“It is a natural for us. I am not looking for political favors from them. I expect you to pick our candidate and soon. I repeat, I dont want an alliance with the Kennedy group, I want to put them on the payroll.”
Maheu understood. And he delivered. Not the entire Kennedy team, but its leader, Bobby’s campaign manager, Larry O’Brien. Before the month was out, Maheu had made contact. A few days later, O’Brien—a central figure in American politics, a White House insider who had already directed two successful presidential campaigns and was about to take command of the Democratic party—was in Las Vegas talking terms. Soon he was “on the payroll.”
Moving with the cold audacity of a grave robber, Hughes had switched O’Brien from Camelot to his own dark kingdom almost as effortlessly as he switched television channels. And he had done it without ever leaving his room. By remote control.
To a nation of mourners focused on the public passion play, this hidden backstage drama would have seemed a blasphemy, its language alone an outrage. There was no hint of sorrow, no sign of any emotion, only a terrible urgency to close the “deal.” For two days Hughes had watched a tragedy and seen only an “opportunity.”
He had also seen what the mourners missed. Power in America was not an Arthurian romance of martyred princes and loyal knights honor-bound to an ideal, but a marketplace where influence and allegiances were bought and sold.
There was nothing unusual about the O’Brien transaction, except for its macabre backdrop. Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson—virtually every major political figure of the era, including even Bobby Kennedy himself—also had a Hughes connection, as did scores of lesser national leaders and local potentates. Hughes had appraised them all with the cool detachment of an investment analyst. “I have done this kind of business with him before,” he had said of Johnson. “So, he wears no awe-inspiring robe of virtue with me.” Humphrey was “a candidate who needs us and wants our help,” and thus “somebody we control sufficiently.” Bobby Kennedy, on the other hand, “would get too much support from others,” but might win, “so lets cover our bets.” Only Nixon (“my man”) got the ultimate accolade: “he I know for sure knows the facts of life.”
Camelot was a trifle. Howard Hughes had long ago set out to buy the government of the United States.
“Try to determine who is the real, honest-to-God, bagman at the White House,” he once ordered his henchman Robert Maheu. “And please dont be frightened away by the enormity of the thought. Now, I dont know whom you have to approach, but there is somebody, take my word for it.”
Hughes spoke the language of power stripped of all pretense. What set him apart, finally, more than his money, more than his megalomania, more even than his mystery, was his blunt buy-the-bastards approach. It was not that Hughes cynically bought politicians—others also went to market—but that he innocently demanded a bill of sale. All who did business with him knew that they had made not merely a deal, but had entered into a virtual Faustian pact.
“I am determined to elect a President of our choosing this year, and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness,” the billionaire had declared earlier in 1968, preparing for an orderly transition of power. “Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life.”
He ordered repeated payoffs to presidents, presidential candidates, senators, congressmen, and governors, caring nothing about party labels or political ideologies, not at all caught up in personal charisma or campaign rhetoric, guided only by his own golden rule: “find the right place, and the right people, and buy what we want.”
When his agents approached the government on a businesslike basis, the payoffs often succeeded. But Hughes was driven by his fears and phobias to seek what even his money could not buy and no matter how much power he acquired, he was never satisfied.
“I have given a full lifespan of service to this country, and taken very little for my personal pleasure or glorification,” complained the unappreciated patriot. “If I dont rate better than this shoddy treatment, it is pretty sad.”
Citizen Hughes. He bought politicians but never voted. He railed bitterly against taxes but paid none at all for seventeen consecutive years. His empire produced strategic weapons of the nuclear age, but he fought atomic testing in his own backyard.
Citizen Hughes. He tried to buy the government of the United States but instead helped bring it down.
Neither Hughes nor anyone else could have known it at the time, but the long slide toward Watergate started with the memo he wrote the night that Bobby Kennedy died.
That memo brought Larry O’Brien into the Hughes orbit, and their relationship came to obsess Richard Nixon, who feared that the hated Kennedy gang would discover his own hidden dealings with the billionaire. For years it has been rumored that the Hughes-Nixon-O’Brien triangle triggered Watergate. New information disclosed in this book now makes it clear that Nixon inspired the break-in in a desperate effort to cover up his Hughes connection.
Hughes had so carefully hedged his bets, had channeled so much secret cash to so many rival powers, that such a collision was inevitable.
If others more sophisticated, less paranoid, managed to acquire more actual power, still it was Hughes who became the very symbol of hidden power, it was Hughes who brought down a president, and it was Hughes who forced the eternal question: Is there a Mr. Big?
He was only trying to protect himself.
There were dangers everywhere, and he was so vulnerable. The world was dealing with a façade. The real Howard Hughes lay hidden in a self-made prison, a naked old man in terrible pain and terminal terror, living like an inmate in the back ward of a mental institution, looking like a corpse laid out on a slab in the city morgue.
He was a figure of gothic horror, something ready for or just risen from the grave. Emaciated, practically skeletal with only 120 pounds stretched out over his six-foot-four-inch frame, and hardly a speck of color about him anywhere, not even in his lips, he seemed not merely dead but already in decay. Only the long gray hair that trailed halfway down his back, the thin, scraggly beard that reached midway onto his sunken chest, and the hideously long nails that extended several inches in grotesque yellowed corkscrews from his fingers and toes seemed still to be growing, still showing signs of life. That, and his eyes. Sometimes they looked dead, blank. But other times they gleamed from their deep-sunk sockets with surprising, almost frightening intensity, fixed in a hard, searching, penetrating stare. Often, however, they seemed to stare in, not out.
Hughes was in pain. Physical pain. Mental pain. Deep, unrelenting pain. Many of his teeth were rotting black stumps, some just dangling loose from his puffy, whitened, pus-filled gums. A tumor was beginning to emerge from the side of his head, a reddened lump protruding through sparse strands of gray hair. He had bedsores festering all down his back, some so severe that eventually one shoulder blade—the bare bone—would poke through his parchmentlike skin. And then there were the needle marks. The telltale tracks ran the full length of both his thin arms, scarred his thighs, and clustered horribly around his groin.
Howard Hughes was an addict. A billionaire junkie. He was shooting up massive amounts of codeine, routinely “skin-popping” more than twenty grains daily, sometimes three or four times that much, regularly taking doses thought lethal. He had been hooked for two decades, ever since a 1946 plane crash, when his doctor prescribed morphine to ease the pain of what everyone thought would be his final hours. As he instead recovered, the doctors substituted codeine, and through the years Hughes demanded ever-larger doses, finally setting up a byzantine illegal supply operation, getting prescriptions filled under assumed names at various Los Angeles drugstores.