“Well, I am,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I am. Either you’re the most sincere guy I ever met or the best con man in the world. Anyway, I’m gonna give them to you. I wouldn’t if Hughes was still alive. If you had come while he was alive, I wouldn’t of even talked to you. I wouldn’t of talked to Colby or Hoover. I wouldn’t of talked to Nixon. Only Hughes.”
We drove for a while in silence and finally pulled into another cheap motel out in the middle of nowhere. As soon as we walked in the door, I saw three padlocked steamer trunks.
The Pro opened them without ceremony. It was the end of his adventure, and the beginning of mine, his escape from the hold that Hughes had kept over him for more than two years, and my heedless rush into that same harrowing embrace.
Two of the trunks were crammed with white typewritten documents, and the third was filled with thousands of yellow legal-pad pages, handwritten memos signed “Howard.” It was Hughes’s “in” box and “out” box for an entire era, virtually everything his henchmen had sent him, virtually everything Hughes himself had ever dared to put down in his own hand, a complete documentary record of his dealings stolen from his fortress and then sealed in a wall, unseen and untouched by any outsider except the Pro, until now.
All that night, all through the next day, and all through the next night I sat up in that motel room reading those documents, at first afraid to stop, not knowing whether I’d ever get to see them again, then unable to stop, completely drawn into the stark power of the story revealed in these strange secret papers.
It was “political dynamite,” all right. But hardly what the FBI or the CIA could have feared or even imagined. The memos were at once a cold-blooded tale of an entire nation’s corruption and an intimate journal of one man’s descent into madness. The great secret that Howard Hughes had kept hidden was not this or that scandal, not this payoff or that shady deal, but something far more sweeping and far more frightening—the true nature of power in America.
1
Mr. Big
Remote control.
There was no need to venture out, not even to stand up. The little silver-gray box had invisible power, and its four oblong buttons controlled everything. At the slightest touch it sent out a special high-frequency signal, silent to the human ear, but capable of activating an immense circuitry that reached almost everywhere.
Howard Hughes gripped the rectangular instrument.
Alone in the darkened bedroom of his Las Vegas penthouse hideaway, lying naked on a double bed, propped up by two pillows, and insulated by a layer of paper towels from the disheveled sheets that had not been changed for several months, Hughes pushed one button. Again. And again.
The television channels flipped by in rapid succession.
Hughes checked out the full gamut of stations on the color TV that flickered at his feet. Then, satisfied, he set aside his Zenith Space Commander.
It was just after two A.M. on Thursday, June 6, 1968. ABC was dark. NBC had also signed off for the night. Only channel 8, the local CBS affiliate that Hughes himself owned, was still on the air to broadcast the grim news.
Robert F. Kennedy was dead.
Hughes had been awake for two nights, gripped by the video spectacle. He had watched Kennedy claim victory in the California presidential primary, smiling, joking, earnest, vibrantly alive. He had heard the shots just minutes later, muffled at first by the noise of the still cheering crowd, then distinct and unmistakable. He had seen Bobby lie bleeding on the cold cement floor.
It was a shared national experience. The shock and horror—the agonized moans of disbelief, the panic, the hysteria, the tears—spread in waves through the throng of stunned campaign workers and was instantly transmitted to millions across the country. Everywhere people watched television and waited, listening to hospital bulletins, reliving the immediate tragedy in endless replays that also revived painful memories of Dallas.
Through it all, for almost twenty-six hours, Hughes had kept his TV vigil, and now he watched a red-eyed Frank Mankiewicz walk slump-shouldered into the floodlit hospital lobby to confirm everybody’s worst fears. Biting his lip to hold back the tears, the press secretary bowed his head for a moment, then read a brief statement: “Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 A.M. today. He was forty-two years old.”
Mankiewicz spoke softly, but the fateful announcement blared from Hughes’s television, its volume turned to the highest level to accommodate the partially deaf billionaire. News of the tragedy continued to reverberate in his room.
But Hughes was no longer listening. He reached over to a bedside night table, grabbed a long yellow legal pad, and, propping it up on his knees, scrawled a fevered memo to his chief of staff, Robert Maheu.
“I hate to be quick on the draw,” wrote Hughes, “but I see here an opportunity that may not happen again in a lifetime. I dont aspire to be President, but I do want political strength….
“I have wanted this for a long time, but somehow it has always evaded me. I mean the kind of an organization so that we would never have to worry about a jerky little thing like this anti-trust problem—not in 100 years.
“And I mean the kind of a set up that, if we wanted to, could put Gov. Laxalt in the White House in 1972 or 76.[2]
“Anyway, it seems to me that the very people we need have just fallen smack into our hands. Also, if we approach them quickly and skillfully, they should be as anxious to find a haven with us as we are to obtain them….
“So, in consideration of my own nervous system, will you please move like lightning on this deal—first, to report to me whom you think we want, of Kennedy’s people, and second to contact such people with absolutely no delay the minute I confirm your recommendation. I repeat, the absolutely imperative nature of this mission requires the very ultimate in skill. If it is not so handled, and if this project should leak out, I am sure that I will be absolutely crucified by the press….
“However, I have confidence that you can handle this deal, and I think the potential, in manpower and in a political machine all built and operating, I think these potentials are just inestimable, and worth the risk—provided you move fast. Please let me hear at once.”
Hughes lifted his ball-point pen, read the memo over carefully, and signed it “Howard.” He slipped the two-page message into a large manila envelope, then snapped one long fingernail smartly against a brown paper bag hanging at his bedside as a depository for used Kleenex. It made a sharp noise, summoning from an adjoining room one of the five male attendants who served him in rotating shifts around the clock. The Mormon aide licked the flap, sealed the envelope, and carried it to an armed security guard stationed just outside, separated from the Hughes suite by a locked door that had been specially installed in the hotel hallway. The guard, in turn, took an elevator nine flights down, walked a few yards, and delivered Hughes’s memo to Robert Maheu at his home next door to the hotel.
Maheu, an outwardly genial former FBI agent whose soft round features masked a toughness only hinted at by his cold black eyes, apparently failed to fully grasp the nature of his new mission. In a follow-up message later that morning, Hughes impatiently explained his orders while a presidential jet flew Kennedy’s body back to New York to lie in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where 150,000 people waited in a line stretching more than a mile for a glimpse of the coffin.
“Bob,” wrote Hughes, “I thought you would understand. I want us to hire Bob Kennedy’s entire organization—with certain exceptions, of course, I am not sure we want Salinger and a few others. However, here is an entire integrated group, used to getting things done over all obstacles. They are used to having the Kennedy money behind them and we can equal that. This group was trained by John Kennedy and his backers, and then moved over to R.F.K. when John died.
2
Paul Laxalt, then the obscure but very cooperative governor of Nevada, now a U.S. Senator who was Ronald Reagan’s campaign chairman and is perhaps the president’s closest friend.