There was no need to rush to the bank. Humphrey would be waiting—still a candidate who needed and wanted Hughes’s help—whenever the billionaire was ready.
Meanwhile, Maheu felt Humphrey’s pulse and reported back to the penthouse. “We are continuing to move on all fronts on the AEC matter,” he wrote. “The Vice President has been most cooperative in every instance and we continually, through him, are feeding most important data to the White House, the proper sources at the U.N., and even more importantly to those involved in very high level conferences with the Russians.”
“I received a telephone call this morning from Bob Humphrey, the Vice President’s son,” Maheu told his boss in another of a steady stream of memos. “He informed me that his father was sending one of his top men to discuss with me the strategy for delaying any megaton tests until after the elections and then, hopefully, forever.”
There was only one catch. Maheu intended to hold the big strategy talks out on his yacht. He was about to weigh anchor when Hughes got the message. As desperate as he was to stop the bombing, as anxious as he was to seduce Humphrey, he could not bear to let Maheu escape.
“Now, Bob, I dont have to remind you that I am just as disturbed about the AEC as you are,” he wrote, catching the yacht just in time. “I am also just as aware of Humphries’ importance. But I cannot believe that there is no way to service the VP properly except at the expense of punishing me.
“I will appreciate it very much, Bob, if you will delay your departure to Catalina until I communicate with you about several very important matters.”
Neither Maheu nor the vice-president’s aide ever left shore. Hughes kept his first mate on dry land all day, sending him an endless series of memos, all of course requiring his immediate attention. Still, Maheu managed to check Humphrey’s pulse.
“Today we talked to Washington twice,” Maheu reported from the Balboa Bay Yacht Club, “and I now believe that we will be instrumental in naming the next scientific advisor to the White House.”
Next Maheu got word from Humphrey himself, who also wanted Hughes to help pick his running mate.
“Humphrey is going to be in L.A. Monday,” Maheu wrote, “and, among other things, he wants to discuss with me the Vice Presidential candidate. He has asked if I would meet with him.”
Humphrey’s attitude was perfect. As for his capabilities, they would improve if he became president. And, with Kennedy dead, there was little doubt that Humphrey would soon be the Democratic nominee.
It was time to make the promised payoff.
On July 29, 1968, Robert Maheu checked into the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, carrying with him a manila envelope stuffed with $25,000 in hundred-dollar bills. He took a suite of rooms on the seventeenth floor and waited there for a courier to arrive from Las Vegas with an additional $25,000 in a black briefcase. Then he went downstairs to meet the candidate.
Humphrey had come to town a few days earlier and was winding up his campaign swing with a five-thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner for thirty select contributors in a conference room at the same hotel. Maheu greeted the vice-president at a cocktail reception, and toward the end of the evening arranged a private meeting through their mutual friend Lloyd Hand, former U.S. chief of protocol. Invited to accompany the candidate on a drive to the airport, Maheu left the dinner, went up to his suite, and returned with the black briefcase.
Humphrey’s limousine was waiting. Satchel in hand, Maheu joined the vice-president in the rear compartment. They sat facing each other, Maheu on a jump seat, and chatted a few minutes about Hughes and the bomb tests. Then Maheu placed the cash-laden briefcase, now stuffed with the entire $50,000, at Humphrey’s feet. The motorcade came to an unscheduled halt after traveling just five hundred yards, and Maheu, mission completed, stepped out.
“I had an excellent meeting,” he wrote, reporting his conquest later that night, “and this man wants me to assure you that he will break his back in an effort to accomplish our needs.”
Hubert Humphrey had lost his virginity in the classic American way—with a furtive quickie in the backseat of a car. It was a fittingly sad consummation of the Hughes-Humphrey relationship, the corruption of a candidate more to be pitied than scorned. He had simply surrendered to the sordid realities of politics in America.
Humphrey, who had opened his campaign proclaiming the “politics of joy,” arrived in Chicago August 25 morose, with no one to greet him except a handful of paid party workers. There were no crowds lining the route from the airport to the hotel, no cheering supporters to welcome the candidate to his convention headquarters. Humphrey was relieved simply to get into his suite unmolested.
Chicago was in turmoil. Earlier that Sunday police had swept through Lincoln Park, clubbing antiwar demonstrators, beating youths blinded by tear gas. The mayhem mounted every day. Humphrey was nervous.
So was Maheu. The backseat payoff was his biggest bag job. Although he had handled Hughes’s political money for years, he had never before passed $50,000 in secret cash to a vice-president of the United States.
“I know you think I may be overly cautious about having messages transmitted over the telephone which pertain to Humphrey and the convention,” he wrote Hughes as the Democrats prepared to choose a presidential candidate.
“Personally, I would put nothing past the AEC and their attempt to curtail our efforts. If—they ever were in a position to show the extent to which we are helping this man—they would clobber us.
“I don’t mind taking a calculated risk on Air West, L. A. Airways and many other projects in which we are involved—but—the Humphrey situation is one we should play real close to the vest.”
And that’s how they played it, all through the convention.
Closeted in their hotel command posts in Las Vegas and Chicago, both Hughes and Humphrey were feeling besieged. Neither really focused on the open warfare in the streets of Chicago but instead on hidden threats from rival powers.
First there was the president, Lyndon Johnson. For weeks he had been publicly ridiculing and privately tormenting his presumed heir, and now Humphrey feared something far worse. A coup. There were rumors that LBJ was about to board Air Force One, fly into Chicago, appear at the convention on his sixtieth birthday, and dramatically seize the nomination back from Humphrey.
“Howard, I dont think this will happen but it is a possibility which I think we must bear in mind,” Maheu cautioned Hughes. “When the President shows up at the Convention, it is conceiveable that the place may break up in pandemonium and that the delegates could insist on a draft. Obviously, if this takes place, the Vice President is in no position to fight it.
“I believe, therefore, that if it is your intention to pledge some support in helping the President with his new concept of a College of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, we should do so prior to the Convention being in full force.”
Hughes, however, remained stubbornly unwilling to make the donation Johnson had requested in his secret meeting with Maheu at the LBJ Ranch two weeks earlier, and was instead preoccupied with the threat of a sudden boom for Teddy Kennedy.
“Needless to say, there is one hell of a drive on to draft Kennedy,” Maheu told Hughes. “Our informants tell us, however, that, as of this morning, Mr. H. is in.”
Hughes was not satisfied. “I dont want to see Ted Kennedy get the V.P. nomination,” he scrawled, determined to keep Teddy off the ticket entirely. “Is there anything we can do about this?”
Maheu checked out the scene in Chicago and reported back to the penthouse. “Bob believes the Kennedy situation is under control,” a Mormon aide told Hughes. “Bob’s choice would be the Senator from Maine.”
That senator, of course, was none other than Maheu’s old pal Ed Muskie. In his hotel suite, Humphrey was about to make the same choice. After agonizing for hours, Humphrey finally turned to his campaign manager, Larry O’Brien, and asked, “Larry, if you had fifteen seconds to decide, who would it be?” O’Brien pick
ed Muskie, and Hubert called in the big man from Maine.
“Howard, as I indicated to you yesterday, Muskie was definitely my No. 1 choice,” wrote a triumphant Maheu. “He and his wife, my wife and I have been lifelong friends—all coming from the same small city in Maine. We have been supporting him since his first trip in the political arena, and he is truly one hell of a man. He was my personal attorney until he became a senator. As a matter of fact, he stopped here at the D.I. a few months ago to see me. The Vice President and Larry are fully aware of my closeness to Muskie.”
All the while Hughes and Maheu and Humphrey and O’Brien were cutting backroom deals, the battle raged in the streets of Chicago. Finally, on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, just as the delegates prepared to cast their ballots in a convention hall surrounded by barbed wire and armored personnel vehicles, the violence outside peaked.
Out in front of the Conrad Hilton, right below Humphrey’s window, in full view of the television cameras, the Chicago police suddenly attacked thousands of demonstrators marching on the amphitheatre. It was a bloodbath. Shooting tear gas, spraying Mace, waving their billy clubs, the helmeted cops converged from all sides, cutting through the crowd, chasing men and women, teenaged boys and girls, running them down, beating them with unrestrained fury, finally losing all control and attacking even middle-aged bystanders, pushing scores of them backward through the hotel’s plate-glass window and charging in after them, swinging wildly, clubbing patrons sitting at the bar, eating in the restaurant, standing in the lobby.
“The whole world is watching!” chanted the demonstrators outside, but Mayor Daley and his police didn’t seem to care.
Even inside the convention hall, Daley’s security force attacked and dragged off dissident delegates, even went after Dan Rather, punching him in the belly and beating him to the floor live on national television, while a shocked Walter Cronkite called to him from the anchor booth in horror.
From the podium, Senator Abraham Ribicoff denounced “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” and Mayor Daley just below stood up enraged, shaking his fist at the senator, calling him a “fucking Jew bastard.”
In that scene of violence and mass hysteria, Hubert Humphrey was nominated the Democrats’ candidate for president of the United States.
So, at the end, it came down to that. After all the passion and hope and tragedy and turmoil of 1968, after McCarthy and his children’s crusade, after New Hampshire and Johnson’s abdication, after Bobby Kennedy and his assassination, after the riots and marches and demonstrations, after the siege of Chicago, it came down to that—a choice between the old Humphrey and the new Nixon.
Up in his penthouse, watching TV, Howard Hughes could not have been more pleased.
It was now a contest he could not lose.
“Rather than take the calculated risk of ‘picking the winner’ I think we should hedge our bets,” wrote Maheu, plotting the final drive. “There is no doubt in my mind that if the election were tonight the Republicans would enjoy a glorious victory. There is equally no doubt in my mind that in the sanctimonious confines of the voting booth there will be many Democrats who will have a tremendous struggle with their conscience and make an instantaneous change in their thinking.
“I have taken the liberty of hedging our bets and sincerely hope that you will agree with my judgement. I also believe that we should do substantially more for each since we are playing for such big stakes.”
Hughes agreed. He could hardly take his chances on sanctimonious voters acting out of conscience. Soon he would pass $50,000 to Nixon through Governor Laxalt and a second $50,000 to Humphrey through Dwayne Andreas, a longtime backer who had no official role in the campaign but handled the “sensitive” contributions.
“You may rest assured, Howard,” reported Maheu, “that we have taken all necessary steps to be in a good posture, whichever way it goes.”
It was not going well for Humphrey as he stepped to the podium in Chicago to accept his nomination on Thursday, August 29, the final night of the Democratic convention.
Indeed, poor Hubert had never looked worse than now, at his moment of greatest triumph. Weighed down by the war and LBJ and Mayor Daley, by all the dead in Vietnam and all the demonstrators beaten in Chicago, he seemed covered with blood, covered with shame, as irrevocably soiled as if he had had to crawl on his belly through the slime of the stockyards to get that nomination, and now that he finally had it, the prize seemed only to further befoul him.
Still he stood there with a frozen smile, slavishly thanked his cruel master Lyndon Johnson, and closed with words so obviously hollow they must have hurt: “I say to this great convention, and to this great nation of ours, I am ready to lead our country!”
It was past two in the morning by the time Humphrey made it back to his hotel. He was tired and battered but could not sleep. Obsessively immaculate and offended by dirt, he tidied up his room, busily emptying ashtrays and washing out half-empty glasses, as if by cleaning the suite he could also cleanse himself of the stain of Chicago. Then he sent a Secret Service agent to summon Larry O’Brien.
From three A.M. until past dawn Humphrey and O’Brien talked. The vice-president poured out his pain. He was desperate. He had no campaign money, he had no campaign plan, and now he also had no campaign manager. O’Brien had agreed to help Humphrey only through the convention. Now Hubert was on his own. O’Brien had other plans. He had never told Humphrey the details, but he had made it clear from the start that he was quitting politics to make some real money.
This was farewell. They sat together hour after hour in a room smelling of tear gas, with Humphrey, who cried easily anyway, close to tears, and all the while they could hear the angry shouts of demonstrators in the street below, even now in the middle of the night still chanting, “Dump the Hump! Dump the Hump!”
“Larry, do you hear those people down there?” wailed Humphrey, suddenly begging O’Brien to stay on and run his campaign. “Please, Larry, don’t leave me naked.”
O’Brien was not swayed. He was through with public service. He was through with the destitute Humphrey. He had a new job waiting. He was eager to cash in.
“For Christsake, Hubert,” he exploded, “this is my private-sector move!”
Humphrey groveled. “Larry, I’ve just got to have you,” he pleaded. “If I get them to agree to a delay, will that settle it?”
O’Brien relented. For the first time he told Humphrey the name of his new boss. It was a sickening final blow.
Now, at dawn on Friday, August 30, 1968, Hubert Humphrey, the vice-president of the United States, the man just nominated to be president, had to pick up his phone and call Robert Maheu, call the man who employed his son and had helped pick his running mate, call the man who had slipped him fifty grand in the backseat of a car, call and beg Maheu to allow O’Brien to remain his campaign manager.
Unknown to Humphrey until now, Larry O’Brien had already agreed to go to work for Howard Hughes.
9 Camelot
The old bastard.
That’s who Howard Hughes thought of now, that’s who he always thought of when he thought of the Kennedys. Not Jack. Not Bobby. Not Teddy. Not the glamorous sons but their cutthroat father. Old Joe. He was the real Kennedy, the one Hughes remembered. And despised.
“The Kennedy family and their money and influence have been a thorn that has been relentlessly shoved into my guts since the very beginning of my business activities,” wrote the billionaire, bursting with a grudge he had held for forty years.
Right from the start Joseph P. Kennedy had been there to plague him. They had arrived together in Hollywood in the mid-1920s, the Boston Irishman and the Texas WASP invading an infant industry created by immigrant Jews. They both figured to take over the town.
Hughes had come to make movies. Not yet twenty, full of romantic visions, the tall, handsome tycoon left Houston in 1925 and took his inheritance to the Dream Capital. There, amid the palm trees and pink stucco palaces,
former furriers and ragmen, many just off the boat, were shaping America’s image of itself. But Hughes was the image they had created, and within a few years he was more than a top producer, he was a star.
Kennedy had come only to make money. He arrived less than a year after Hughes, at thirty-seven already an established, hard-bitten financier and in movieland strictly on business. “Look at that bunch of pants pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires,” he told an associate as he set out for California. “I could take the whole damn business away from them.”
He tried. Joe Kennedy was a ruthless operator, and he gave many men good reason to hate him. But what had he done to so irritate Hughes? It seemed to have something to do with RKO. Kennedy never made a movie of note, but he did found a movie studio, and Hughes seemed to hold that against him. “You see Joe Kennedy used to own the biggest part of RKO before I got into it,” he explained, suggesting that the studio was somehow behind the big grudge.
Twenty years later Hughes himself would buy RKO. But not from Kennedy. Joe was long gone from Hollywood, in and out in his usual style, a quick raid for a quick profit, gone before Hughes had made his first big movie, gone before Hughes was anything more than a rich kid. They never had any dealings over RKO, they never dealt with each other at all.
So why the grudge? In his three years in Hollywood, Kennedy probably never even met Hughes—“Howard was just a kid,” noted Joe’s mistress Gloria Swanson. “We didn’t move in the same circles”—and their paths would never cross again.
Joe moved on to banking, liquor, and land, always striking hard and fast, often skirting the law, building his fortune with whiskey deals that bordered on bootlegging and cynical stock-market manipulations, less a businessman than a predator on other men’s businesses, a bold buccaneer who continued milking Wall Street right up to the moment he was named first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, some said beyond. In short, a man much like Hughes himself would become, but less a romantic. He made many enemies, he crushed many rivals, he cheated his partners, but not once did he tangle with Hughes.
Citizen Hughes Page 28
