It would have been an interesting meeting, indeed. Because Lyndon Johnson, almost as obsessed with television as Hughes himself, with a three-set console in both his office and his bedroom, had come to decide that the TV networks were Communist-controlled. And he had been monitoring the Hughes-ABC deal closely, although avoiding any direct involvement due to his own controversial broadcast interests.
But Hughes, who had had dealings with the president before, never did learn the direction of the wind on the White House lawn. Maheu discouraged the plan. “We must remember,” he argued, “that whatever the Pres. recommends—then we are bound forever. He is not, though, because his advice must be ‘off the record.’ He’ll have an implied obligation but we must remember that he has had a lot of experience in the technique of ‘sliding’ away from implied obligations.”
Hughes was not immediately convinced. What was there to lose?
“If we are going to cancel out tomorrow, I urge we put it right in Johnson’s lap and offer him the opportunity to determine what we do. If we could get a real green light signal from Johnson, I simply dont think the FCC would hold us up in defiance of his wishes, and I doubt very much that Goldenson would pursue the issue in court if it became evident that we had the approval of the Whitehouse.”
Still, Hughes’s remote-control unit balked. Late Sunday evening, Maheu replied with the pessimism of a man who dealt with life’s daily realities: “I know that you don’t like to hear anything you don’t want to hear. As you know, I was selling positive thinking before Peale ever thought of writing a book. But even affirmative thinking must have some foundation in the realm of realism. If you are prepared to tell me that, at a given point, you will make an appearance, I’ll guarantee you that we’ll deliver ABC to you on a silver platter.”
Of course, that was the one thing Hughes could not bring himself to do.
As the three P.M. Monday deadline came near, it hardly seemed to matter. By midday less than 150,000 of the two million shares of ABC stock Hughes was seeking had been tendered.
The network’s final court appeal, heard earlier that day, seemed beside the point. Then, at one P.M., a three-judge panel once more backed Hughes in his bid to buy ABC. And in the next two hours almost a million and a half shares flooded in to the billionaire’s brokers.
When all the paper had been counted, Howard Hughes had 1.6 million shares, more than a third of all the outstanding stock in ABC. It was easily enough to control the network, and it would now be no problem to get more. A naked hermit, eager to mold mass opinion and manipulate national policy, had just been offered the most powerful position in broadcast history.
What made it all the more incredible was that Maheu, on Hughes’s instructions, had been busily working behind the scenes to make sure that the two million shares Hughes was legally bound to buy would not be tendered. To the last, Hughes wanted to preserve his option to drop the deal.
Indeed, Maheu had gone so far in his efforts as to risk imprisonment. “Hell, Howard,” he later boasted, “if some of the things which I did in order to extricate us from the ABC matter ever surfaced, I would be spending the rest of my life in jail.”
But now Hughes was not at all certain he wanted to bail out. Everything was going his way. The stock had been tendered, the courts had backed him, and the FCC also seemed ready to approve his takeover. None of the commissioners even guessed at his true condition, or his true motives. All were ready to okay the acquisition. There was only one catch: Hughes would have to appear in person to claim the license.
It was the one thing he would not, could not do. Informed Monday night that the FCC would definitely demand his appearance, Hughes immediately capitulated. Ready to pay $200 million, he would not emerge from his blacked-out bedroom.
“I am just not up to that,” he explained.
Shortly after noon on July 16, 1968, a formal statement was issued. Hughes rejected the stock. And his bid to take over ABC—to have a network of his own—seemed to disappear as suddenly and mysteriously as it had been announced.
Hughes, however, had not abandoned his plans to control television. If he could not get one of the three existing networks without giving up his privacy, then he would create a new fourth network—a Hughes Network—and “chase ABC right out of business.”
“My desire for a voice—for media—has not changed in the least,” he emphasized from his ninth-floor retreat. “It seems to me that thru the alternatives of building a compact, wholly owned 4th Network, or a vast united complex of CATV systems, I might achieve the channel to the public at a lower price and with less bruises along the road.”
The idea was not new. It had been in the back of his mind for years and had even come up several times while the ABC deal was still in progress. In one moment of despair, he had considered settling for a state-wide network in Nevada.
“I am absolutely sure my plans to acquire ABC will not bear fruit, so I am more anxious than ever to build the strongest network here in Nevada that anybody ever conceived. I will be very content with a really strong network in Nevada. I will be very unhappy if this blows up in addition to ABC.”
But having come so close to a national outlet, Hughes could not now be content with a local system.
So he schemed to take over a major independent, like Storer or Metromedia, to string together every available cable TV station in the country, and to use the money that might have gone to ABC stockholders to make his new system a national contender.
Not long after walking away from ABC, Hughes actually did acquire a sports network, which he planned to augment with communications satellites his own company manufactured.
But soon he was finding the Hughes Sports Network as unsatisfactory as KLAS: “The broadcast looks like color television when it was first introduced twelve years ago. When something carries my name, as this network does, I dont propose to stand by and see these results.”
And neither HSN nor any fledgling network offered the immediate power he craved: “Let’s be realistic and admit that no such alternate could possibly be built up to the point of effectiveness in time to carry any weight in the forthcoming political contests—either primary or final.”
The 1968 elections came and went, and still Hughes had no national “voice,” no “channel to the public,” certainly no “balance of power.”
Maheu’s report that the new president was interested in his plans—“Nixon, through his friend [Rebozo], has suggested the creation of a 4th Network as a means of elevating the standard of all TV broadcasting”—briefly buoyed the billionaire’s spirits.
In the end, however, Hughes decided that a fourth network was not the answer.
“I dont say a fourth network cannot be built up,” he explained. “I just say it wont happen without the back breaking, heart breaking kind of effort that went into the creation of the other networks. Even with the best of luck, it will take years for any fourth network to advance to the point where it could equal ABC.”
Now, after nine months of toying with alternatives, Hughes was ready to return to his first love.
“I have finally decided to go on ABC,” Hughes exulted in late March of 1969. It was, of course, a secret enthusiasm. “Now, if this is permitted to leak out, even a tiny bit, it will bounce the market up and I will have to cancel out. So I beg you to be careful whom we trust.”
Secret or not, Hughes could hardly contain himself. It was technological ecstasy. With a passion he could feel for nothing human, Hughes now coveted the network he had so recently rejected.
“Bob,” he wrote, “what appeals to me about ABC is its tremendous mechanical machine. There is an ABC outlet in almost every city in the US that has a CBS or NBC station.