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.