Several top White House aides noted Nixon’s sensitivity toward Hughes. “He was feared in the Nixon White House, where some believed that the ‘Hughes loan’ scandal had cost Nixon the 1960 election to Kennedy.” wrote John Dean in Blind Ambition (Simon & Schuster, 1976, p. 67). “On matters pertaining to Hughes, Nixon sometimes seemed to lose touch with reality,” wrote Haldeman in The Ends of Power (Times Books, 1978, pp. 19–20). “His indirect association with this mystery man may have caused him, in his view, to lose two elections.”
Nixon first tried to get the CIA to put a “full cover” on Donald and when the CIA refused turned instead to the Secret Service, according to the final report of the House Impeachment Committee. Ehrlichman confirmed in an interview that the president had him arrange the Secret Service surveillance in May 1969, and that Nixon also ordered Donald’s home and office telephones tapped, primarily to keep track of his brother’s dealings with Meier. “Don’s involvement with Hughes had already caused so much pain in the past, and Nixon was not anxious for another Hughes connection to emerge,” said Ehrlichman. “The president was very upset that his ‘stupid brother’ was involved again in this kind of thing, he was angry.”
When Donald was caught at the airport meeting with Meier and Hatsis in July 1969, Ehrlichman immediately called Rebozo, who immediately called Danner. “Do you know where John Meier is?” demanded an angry Rebozo. “I think you’ll find that he is at the Orange County airport with Don Nixon.” Ehrlichman pulled Hatsis’s FBI file, which he said in an interview showed Hatsis to be an “‘unsavory character’ with organized-crime connections.”
Kreigsman’s inquiry about Hughes to the AEC is confirmed by AEC documents dated July 25 and August 2, 1969, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The AEC’s report on Hughes to the White House is dated August 18, 1969, and was personally reviewed by Chairman Seaborg. Seaborg recalled in an interview that top White House aides contacted him on several occasions to say that Hughes had expressed concern about the bomb tests.
Hoover’s report on Hughes was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Its description of Hughes was based on a January 7, 1952, report to the FBI by a disgruntled Hughes executive who had also accused the billionaire of income-tax evasion. Hoover had been keeping tabs on Hughes since the 1947 “Spruce Goose” Senate hearings, receiving regular reports from his agents that focused primarily on Hughes’s escapades with various starlets. FBI files also reveal that Hughes contacted Hoover directly through his chief Mormon, Bill Gay, on August 20, 1955, to discuss “a very delicate matter,” and according to FBI sources shortly thereafter Hughes tried to hire Hoover as his Washington lobbyist. Dean Elson, FBI bureau chief in Las Vegas who later went to work for Hughes, said in an interview that Hoover told him that Hughes came to see the director while Hoover was on vacation in La Jolla, California, and told Hoover he could “name his own price, write his own ticket.” Hoover told Elson he turned the job down because he considered Hughes “erratic.” FBI files show that before he met with Hughes, Hoover received from his top aide the same report on Hughes he later sent Nixon.
The nuclear test announced on September 10, 1969, and detonated September 16 was code-named “JORUM” and according to AEC reports was “under a megaton.”
Maheu’s reports to Hughes, pilot logs of the Hughes jet, and Danner’s travel records show that Danner and Maheu saw Rebozo in Key Biscayne on September 11 and 12, 1969. The Senate Watergate Committee in its final report called this “the most probable delivery date for the first contribution.”
Danner in his first account of the hundred-thousand-dollar payoff told the IRS that it had taken place in Rebozo’s home at Key Biscayne in September 1969 and that Maheu was present: “We took the de Havilland, flew to Miami, went to Key Biscayne, met Rebozo at his house. Maheu handed him the package and says, ‘Here’s $50,000, first installment.’ Rebozo thanked him.” Maheu also testified that he was present in Key Biscayne when $50,000 was delivered to Rebozo in 1969, but said that Danner handed over the money. Rebozo himself first told the IRS that the initial $50,000 was received from Danner in Key Biscayne in 1969.
Later, all three men gave contradictory accounts. Rebozo, in an effort to explain why some of the hundred-dollar bills he eventually returned to Hughes were issued by the U.S. Treasury after the date he originally said they were delivered, claimed he received all the money late in 1970. Under pressure from Rebozo, Danner changed his account and said he did not recall if the first delivery was in 1969 or 1970, but also testified that it was Rebozo’s insistence that led him to change his mind. The only other reason Danner gave for retracting his original testimony was his recollection that the September 1969 trip related to Hughes’s concern over the dumping of nerve gas. This is clearly wrong, as the nerve-gas dumping actually took place in August 1970.
All details of the delivery of the first $50,000 to Rebozo are based on Danner’s testimony to the IRS and the Senate Watergate Committee, and Maheu’s court testimony and statements in interviews with the Senate staff.
Nixon’s activities and state of mind in September 1969 were established by his own account in his memoirs, and further detailed by Kissinger in The White House Years (Little, Brown & Co., 1979) and interviews with White House and NSC aides. As noted, Kissinger refused repeated interview requests.
Interviews with top White House officials, including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson, establish that while Nixon was well aware of Hughes’s opposition to the bomb tests, the president never indicated that he had any idea of the true extent of Hughes’s terror and outrage. Also, Nixon may well have been falsely reassured by the report on Hughes he received from the AEC just weeks earlier, claiming that “Hughes will not object as long as detonations do not exceed a megaton.”
The account of the September 1969 blast is drawn from press reports, AEC records, and after-action reports to Hughes from his aides.
Danner’s meetings with Attorney General Mitchell on the Dunes deal are established by his Senate Watergate Committee testimony, Justice records obtained through Senate staff investigators, and Maheu’s contemporaneous reports to Hughes. In addition, FBI Director Hoover let Nixon and Mitchell know that he knew about the Dunes deal in a March 23, 1970, report sent to Justice: “Information was received by the Las Vegas office of this Bureau that on March 19, 1970, a representative of Howard Hughes… stated that Hughes had received assurance from the Department of Justice that no objection would be interposed to Hughes’s purchasing the Dunes Hotel.”
Maheu described Hughes’s orders to give Nixon a million-dollar bribe to halt the March 1970 bomb test in statements to the Senate Watergate Committee, which he confirmed in an interview and detailed in a sworn deposition in his 1973 slander suit against Hughes.
Danner’s travel records submitted to the Senate Watergate Committee show that he and Maheu were in Key Biscayne on March 20–22, 1970, and in Senate testimony both Danner and Maheu confirmed meeting with Rebozo on those dates.
13 Exodus
Hughes’s fifteen-month effort to escape Las Vegas was described by several of his aides in depositions, further detailed by two of the aides in interviews, and also established by the memos Hughes sent and received during the period.
“It took about a year and a quarter to get going on our trip to Nassau,” testified one of the Mormons, John Holmes. “There was some business to attend to. We had a big dust storm in Las Vegas, or it was raining cats and dogs in Nassau. One thing led to another. Also, we required twenty-four-hour advance notice, and he didn’t want to commit himself.”