“It was his shocking conduct since my departure that left me feeling all efforts to explain away these actions would be totally without purpose.
“And, if his conduct since my departure consisted of a mass of lies, then I must assume that, in hundreds of other instances wherein his contentions were in direct conflict with other of my associates who had been with me for years and years of honest, loyal service, I repeat, if he has been lying since my departure, then I must assume that he was lying in these many, many other situations wherein I was forced to choose between accepting Maheu’s contentions or the equally impassioned and, so far as I could tell, equally genuine and truthful claims of other of my associates whom I have learned to trust.
“Up to this time,” Hughes concluded, “I simply had no way to know who was telling the truth, and who was not.
“But Maheu’s actions since my departure have made this entire situation very clear.”
Not long after, John Ehrlichman encountered Bebe Rebozo coming down the stairway from the president’s private quarters inside the White House. They spoke in hushed tones about the strange doings in Las Vegas and the Bahamas. Rebozo wondered aloud whether his pal Richard Danner would survive the big shake-up. His real fear remained unspoken: Would Richard Nixon?
Epilogue I
Watergate
“This is for Haldeman,” said Richard Nixon, speaking into his dictaphone aboard Air Force One. The president had just emerged from a ten-day retreat at San Clemente, plotting his reelection campaign and brooding alone with Bebe Rebozo, and now he was flying to the University of Nebraska to “forge an alliance of the generations.” But his mind was elsewhere, fixated on another alliance. One he had to destroy, before it destroyed him.
“It would seem that the time is approaching when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes,” declared Nixon, going on the attack, dictating his message to Haldeman. “Bebe has some information on this, although it is, of course, not solid. But there is no question that one of Hughes’s people did have O’Brien on a very heavy retainer for ‘services rendered’ in the past. Perhaps Colson should check on this.”
It was January 14, 1971. Just six weeks had passed since Howard Hughes made his great escape, and the ugly aftermath of the Hughes-Maheu split had Nixon in mortal terror.
It was not the money O’Brien got from Hughes that really obsessed him. It was his own Hughes money. The hot hundred grand hidden away in Bebe Rebozo’s safe-deposit box. Throughout his presidency Nixon had heard that tell-tale heart beating, had grown increasingly fearful that others could also hear it, that soon they would discover the $100,000 payoff his pal Danner had delivered to his pal Rebozo, that again he would be ruined by an ugly Hughes scandal, that it would cost him the White House as it had once before.
Nixon never got over that 1960 defeat. His narrow loss to JFK still haunted him, and he still blamed that loss on the Hughes “loan” scandal—the never-repaid $205,000 his brother had received from the billionaire. Yet Nixon had taken more Hughes money. A cursed bundle of hundred-dollar bills. And now, with the Hughes empire split by a bitter power struggle, Nixon was certain his terrible guilty secret was about to come spilling out.
That very morning, before leaving the western White House, the president had seen a Los Angeles Times report that Maheu planned to subpoena his former boss for a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit. Even if the recluse himself failed to appear, secret Hughes memos impounded by the Nevada court were likely to surface. Indeed, the dreaded Jack Anderson already claimed to have seen some.
The more Nixon brooded, the more terrified he grew, and the more he focused on Larry O’Brien. He was getting away with it. The hated leader of the Kennedy gang, the man who had beaten him in 1960 by exploiting the Hughes loan scandal, was himself getting $15,000 a month from the billionaire while he served as unpaid chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon wanted revenge. He wanted to unmask O’Brien as a secret Hughes lobbyist. He wanted to make O’Brien pay as he had paid.
But now, aboard Air Force One, the president was gripped by a darker thought. The terrible fear that O’Brien knew—that he had somehow learned from his hidden masters all about the secret Hughes cash in Bebe’s little tin box.
Nixon could not tell that to Haldeman. He could not say to his chief of staff, “My God, O’Brien must know! We’ve got to find out what he’s found out. We’ve got to get him before he gets me.” Nixon could not say that because Haldeman himself didn’t know. None of the president’s men knew. Only Rebozo shared that secret. So, instead, Nixon ordered Haldeman to get O’Brien.
“We’re going to nail O’Brien on this, one way or the other,” the president told him back in Washington the next day. He called Haldeman into the Oval Office and said, “O’Brien’s not going to get away with it, Bob. We’re going to get proof of his relationship with Hughes—and just what he’s doing for the money.”
It was the beginning of a desperate covert campaign. One that would end with Richard Nixon’s burglars caught looking for Howard Hughes’s secrets inside Larry O’Brien’s office—at the Watergate.
Down in the Bahamas, Hughes was oblivious to the high-stakes intrigue he had unwittingly inspired back in Washington. Indeed, he was oblivious to everything outside his new blacked-out bedroom.
He was finally safe. As safe as a prisoner in solitary confinement, with two armed guards on the penthouse floor of his Paradise Island retreat, one at the elevator, the other behind a locked partition, himself sealed off from Hughes by a second locked partition, but keeping watch on the rest of the hotel through closed-circuit TV cameras, while a third guard patrolled the roof with a vicious attack dog.
But Hughes was no longer entirely his own prisoner. With Maheu out of the picture, his Mormon attendants were firmly in control, determined to keep their boss bedridden and befuddled.
Hughes was completely cut off from the world, thousands of miles from all citadels of his empire, now run by virtual strangers. No longer was he sending secret handwritten memos in sealed envelopes to a trusted regent; indeed he rarely wrote any memos at all. The Mormons controlled all lines of communication. Hughes dictated his messages to them and received all replies through them. And he knew only what they wished him to know.
He no longer read newspapers. He had even stopped watching television. The reception was so bad on his island retreat that he gave up TV after one futile day. To bring a clear picture into his bedroom, he toyed for a few weeks with the idea of using one of the thirty satellites his empire had circling the globe, but soon abandoned that too.
Instead he watched movies, turning his penthouse into a darkened theater of the absurd, screening one film after another, or the same one several times in a row, not infrequently ten or twenty times, and a few real favorites more than a hundred times. Movie soundtracks blared constantly, as his television once had. But unlike TV, the movies told him nothing of the real world beyond.
Caught up in his celluloid fantasies, Hughes spent his days reclining naked on a paper-towel-insulated lounge chair and rarely left his Barcalounger even to sleep. His bedsores got so bad that they required surgery, which Hughes forced his doctor to perform in the hotel room. But one shoulder blade—the bare bone—kept tearing through the parchmentlike skin of his emaciated body, an open sore five inches long continually rubbed raw by his hard Naugahyde lounge chair.