Maheu called Salinger a couple of weeks after their Las Vegas meeting to say that Hughes would give Kennedy $25,000. Not a real investment, but a good hedge. Salinger, in Portland for the Oregon primary, said he would return to Las Vegas to pick up the cash right after the next contest, in California. It was only a week away. But by then it was too late.
At first the cheers drowned out the gunshots.
Bobby Kennedy had just won the big one. California. It looked like he might actually go all the way. In twelve incredible weeks he had helped force Lyndon Johnson to abdicate, he had beaten Hubert Humphrey in his home state, South Dakota, and now he had defeated his antiwar rival Eugene McCarthy in California. At midnight on Tuesday, June 4, 1968, he entered the packed ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to claim his victory.
Smiling and exuberant, Kennedy joked with his cheering supporters, flashed a V-sign and declared, “Now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there!” Then he left the podium, looking like the next president of the United States.
Minutes later he lay dying, shot through the head.
Howard Hughes watched it all. He saw it happen live and in color, and he stayed up through the night to watch the replays—the victory speech, the sound of gunfire, Bobby lying in a pool of blood—over and over again. He listened to the hospital bulletins, watched the random and collective scenes of shock and horror—people running, crying, screaming, kneeling silently to pray—he saw the Kennedy family gather for another grim death watch, and he kept his own TV vigil.
News reports and solemn commentary blared in his bedroom all night: “There was only one assailant… this was not a conspiracy… a sense of guilt for all Americans… it was clearly the act of one man… the crisis of violence in this country… just weeks after the King assassination… brother of the martyred president… there is no doubt, this was not a conspiracy….”
While TV commentators once more rushed to reassure a shocked nation, Hughes began to conspire. He reached for his bedside legal pad and, while Kennedy’s life still hung in the balance, wrote:
“It seems to me that this particular moment in the historical passage of time may be the very most ideal to launch our anti-anti-trust campaign.
“In other words, I cannot imagine another time, if we waited a year, when public sentiment will ever again be so violently and passionately focused on the need for measures to control crime.
“Surely this is the truely perfect background to support our appeal to the criminal division of Justice, pointing to what we have already done in clearing the atmosphere here, and the extreme disadvantage of permitting the Anti-Trust Division to jeopardize this unique opportunity, which in all likelyhood, will never again be available—that is to say, the opportunity, with the public aroused as it presently is, of eliminating completely force and violence as significant factors bearing on the way of life in this community.
“Bob, I urge you contact Justice at once. I just dont want you to miss the opportunity of mobilizing this intense feeling.”
A golden opportunity to get on with his Monopoly game in Las Vegas. That was all the assassination meant to him. At first. But Hughes maintained his TV vigil for almost twenty-six hours while Kennedy clung to life, and by the time Bobby died he had come to see the deeper meaning of the tragedy.
He watched a dazed Frank Mankiewicz walk into the makeshift press room of the Good Samaritan Hospital one last time to tell the world that Bobby Kennedy was dead. It was the moment Hughes had been waiting for through two sleepless nights.
“I hate to be quick on the draw,” he wrote, barely able to restrain himself, “but I see here an opportunity that may not happen again in a lifetime. I dont aspire to be President, but I do want political strength.
“I mean the kind of an organization so that we would never have to worry about a jerky little thing like this anti-trust problem—not in 100 years.
“And I mean the kind of a set up that, if we wanted to, could put Gov. Laxalt in the White House in 1972 or 76.
“Anyway, it seems to me that the very people we need have just fallen smack into our hands.”
The suddenly leaderless Kennedy gang was up for grabs. He would hire the Kennedy machine and make it the Hughes machine. He would buy the Kennedy magic, and with it place a man of his own creation in the White House. A man like Paul Laxalt.
But Kennedy’s murder had deeper meaning still. It had removed from the 1968 race the one candidate Hughes did not want and could not control. He had to move quickly to consolidate his gains.
Maheu was confused. The memos came at him so fast and furious in the middle of a night of national cataclysm, the missions proposed were so bold and outrageous, that not even Hughes’s veteran bagman could immediately comprehend that his boss actually wanted him not only to pick the next president, but also to buy Camelot.
“I get the impression from your note that you want to confine this activity to someone within the ‘Kennedy’ people,” Maheu replied. “I am sure my impression must be wrong because, naturally, to accomplish your purpose, we must think outside of this particular realm.
“Obviously Sen. Ted Kennedy will be their heir apparent. I expect to see some very strange alliances. In any event, Howard, will you please clarify my impression.”
Strange alliances? Hughes was not interested in making any alliances, and certainly not with the Kennedys. What he had in mind was a simple business transaction.
“I want us to hire Bob Kennedy’s entire organization,” he explained with some impatience. “They are used to having the Kennedy money behind them and we can equal that. I dont want an alliance with the Kennedy group, I want to put them on the payroll.”
Hughes fired all that off to Maheu within hours of Kennedy’s death but was now so excited he could not sleep. Instead, he continued to watch the replays of the assassination and the film clips of Bobby’s life, his eyes fixed on the TV screen until past dawn. Then, finally satisfied that he had seen the full meaning of the tragedy and all its opportunities, he went to sleep, just as most of the nation woke up in horror to discover that Bobby was dead.
Hughes himself arose Thursday afternoon still excited.
“I have just awakened,” he immediately scrawled, dashing off another memo to Maheu. “I was up all night Monday and Tuesday nights.[9] I heard Mankiewicz make the fateful announcement and, since our ch 8 was still on the air, I stayed up all night to watch in amazement as we continued to achieve absolutely exclusive coverage of his death and obituary material etc.”
Hughes was thrilled by the coup his own television station, the local CBS affiliate, had scored.
“The other two networks, ABC and NBC were not on the air in Sou. Nevada during the entire night…. ABC and NBC had just closed down their broadcasts from the hospital for the night and ch 13 and ch 3 had just gone dark for the night. This was understandable, as the doctors had just announced that there would be no more regular bulletins until morning.
“I believe it was sheer accident that CBS was still on the air when the bomb fell. Of course they (CBS) made the most of it, and I thought how lucky we were to have been on the air and achieved this historic news broadcast….
“Anyway, Bob, please do not say anything to anybody about our achieving this TV exclusive,” Hughes cautioned, suddenly serious, recognizing how unseemly and even dangerous it might be to boast about their small triumph when things so much more important were at stake. “It occurred to me you might mention it by way of gently needling your friends in ch 13. But please do not. I am very desirous that we retain the late night movie programing exclusively here in Sou. Nevada. I hope eventually to extend this into an all-night, every-night show, and I dont want any competition. I dont think the market can support 2 such shows.”