“I have taken the liberty of hedging our bets and sincerely hope that you will agree with my judgement. I also believe that we should do substantially more for each since we are playing for such big stakes.”
Hughes agreed. He could hardly take his chances on sanctimonious voters acting out of conscience. Soon he would pass $50,000 to Nixon through Governor Laxalt and a second $50,000 to Humphrey through Dwayne Andreas, a longtime backer who had no official role in the campaign but handled the “sensitive” contributions.
“You may rest assured, Howard,” reported Maheu, “that we have taken all necessary steps to be in a good posture, whichever way it goes.”
It was not going well for Humphrey as he stepped to the podium in Chicago to accept his nomination on Thursday, August 29, the final night of the Democratic convention.
Indeed, poor Hubert had never looked worse than now, at his moment of greatest triumph. Weighed down by the war and LBJ and Mayor Daley, by all the dead in Vietnam and all the demonstrators beaten in Chicago, he seemed covered with blood, covered with shame, as irrevocably soiled as if he had had to crawl on his belly through the slime of the stockyards to get that nomination, and now that he finally had it, the prize seemed only to further befoul him.
Still he stood there with a frozen smile, slavishly thanked his cruel master Lyndon Johnson, and closed with words so obviously hollow they must have hurt: “I say to this great convention, and to this great nation of ours, I am ready to lead our country!”
It was past two in the morning by the time Humphrey made it back to his hotel. He was tired and battered but could not sleep. Obsessively immaculate and offended by dirt, he tidied up his room, busily emptying ashtrays and washing out half-empty glasses, as if by cleaning the suite he could also cleanse himself of the stain of Chicago. Then he sent a Secret Service agent to summon Larry O’Brien.
From three A.M. until past dawn Humphrey and O’Brien talked. The vice-president poured out his pain. He was desperate. He had no campaign money, he had no campaign plan, and now he also had no campaign manager. O’Brien had agreed to help Humphrey only through the convention. Now Hubert was on his own. O’Brien had other plans. He had never told Humphrey the details, but he had made it clear from the start that he was quitting politics to make some real money.
This was farewell. They sat together hour after hour in a room smelling of tear gas, with Humphrey, who cried easily anyway, close to tears, and all the while they could hear the angry shouts of demonstrators in the street below, even now in the middle of the night still chanting, “Dump the Hump! Dump the Hump!”
“Larry, do you hear those people down there?” wailed Humphrey, suddenly begging O’Brien to stay on and run his campaign. “Please, Larry, don’t leave me naked.”
O’Brien was not swayed. He was through with public service. He was through with the destitute Humphrey. He had a new job waiting. He was eager to cash in.
“For Christsake, Hubert,” he exploded, “this is my private-sector move!”
Humphrey groveled. “Larry, I’ve just got to have you,” he pleaded. “If I get them to agree to a delay, will that settle it?”
O’Brien relented. For the first time he told Humphrey the name of his new boss. It was a sickening final blow.
Now, at dawn on Friday, August 30, 1968, Hubert Humphrey, the vice-president of the United States, the man just nominated to be president, had to pick up his phone and call Robert Maheu, call the man who employed his son and had helped pick his running mate, call the man who had slipped him fifty grand in the backseat of a car, call and beg Maheu to allow O’Brien to remain his campaign manager.
Unknown to Humphrey until now, Larry O’Brien had already agreed to go to work for Howard Hughes.
9
Camelot
The old bastard.
That’s who Howard Hughes thought of now, that’s who he always thought of when he thought of the Kennedys. Not Jack. Not Bobby. Not Teddy. Not the glamorous sons but their cutthroat father. Old Joe. He was the real Kennedy, the one Hughes remembered. And despised.
“The Kennedy family and their money and influence have been a thorn that has been relentlessly shoved into my guts since the very beginning of my business activities,” wrote the billionaire, bursting with a grudge he had held for forty years.
Right from the start Joseph P. Kennedy had been there to plague him. They had arrived together in Hollywood in the mid-1920s, the Boston Irishman and the Texas WASP invading an infant industry created by immigrant Jews. They both figured to take over the town.
Hughes had come to make movies. Not yet twenty, full of romantic visions, the tall, handsome tycoon left Houston in 1925 and took his inheritance to the Dream Capital. There, amid the palm trees and pink stucco palaces, former furriers and ragmen, many just off the boat, were shaping America’s image of itself. But Hughes was the image they had created, and within a few years he was more than a top producer, he was a star.
Kennedy had come only to make money. He arrived less than a year after Hughes, at thirty-seven already an established, hard-bitten financier and in movieland strictly on business. “Look at that bunch of pants pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires,” he told an associate as he set out for California. “I could take the whole damn business away from them.”
He tried. Joe Kennedy was a ruthless operator, and he gave many men good reason to hate him. But what had he done to so irritate Hughes? It seemed to have something to do with RKO. Kennedy never made a movie of note, but he did found a movie studio, and Hughes seemed to hold that against him. “You see Joe Kennedy used to own the biggest part of RKO before I got into it,” he explained, suggesting that the studio was somehow behind the big grudge.
Twenty years later Hughes himself would buy RKO. But not from Kennedy. Joe was long gone from Hollywood, in and out in his usual style, a quick raid for a quick profit, gone before Hughes had made his first big movie, gone before Hughes was anything more than a rich kid. They never had any dealings over RKO, they never dealt with each other at all.
So why the grudge? In his three years in Hollywood, Kennedy probably never even met Hughes—“Howard was just a kid,” noted Joe’s mistress Gloria Swanson. “We didn’t move in the same circles”—and their paths would never cross again.
Joe moved on to banking, liquor, and land, always striking hard and fast, often skirting the law, building his fortune with whiskey deals that bordered on bootlegging and cynical stock-market manipulations, less a businessman than a predator on other men’s businesses, a bold buccaneer who continued milking Wall Street right up to the moment he was named first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, some said beyond. In short, a man much like Hughes himself would become, but less a romantic. He made many enemies, he crushed many rivals, he cheated his partners, but not once did he tangle with Hughes.
So what was the “thorn”? What terrible thing had old Joe done to young Howard that Hughes would hold so strong a grudge for forty years? Apparently nothing. Nothing at all.
All Howard Hughes held against the Kennedys was the simple fact that they too had money and power. That was the thorn shoved into his guts. Relentlessly.
In the beginning, they had more money. Now that he had far more money,[8] they had more power. They always seemed to have what Hughes wanted. Back in Hollywood, it was RKO. Later, it was the White House. Old Joe had not only bought it for his son Jack, he had stolen it from Hughes. The billionaire had not forgotten or forgiven that either.
8
So much more that when