None of the senators wanted to publish that. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats. Obviously there was no way to expose Nixon without at the same time exposing O’Brien. But it was more than that. Hughes money exploded in too many directions. Several senators, including at least one on the Watergate committee, Joseph Montoya, had also received contributions from Hughes, and in his lawsuit Maheu had named other prominent political leaders, including Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey. As the committee’s maverick Republican Lowell Weicker put it, “Everybody was feeding at the same trough.”
But beyond that, none of the senators could believe that $100,000 explained Watergate. It just didn’t seem like enough.
Some thought there must be more, that the real payoff, the big bribe that would explain the big risk of the big break-in had not yet been uncovered. Even some in Nixon’s own gang were certain there must be more. “Who knows that that’s the only $100,000?” said Chuck Colson, shortly before he went to prison.
Surely $100,000 could not have brought the president to the brink. But it had. It was not the amount of money. It wasn’t even that it was dirty money. It was the very fact that it was Hughes money, the kind of money Nixon had been caught with before, the kind of money that had once cost him the White House. In a desperate effort to keep it from happening again, he had made it happen again.
Haldeman understood. “To take a risk such as that burglary was absurd,” he later wrote. “But on matters pertaining to Hughes, Nixon sometimes seemed to lose touch with reality. His indirect association with this mystery man may have caused him, in his view, to lose two elections.”
Hughes and Nixon had brought on the cataclysm trying to protect themselves—from each other. Hughes gave Nixon the $100,000 in a desperate effort to stop the bombing, and Nixon brought himself down in a desperate effort to hide the payoff.
Secret money, so central to Watergate, still obsessed Nixon as the end drew near. In one of a series of final phone calls to Haldeman on August 7, the president told his former chief of staff that there was one more unexploded bombshell in the tapes: the secret Rebozo slush fund. At the end, with all his crimes exposed and his soul laid bare, that was still the revelation he most feared.
At nine P.M. the next day, Thursday, August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon announced his resignation as president of the United States.
Hughes and the government fell together.
As Nixon exited the White House for the last time, Hughes described his own terminal condition in a note scrawled on his bedside legal pad.
“I did not leave the stretcher and prone position from time of surgery until arrival in Freeport,” he wrote, recalling the operation on his fractured hip a year earlier. “I was put in a bed, and I have not left that bed up until and including this moment, not even to attempt to go to the bathroom.”
Yet now, more than ever, even as he went into his final decline, Hughes was seen as the real Mr. Big, the secret center of Watergate, the secret patron of presidents, and the secret partner of the CIA.
Alone in his darkened room atop the Xanadu Princess Hotel, his sixth foreign hideout in four years of exile, the presumed evil genius remained puzzled by events back in the States.
For a moment he thought he had found the key to Watergate. It seemed to be in one White House tape on which the president was heard to say: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up, or anything else if it’ll save it—save the plan.”
“What’s the plan?” asked Hughes. If there was one, he wanted to know about it.
His public relations man in Los Angeles, whose job had long been to refuse all comment, and whose tasks now included keeping Hughes informed on Watergate, sent the answer:
“‘The Plan’ apparently refers to an agreement reached by the White House advisors, and accepted by Nixon, that the best method for dealing with the Watergate Committee would be for White House witnesses to refuse to answer questions. The over-all term for this plan was to ‘Stonewall it.’”
How disappointing. Hughes had been stonewalling it all his life, and where had it gotten him?
He turned his attention to more immediate concerns, demanding a secret survey of breakfast cereals. “Please have them research the serial field—either in Freeport, Miami or L.A. before I consume any more of that turd-like meat,” he scribbled to his Mormons. “But plse exercise all caution toward security.”
He was equally security-conscious when he closed a deal to buy his Bahamas hoteclass="underline" “Please send a personal note from me to Mr. Ludwig (just orral—not written—through Mr. Ludwig’s chief representative—but with no other man present—) as follows:
“‘It has been a pleasure to do business with you.’”
While Hughes carefully guarded such sensitive messages in Freeport, his biggest secret of all escaped back in Los Angeles, a belated fallout of the heist at his unguarded Romaine Street headquarters. On February 7, 1975, the Los Angeles Times broke the Glomar story.
While some now began to wonder whether Hughes was a front for the CIA or the CIA was a front for Hughes, whether it was all in fact one dark empire, the naked emperor himself never even heard that the Glomar secret was out.
Still, on March 18, when the story broke wide open, banner headlines across the country proclaimed Hughes the CIA’s partner in a fantastic three-hundred-fifty million dollar plot to steal a Russian submarine.
And then, at the height of the CIA scandals a few months later, Senate investigators revealed that Robert Maheu had orchestrated a CIA-Mafia conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Many were now certain that Hughes was involved in a cabal of sinister dimensions, a secret axis that lay behind all dark events from Dallas to Watergate. The Senate Intelligence Committee began to explore his links to Nixon, the Mob, and the CIA. The only real question seemed to be whether Hughes was master or pawn. “Indeed, was there even a live man named Hughes at the center of it all,” asked Norman Mailer, “or was there a Special Committee?”
The IRS had similar concerns. Even as Hughes himself repeatedly asked his aides if it was safe to return to the United States, if the IRS was still after him, an agent involved in the big Hughes probe suggested that he was long dead.
“It is my belief,” he reported to headquarters, “that Howard Hughes died in Las Vegas in 1970 and that key officials running his empire concealed this fact in order to prevent a catastrophic dissolution of his holdings.”
IRS Commissioner Walters personally tried to determine if Hughes was alive, with no definitive results.
In fact, Hughes was just barely alive, and not master of anything, not even his own empire. His money was disappearing at an alarming rate. Under the new command, corporate losses soared above $100 million in five years, and over the previous decade half a billion in cash and securities had vanished from his bank accounts, apparently the result of mismanagement and waste rather than any conspiracy.
Hughes was oblivious to the loss. He could not even control the name of his empire. Back in 1972 it had been changed without his knowledge to Summa, after he was forced to sell off the foundation of his fortune, the business his father had bequeathed to him, the Hughes Tool Company. Pressured by his lawyers and executives, he reluctantly sold his birthright for $150 million to satisfy the TWA judgment, then watched the stock triple while the TWA case was dismissed.
And now, two years later, he discovered his empire had a new name. “Do you see any reason why we cannot change the name Summa to HRH Properties at the end of this year?” he asked. “Can we change the name Summa now?” he inquired again, and on another occasion instructed, “Don’t spend any more money on the name Summa.” But the name was never changed.