“Who is this Maheu, why does he get to see you, Mr. President?” asked White House Appointments Secretary Jim Jones.
“He’s Howard Hughes’s man,” replied Johnson, as if that alone answered the question.
Maheu arrived in Texas the night before his scheduled rendezvous at the LBJ Ranch, checked into a motel, and called the penthouse. “I have an appointment with the President of the United States tomorrow morning,” he reminded Hughes. “I wish you would tell me what you want me to discuss with him.” Hughes again refused. “Call me in the morning just before you leave,” he replied, “and in the meantime, just sleep comfortably.”
If Maheu found that difficult, under the circumstances, so probably did the president. Johnson had met Maheu before, but not in the months since the president had bombed Hughes, and not in the year since he had finally learned the dirty secret that Hughes, Maheu, and the Central Intelligence Agency had long shared—the still hidden Castro assassination plot.
Maheu, of course, had played a pivotal part in that CIA-Mafia murder conspiracy. Hughes had been let in on the secret almost immediately and without a second thought. But the president had to learn about it six years later from Washington newspaper columnist Drew Pearson.
His belated discovery of the murder plot had sent Johnson into a rage. Convinced that the attempts on Castro’s life had somehow caused John F. Kennedy’s death, in fact certain that the CIA had a hand in Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson—fearing that he too was in danger—had put the Secret Service on full alert and ordered a top-secret FBI investigation. He denounced the CIA as “a damn Murder Inc.” and hauled spymaster Richard Helms into the Oval Office.
Johnson never got the full story, but he did learn of Maheu’s central role in the bloody cabal.
So now the president knew that Hughes’s ambassador had also been the CIA’s top hit man, its link to the Mob in a failed contract to murder a chief of state. And in the early morning hours of August 12, 1968, as Maheu waited nervously in a Dallas motel for Hughes to call with final orders on his latest mission, the president was also left to ponder with some discomfort the reason for Maheu’s impending visit. Finally, just minutes before Maheu’s scheduled departure, the billionaire phoned his bagman.
“He wanted me to suggest to President Johnson,” Maheu would later testify, “that he, Howard Hughes, was prepared to give him a million dollars after he left office, if he would stop the atomic testing before he left office.”
It was one mission Maheu never carried out.
Johnson had been ailing again, but seemed in fine form when he returned from the hospital later that morning to find Maheu already at the LBJ Ranch. Still ignorant both of Hughes’s orders and Maheu’s intentions, the president betrayed no concern as he greeted his visitor.
He stepped easily from his helicopter, put his big arm around Maheu’s shoulder, shook hands, and, pumping Maheu vigorously, guided him into the front seat of a waiting car, next to Lady Bird, for a half-hour tour of the Texas domain.
Johnson took the wheel of his white Lincoln Continental convertible and, gesturing broadly, kept up a nonstop monologue, showing off his spread, as he drove at breakneck speed across the rocky land, past the grazing Herefords, past the shack where his grandfather had lived, past the family cemetery with its low stone wall, finally stopping at the small cabin on the north bank of the Pedernales River where the president had been born.
The visit to his birthplace was mandatory. Unlike his fellow Texan, Hughes, Johnson had grown up dirt-poor, not in the oil-rich Texas personified by the billionaire’s father, but in the rugged hill country near Austin, where his own father barely scraped by as a hard-scrabble farmer. The president insisted that every visitor see his old home, and now he showed Maheu the humble cabin so that he too could be impressed by Johnson’s hard climb to power.
Only then did the two men retire alone to the front yard of the big stone ranch house where Johnson now lived, and get down to business.
Maheu did not mention the million dollars. Instead, sitting next to the president on a padded lawn chair, in the shade of an old oak tree, Maheu noted that Hughes had a keen interest in Johnson’s future and asked how the billionaire might be of assistance.
Finally, Johnson knew Maheu’s mission. The ex-CIA hit man had come to offer him a friendly bribe. The president’s reply seemed to invite that approach. Unaware of the potential stakes, however, he kept both his price and his promises discreetly low.
Johnson, Maheu later reported to the penthouse, said that “he is very much interested in dedicating all of his future years to a school of public affairs which will be run in conjunction with the Univ. of Texas adjacent to where the Johnson Library is being built” and “would very much appreciate some help with this program.”
The LBJ School and Library increasingly obsessed Johnson in these waning months of his presidency. They would be his monuments to himself, the institutions that would secure his place in history, protect him from “the Harvards,” the hostile Eastern professors who would otherwise write his epitaph. Johnson’s pitch to Hughes, however, was somewhat more pointed.
“While discussing the purpose of the school and stating specifically his desire to have people become involved in politics and government,” Maheu continued, “he stated ‘so that we can avoid having jerks like this fellow Zimmerman who is running the anti-trust division of the Dept. of Justice.’ He then asked me what the status was pertaining to our Stardust problem. I brought him up to date. He said ‘well I am going to get into this and let’s see what happens.’”
If the president was none too subtle in linking the library donation to the Stardust deal, he quickly made it clear that he was not willing to sell Hughes the bomb.
Before Maheu could even mention the nuclear tests, Johnson staged a preemptive strike. He recalled the billionaire’s letter and deftly discouraged further discussion by saying “this was one document he would not place in the Johnson library, because it would prove embarrassing to Mr. Hughes if he did.” Despite the put-down, however, Johnson did not entirely foreclose even that issue. Indeed, according to Maheu, he promised to “do everything in his power to stop future big blasts in Nevada.”
Their business concluded, the president invited Maheu into his private office. There was no mention of the helicopter debacle. Despite his staggering losses, Hughes had merely instructed Maheu to find out when the war in Vietnam might end. Johnson would probably have paid a million himself for the answer, and the best he could now offer Maheu was a peek at some top-secret documents. While Maheu sat there trying to find light at the end of the tunnel, the president handled other matters of state. Ironically, among the papers he signed was an executive order allowing the displaced people of Bikini to return to their Pacific atoll. It was finally thought safe— twenty-two years after the natives had been evicted to make way for America’s first major atomic tests. (In fact, the island was later found to be dangerously radioactive, and is still uninhabited.)
After meeting privately with Hughes’s ambassador for almost three hours, Johnson invited him to lunch with the First Family—a lunch also attended by Arthur Krim, finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee—and then personally drove Maheu back to his plane.
“I was at the ranch for a total of five hours and I could not have been treated more graciously and hospitably throughout the entire time,” Maheu wrote Hughes, concluding his report. “Upon departure he asked me again to convey to you his highest respect and warmest regards.”
It certainly seemed a friendly visit. Not long after Maheu flew off, however, Johnson told one aide quite a different story. Hughes’s emissary, he confided with apparent dismay, had dared offer him money!