“Larry O’Brien—He is coming here on Wednesday next for a conference as per our request after the assassination of Senator Kennedy,” Maheu reported to the penthouse. “He is prepared to talk employment and has received a commitment (without any obligation whatsoever) from the four or five key men in the Kennedy camp that they will not become obligated until they hear from him.”
The leader of the Irish Mafia arrived in Las Vegas on the Fourth of July. He was put up in style at the Desert Inn and had the run of the town, compliments of Hughes, but he never met his would-be boss in the room upstairs. O’Brien had sat with presidents and moved in the highest circles of power. Jack Kennedy had personally recruited him, old Joe had welcomed him into his home, Lyndon Johnson had begged him to stay on at the White House, and Bobby had called to woo him away. But now O’Brien would have to settle for a surrogate. He never even got a peek at Howard Hughes.
“I’ve never met him myself,” explained Maheu as the job negotiations got under way at his home next door to the hotel. Since that was hardly reassuring, Maheu reached into his desk and pulled out a memo handwritten on yellow legal-pad paper. “I don’t want you to have any doubts that everything I’m saying comes directly from Hughes himself,” he said, presenting his boss’s sacred scrawl to O’Brien.
Incredibly, the proof Maheu offered was almost certainly Hughes’s “thorn in my guts” diatribe. O’Brien’s own account makes that clear. Except that instead of expressing hatred of the Kennedys, the memo—as O’Brien read it in his eagerness to take the job—was a heartfelt eulogy in which Hughes poured out his sorrow over Bobby’s death and the continuing tragedy of the Kennedy family.
Maheu said nothing to disillusion his guest. Instead, he presented the job offer in a code both men understood. He told O’Brien that Hughes had a problem—he didn’t think that his “good works” were sufficiently appreciated by the American people! O’Brien, one-upping his host, said he understood exactly what Maheu meant. Both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had felt the same way.
It was a perfect meeting of the minds. Over the next two days Maheu mentioned some of the good works in which Hughes was now engaged. They were manifold. First, there was his stalled Monopoly game in Las Vegas. Then, his legal battle over TWA. And that very weekend, Hughes had extended his benevolence to a television network in financial distress and a struggling new airline. He hatched his plot to take over Air West and launched his sudden raid to seize control of ABC. That particular act of munificence required immediate attention.
As it happened, O’Brien was simultaneously dickering with the three television networks. They too felt unappreciated and wanted O’Brien to help improve their public image. In fact, it was James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s former press secretary and now vice-president of ABC, who had proposed the deal. Since both Hughes and Hagerty were concerned only with good works, O’Brien apparently felt no conflict of interest.
And, according to Maheu, he was quite encouraging about the ABC raid. “He feels that we have no insoluble conditions before the FCC and/or the Dept. of Justice,” Maheu reported to Hughes. “Whether or not we work out a deal with Larry O’Brien, I surely believe we should tap his brain before making ‘the big move’ in Washington.”
Hughes was eager to put O’Brien right to work. Indeed, he wanted to send him right into the Oval Office. “It seems to me, Bob, there is a comparatively easy way to get an immediate answer to the network decision,” he wrote. “I think such an answer should be obtainable by Mr. O’Brien marching in and collaring Johnson and saying: ‘Look, my friend, my client Mr. Hughes has initiated the machinery to acquire control of ABC.’
“It seems to me that such a meeting would certainly give us an indication of which way the wind blows across the White House lawn.”
Maheu had his doubts about collaring LBJ, but he was very high on O’Brien. “I don’t know of one person to whom the President is more indebted and who could unravel this whole mess as quickly as he,” replied Maheu. “I just happen to know that when O’Brien left the administration to become involved in the Kennedy campaign, he did so with the full blessing of the President. Furthermore, I know that the President and Humphrey are most anxious to get him involved in the Humphrey campaign.”
In fact, when O’Brien returned to Washington he discovered that Humphrey had called while he was meeting with Maheu in Las Vegas. The vice-president had moved almost as quickly as Hughes to snare O’Brien, but just a bit too late. O’Brien had already more or less agreed to join the billionaire. With Maheu’s approval, however, he put off the Hughes job to see Humphrey through the Democratic convention, and then, after forcing Humphrey personally to beg Maheu’s permission, until after the November election.
But O’Brien never stopped his job negotiations with Hughes. He met with Maheu for a second round of talks in Washington at the end of July, just two days after Maheu delivered $50,000 to Humphrey in the backseat of a limousine. It was a busy weekend for the bagman. Now, in their meeting at the Madison Hotel, he gave O’Brien the $25,000 Hughes had promised Bobby Kennedy just before the assassination. O’Brien passed on the cash-filled manila envelope to Kennedy’s brother-in-law Steve Smith, who gratefully accepted Hughes’s unusual expression of condolences.
And at that same Washington meeting, Maheu and O’Brien came to terms. Howard Hughes would become a client of the newly formed O’Brien Associates, and its proprietor, Larry O’Brien, would get $15,000 a month, $500 a day, for at least two years, a $360,000 secret contract.
Hughes had done it. He had captured the leader of the Kennedy gang, hired its top gun.
Now the man who had managed the 1960 Kennedy campaign, the 1964 Johnson campaign, and Bobby’s aborted 1968 race, the man who had just taken command of Humphrey’s presidential drive, would also handle campaigns for Howard Hughes. Now the man who had lobbied Congress for the White House—for the New Frontier and the Great Society—would instead lobby Washington for the penthouse. Now the country’s premier political operative would handle politics for a madman secretly determined to buy America.
Only the details remained to be worked out.
Right after the November election, O’Brien returned to Las Vegas to strike the final deal. By now he was also chairman of the Democratic National Committee. But that was no problem. He would simply serve simultaneously as unpaid leader of the Democratic party and as Hughes’s very well paid Washington representative.
O’Brien was not scheduled to start work for Hughes until New Year’s Day, but in fact he jumped right in. Even while he managed Humphrey’s campaign, he was already secretly doing odd jobs for his new boss.
When Hughes announced his bid to take over Air West, plotting to swindle its stockholders—“This plan necessitates that the stock edge downward, and then that we come along with a spectacular offer”—Maheu conferred with O’Brien.
“I don’t believe there is a living person who knows more about handling campaigns than Larry,” he reported. “Although our present situation is not in the political arena, I look forward to receiving invaluable guidance from him in the motivation of stockholders to come our way.”
When Hughes got hit with a judgment of $137 million on TWA, Maheu plotted with O’Brien to strike back at the bankers with a congressional investigation.
“The Establishment unfortunately does exist and, in fact, would make the Mafia look like a Sunday school picnic,” he wrote his boss. “We happen to be victims of this group, and I sincerely believe we should not take all this lying down. In 30 days O’Brien will be available. I have discussed this entire situation with him and he can’t wait to get going. We still have time to create a situation whereby these bums will come to us on bloody knees.”