“You can see how cruel it was, after my all-out support of Nixon, to have Jack Kennedy achieve that very, very marginal so-called victory over my man,” wrote Hughes, bitterly recalling the Kennedy gang’s “theft” of the White House in 1960.
Both he and Joe had set out to buy America. Kennedy had succeeded. But it was more than that. Over the years there had been a strange reversal of roles. In their Hollywood days, Hughes had been the newsreel hero, Joe the cynical operator. Now the Kennedys had escaped the curse of their father to become royalty, while Hughes had taken his place as the troll under the bridge.
And now, in 1968, just as Hughes finally seemed to have it all in the bag, his drive to buy the government of the United States all but guaranteed, certain of victory, having bought both Humphrey and Nixon, old Joe was about to snatch it away again. With Bobby.
On Saturday, March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy suddenly entered the race, announcing his bid to reclaim the throne from the same Senate room his brother had used to launch his campaign eight years earlier.
“I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies,” he declared, looking very young and very vulnerable, his long hair falling across his forehead, his famous Kennedy voice halting and uncertain, yet striking fear into older, more powerful men. “I cannot stand aside from the contest that will decide our nation’s future, and our children’s future.”
Neither could Hughes. Alone in his penthouse, with a fortune far greater than old Joe’s but without an heir, the billionaire watched Bobby’s televised speech, saw Joe about to put another son in the White House, and grabbed for his yellow legal pad.
“Re: Kennedy, I want him for President like I want the mumps,” he wrote. “I can think of nothing worse than 8 years under his exalted leadership. God help us!
“However, lets face it. It could happen, so lets cover our bets both ways.”
Hughes was not about to be denied the Oval Office. Not this time. He would own the next president even if he had to buy every candidate in the race, even if that meant backing Bobby. But how could he buy a Kennedy?
The question took on new urgency just one month later when the Atomic Energy Commission declared war. Facing the big blast, unable to move Lyndon Johnson, doubtful that Humphrey could block it, Hughes reviewed his strategy.
“I am afraid there are only two people strong enough to stand up to the AEC,” he wrote. “They are Kennedy or Johnson.
“I can see no way to motivate Kennedy except by a truely meaningful gesture of assistance.”
Reluctant to join forces with Kennedy and far from certain that Bobby could be bought, Hughes still saw a way he could use the Kennedy threat to end the nuclear threat. It was at this time that he sent word to Johnson that he would back Humphrey “to any extent necessary to match the funds expended by Kennedy.” At the same time he ordered Maheu to throw a real scare into the needy vice-president: “sit down with Humphries and tell him I have been propositioned by Kennedy in the most all-out way.”
It was a bare-faced lie. But less than two weeks later it came true.
Before Hughes could move to cover his bets, before Bobby had won his first primary, Kennedy sent an emissary to Hughes. Even Kennedy.
Maheu reported the contact: “Pierre Salinger called me asking if he could have a conference in Las Vegas immediately after the results of the Indiana Primary which is being held tomorrow. He stated that ‘Bobby’ agrees with our position of delaying these AEC tests and they want to confer with us before taking any ‘overt’ position.
“Howard, you and I both know that this is the overture to financial help for their campaign—and I would like some guidance from you as to how we play the music.
“If our only concern were of a ‘political’ nature, I would be tempted to forget about Kennedy—because I truly believe ‘Hubert’ has enough ‘due bills’ from the political pros to assure him the Democratic nomination. However, we have other things at stake for the present and it might be wise to buy some ‘insurance.’”
Hughes was not surprised by the approach. He had been expecting it. The overture might be from Camelot, but to him it was an old familiar tune.
“I dont know what it is that Sallinger and Kennedy want, but I have a pretty good idea what they will want before too long,” replied Hughes, with the satisfaction of a cynic watching the last idol fall.
“I am not in favor, at the moment, of contributing any $$ unless he can and will make some kind of a half-assed promise to help us postpone or abort the bombing. Now, if he gets the nomination, then I think we are forced to contribute no matter what he does about the bomb.
“So, to summarize, until either some promise re: the bomb, or his nomination, I recommend a stalling operation inlaid with beautiful dialogue and all sorts of encouragement for the future, but involving no hard spending money.
“But, I repeat, I would try not to make an enemy of him.”
Pierre Salinger came to Las Vegas early in May, just after Kennedy’s first primary victory. He reminded Maheu that Bobby had called for an end to all nuclear tests in his maiden Senate speech three years earlier, assured him that Kennedy would now help Hughes battle the bomb, and asked for a contribution. Maheu stalled but promised to run it by his boss.
It was all quite friendly. Maheu and Salinger had known each other for years, and Maheu had even served as cochairman of Salinger’s own 1964 Senate campaign in California.
Bobby Kennedy also knew of Maheu. From the Castro assassination plot. He had learned of that CIA-Mafia murder conspiracy in May 1962, when he was attorney general and his brother was president. The Agency had to tell him. There was no other way to block Maheu’s prosecution for wiretapping comedian Dan Rowan, rival for the affections of singer Phyllis McGuire, girlfriend of Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana. Kennedy was shocked. Not about the failed attempt to kill Castro, which he and his brother almost certainly approved in advance, but about the CIA’s choice of hit men. Especially Giancana. Kennedy had to tell J. Edgar Hoover, knowing all the while that Hoover knew that brother Jack had only recently ended a White House affair with another of Giancana’s mistresses, Judith Campbell.
And Maheu had been right in the middle of it all. Now Kennedy had to assume that Maheu—and therefore Hughes—knew the darkest secrets of Camelot, and had to wonder if Maheu knew something darker stilclass="underline" who killed his brother.
The possible connections between the Castro plot and Dallas had long anguished Kennedy. And just a year earlier the entire ugly story had started to surface with a column by Drew Pearson that virtually branded him with the mark of Cain.
“President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb,” it began, “an unconfirmed report that Sen. Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother.” It was Bobby’s worst nightmare, the fear he confided to a few close friends that Castro or the Mafia or the CIA itself had ordered his brother’s murder.
Lurking in the background of this tangled nightmare was Maheu’s boss—the mysterious billionaire with a burning hatred of the entire Kennedy family.
Bobby could not have known the full extent of Hughes’s hate, but he knew quite well the dangers of taking Hughes’s money. He himself had singled out a scandal over funds Nixon received from Hughes as a decisive factor in his brother’s 1960 victory, and later as attorney general secretly investigated the Hughes-Nixon dealings.
But now, in 1968, the need for campaign money was urgent, and Kennedy apparently solicited Hughes’s contribution in the same spirit in which it would be given: business as usual.