A nice touch. Now for a strong finish.
“If the A.E.C. technicians did not consider the nuclear explosions at the Las Vegas Test site to be of marginal safety, then why did they make a firm agreement with me, 11 months ago, to move the large explosions… to some more remote place?” Hughes demanded, reminding Johnson of the nonexistent broken treaty, assuming the stance of an outraged sovereign.
“I think Nevada has become a fully accredited state now and should no longer be treated like a barren wasteland that is only useful as a dumping place for poisonous, contaminated nuclear waste material, such as normally is carefully sealed up and dumped in the deepest part of the ocean.
“The A.E.C. technicians assure that there will be no harmful consequences, but I wonder where those technicians will be 10 or 20 years from now.
“There are some sheep lying dead in nearby Utah.”
Ah, the martyred flock. It was the perfect clincher.
The four-page letter had taken Hughes all night and half the day to write and rewrite, and now, with the dreaded blast less than twenty-four hours away, there was no time to send it to the White House.
Instead, one of the Mormons dictated it over the telephone to Washington attorney Thomas Finney—law partner of Johnson’s newly appointed Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford—who hand-delivered Hughes’s impassioned plea to the president’s office.
Lyndon Johnson had problems of his own. Less than a month earlier he had been forced to abdicate, solemnly telling a startled nation: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
The withdrawal had brought him no real peace. It was not merely that Eugene McCarthy continued to sweep the primaries, or even that the hated Bobby Kennedy had announced his long-dreaded decision to claim his brother’s throne. Everything, at home and abroad, seemed to be in disarray. The war in Vietnam had been shattered by the Tet offensive, the Great Society had been undermined by the cost of the war, the American economy was in danger, the world gold market was in collapse, the nation was torn by protest marches, campus upheavals, and race riots of unprecedented violence. The cowboy president, caught in a stampede, had been trampled.
Still, the outer Johnson remained intact. He did not remove all his clothes, let his hair, beard, and fingernails grow long, take to bed, and tape dark blinds over the Oval Office windows. But the inner man had crumbled. And the siege atmosphere in the White House now resembled the siege atmosphere in the penthouse.
By day the president would harangue his staff—now purged of all but loyal Texans—with shouted accusations of treason and whispered tales of conspiracy. Communists controlled the television networks. New York Times Washington correspondent James Reston was consorting with the Russian ambassador. Most of the press was in on it, and so were the professors. All were in league with the Kennedys, and together they had plotted his downfall.
By night Johnson would dream that he was paralyzed from the neck down, a helpless cripple unable even to protest as his most trusted aides fought to divide the remnants of his power. The nightmares were a secret, but the raging paranoia and wild suspicions, often punctuated by obscene outbursts and misplaced laughter, frightened his advisers and convinced several that the president had become dangerously unhinged.
So, if Hughes’s letter was in one sense sovereign to sovereign, it was also bunker to bunker.
Johnson, keeping up appearances, had just returned from getting a haircut and was about to change into tails for a state dinner honoring the King of Norway, when the letter finally reached him early that evening. The president was in a foul mood. His day had been a disaster. Arthur Goldberg had suddenly quit as U.N. ambassador in a bitter confrontation over Johnson’s war policy, no one else wanted the job, and George Ball had to be bludgeoned into accepting it. Hanoi was threatening to abandon the stalled peace talks, antiwar demonstrators were converging on New York for a march the next day, militant students had just seized several buildings at Columbia, top administration officials were defecting to support Bobby Kennedy, and with all these pressing problems, surrounded by traitors and turmoil, the president had to spend half his time playing host to King Olav, who arrived that morning for a state visit. (“He’s the dumbest king I’ve ever met,” complained LBJ, adding with sour impatience, “I didn’t know they made kings that dumb.”)
So when Johnson picked up the billionaire’s letter, his first reaction was blind outrage. “Who the fuck does Howard Hughes think he is?!” the president bellowed, seeing the desperate plea to halt the bomb test as yet another challenge to his power.
It was, of course, a good question. Who, indeed, was Hughes? Neither Johnson nor anyone else at the White House really had the answer. Despite some past dealings, the president knew only what everybody knew—that Hughes was the richest man in the United States, a man of incalculable power whose secret empire seemed to reach everywhere, a mythic figure now in hiding who also happened to be the country’s biggest private military contractor. That was enough.
Beleaguered as he was, Johnson did not ignore the bomb plea, nor did he take it lightly. In a move without precedent, he withheld approval of the scheduled blast, secretly alerting the AEC to await his final go-ahead.
The president’s mood swing was dramatic. Although still more than a bit irritated that any private citizen would presume to dictate national defense policy, Johnson was also fascinated, even flattered by the hidden billionaire’s direct approach. The letter seemed to make him feel more important. He proudly displayed it to several White House aides, more like a kid who had just obtained a celebrity’s autograph than a president who had been petitioned to halt a nuclear test. In fact, Johnson was so intrigued by the personal contact from this mystery man that he falsely claimed Hughes had also telephoned, embroidering his tall tale with a detailed account of the conversation that had never taken place.
Moreover, the president was clearly impressed by what he considered the surprisingly logical and forceful case the reputedly eccentric financier had made.
“He may be wrong,” Johnson told his chief speech writer Harry McPherson, “but he sure as hell isn’t a loony.”
Back at the penthouse, the naked recluse, while unaware that he had been officially certified sane, was nonetheless confident he had made the right move.
“My letter to the President was a masterpiece,” he exulted. “Also when I started focusing my memory on the relationship I had about 8 years ago with Johnson, I came up with some very solid memories.”
Solid memories. To Hughes that could mean only one thing: hard cash. And, indeed, the two Texans had once had what Hughes would later describe as a “hard cash, adult” relationship. Hughes had not only backed Johnson’s first serious White House bid eight years earlier (when he had lost the Democratic nomination to their mutual enemy John F. Kennedy), but had secretly supported Johnson for at least two decades, right from the beginning of his rise to power as a freshman senator. The full extent of their dealings is unknown. In any event, it was a relatively small sum Hughes gave in the early days that now came most solidly to mind. He had once bought the man who was now president with pocket change, and if Johnson had since moved up in the world, to the billionaire he remained just another politician who had his price.
“I have done this kind of business with him before,” explained Hughes. “So, he wears no awe-inspiring robe of virtue with me.”
To what degree these past dealings now affected Johnson is less clear, but there is no question that the president had once been on the pad. In his leaner years as a raw-boned young congressman, Johnson was a regular visitor at the Houston headquarters of the Hughes Tool Company, where he befriended the absentee owner’s top executive, Noah Dietrich. His big Stetson hat in hand, Johnson asked free use of company billboards for his first Senate race. Dietrich refused, preferring to use them to promote a Hughes sideline, Grand Prize Beer.