Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  It was true. The billionaire had taken a bath. The loss was not quite so great as he claimed, but it was close to $90 million. There was, however, one aspect of the debacle Hughes failed to mention. The price was not “miscalculated.”

  Hughes had intentionally submitted a ridiculously low bid in a plot to corner the market on helicopters vital to the war. But his scheme had backfired when he tried to triple the price and got caught in a messy congressional probe. Now he was stuck with the bill.

  Like the war in Vietnam itself, the copter deal, born in deceit, was ending in disaster. Johnson should certainly sympathize.

  Still, it was neither his staggering helicopter losses nor the antitrust blockade that really obsessed Hughes. It was the bomb. And having failed to persuade the president, Hughes was now determined to buy him.

  Within two weeks of his failed White House mission, Maheu was on his way to the LBJ Ranch, flying there in a private Hughes jet, the full magnitude of his mission still a secret known only to his taciturn boss. “I’m not ready to tell you yet,” said Hughes, sending Maheu off with no further explanation.

  Johnson was completely in the dark. So great was the cachet of the name Hughes that the president had agreed to receive his emissary without even being told the purpose of his visit. In the previous two days Johnson had played host to Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, and now, having seen his two potential successors, the president prepared to meet the representative of a third major power.

  “Who is this Maheu, why does he get to see you, Mr. President?” asked White House Appointments Secretary Jim Jones.

  “He’s Howard Hughes’s man,” replied Johnson, as if that alone answered the question.

  Maheu arrived in Texas the night before his scheduled rendezvous at the LBJ Ranch, checked into a motel, and called the penthouse. “I have an appointment with the President of the United States tomorrow morning,” he reminded Hughes. “I wish you would tell me what you want me to discuss with him.” Hughes again refused. “Call me in the morning just before you leave,” he replied, “and in the meantime, just sleep comfortably.”

  If Maheu found that difficult, under the circumstances, so probably did the president. Johnson had met Maheu before, but not in the months since the president had bombed Hughes, and not in the year since he had finally learned the dirty secret that Hughes, Maheu, and the Central Intelligence Agency had long shared—the still hidden Castro assassination plot.

  Maheu, of course, had played a pivotal part in that CIA-Mafia murder conspiracy. Hughes had been let in on the secret almost immediately and without a second thought. But the president had to learn about it six years later from Washington newspaper columnist Drew Pearson.

  His belated discovery of the murder plot had sent Johnson into a rage. Convinced that the attempts on Castro’s life had somehow caused John F. Kennedy’s death, in fact certain that the CIA had a hand in Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson—fearing that he too was in danger—had put the Secret Service on full alert and ordered a top-secret FBI investigation. He denounced the CIA as “a damn Murder Inc.” and hauled spymaster Richard Helms into the Oval Office.

  Johnson never got the full story, but he did learn of Maheu’s central role in the bloody cabal.

  So now the president knew that Hughes’s ambassador had also been the CIA’s top hit man, its link to the Mob in a failed contract to murder a chief of state. And in the early morning hours of August 12, 1968, as Maheu waited nervously in a Dallas motel for Hughes to call with final orders on his latest mission, the president was also left to ponder with some discomfort the reason for Maheu’s impending visit. Finally, just minutes before Maheu’s scheduled departure, the billionaire phoned his bagman.

  “He wanted me to suggest to President Johnson,” Maheu would later testify, “that he, Howard Hughes, was prepared to give him a million dollars after he left office, if he would stop the atomic testing before he left office.”

  It was one mission Maheu never carried out.

  Johnson had been ailing again, but seemed in fine form when he returned from the hospital later that morning to find Maheu already at the LBJ Ranch. Still ignorant both of Hughes’s orders and Maheu’s intentions, the president betrayed no concern as he greeted his visitor.

  He stepped easily from his helicopter, put his big arm around Maheu’s shoulder, shook hands, and, pumping Maheu vigorously, guided him into the front seat of a waiting car, next to Lady Bird, for a half-hour tour of the Texas domain.

  Johnson took the wheel of his white Lincoln Continental convertible and, gesturing broadly, kept up a nonstop monologue, showing off his spread, as he drove at breakneck speed across the rocky land, past the grazing Herefords, past the shack where his grandfather had lived, past the family cemetery with its low stone wall, finally stopping at the small cabin on the north bank of the Pedernales River where the president had been born.

  The visit to his birthplace was mandatory. Unlike his fellow Texan, Hughes, Johnson had grown up dirt-poor, not in the oil-rich Texas personified by the billionaire’s father, but in the rugged hill country near Austin, where his own father barely scraped by as a hard-scrabble farmer. The president insisted that every visitor see his old home, and now he showed Maheu the humble cabin so that he too could be impressed by Johnson’s hard climb to power.

  Only then did the two men retire alone to the front yard of the big stone ranch house where Johnson now lived, and get down to business.

  Maheu did not mention the million dollars. Instead, sitting next to the president on a padded lawn chair, in the shade of an old oak tree, Maheu noted that Hughes had a keen interest in Johnson’s future and asked how the billionaire might be of assistance.

  Finally, Johnson knew Maheu’s mission. The ex-CIA hit man had come to offer him a friendly bribe. The president’s reply seemed to invite that approach. Unaware of the potential stakes, however, he kept both his price and his promises discreetly low.

  Johnson, Maheu later reported to the penthouse, said that “he is very much interested in dedicating all of his future years to a school of public affairs which will be run in conjunction with the Univ. of Texas adjacent to where the Johnson Library is being built” and “would very much appreciate some help with this program.”

  The LBJ School and Library increasingly obsessed Johnson in these waning months of his presidency. They would be his monuments to himself, the institutions that would secure his place in history, protect him from “the Harvards,” the hostile Eastern professors who would otherwise write his epitaph. Johnson’s pitch to Hughes, however, was somewhat more pointed.

  “While discussing the purpose of the school and stating specifically his desire to have people become involved in politics and government,” Maheu continued, “he stated ‘so that we can avoid having jerks like this fellow Zimmerman who is running the anti-trust division of the Dept. of Justice.’ He then asked me what the status was pertaining to our Stardust problem. I brought him up to date. He said ‘well I am going to get into this and let’s see what happens.’ ”

  If the president was none too subtle in linking the library donation to the Stardust deal, he quickly made it clear that he was not willing to sell Hughes the bomb.

  Before Maheu could even mention the nuclear tests, Johnson staged a preemptive strike. He recalled the billionaire’s letter and deftly discouraged further discussion by saying “this was one document he would not place in the Johnson library, because it would prove embarrassing to Mr. Hughes if he did.” Despite the put-down, however, Johnson did not entirely foreclose even that issue. Indeed, according to Maheu, he promised to “do everything in his power to stop future big blasts in Nevada.”

  Their business concluded, the president invited Maheu into his private office. There was no mention of the helicopter debacle. Despite his staggering losses, Hughes had merely instructed Maheu to find out when the war in Vietnam might end. Johnson would probably have paid a million himself for the answer, and the best he could now offe
r Maheu was a peek at some top-secret documents. While Maheu sat there trying to find light at the end of the tunnel, the president handled other matters of state. Ironically, among the papers he signed was an executive order allowing the displaced people of Bikini to return to their Pacific atoll. It was finally thought safe— twenty-two years after the natives had been evicted to make way for America’s first major atomic tests. (In fact, the island was later found to be dangerously radioactive, and is still uninhabited.)

  After meeting privately with Hughes’s ambassador for almost three hours, Johnson invited him to lunch with the First Family—a lunch also attended by Arthur Krim, finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee—and then personally drove Maheu back to his plane.

  “I was at the ranch for a total of five hours and I could not have been treated more graciously and hospitably throughout the entire time,” Maheu wrote Hughes, concluding his report. “Upon departure he asked me again to convey to you his highest respect and warmest regards.”

  It certainly seemed a friendly visit. Not long after Maheu flew off, however, Johnson told one aide quite a different story. Hughes’s emissary, he confided with apparent dismay, had dared offer him money!

  “I told him to stick it up his ass,” the president declared, thrusting his arm upward with a vicious twist. Over the next few days word spread through the White House staff that Hughes had offered a big donation to the LBJ Library, and that Johnson had indignantly refused the offer, shocked that Maheu would even suggest such a thing.

  Yet at their lunch with Maheu, the president had told his trusted fund-raiser Krim to follow up and get the Hughes money, and in fact later sent Krim to Las Vegas to press Maheu for the contribution.

  The cover-up was unnecessary. Hughes had no interest in such side deals. Told that donations to the LBJ Library were limited to $25,000, he reportedly snapped, “Hell, I couldn’t control that son of a bitch with $25,000,” and never contributed a cent.

  Johnson also failed to deliver. He never did bring the bombing to a halt, and if he intervened as promised on the Stardust deal, it had no effect on either the attorney general or his deputy, that “jerk” Zimmerman. Both the antitrust blockade and the dreaded blasts continued.

  Circling each other like two wounded lions, neither sure of the other’s true strength or intentions, Hughes and Johnson never came to terms. Soon the president would retire permanently to his ranch and himself become a virtual hermit, his failed encounter with Hughes a small part of his bitter memories.

  For Hughes, however, it was a turning point. His failure first to persuade, then to buy, Johnson only left him more than ever determined to own the next president. In LBJ, Hughes saw a man he had once bought and was certain was still for sale, but who now refused to sell him what he wanted. Unable to recognize that he was trying to buy the one thing no president could sell—the Bomb—he began to search for a candidate with whom he could do business.

  Hughes would pursue Johnson to his last days in office, but his focus had already shifted to another national leader who had proven himself far more cooperative.

  *Gillis Long, former congressman and new Hughes lobbyist.

  8 Poor Hubert

  “Here we are, the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, the politics of joy! And that’s the way it’s going to be, too, all the way from here on out!”

  The voice, so overripe with good cheer, was unmistakable. Bobbing and weaving, flapping his arms, barely able to contain his own high spirits, Hubert Horatio Humphrey launched his presidential campaign. It was April 27, 1968. Almost a month had passed since Johnson’s sudden abdication, and now the vice-president finally felt free to declare himself a candidate.

  “And so my friends and fellow Americans,” he told a national television audience and two thousand supporters jammed into the ballroom of a Washington hotel, “I shall seek the nomination—” Before he could finish, the crowd stood to cheer, shouting, “We Want Humphrey! We Want Humphrey!” the chant drowning him out, and Hubert, beaming, shouted back, “You have him!” and the crowd roared.

  Always effusive, the Happy Warrior had never seemed quite so exuberant as now—with his band playing “The Minnesota Rouser” and his people waving their plastic Humphrey hats—he stood ready to enter the White House, proclaiming “the politics of happiness, the politics of joy.”

  It was a peculiarly inappropriate campaign theme in that wretched year of war, riots, and assassinations. And at that moment it could not have seemed more inappropriate to anyone than to the man who would soon become one of the vice-president’s chief backers: Howard Hughes.

  For there was no joy in the penthouse. Humphrey’s announcement came bubbling over the billionaire’s television set just one day after the “Boxcar” blast, and the shaken but determined recluse was plotting a very different kind of campaign.

  The politics of money, the politics of graft.

  “Bob,” wrote Hughes, “we have to act fast or we will be right up against another deadline, making last-minute desperate attempts to abort another threatened blast. The A.E.C. is not going to let this thing rest.

  “Now I am no political expert, but I can readily see that we have only one assett of really important value, and I dont have to spell that out, I am sure.

  “So, it seems to me we have to lead off with our best shot. I think we must decide which candidate we intend to support and then support him till hell wont have it, but only if he will do something for us on the bomb.

  “Now, if Humphries is the man, fine.

  “Anyway, as I say, we have only one kind of markers to use in this game, and I think we should decide through whom, and how much, and then go to work.”

  Howard Hughes could never spell Hubert Humphrey’s name correctly—he usually called him “Humphries”—but he had reason to place his bets on the vice-president.

  Theirs was a curious relationship. The two men seemingly had nothing in common. Humphrey, the quintessential public man, loved a crowd, was outgoing, garrulous, almost embarrassingly emotional, a complete extrovert. Born in a room above the family drugstore, he grew up poor, had to drop out of college to return to work, and his political career had always been and still was plagued by a chronic lack of money. A classic old-line liberal, a farmer-labor populist, he had championed every social cause from civil rights to arms control to Medicare.

  Only three weeks earlier, Hughes’s reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King had dramatized how different the two men were. Humphrey had first come to national prominence leading the fight for a strong civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic convention, where he declared, “There are those who say, ‘We are rushing this issue of civil rights.’ I say we are 172 years late.” Hughes seized the occasion of King’s murder to declare “negroes have already made enough progress to last the next 100 years, and there is such a thing as overdoing it.”

  Yet now, in the spring of 1968, the Texas oligarch and the Minnesota populist forged an alliance. None of Humphrey’s issues—certainly not nuclear disarmament—had ever before been moneymakers. Now, suddenly, he struck gold. Hughes was determined to stop the bombing at all costs, and the vice-president, who for a decade had labored unpaid to limit atomic tests, readily enlisted in the billionaire’s lucrative antibomb campaign.

  Beyond the bomb they had no common bond. Except that Hughes wanted a president who would be reliably indebted and Humphrey desperately needed money to reach the White House.

  Poor Hubert. Relentless in his pursuit of the presidency since 1952, he entered the race in 1968 short of cash and haunted by memories of past defeats, none more vivid than that of the night he sat helpless in a stalled rented bus, flat-broke, shedding tears of anger and frustration as he heard the private Kennedy jet roar overhead, carrying his well-heeled opponent to victory in the West Virginia primary, to the 1960 nomination, to the White House.

  This time it would be different. This time Humphrey was determined to go first-cl
ass. He would accept illegal corporate contributions from the milk lobby, he would take a questionable loan from a Minnesota grain merchant, and he would make a deal with Howard Hughes.

  Still, he would be outspent four-to-one by Richard Nixon, would not have enough money to buy a single national television spot until the final weeks of his campaign, and would lose the election for want of a few thousand votes that may well have been his for a few million dollars.

  The day after “Humphries” announced his candidacy, Hughes pounced. “I read an article in the paper saying H.H.H. is sore-pressed for solvency at the moment,” he wrote. “Are we marching through this obvious opening? I mean in a really big and definite way?”

  Within two weeks Maheu met privately with the vice-president. The deal was struck. Before the campaign was over, Hubert Humphrey would receive $100,000—half of it in secret cash—from Howard Hughes.

  Humphrey was not the only candidate to receive Hughes’s support that year, and it was not only the bombing that troubled Hughes. As the 1968 election approached, he was faced with a number of serious, unresolved problems.

  His drive to buy up Las Vegas had been stalled by the threatened antitrust action. His once aborted but still cherished plan to acquire the ABC television network needed FCC approval. His move back into the airlines business, through the illegal Air West takeover, would require both CAB and White House clearance. His helicopter deal was ending in disaster, and any chance of salvaging it depended on a new government contract. His TWA legal battle, with $137 million at stake, would come before a Supreme Court reshaped by the new president. A major overhaul of the nation’s tax laws loomed, imperiling the exempt status of his medical foundation. And there was always the Hughes Aircraft Company to consider, a billion-dollar-a-year business almost entirely dependent on defense, CIA, and space-agency contracts.