“Certainly none with Rebozo,” replied Hughes, handling this as calmly as the inquiry about his fingernails. “Now, regarding Mr. Nixon, I have tried not to bother him since he’s been in office, and I’ve made no effort to contact him.”
The press conference over, Hughes settled back to watch another movie, Topaz, shot up four more grains of codeine, then stayed up all night for a fourth and fifth screening of Funeral in Berlin. Finally, at eleven the next morning, he swallowed four blue bombers and fell asleep.
All the while his paranoia over Hughes mounted, the president had been pushing his men to set up a covert intelligence operation for his 1972 reelection campaign.
Nixon already had a secret police force operating out of the White House basement, but that gang, the Plumbers, handled “national security leaks.” What the president now wanted was a team targeted on the Democrats. The failure of his staff to nail Larry O’Brien showed the need for some real professionals.
To lead the new gang, Nixon’s campaign manager, Attorney General John Mitchell, chose a former FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy. A gun fanatic who liked to watch old Nazi propaganda films, Liddy had already made his bones as a Plumber, staging a break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
He reported for work at the Committee for the Re-election of the President on December 8, 1971, the day after Clifford Irving’s book was first announced. And now, as Liddy prepared his espionage plan, the fallout from the Irving caper brought Nixon’s paranoia to full boil.
The billionaire’s bizarre press conference had only focused yet more attention on Irving, on Hughes himself, and on Nixon.
It all came together January 16, 1972, in a headline on the front page of the New York Times: “HUGHES-NIXON TIES DESCRIBED IN BOOK.” The story said that Hughes had told Irving all about his Nixon connection, but gave no details.
A week later the Times revealed that Bobby Kennedy, as attorney general, had secretly investigated the Hughes-Nixon dealings and considered prosecuting Nixon himself, as well as members of his family. That story particularly enraged the president, and he called Bobby “a ruthless little bastard.”
“He wanted to bring criminal charges against my mother!“ exclaimed Nixon, adding that it was typical of the Kennedys.
And that same day, January 24, the equally feared and hated Jack Anderson repeated his allegation that Nixon had received $100,000 from Hughes through Rebozo, this time adding that he had “documentary evidence” to back it up.
Still, nothing happened, and the president maintained his tortured silence about the payoff, waiting once more for the full story to explode. The press and the Kennedys were clearly out to get him again, to ruin him with another Hughes scandal.
And the ammunition they needed might right now be locked inside a huge green safe, sitting in a Las Vegas newspaper office, under an autographed picture of Richard Nixon.
On February 3, the New York Times reported that Maheu’s pal Hank Greenspun—who was also known to be close to Jack Anderson—had two hundred secret Hughes memos, some handwritten by the billionaire himself, giving “precise instructions on approaches to be taken in delicate matters.”
At eleven o’clock the next morning, G. Gordon Liddy presented his espionage plans to John Mitchell in the attorney general’s office. Also at the big meeting were John Dean and Mitchell’s deputy campaign chief, Jeb Stuart Magruder.
They had all been there a week earlier to hear Liddy outline a million-dollar operation code-named “Gemstone,” for which he had already recruited safecrackers, wiremen, call girls, thugs, and professional killers (“twenty-two dead so far,” noted Liddy), a team assembled to carry out his program of kidnapping, blackmail, mugging, bugging, break-ins, and black-bag jobs, all aimed at the president’s political foes.
Mitchell had not approved it. “Gordon, that’s not quite what we had in mind,” said the attorney general. “The money you’re asking for is way out of line. Why don’t you tone it down a little, then we’ll talk again.”
Now Liddy was back. He presented a scaled-down version of the same plan, one that concentrated more on burglaries and wiretaps. It would cost half a million.
Mitchell did not give it his final approval—the price still seemed high—but he did suggest two targets. Larry O’Brien’s office at Democratic National Committee headquarters. And Hank Greenspun’s safe.
Liddy immediately began to plan the Greenspun job, plotting it with his partner in the Ellsberg break-in, a former CIA agent named E. Howard Hunt, who was already working for both Chuck Colson at the White House and Howard Hughes’s man in Washington, Bob Bennett.
Indeed, Bennett played a central role in the Greenspun caper. He apparently suggested the burglary to Hunt a few days before Mitchell approved it—as a kind of joint venture—and now he introduced Hunt and Liddy to Hughes security chief Ralph Winte.
They met again the weekend of February 20, in a plush suite at the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles. Winte had prepared a hand-drawn diagram of Greenspun’s office, the location of his safe marked by a big X. Liddy had the job all figured. The Nixon gang would handle the break-in, bust open the safe, throw the stolen Hughes memos into a canvas bag, and hop on a waiting Hughes jet that would fly them directly to some secret Central American rendezvous point, where the Nixon men and the Hughes men would meet to divide up the booty.
“Gee!” said Winte. “Suppose you get caught?”
“Don’t worry about that,” replied Hunt. “We’re professionals!”
The Hughes high command, however, had no interest in the plot and refused to supply the getaway jet. Liddy was crestfallen. He continued to case Greenspun’s office, but without the airplane the mission did not have the same appeal, and it appears that the break-in was never attempted.
Nixon was getting impatient. Months had passed since he first ordered a covert intelligence operation, and still there were no results. In fact, Mitchell still had not approved Liddy’s overall plan.
The president called Haldeman into the Oval Office. “When are they going to do something over there?” he demanded, drumming his fingers on the desk.
Haldeman told his expediter, Gordon Strachan, to get action, and Strachan called Mitchell’s deputy, Jeb Magruder.
“The president wants it done, and there’s to be no more arguing about it,” Strachan told Magruder, and the pressure from the White House continued.
More and more the pressure focused on Larry O’Brien.
A new scandal had erupted, and O’Brien was leading the attack. Late in February, Jack Anderson revealed that Nixon had killed an antitrust suit against ITT in return for a donation of $400,000 to the Republican convention. It was O’Brien who first made the accusation months earlier, and Nixon believed that he was somehow behind the Anderson exposé. If the two of them could make this much trouble over ITT, imagine what they could do with the Hughes hundred grand.
Day after day O’Brien kept the ITT scandal in the headlines, and an enraged Nixon turned to Chuck Colson. Colson was his ass-kicker, the man who would do anything, the man with whom Nixon shared his darkest fantasies. “One day we will get them,” he would tell Colson, speaking of all his enemies. “We’ll get them on the ground where we want them. And we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist—right, Chuck, right?” And Colson would reply, “Yes, sir, we’ll get them.”
Now the president called Colson into his hideaway rooms at the Executive Office Building and railed at him about ITT and Larry O’Brien. It was an outrage, said Nixon. O’Brien of all people making noise about ITT underwriting the Republican convention. Shit, Howard Hughes was underwriting the Democratic National Committee. O’Brien was on his damn payroll!