“Here’s the goddamn money,” shouted Davis. “Take it, burn it, do whatever you damn please with it!”
But the senators were not satisfied with the money. They also wanted Hughes. In mid-January, the committee sent Davis a letter asking the billionaire to appear. Soon after, Ervin approved a subpoena.
Down in the Bahamas, already on the lam, Hughes remained vague about Watergate, even as others began to wonder whether he was somehow at the center of it all.
In a memo dictated to the Mormons, Davis tried to explain the “Hughes connection” to Howard Hughes.
“We are involved in the Watergate affair to this extent:
“1. E. Howard Hunt, convicted for the Watergate break-in, was employed by Bob Bennett (our current Washington representative). In addition, Bennett was maintaining liaison with the White House through Chuck Colson, who was deeply involved in the Watergate cover-up.
“2. Bennett, Ralph Winte (employed by us re: security matters) and Hunt are involved in plans to burglarize Greenspun’s safe, and even though those plans were rejected and never carried out, investigators see political motivation related to Watergate.
“3. The political contribution by Danner to Rebozo and visits by Danner to Mitchell, are claimed to be an effort for influencing Governmental decisions, including an alleged change in rulings of the Department of Justice.
“4. Payments made to Larry O’Brien and his employment has been claimed to have been part of the possible motivation for the Watergate break-in because of White House interest in that arrangement as a possible means of embarrassing O’Brien and the Democrats.
“5. The massive political contributions supposedly made by Maheu, particularly those made in cash, is part of the over-all Watergate investigation dealing with the need for reform.”
Hughes was not satisfied with the explanation. Alternately puzzled and put upon, seemingly unable to recall the $100,000 payoff, he demanded that Davis bring the entire Watergate investigation to a halt. He was sure it was all a plot designed to force him out of hiding.
“I have not yet received further information identifying exactly who are the persons behind this determined effort to embarrass you in order to compel you to appear,” wrote Davis, humoring his mad boss, but suggesting that perhaps it was instead a plot against Nixon.
“Since the Watergate incident, there has been a bitterly fanatic political movement to destroy Nixon. The staggering sums which Maheu is supposed to have paid, allegedly on your behalf and pursuant to your instructions, and the publication of alleged messages from you to Maheu construed as instructions to influence if not control the Administration, has encouraged the Senate Watergate Committee to pursue the contention that Nixon received monies from you (including the $100,000 to Rebozo) for his personal use rather than as a proper contribution to a political campaign.
“To date we have successfully resisted the efforts of the IRS, SEC, and the Senate Watergate Committee from having access to you.
“This has developed into quite a dog fight,” concluded Davis, “but I am confident we will prevail.”
In fact, Hughes did prevail. He was the only major Watergate figure who eluded all the probes, who was never brought to justice.
Beyond the law in his Bahamas bedroom, under indictment and under subpoena, Hughes watched B-movies in a codeine haze while his past machinations brought down the government of the United States.
If the billionaire was safe, however, his secrets were not.
In the early morning hours of June 5, 1974, the secret papers that Richard Nixon feared were stashed in Larry O’Brien’s office or Hank Greenspun’s safe were stolen from Howard Hughes’s old headquarters at 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood.
No one dared tell Hughes that his sacred memos were gone.
Nonetheless he was worried. Not that unknown burglars had discovered his dealings with Nixon but that they had made off with an old steam car Hughes had bought when he was twenty or disturbed the movies he had preserved in his vaults. And most of all he was worried that more outsiders would start poking through this warehouse of his past life.
“He wants to know who is actually going to look in the various areas, vaults, and rooms at Romaine to ascertain just what is missing and presumed stolen in the robbery,” his aides informed headquarters.
“He does not want some insurance investigator to take it upon himself to start opening boxes and crates when he has left such rigid instructions through the years on the handling of such sensitive items as his motion picture equipment, etc.
“He wants a detailed report, step by step, on just how it is intended that these searches be made. He wants this report before anything is touched.”
While Hughes worried about his memorabilia, his aides back at Romaine discovered that another “sensitive item” was missing—a memo revealing the true mission of the Glomar Explorer. The security breach could not have come at a more dangerous time. The Glomar was just about to reach its giant claw three miles underwater and scoop up a sunken Russian submarine.
Now, a month after the break-in, CIA Director William Colby had to tell the president the Glomar secret was out, apparently in the hands of unknown burglars who had looted Romaine.
The president received that unsettling news just days after he returned from Moscow, where he signed an arms-control treaty that might have saved him had he signed it a few years earlier. It ended the big blasts in Nevada.
But too late. And now Nixon had reason beyond the Glomar to worry about the Hughes heist.
Colby knew that. When the CIA compiled its first list of “possible culprits” on July 4, it noted that the Romaine break-in might have been “politically motivated to aid or deter Watergate investigation.” And among “possible customers for documents” the Agency listed “anti-impeachment forces if documents are embarrassing.”
And now Colby was coming to see Nixon. It could not have been entirely comfortable, this meeting between a CIA director who believed there might be a Watergate motive behind the Hughes break-in, and a president who knew there was a Hughes motive behind the Watergate break-in.
But whatever the CIA suspected, Nixon knew that the Romaine heist was not a White House job. Now he also knew that the secret Hughes papers he had so long feared had fallen into unknown and perhaps hostile hands.
The president, however, had little time to worry about the “smoking guns” stolen from Romaine.
It was just past nine on Wednesday morning, July 24, when the telephone rang in Nixon’s bedroom at San Clemente, jolting him awake. Alexander Haig was on the line.
“It’s pretty rough, Mr. President,” said Haig. “The Supreme Court decision came down this morning.”
Nixon had to surrender his White House tapes.
Watergate, which began with Hughes’s dirty secrets spilling out, would now end with Nixon’s own dirty secrets spilling. Incredibly, these two most secretive men had both kept a running record of their crimes.
Nixon was now in the dock. That same night the House Impeachment Committee began its televised hearings. The whole appalling story of Watergate would now come out, the president convicted by his own recorded words, all his men already indicted for the cover-up, his burglars already in jail.
Only one aspect of the crime would remain hidden. The motive.
It was not unknown, but it had been suppressed. Just before the Senate Watergate Committee released its final report earlier that month, the senators cut out forty-six pages. In that deleted section staff investigators concluded that the Hughes connection had triggered Watergate.
It all began, the staff reported, with Nixon’s fears that Larry O’Brien had discovered the $100,000 payoff while serving simultaneously as the billionaire’s Washington lobbyist and chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
None of the senators wanted to publish that. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats. Obviously there was no way to expose Nixon without at the same time exposing O’Brien. But it was more than t
hat. Hughes money exploded in too many directions. Several senators, including at least one on the Watergate committee, Joseph Montoya, had also received contributions from Hughes, and in his lawsuit Maheu had named other prominent political leaders, including Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey. As the committee’s maverick Republican Lowell Weicker put it, “Everybody was feeding at the same trough.”
But beyond that, none of the senators could believe that $100,000 explained Watergate. It just didn’t seem like enough.
Some thought there must be more, that the real payoff, the big bribe that would explain the big risk of the big break-in had not yet been uncovered. Even some in Nixon’s own gang were certain there must be more. “Who knows that that’s the only $100,000?” said Chuck Colson, shortly before he went to prison.
Surely $100,000 could not have brought the president to the brink. But it had. It was not the amount of money. It wasn’t even that it was dirty money. It was the very fact that it was Hughes money, the kind of money Nixon had been caught with before, the kind of money that had once cost him the White House. In a desperate effort to keep it from happening again, he had made it happen again.
Haldeman understood. “To take a risk such as that burglary was absurd,” he later wrote. “But on matters pertaining to Hughes, Nixon sometimes seemed to lose touch with reality. His indirect association with this mystery man may have caused him, in his view, to lose two elections.”
Hughes and Nixon had brought on the cataclysm trying to protect themselves—from each other. Hughes gave Nixon the $100,000 in a desperate effort to stop the bombing, and Nixon brought himself down in a desperate effort to hide the payoff.
Secret money, so central to Watergate, still obsessed Nixon as the end drew near. In one of a series of final phone calls to Haldeman on August 7, the president told his former chief of staff that there was one more unexploded bombshell in the tapes: the secret Rebozo slush fund. At the end, with all his crimes exposed and his soul laid bare, that was still the revelation he most feared.
At nine P.M. the next day, Thursday, August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon announced his resignation as president of the United States.
Hughes and the government fell together.
As Nixon exited the White House for the last time, Hughes described his own terminal condition in a note scrawled on his bedside legal pad.
“I did not leave the stretcher and prone position from time of surgery until arrival in Freeport,” he wrote, recalling the operation on his fractured hip a year earlier. “I was put in a bed, and I have not left that bed up until and including this moment, not even to attempt to go to the bathroom.”
Yet now, more than ever, even as he went into his final decline, Hughes was seen as the real Mr. Big, the secret center of Watergate, the secret patron of presidents, and the secret partner of the CIA.
Alone in his darkened room atop the Xanadu Princess Hotel, his sixth foreign hideout in four years of exile, the presumed evil genius remained puzzled by events back in the States.
For a moment he thought he had found the key to Watergate. It seemed to be in one White House tape on which the president was heard to say: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up, or anything else if it’ll save it—save the plan.”
“What’s the plan?” asked Hughes. If there was one, he wanted to know about it.
His public relations man in Los Angeles, whose job had long been to refuse all comment, and whose tasks now included keeping Hughes informed on Watergate, sent the answer:
“ ‘The Plan’ apparently refers to an agreement reached by the White House advisors, and accepted by Nixon, that the best method for dealing with the Watergate Committee would be for White House witnesses to refuse to answer questions. The over-all term for this plan was to ‘Stonewall it.’ ”
How disappointing. Hughes had been stonewalling it all his life, and where had it gotten him?
He turned his attention to more immediate concerns, demanding a secret survey of breakfast cereals. “Please have them research the serial field—either in Freeport, Miami or L.A. before I consume any more of that turd-like meat,” he scribbled to his Mormons. “But plse exercise all caution toward security.”
He was equally security-conscious when he closed a deal to buy his Bahamas hotel: “Please send a personal note from me to Mr. Ludwig (just orral—not written—through Mr. Ludwig’s chief representative—but with no other man present—) as follows:
“ ‘It has been a pleasure to do business with you.’ ”
While Hughes carefully guarded such sensitive messages in Freeport, his biggest secret of all escaped back in Los Angeles, a belated fallout of the heist at his unguarded Romaine Street headquarters. On February 7, 1975, the Los Angeles Times broke the Glomar story.
While some now began to wonder whether Hughes was a front for the CIA or the CIA was a front for Hughes, whether it was all in fact one dark empire, the naked emperor himself never even heard that the Glomar secret was out.
Still, on March 18, when the story broke wide open, banner headlines across the country proclaimed Hughes the CIA’s partner in a fantastic three-hundred-fifty million dollar plot to steal a Russian submarine.
And then, at the height of the CIA scandals a few months later, Senate investigators revealed that Robert Maheu had orchestrated a CIA-Mafia conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Many were now certain that Hughes was involved in a cabal of sinister dimensions, a secret axis that lay behind all dark events from Dallas to Watergate. The Senate Intelligence Committee began to explore his links to Nixon, the Mob, and the CIA. The only real question seemed to be whether Hughes was master or pawn. “Indeed, was there even a live man named Hughes at the center of it all,” asked Norman Mailer, “or was there a Special Committee?”
The IRS had similar concerns. Even as Hughes himself repeatedly asked his aides if it was safe to return to the United States, if the IRS was still after him, an agent involved in the big Hughes probe suggested that he was long dead.
“It is my belief,” he reported to headquarters, “that Howard Hughes died in Las Vegas in 1970 and that key officials running his empire concealed this fact in order to prevent a catastrophic dissolution of his holdings.”
IRS Commissioner Walters personally tried to determine if Hughes was alive, with no definitive results.
In fact, Hughes was just barely alive, and not master of anything, not even his own empire. His money was disappearing at an alarming rate. Under the new command, corporate losses soared above $100 million in five years, and over the previous decade half a billion in cash and securities had vanished from his bank accounts, apparently the result of mismanagement and waste rather than any conspiracy.
Hughes was oblivious to the loss. He could not even control the name of his empire. Back in 1972 it had been changed without his knowledge to Summa, after he was forced to sell off the foundation of his fortune, the business his father had bequeathed to him, the Hughes Tool Company. Pressured by his lawyers and executives, he reluctantly sold his birthright for $150 million to satisfy the TWA judgment, then watched the stock triple while the TWA case was dismissed.
And now, two years later, he discovered his empire had a new name. “Do you see any reason why we cannot change the name Summa to HRH Properties at the end of this year?” he asked. “Can we change the name Summa now?” he inquired again, and on another occasion instructed, “Don’t spend any more money on the name Summa.” But the name was never changed.
There were even problems with his drug supply. Hughes was convinced that the Mormons were withholding his blue bombers.
“Of course no one wants you to take any but we don’t try to keep them away,” soothed an aide. “When you use words and phrases such as ‘putting you to sleep,’ ‘permitting you to go to sleep,’ etc. you imply that we have some kind of control over what you or your mind tells you to do.”
Actua
lly, the Mormons were firmly in control. Sullen and resentful after fifteen years of servitude, forced to perform absurd and odious tasks, they pressed their dependent boss for ever greater salaries, and while each was paid more than $100,000 a year, they still often treated him with contempt.
“If you knew how much it disturbs me, and how unhappy it makes me when you are completely cold and unfriendly as you were tonight, I really dont think you would turn on the punishment outlet quite all the way,” Hughes pleaded in a note to a nursemaid.
“So, all I ask is that the next time you get ready to give me a really harsh expression of your views, you merely take into account the fact that my life is not quite the total ‘bed of roses’ that I sometimes get the impression you think it is.
“In fact, if we were to swap places in life, I would be willing to bet you would be asking me to permit you to re-swap back to the present position before the passage of the first week.”
Hughes had only one last hold over his nursemaids and executives—his will. He had been dangling it in front of them for years, repeatedly assuring them they were all well rewarded, but never letting anyone see it.
“I have had in existance for some time a holographic will,” he claimed. “It was carefully written seated at a desk, complying to all the rules governing such wills. It was all done under the supervision of my personal attorney Neil McCarthy, and I assure you no detail was overlooked. It is as binding as a band of steel.”
The aides were suspicious. McCarthy was long dead, and the will Hughes claimed to have written was supposedly drafted in the early 1940s, a decade before he assembled his strange crew of Mormons.
“I am sure you dont need this protection,” Hughes told them, “as everybody knows that the five of you have been my eyes, ears, and voice for the past five to ten years, so I am sure any one of you could get any exec, position you might care to seek, and with any number of companies to choose from.
Citizen Hughes Page 49
