“I told him to stick it up his ass,” the president declared, thrusting his arm upward with a vicious twist. Over the next few days word spread through the White House staff that Hughes had offered a big donation to the LBJ Library, and that Johnson had indignantly refused the offer, shocked that Maheu would even suggest such a thing.
Yet at their lunch with Maheu, the president had told his trusted fund-raiser Krim to follow up and get the Hughes money, and in fact later sent Krim to Las Vegas to press Maheu for the contribution.
The cover-up was unnecessary. Hughes had no interest in such side deals. Told that donations to the LBJ Library were limited to $25,000, he reportedly snapped, “Hell, I couldn’t control that son of a bitch with $25,000,” and never contributed a cent.
Johnson also failed to deliver. He never did bring the bombing to a halt, and if he intervened as promised on the Stardust deal, it had no effect on either the attorney general or his deputy, that “jerk” Zimmerman. Both the antitrust blockade and the dreaded blasts continued.
Circling each other like two wounded lions, neither sure of the other’s true strength or intentions, Hughes and Johnson never came to terms. Soon the president would retire permanently to his ranch and himself become a virtual hermit, his failed encounter with Hughes a small part of his bitter memories.
For Hughes, however, it was a turning point. His failure first to persuade, then to buy, Johnson only left him more than ever determined to own the next president. In LBJ, Hughes saw a man he had once bought and was certain was still for sale, but who now refused to sell him what he wanted. Unable to recognize that he was trying to buy the one thing no president could sell—the Bomb—he began to search for a candidate with whom he could do business.
Hughes would pursue Johnson to his last days in office, but his focus had already shifted to another national leader who had proven himself far more cooperative.
8
Poor Hubert
“Here we are, the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, the politics of joy! And that’s the way it’s going to be, too, all the way from here on out!”
The voice, so overripe with good cheer, was unmistakable. Bobbing and weaving, flapping his arms, barely able to contain his own high spirits, Hubert Horatio Humphrey launched his presidential campaign. It was April 27, 1968. Almost a month had passed since Johnson’s sudden abdication, and now the vice-president finally felt free to declare himself a candidate.
“And so my friends and fellow Americans,” he told a national television audience and two thousand supporters jammed into the ballroom of a Washington hotel, “I shall seek the nomination—” Before he could finish, the crowd stood to cheer, shouting, “We Want Humphrey! We Want Humphrey!” the chant drowning him out, and Hubert, beaming, shouted back, “You have him!” and the crowd roared.
Always effusive, the Happy Warrior had never seemed quite so exuberant as now—with his band playing “The Minnesota Rouser” and his people waving their plastic Humphrey hats—he stood ready to enter the White House, proclaiming “the politics of happiness, the politics of joy.”
It was a peculiarly inappropriate campaign theme in that wretched year of war, riots, and assassinations. And at that moment it could not have seemed more inappropriate to anyone than to the man who would soon become one of the vice-president’s chief backers: Howard Hughes.
For there was no joy in the penthouse. Humphrey’s announcement came bubbling over the billionaire’s television set just one day after the “Boxcar” blast, and the shaken but determined recluse was plotting a very different kind of campaign.
The politics of money, the politics of graft.
“Bob,” wrote Hughes, “we have to act fast or we will be right up against another deadline, making last-minute desperate attempts to abort another threatened blast. The A.E.C. is not going to let this thing rest.
“Now I am no political expert, but I can readily see that we have only one assett of really important value, and I dont have to spell that out, I am sure.
“So, it seems to me we have to lead off with our best shot. I think we must decide which candidate we intend to support and then support him till hell wont have it, but only if he will do something for us on the bomb.
“Now, if Humphries is the man, fine.
“Anyway, as I say, we have only one kind of markers to use in this game, and I think we should decide through whom, and how much, and then go to work.”
Howard Hughes could never spell Hubert Humphrey’s name correctly—he usually called him “Humphries”—but he had reason to place his bets on the vice-president.
Theirs was a curious relationship. The two men seemingly had nothing in common. Humphrey, the quintessential public man, loved a crowd, was outgoing, garrulous, almost embarrassingly emotional, a complete extrovert. Born in a room above the family drugstore, he grew up poor, had to drop out of college to return to work, and his political career had always been and still was plagued by a chronic lack of money. A classic old-line liberal, a farmer-labor populist, he had championed every social cause from civil rights to arms control to Medicare.
Only three weeks earlier, Hughes’s reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King had dramatized how different the two men were. Humphrey had first come to national prominence leading the fight for a strong civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic convention, where he declared, “There are those who say, ‘We are rushing this issue of civil rights.’ I say we are 172 years late.” Hughes seized the occasion of King’s murder to declare “negroes have already made enough progress to last the next 100 years, and there is such a thing as overdoing it.”
Yet now, in the spring of 1968, the Texas oligarch and the Minnesota populist forged an alliance. None of Humphrey’s issues—certainly not nuclear disarmament—had ever before been moneymakers. Now, suddenly, he struck gold. Hughes was determined to stop the bombing at all costs, and the vice-president, who for a decade had labored unpaid to limit atomic tests, readily enlisted in the billionaire’s lucrative antibomb campaign.
Beyond the bomb they had no common bond. Except that Hughes wanted a president who would be reliably indebted and Humphrey desperately needed money to reach the White House.
Poor Hubert. Relentless in his pursuit of the presidency since 1952, he entered the race in 1968 short of cash and haunted by memories of past defeats, none more vivid than that of the night he sat helpless in a stalled rented bus, flat-broke, shedding tears of anger and frustration as he heard the private Kennedy jet roar overhead, carrying his well-heeled opponent to victory in the West Virginia primary, to the 1960 nomination, to the White House.
This time it would be different. This time Humphrey was determined to go first-class. He would accept illegal corporate contributions from the milk lobby, he would take a questionable loan from a Minnesota grain merchant, and he would make a deal with Howard Hughes.
Still, he would be outspent four-to-one by Richard Nixon, would not have enough money to buy a single national television spot until the final weeks of his campaign, and would lose the election for want of a few thousand votes that may well have been his for a few million dollars.
The day after “Humphries” announced his candidacy, Hughes pounced. “I read an article in the paper saying H.H.H. is sore-pressed for solvency at the moment,” he wrote. “Are we marching through this obvious opening? I mean in a really big and definite way?”
Within two weeks Maheu met privately with the vice-president. The deal was struck. Before the campaign was over, Hubert Humphrey would receive $100,000—half of it in secret cash—from Howard Hughes.