But, in fact, even as the president was trying to bribe his two closest aides, Bebe Rebozo was frantically trying to return that hot hundred grand to Howard Hughes.
There was only one problem. The money was gone.
At eight A.M. the next day, Monday, April 30—as Nixon prepared to announce the purge of his top White House staff in a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office—Rebozo met furtively in a room down the hall with the president’s personal lawyer, Herb Kalmbach.
Rebozo was tense. He swore Kalmbach to secrecy, said he was there at the request of the “big man,” and then revealed his big problem. It was the Hughes money.
The IRS, Rebozo said, had finally asked to see him about the unreported $100,000 “campaign contribution,” the tax interview was just ten days away, and Rebozo told Kalmbach that he no longer had all the money. It had already been spent. And not for any campaign.
Rebozo said he had given some of the secret Hughes cash to Nixon’s two brothers, Edward and Donald, to the president’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and to unnamed “others.”
He asked Kalmbach what to do. Kalmbach was not merely the president’s lawyer but also his backstage fund-raiser, the chief source of hush money for the Watergate burglars, and he realized that Rebozo was hoping he would volunteer to find fresh cash to replace the missing Hughes money. He figured it was probably all gone. And he had a pretty good idea which unnamed “others” it had gone to. But Kalmbach had had it. He was through playing bagman for the “big man.”
He told Rebozo to hire a good tax lawyer, return what was left of the $100,000 to Hughes, and come clean with the IRS.
Rebozo was shocked. “This touches the president and the president’s family,” he exclaimed. “I just can’t do anything to add to his problems at this time, Herb.”
On May 10, Rebozo met with the IRS. He did not come clean. He said he had kept the Hughes money intact and untouched in his safe-deposit box for three years and now planned to return it all. The bitter power struggle in the Hughes empire had made him nervous about putting it into Nixon’s campaign. The president was not even aware of the contribution, not until Rebozo mentioned it to him a few weeks earlier. Nixon immediately said, “You ought to give it back.” That was the whole story.
The IRS agents did not probe. They were not eager to interrogate the president’s best friend. Indeed, although Danner had confirmed the $100,000 transaction a full year earlier, agents handling the Hughes case were refused permission to interview Rebozo until now. And before they had come to see him, Nixon’s man in the IRS commissioner’s office called the White House to ask if it was okay. “We’re scared to death,” he told Ehrlichman. “He’s so close to the president.”
As soon as the agents left, Rebozo started calling Richard Danner. He told his old pal to come to Washington immediately, but he didn’t tell him why. Danner flew in on May 18. Only when they met over breakfast in Danner’s room at the Madison Hotel did Rebozo reveal that he wanted to give back the Hughes money. He said he had the very same hundred-dollar bills Danner had delivered three years earlier. Rebozo stressed that repeatedly. The money was still in the original Las Vegas bank wrappers. It had never been touched. Not once. Not a penny.
Danner refused to take it. For two and a half hours they argued, but Danner wanted no part of it. The cash that Rebozo first feared was too hot to take, and now feared was too hot to keep, Danner feared was too hot to take back.
“It’s your money,” the Cuban shouted at him angrily.
“It’s not my money,” said Danner. “It’s your money. And if I were in your place, I’d go see a lawyer.”
Rebozo instead took Danner to see Nixon’s other millionaire crony, Bob Abplanalp. “Do you like fresh trout?” asked the aerosol king. “I know just the place.” They drove out to the airport, hopped on Abplanalp’s private jet, and flew up to his lodge in the Catskills. Just for lunch. It was an impressive display of the rewards of good fellowship. But Danner remained unwilling to take back the Hughes money.
Rebozo was desperate to unload that cursed cash. He told Danner to stay in Washington over the weekend. The president wanted to see him. The three men met at Camp David on Sunday, May 20. It had been a bad week for Nixon. On May 17 the Senate Watergate Committee began its televised hearings. On May 18 Archibald Cox was named special prosecutor. And now Nixon was holed up alone at his rustic retreat preparing a “definitive statement” on Watergate, to be released Tuesday. But he took time off to see Danner.
The president exchanged a few pleasantries, then launched into a lengthy and passionate defense of himself. “I’m not guilty of anything,” declared Nixon. He said he would weather the storm. He would not resign. The three old friends spoke for more than two hours, but all would later claim that no one mentioned the $100,000 Nixon had personally asked Danner to get from Hughes. Not in the hour they sat in the cabin. Not in the hour they walked together through Camp David in the light misting rain.
But Danner knew why he had been summoned to the mountaintop, and both before and after he met with the president, Rebozo pressed him again to take back the money. Danner refused.
A few days after the failed summit meeting, Rebozo told Nixon’s new chief of staff Alexander Haig about the Hughes problem. Haig called Deputy Treasury Secretary William Simon and asked for a status report on the IRS case. Simon informed him that Rebozo was going to be audited.
Rebozo hired a good tax lawyer. On June 18, following his lawyer’s advice, Bebe called the FBI’s chief agent in Miami, an old friend, and asked him to come over to his Key Biscayne bank. They entered the vault, and there in the presence of the agent and his lawyer, Rebozo opened safe-deposit box number 224. He slipped out two large manila envelopes and emptied bundles of hundred-dollar bills onto the table. It was the Hughes money, said Rebozo, and they counted it out.
There were no longer twenty bundles in bank wrappers, but ten bundles in rubber bands. Still, it was the same money he received, Rebozo insisted. He had simply removed the Las Vegas wrappers because of “the stigma applied to anything from Las Vegas.”
And it was all there, every penny, in fact it had multiplied. The count came to $100,100. Rebozo could not explain the extra hundred-dollar bill.
The next day he brought it all to his lawyer’s office, and prevailed on Danner to meet him there. Danner never showed. Finally, however, Danner put Rebozo in touch with Chester Davis, and the bluff Hughes attorney readily agreed to take back the money. “Be glad to accept it,” said Davis without ceremony.
Rebozo immediately unloaded the loot on Abplanalp’s corporate secretary, who handed it over to a Davis associate in New York on Wednesday, June 27, 1973.
Richard Nixon was finally rid of the Hughes cash, but he had not escaped the Hughes curse.
Out in Los Angeles one week later, on the Fourth of July, Robert Maheu blew the lid off the payoff.
Alone in a room with four lawyers, he celebrated the holiday by giving his deposition for a seventeen-million-dollar slander suit he had filed against Hughes, a suit triggered by his former boss’s outburst at the Clifford Irving press conference, the angry accusation that Maheu “stole me blind.”
It was the final act of their bitter divorce, and Maheu now openly revealed their most intimate dirty secrets.
“I have religiously protected Howard Hughes relative to political contributions,” said Maheu, posing as the still faithful spouse. “I think I should warn you,” he told the Hughes lawyers, “that if you want to push into the political world of Howard Hughes, I will put the consequences squarely on your shoulders.”