyndon Johnson had problems of his own. Less than a month earlier he had been forced to abdicate, solemnly telling a startled nation: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

  The withdrawal had brought him no real peace. It was not merely that Eugene McCarthy continued to sweep the primaries, or even that the hated Bobby Kennedy had announced his long-dreaded decision to claim his brother’s throne. Everything, at home and abroad, seemed to be in disarray. The war in Vietnam had been shattered by the Tet offensive, the Great Society had been undermined by the cost of the war, the American economy was in danger, the world gold market was in collapse, the nation was torn by protest marches, campus upheavals, and race riots of unprecedented violence. The cowboy president, caught in a stampede, had been trampled.

  Still, the outer Johnson remained intact. He did not remove all his clothes, let his hair, beard, and fingernails grow long, take to bed, and tape dark blinds over the Oval Office windows. But the inner man had crumbled. And the siege atmosphere in the White House now resembled the siege atmosphere in the penthouse.

  By day the president would harangue his staff—now purged of all but loyal Texans—with shouted accusations of treason and whispered tales of conspiracy. Communists controlled the television networks. New York Times Washington correspondent James Reston was consorting with the Russian ambassador. Most of the press was in on it, and so were the professors. All were in league with the Kennedys, and together they had plotted his downfall.

  By night Johnson would dream that he was paralyzed from the neck down, a helpless cripple unable even to protest as his most trusted aides fought to divide the remnants of his power. The nightmares were a secret, but the raging paranoia and wild suspicions, often punctuated by obscene outbursts and misplaced laughter, frightened his advisers and convinced several that the president had become dangerously unhinged.

  So, if Hughes’s letter was in one sense sovereign to sovereign, it was also bunker to bunker.

  Johnson, keeping up appearances, had just returned from getting a haircut and was about to change into tails for a state dinner honoring the King of Norway, when the letter finally reached him early that evening. The president was in a foul mood. His day had been a disaster. Arthur Goldberg had suddenly quit as U.N. ambassador in a bitter confrontation over Johnson’s war policy, no one else wanted the job, and George Ball had to be bludgeoned into accepting it. Hanoi was threatening to abandon the stalled peace talks, antiwar demonstrators were converging on New York for a march the next day, militant students had just seized several buildings at Columbia, top administration officials were defecting to support Bobby Kennedy, and with all these pressing problems, surrounded by traitors and turmoil, the president had to spend half his time playing host to King Olav, who arrived that morning for a state visit. (“He’s the dumbest king I’ve ever met,” complained LBJ, adding with sour impatience, “I didn’t know they made kings that dumb.”)

  So when Johnson picked up the billionaire’s letter, his first reaction was blind outrage. “Who the fuck does Howard Hughes think he is?!” the president bellowed, seeing the desperate plea to halt the bomb test as yet another challenge to his power.

  It was, of course, a good question. Who, indeed, was Hughes? Neither Johnson nor anyone else at the White House really had the answer. Despite some past dealings, the president knew only what everybody knew—that Hughes was the richest man in the United States, a man of incalculable power whose secret empire seemed to reach everywhere, a mythic figure now in hiding who also happened to be the country’s biggest private military contractor. That was enough.

  Beleaguered as he was, Johnson did not ignore the bomb plea, nor did he take it lightly. In a move without precedent, he withheld approval of the scheduled blast, secretly alerting the AEC to await his final go-ahead.

  The president’s mood swing was dramatic. Although still more than a bit irritated that any private citizen would presume to dictate national defense policy, Johnson was also fascinated, even flattered by the hidden billionaire’s direct approach. The letter seemed to make him feel more important. He proudly displayed it to several White House aides, more like a kid who had just obtained a celebrity’s autograph than a president who had been petitioned to halt a nuclear test. In fact, Johnson was so intrigued by the personal contact from this mystery man that he falsely claimed Hughes had also telephoned, embroidering his tall tale with a detailed account of the conversation that had never taken place.

  Moreover, the president was clearly impressed by what he considered the surprisingly logical and forceful case the reputedly eccentric financier had made.

  “He may be wrong,” Johnson told his chief speech writer Harry McPherson, “but he sure as hell isn’t a loony.”

  Back at the penthouse, the naked recluse, while unaware that he had been officially certified sane, was nonetheless confident he had made the right move.

  “My letter to the President was a masterpiece,” he exulted. “Also when I started focusing my memory on the relationship I had about 8 years ago with Johnson, I came up with some very solid memories.”

  Solid memories. To Hughes that could mean only one thing: hard cash. And, indeed, the two Texans had once had what Hughes would later describe as a “hard cash, adult” relationship. Hughes had not only backed Johnson’s first serious White House bid eight years earlier (when he had lost the Democratic nomination to their mutual enemy John F. Kennedy), but had secretly supported Johnson for at least two decades, right from the beginning of his rise to power as a freshman senator. The full extent of their dealings is unknown. In any event, it was a relatively small sum Hughes gave in the early days that now came most solidly to mind. He had once bought the man who was now president with pocket change, and if Johnson had since moved up in the world, to the billionaire he remained just another politician who had his price.

  “I have done this kind of business with him before,” explained Hughes. “So, he wears no awe-inspiring robe of virtue with me.”

  To what degree these past dealings now affected Johnson is less clear, but there is no question that the president had once been on the pad. In his leaner years as a raw-boned young congressman, Johnson was a regular visitor at the Houston headquarters of the Hughes Tool Company, where he befriended the absentee owner’s top executive, Noah Dietrich. His big Stetson hat in hand, Johnson asked free use of company billboards for his first Senate race. Dietrich refused, preferring to use them to promote a Hughes sideline, Grand Prize Beer.

  After an eighty-seven-vote victory in his second try for the Senate in 1948, however, “Landslide Lyndon” seemed a better investment. His triumph—marred by charges of ballot stuffing—happened to coincide with Hughes’s first big plunge into buying national power, and Johnson soon joined numerous other politicians already on the Hughes payroll.

  “Lyndon was taken care of annually,” recalled Dietrich. “On the basis of contributing to the former campaign, th
e present campaign, and the anticipated campaign, why we could legally give him $5,000 a year.”

  Johnson was then a newly elected senator with no campaigns to run for another six years, but as his longtime aide Bobby Baker later noted, “he was always on the look-out for an odd nickel or dime.” Hardly yet a national figure, as a member of the powerful Armed Services Committee he nonetheless soon became known for his uncanny ability to land military contracts for his defense-industry backers.

  Hughes, although only three years older than Johnson, was already a national legend, but he was just then emerging as a major defense contractor. Tainted by the “Spruce Goose” hearings a year earlier, and in need of well-placed friends, he sent Johnson $5,000 a year for at least four years, at a time when a senator’s salary was only $12,500.

  The money came from a Canadian subsidiary of the Hughes Tool Company especially set up to bypass a ban on political contributions from domestic corporations.

  Through the years there would be further contributions, and eventually Hughes would offer Johnson a million-dollar bribe. For the moment, however, he was confident his masterful bomb letter would carry the day. That, and the “solid memories.”

  The president clearly shared those memories, and apparently looked forward to future rewards. Certainly he must have savored the fact that Hughes was now the supplicant, that the man from whom he had once begged billboards was now begging him—the Leader of the Free World—to halt a nuclear blast.

  In any event, he treated his erstwhile benefactor with unusual deference. Even before Hughes’s letter arrived at the White House, Johnson had met privately with a Hughes emissary, Grant Sawyer, a former governor of Nevada now on Hughes’s payroll. The meeting was arranged by Vice-President Humphrey, who had already tapped Sawyer for a key position in his still unannounced presidential campaign. Sawyer would later deliver $50,000 in Hughes money to Humphrey’s drive.

  And a day earlier, another Hughes representative had called White House Chief of Staff Marvin Watson with an astounding offer: “Mr. Hughes has agreed to completely finance the pending campaign of Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey to any extent necessary to match the funds expended by Senator Robert Kennedy.” But only if Johnson delayed the scheduled nuclear test.

  Watson later insisted he never even mentioned the call to either Humphrey or Johnson—perhaps because he was soon warned that “Drew Pearson has learned of Hughes’s offer of money to HHH if the blast is held off”—and there is no evidence that Hughes himself authorized the payoff, although he would later order Maheu to make a similar deal directly with the vice-president.

  Whatever Hughes, Johnson, and Humphrey knew, and when they knew it, Sawyer’s Oval Office parley went quite well.

  “Grant Sawyer has just left the President who sends his warmest personal regards,” Maheu reported to the penthouse. “He told Grant that he had the highest respect for you and your ability and also was very grateful for many favors of the past. I am sure you know that in addition to what you may have done personally many years ago, we have been good supporters. You will recall that when he was Vice President you asked me to set up something with him whereby he could call upon us any time he had candidates in whom he had a personal interest. We have never let him down in that area among other things.”

  One of the candidates in whom Johnson had expressed a “personal interest” was his longtime crony John Connally, then running for governor of Texas. Maheu arranged a contribution to the Connally campaign through the Hughes Tool Company in Houston.

  At the same time, Maheu had sought the then vice-president’s advice on a well-connected law firm to represent Hughes in the TWA litigation that was just beginning. Johnson was pleased to oblige. He recommended Arnold, Fortas & Porter, where his old friend and business associate Abe Fortas was then a senior partner. Hughes, of course, retained the firm.

  Now, Johnson, still grateful for past favors, seemed ready to help the billionaire battle the bomb.

  “He continued by telling Grant that if you had concern about the pending blast that was sufficient enough for him to have concern also,” Maheu reported, completing his account of the just-ended Oval Office parley. “In Grant’s presence he summoned AEC Chairman Seaborg to the White House. He informed Grant that Seaborg would have to prove to him conclusively that the blast was safe in every detail.”

  At first elated, Hughes grew restive as the day wore on with no further word from the president. As evening approached, he became increasingly frantic, worried that Johnson would not read his letter, afraid that even if he did the AEC still might prevail.

  “I wish you would call Sawyer and ask if he knows any way to find out if the President has actually read my letter and what his decision is and if he is going to do anything,” wrote the impatient recluse, certain that his masterpiece would have more impact than the former governor’s White House visit.

  “The reason I ask is this: my letter contains a lot of material and data etc. which was not and is not known to Mr. Sawyer. On the other hand, when Sawyer arrived ahead of my letter and Johnson granted Sawyer an interview, he (Johnson) may have thought there was no need to read my letter since he had heard from Sawyer. We must find some way of persuading Johnson to read my letter now. It will do more for us than anybody can obtain through a meeting.”

  Yet even as he put his faith in the inspired words he had written, Hughes became alarmed at the thought that his foes might gain the ear of the president.

  “I am positive that my letter was very very effective, but the AEC has had a rebuttal period since my letter was digested, and I have had no opportunity to answer any claims they may have made,” he fretted.

  “That is why I think we should discontinue being quite so bashful and risk the chance of finding we have made the first move,” he continued, eager to counter the bombers’ presumed backstairs lobbying.

  “We must find out to whom this matter has been entrusted by the President. I am sure he has turned it over to one of his staff members. If we could make contact with such individual, I think we could make some exceedingly important suggestions: like how we dont seek glory of victory in this matter, and will be most happy to agree upon a press release (joint).”

  In fact, Johnson had not delegated the matter to any single aide. Rather, he had taken personal charge of the bomb controversy and mobilized half the White House staff to deal with Hughes.

  National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg, and the president’s science director Donald Hornig were instructed to report on the substantive issues. Marvin Watson, his second-in-command Jim Jones, and Harry McPherson were assigned to coordinate the project and draft a reply to Hughes’s letter.

  It was a measure of Hughes’s real power, the power of his myth, and perhaps the “solid memories” the two men shared, that his somewhat quirky last-minute appeal was taken so seriously by Johnson. But the president’s top advisers were united in opposing any delay of the scheduled nuclear blast.

  Johnson returned from the King Olav dinner shortly before midnight to find their reports waiting. He sent Lady Bird to bed alone, stripped off his formal attire, and sat awake for the next hour reading their replies to Hughes’s protest.

  Rostow, who had gained the president’s confidence, now reassured Johnson that the planned bomb test was also entirely safe and under control.

  “I see nothing in Hughes’s letter that raises questions which the AEC has not confronted with as much responsibility as could be expected,” Rostow declared. Hard-nosed as ever, he even dismissed the dead sheep. “Hughes raises the example of the Utah sheep,” he noted. “If anything happened to the sheep, it arose not from AEC experiments, but from experiments for biological weapons in Utah.”

  Seaborg also called Hughes’s fears unfounded, and warned that “without underground testing much of the dynamic nature of our weapons program would be lost and our strategic deterrent would erode.”

  Strong words. But when press aide Tom Johnson
stopped upstairs to say goodnight, the president cast aside the Seaborg and Rostow reports and once more displayed the letter he had received from Hughes. It still intrigued him.

  Of all the hundreds of papers that came across his desk that day—daily CIA briefings, daily National Security Council reports, daily body counts, war dispatches from Saigon and peace-talk news from Laos, an urgent memo on Chinese troop movements, FBI reports on the planned antiwar march, a message from Egypt’s Nasser and another from the Shah of Iran—the one document that seized the president’s attention and even now, well past midnight, still transfixed him, was the letter from Hughes.

  Johnson showed the letter to his aide without mentioning the impending blast. It was not that Hughes was seeking a private test-ban treaty, it was not that Hughes might be right and his own advisers wrong, it was simply the name at the bottom—Howard Hughes.

  And despite his experts’ strong advice, Johnson went to sleep early Friday morning without making a final decision. The bomb test remained on hold.

  Hughes, who had not slept in three nights, continued his vigil. Desperately awaiting word from the White House, he scribbled a note to his Mormons: “Please watch me carefully and dont let me go to sleep at all.” Then, acutely conscious of the approaching megaton blast, he added a final plea: “But try not to startle me.”

  Finally, the recluse could no longer stand the tension and humiliation of waiting like a condemned man for an eleventh-hour presidential reprieve.

  “I am sick of this continuous ass-kissing and subservient begging,” he exploded. “Why dont we seek an injunction but immediately? We cannot wait to hear back from Johnson.”

  Hughes had toyed with the idea of court action earlier in his battle against the bomb and confidently concluded: “it is just a problem of finding the right judge.” Before deciding on a personal appeal to the president, he was even ready to take his case to the Supreme Court: “They have some awfully left-wing characters on that court, and if we could just catch them when those men are attendant and not the others, it might slide through in about 20 minutes.”