And now, after getting his first taste of pure Mormon blood—blood the billionaire came to like so much that he would later demand transfusions he did not need—Hughes watched television and waited for news that would satisfy an older craving.
It was Tuesday, November 5, 1968. Election night.
“…and it’s a very tight election indeed,” boomed the absurdly amplified voice of Walter Cronkite. “A seesaw race right across the country. Nothing like the presidential countdown that had been anticipated….”
The same report echoed, at a considerably lower volume, in another grim hotel room three thousand miles away. There, men as yet unknown but soon to be notorious monitored the returns for Richard Nixon.
Nixon himself, secluded in a separate room on the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf Towers in New York, would not allow even a TV to share his solitude. Hour after hour he sat alone, hunched over his yellow legal pads, analyzing the vote pattern, shut off from his family down the hall, withdrawn from his closest aides in the adjacent suite.
Nixon had been losing ground to Humphrey for weeks, had seen his once overwhelming lead shrivel day by day, and now, alone in the gloom of his secret room, knew that his political survival was in serious doubt. “You could almost feel the mood changing as the darkness came over the land,” his aide Leonard Garment later recalled. “We knew there was this hemorrhage of votes, this dreadful phenomenon, like a strange disease.” All night and into the early morning, Nixon watched his vote count waver.
Precisely at the stroke of three A.M., he suddenly emerged in an old rumpled suit, haggard from the ordeal, and announced he was ready to claim victory. The outcome was still uncertain, but Nixon savored the moment. It was at the same hour eight years earlier that he had conceded defeat to John F. Kennedy.
Beaten in 1960, buried in 1962, he had delivered his own obituary—“You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more”—in the famous “last press conference.” But now he was back, risen from the grave and ready to enter the White House.
In Nixon, Hughes had at last what he had always wanted—a debtor in the Oval Office.
“I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness,” he had declared early in the 1968 campaign.
“Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life.”
“If we select Nixon,” he later wrote, “then he, I know for sure knows the facts of life.”
Theirs was a special relationship. It stretched back more than two decades, had survived multiple crises, and still endured. Hughes, of course, flirted with other politicians, but with the others it was often hard to tell how far he could go, and he always came back to Nixon, who appreciated a big spender, and would always go all the way
Hughes had supported Nixon in every bid for office since his first congressional race in 1946 and would continue to back him to the end. In addition to campaign funds, he provided large sums for the personal use of the president and his family. The known bequests—the few made openly and the hidden payoffs later discovered—eventually totaled more than half a million dollars.
More than a financial angel, Hughes was a virtual fairy godfather in Nixon’s faltering rise to power. In 1956, when Eisenhower was ready to find a new running mate, Hughes ordered a covert operation to crush the “Dump Nixon” movement, sending Maheu to infiltrate the enemy camp and concoct a spurious pro-Nixon poll. Whether the problem was hanging on to Ike’s coattails or flying a planeload of dignitaries to a testimonial dinner or saving a relative from financial ruin, Hughes always seemed to materialize when Nixon was in need. Then, suddenly, the spell was broken.
The billionaire’s largesse may have cost Nixon his first bid for the presidency when a scandal erupted in the closing days of the 1960 campaign over a never-repaid $205,000 Hughes “loan.”
Nixon had personally requested the money four years earlier, shortly after he was reelected vice-president, ostensibly to bail out his brother Donald’s failing business—a chain of restaurants featuring “Nixonburgers.” The cash came from a Canadian subsidiary of the Hughes Tool Company, was transferred through a cutout to the vice-president’s aged mother, Hannah, who passed it on to her bankrupt son. The name Hughes appeared nowhere on the loan agreement, and none of the Nixons was responsible for repayment. Their only collateral was a vacant lot in Whittier, California, once the site of the Nixon family home. It had an assessed value of $13,000.
Hughes was pleased to play the friendly pawnbroker. “I want the Nixons to have the money,” he told his reluctant business manager, Noah Dietrich. “Let ’em have it.”
Nonetheless uneasy about the secret deal, Dietrich flew to Washington in a futile attempt to dissuade the vice-president. “About the loan to Donald,” he cautioned Nixon, “Hughes has authorized it, and Donald can have it, but if this becomes public it could mean the end of your political career.”
Nixon, unfazed, responded self-righteously. “Mr. Dietrich,” he reportedly said, “I have to put my relatives ahead of my career.”
Donald’s fast-food enterprise soon collapsed despite the easy credit, and Hughes never did get back his money. Still, he apparently came out well ahead. Less than three months after he so generously aided the needy Nixons, the Internal Revenue Service officially recognized his philanthropic status. It declared the Howard Hughes Medical Institute a tax-exempt charity. Twice before the IRS had refused to certify the foundation, calling it “merely a device for siphoning off otherwise taxable income.” Nothing had changed. Indeed the institute had thus far kicked back more than $9 million to Hughes, and spent only $404,372 on good works. Yet, suddenly, the IRS reversed itself. Records of the abrupt about-face remain hidden even today, but Hughes’s timely benevolence to the vice-president was not so well concealed.
The “Hughes Loan Scandal” hit the headlines in the final weeks of the closely contested 1960 election. Maheu took time off from plotting to kill Castro and tried instead to kill the story. Nixon, however, panicked. He put out a preemptive report that never even mentioned Hughes, and promptly got caught in his lies.
“I was successful, during the presidential campaign, in killing a story which was about to break in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and later in the New York Times,” Maheu told Hughes, recalling the failed cover-up. “It was only the complexities involved originally in setting up the loan which caused the Nixon forces to panic days before the election because some small-time accountant, who never should have been cut in, was terribly hungry and playing with the Kennedy forces.
“If a simple loan had been made to brother Don with the Whittier property as collateral, the very simple loan may not have become as complicated,” continued Maheu. “Two weeks before he died, Drew Pearson told me for perhaps the tenth time, that he never would have broken the story if he had not been suspicious of the incredible steps which were taken in the origin to conceal the fact that the loan had been made.”
Although only a hint of his full relationship with Hughes, the revelation ruined Nixon. He lied, denying that either he or Hughes had been involved in the transaction. Confronted with contrary evidence, he lied again, claiming that his widowed mother had “satisfied” the $205,000 loan by turning over “half her life savings,” namely the thirteen-thousand-dollar vacant lot. Nixon never stopped lying, but there was no escape.