Half his empire was now a tax-exempt “charity,” while the other half was a tax-exempt “small business.” Only Hughes himself would have to pay taxes. For the first year under the new law he paid $20,012.64. This was the kind of tax reform the billionaire had in mind. O’Brien Associates had done well on its first official assignment.
Richard Nixon had not done quite so well. The president lost his battle with Congress. On December 30, 1969, after threatening a veto, he bitterly signed into law a tax reform act that eliminated the deduction for his private papers. The repeal was retroactive to July. Nixon had missed the cutoff date. He had blown the chance for his big tax break. Or so it seemed.
But on April 10, 1970, there was another signing ceremony in the Oval Office. On that day, the president signed his 1969 income tax returns. He claimed a charitable deduction of $576,000 for his papers and attached a deed showing that they had been donated to the National Archives in March 1969, four months before the new deadline. That whopping write-off allowed Nixon to escape virtually all of his taxes while he was president. In 1970 he paid $792.81. In 1971 he paid $873.03. In 1972 he paid $4,298. There was only one problem. It was all a fraud, one his own lawyers would later call “the Presidential Papers Caper.” Nixon had backdated the deed on his papers, cheated on his taxes, and evaded $467,000 he owed the IRS while he sat in the White House.
By the time the president backdated his deed, Larry O’Brien had once more become chairman of the Democratic National Committee. For the next year he would serve Howard Hughes and the Democrats simultaneously, and Nixon’s concern about the Hughes-O’Brien relationship would become an absolute obsession.
O’Brien was not merely a figurehead party chairman but the real leader of the opposition. With Johnson in exile, Humphrey in defeat, and Teddy Kennedy in disgrace, he was perhaps the most prominent Democrat in the country, the point man for his party in the 1970 congressional elections. With the financial freedom afforded him by the huge retainer he received from his hidden boss, Howard Hughes, O’Brien toured the country attacking Nixon.
Hughes and O’Brien! The leader of the Democratic party a secret Hughes lobbyist, getting $500 a day from the billionaire, $15,000 every month, $180,000 per year while he served two masters—and getting away with it! O’Brien, the leader of the Kennedy gang, getting away with it, just like the Kennedys always got away with everything. Nixon was determined to nail O’Brien, to get proof of his Hughes connection, to find out just what he was doing for all that secret money.
The president would have been surprised had he known. Certainly he never even guessed at O’Brien’s role in the big “Bold Ones” mission.
It began one night when Hughes was watching television. What he saw was so shocking that he wanted O’Brien put right on the job, even though it came up at the very height of the great tax-bill battle.
“Message to be given to Bob when he first wakes up,” Hughes dictated to one of his Mormons while he sat in the bathroom darkly brooding.
“Sun. night on television was a program entitled ‘The Bold Ones’ which portrayed an almost identical sequence of events as the Apollo 12 flight,” the aide scribbled down as his boss grunted in the background. “This one had one colored man and two white men in it, however HRH is not objecting because of the colored man.
“HRH thinks this type of show is detrimental to the welfare of the U.S. by showing scenes that would indicate that some things happened which could have been prevented, etc. In the program it showed the colored man getting sick and later one of the other men got sick and passed out and the problem had to be diagnosed by a doctor on the ground at Houston with the colored man’s wife sitting beside the control center.
“HRH thinks you, through your connections in Washington, should register a violent protest about such a program being permitted to run. HRH thinks it is unpatriotic and puts the US space program in a bad light.
“HRH thinks perhaps Larry O’Brien might handle such an assignment. However, HRH does not want this protest to be traced back to us.”
There were other top-secret Hughes-O’Brien missions, some of them directly involving Nixon himself. Oblivious to the president’s obsession, completely unaware of Nixon’s fear and hatred of O’Brien, Hughes regularly suggested sending O’Brien right into the White House.
“Suppose you have our top contact with Nixon (maybe O’Brien) go to the administration and offer to assist them in satisfying the southern Nevada public with an alternative water system which would be privately financed and require no government funding,” Hughes suggested, ready to pay any price to assure the purity of fluids.
And when he feared that the president was getting in bed with the bombers, Hughes again proposed that O’Brien make contact: “The very most urgent matter right now is, by all odds, the Nixon-AEC alliance, which I think is absolutely terrible, and must be untied somehow. Can’t you put O’Brien on this and pull out all the stops?”
Indeed, Maheu and O’Brien hatched a plot to help Nixon get Senate approval of a Supreme Court nomination in return for a bombing halt.
“I have been in touch with O’Brien and some of his people,” reported Maheu, “and they are going to make an attempt over the weekend to swap votes for Carswell in exchange for a postponement of the blast. You may rest assured that we are handling this one with extreme caution. But O’Brien thinks it’s at least worth a try.”
Nixon, however, never learned of any of these missions. And the president grew ever more obsessed with discovering exactly what O’Brien was up to. He called in Haldeman—“We’re going to nail O’Brien on this, one way or another,” he told his chief of staff. He called in Ehrlichman, he called in Colson. he called in Dean, he called in the IRS, he called in his pal Rebozo and had Rebozo pump Danner and Maheu. He called in his private gumshoes, and finally he called in his attorney general, and Mitchell called in Liddy, and Liddy called in McCord and Hunt, and Hunt called in the Cubans, and they all got caught in Larry O’Brien’s office at the Watergate.
All in a desperate effort to get to the bottom of the Hughes-O’Brien connection.
“I thought it would be a pleasant—and newsworthy—irony,” Nixon later explained in his memoirs, “that after all the years in which Howard Hughes had been portrayed as my financial angel, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee was in fact the one profiting from a lucrative position on Hughes’s payroll.”
But there was another factor in Nixon’s obsession, one he did not mention in his memoirs.
The president was also on the pad.
10
Nixon: The Payoff
The blood dripped slowly from a suspended pint bag, trickling red down a clear plastic tube, flowing through a hypodermic needle into the emaciated arm of the cadaverous old man.
Howard Hughes, near death, was coming back to life.
He had been losing blood for months, apparently from his ruptured hemorrhoids, a now critical anemia compounded by chronic malnutrition. His hemoglobin count had dropped below four grams, a 75-percent blood loss that left him as leeched as a week-old corpse.
Unwilling to be hospitalized—he would not leave his lair, he dared not face the daylight—Hughes instead sent his henchmen in search of uncontaminated blood. It was no simple mission. Hughes insisted on knowing the precise origin of each pint, requiring a thorough investigation of every potential donor, rejecting some for their dietary habits, others for their sexual activity, and all who had ever given blood in the past, before he finally selected several clean-living Salt Lake City Mormons to be bled for him alone.