Twenty minutes later, a triumphant Davis called back. He said he had spoken to IRS Intelligence Chief John Olsiewski, who reportedly roused Commissioner Walters out of bed, and told the agents in Fort Lauderdale they would soon get orders to scuttle their mission.
At 2:15 A.M. the district chief called from Jacksonville. As Davis had predicted, he told his men to back off, forget the subpoena, stay off the plane, and instead merely let a customs inspector read Hughes an IRS statement requesting a voluntary interview.
The besieged Hughes resisted even that. Through the closed door of the jet the waiting agents heard a shouted conversation, and then one voice rising above the others, screaming “No, no!”
Finally, however, the customs man was allowed on board. He made his way to the back of the darkened plane and turned a flashlight on a bearded old man whose face was half hidden by a black hat pulled down past his ears. The agent handed him the IRS interview request and asked if he understood it. The man in the black hat said he did. That was the last time any U.S. government official would see Howard Hughes alive.
He flew off to London, where arrangements had been made with the Rothschilds for a penthouse suite at their posh Inn on the Park Hotel, overlooking Buckingham Palace. By four in the morning, an hour and a half after checking into his new hideout, Hughes had settled back into his familiar routine, picking up where he left off before the earthquake, sitting on his Barcalounger watching a movie, The Deserter.
He had been in London less than two weeks, however, when news from the States sent his spirits soaring. On January 10, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision in the TWA case. It was a stunning victory for Hughes. Reversing all lower-court findings, the high court dismissed the case he had lost by default when he refused to appear ten years earlier, and threw out the judgment that with interest now totaled $180 million.
Hughes was ecstatic. He decided to celebrate, to break free of his earthbound prison, to relive his past glory—to fly again!
The Mormons were shocked. Hughes had not piloted a plane for a dozen years, had rarely left his bed in the time since, his eyesight was so bad he couldn’t read without a magnifying glass, and of course he didn’t have a valid pilot’s license. No matter. He was going to fly. He sent his aides in search of the proper outfit, a leather flight jacket and a snap-brim Stetson, like the one he had worn back in the 1930s when he had broken all the records. He also started to watch a steady stream of airplane movies—Zeppelin, Helicopter Spies, Doomsday Flight, The Crowded Sky, and Skyjacked.
Months passed while Hughes readied himself for the big event. Finally it was set for Sunday, June 10. The night before he watched Strategic Air Command twice and that morning called in an aide to groom him. It took four hours to cut his hair, trim his beard, clip his long nails, and get him dressed, but shortly before two P.M. he slipped out of the hotel and headed for Hatfield Airport, just north of London.
There a private jet waited. Hughes inspected the Hawker Siddeley 748, settled into the pilot’s seat—and stripped off his clothes. Naked now except for the trademark brown fedora, Hughes gripped the controls and took off.
He spent all that day flying, an experienced English co-pilot who hoped to sell him the plane at his side, and he flew twice more in July, by now quite at home again in the skies.
It was during this time of high adventure that Howard Hughes discovered Watergate. He was looking at a picture of an airplane in the London Express when he noticed a story about the crisis he had unwittingly caused.
“What’s Watergate?” he asked. It was the first time he had seen the word. His Mormons tried to explain, but Hughes didn’t understand and soon lost interest.
A few weeks later, on August 9, Hughes got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, lost his footing, fell to the floor, and fractured his hip.
His flying days were over. He would never get out of bed again.
By the time Hughes discovered Watergate, Nixon’s condition had also taken a sudden turn for the worse. On the morning of March 21, John Dean came into the Oval Office to give the president his bleak diagnosis.
“We have a cancer—within—close to the presidency, that’s growing,” said Dean. The malignancy had spread through the entire White House, and the cover-up was about to blow.
“We’re being blackmailed,” said the shaken young counsel. Already more than $350,000 in hush money had been passed to the burglars, and they were demanding still more.
“It’s going to be a continual blackmail operation by Hunt and Liddy and the Cubans,” warned Dean. “It’ll cost money. It’s dangerous. People around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, things like that.”
Nixon was all business. “How much money do you need?” asked the president.
“I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” replied Dean.
“We could get that,” said Nixon. “You could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten.”
Nixon was determined to handle Watergate the same way Hughes had tried to handle Nixon—with a big bribe. In fact, Nixon planned to use his accumulated payoffs, the money he had taken from Hughes and others, if need be the entire secret slush fund gathered by Rebozo, to buy his way out of Watergate.
As the scandal engulfed him in mid-April, Nixon sat with his last two stalwarts, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, told them they would probably have to resign—and offered them money from Bebe’s little tin box.
“Legal fees will be substantial,” said the president, desperate to buy off his two closest aides. “But there is a way we can get it to you, and uh—two or three hundred thousand dollars.”
“Let’s wait and see if it’s necessary,” replied Ehrlichman.
“No strain,” Nixon quickly assured him. “Doesn’t come outta me. I didn’t, I never intended to use the money at all. As a matter of fact, I told B-B-Bebe, uh, basically, be sure that people like, uh, who, who have contributed money over the contributing years are, uh, favored and so forth in general. And he’s used it for the purpose of getting things out, paid for in check and all that sort of thing.”
Nixon was nervous. He stuttered and stammered, barely able to spit out the name of his personal bagman B-B-Bebe. This was the first time he had revealed to anyone that Rebozo maintained a secret fund for his personal use, cash gathered from “contributors” who were “favored and so forth in general.” Clearly the Hughes $100,000 was just part of a much larger kitty.
“Very substantial” is all the president now told Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and he was still nervously pushing the money on his reluctant henchmen as they walked out the door.
“I want you to, I hope you’ll let me know about the money,” he said in parting. “Understand, there’s no better use for it. Okay?”
Nixon made the offer all over again two weeks later when he called Haldeman and Ehrlichman out to Camp David to tell them the time had come, that they had to resign.
“It’s like cutting off my arms,” wailed Nixon, weeping now, but not at all certain this display of emotion was enough. Ehrlichman, especially, remained bitter and suggested that Nixon himself resign.
“You’ll need money,” said the president, desperately. “I have some—Bebe has it—and you can have it.”
Ehrlichman shook his head. “That would just make things worse,” he said, turning to go, leaving Nixon alone with his money.
Years later Nixon would tell TV interviewer David Frost that the cash he offered Haldeman and Ehrlichman was the $100,000 Rebozo got from Hughes, and it is tempting to believe that Nixon tried to buy his way out of Watergate with the same payoff that led him into it.