At a rally in San Francisco’s Chinatown, he posed with children carrying a huge banner, its message inscrutable but seemingly supportive. Translated, it read: “WHAT ABOUT THE HUGHES LOAN?” Later, at a post-rally luncheon, every fortune cookie contained the same suggestion: “Ask him about the Hughes loan.” The scandal dogged Nixon down to the wire.
He was certain it cost him the presidency, blaming his “poor damn dumb brother” rather than himself or Hughes for his narrow loss to Kennedy.
The “all-out support” Hughes gave Nixon in 1960—a still unknown number of hundred-dollar bills secretly passed through the same bagman who handled the loan transaction—never became public. But the loan scandal would not die. It resurfaced full force when Nixon ran for governor of California two years later, and once more he was sure it caused his humiliating defeat. “I must have answered questions about the Hughes loan at least a hundred times,” he complained. “The media loved the story and played it up big—because it was so damaging to me.”
Hughes had become a haunting symbol of Nixon’s greed and corruption, apparently driving him out of politics forever. Yet neither could now break off the fatal attraction both had done their best to conceal.
Now, in 1968, Richard Nixon was staging a startling comeback. And both he and Hughes were ready to deal again.
“I want you to go see Nixon as my special confidential emissary,” Hughes instructed Maheu just two days after the presidential race opened with the primary in New Hampshire. While the rest of the nation focused on McCarthy’s upset of Johnson, Hughes immediately recognized that the real victor was Nixon, not only back from oblivion but also facing a badly split Democratic party.
“I feel there is a really valid possibility of a Republican victory this year,” Hughes continued. “If that could be realized under our sponsorship and supervision every inch of the way,” he added, so confident of Nixon’s corruption that he was already plotting the succession, “then we would be ready to follow with Laxalt as our next candidate.”
Nixon was indeed eager to renew their ill-fated relationship. Even before Maheu could get to Nixon, Nixon reached out to Hughes.
Of course, Nixon could not reach Hughes directly. Nobody could. In fact, despite their long relationship, the two men had never actually met. Their dealings had always been through intermediaries, and this time Nixon wanted as much insulation as possible.
At one of a series of meetings in Washington and Florida in the spring of 1968, Nixon huddled with his closest friend, Bebe Rebozo, and the man who had introduced them to each other twenty years earlier, Richard Danner. Nixon and Rebozo ran through an apparently well-rehearsed script, designed to maneuver their old pal Danner into handling the dangerous contact with Hughes.
“The discussion was generally did I know or did I have any contacts that I could use to raise money,” Danner would later testify. “And the people I knew, of course, they knew equally well or better. The question arose as to what would be the best way of contacting Mr. Hughes…. And at that time Mr. Nixon and Mr. Rebozo asked me to attempt to contact someone in the Hughes organization relative to a contribution.”
Nixon was as clear in his instructions to Danner as Hughes had been in his orders to Maheu: “The question was, ‘Would he contribute, and if so, how much?’”
Yet the connection quickly became a tangled affair. Unable to resist each other but unwilling to meet, Hughes and Nixon groped toward each other through a profusion of go-betweens. Even the middlemen required middlemen. The clear purpose of the principals was lost. Only their paranoia remained. And the middlemen finally came together months later in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion.
The scene was Duke Zeibert’s, gathering spot for Washington power brokers. Three men were seated around a table in the front room reserved for the real movers and shakers—Bebe Rebozo, Richard Danner, and Edward Morgan. They were there to exchange money for power on behalf of two men who were not there—Richard Nixon and Howard Hughes.
Rebozo was there as Nixon’s surrogate. The Cuban had long been his closest confidant, the perfect companion for a self-absorbed loner like Nixon, willing to sit in silence for hours and listen to his monologues or to sit for hours in mutual silence and just brood with him. Nixon spent more time alone with Rebozo than he did with his wife, and some White House aides would later make suggestive jokes about their strange intimacy. But the real key to their relationship was money. A millionaire bank president who had helped make Nixon himself a millionaire, Rebozo was now putting together a secret slush fund for the president that would eventually total at least several hundred thousand dollars. He was at Duke Zeibert’s to collect a bundle of cash from Hughes.
Danner was at the table because Nixon had personally asked him to find out if the Hughes money was available. A tall, thin former FBI agent from Miami who was now a Washington lawyer, Danner had known both Nixon and Rebozo longer than they had known each other. In fact, they first met when Nixon came down to Florida to recuperate from his first Senate race, and Danner took him fishing on Bebe’s boat. Danner had no connection to Hughes, but he was trusted, and he did know the third man at the table, Ed Morgan.
Morgan had the Hughes connection. Another former G-man now practicing law, he was an intimate of Robert Maheu’s, and had parlayed their friendship into a lucrative position as prime go-between for Hughes and the likes of Moe Dalitz, collecting six-figure “finder’s fees” from the billionaire’s Las Vegas acquisitions. A classic Washington operator who specialized in handling sensitive deals for people who could not afford to deal openly with each other, he represented Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, Maheu’s Mafia partner in the Castro plot, Johnny Roselli, and several other top mobsters, yet still managed also to traffic with leading politicians in both parties. As Maheu would later tell Hughes, in recommending that Morgan be put on a regular retainer, “You can check him out with anybody from Moe Dalitz to the President of the United States.”
Now, over breakfast, the three middlemen got down to business. Morgan had taken Danner’s request from Nixon and Rebozo to Maheu, and Maheu had taken it to Hughes. Everything was set. Hughes had approved a $100,000 contribution—$50,000 for the campaign, $50,000 for the candidate. Maheu had secured the cash. Morgan was prepared to make the transfer. Rebozo was ready to take delivery. Yet the meeting at Duke Zeibert’s ended unresolved. No money changed hands.
What followed was a clash of fear and greed, a comic opera of missed connections, with confused intermediaries stumbling over each other while the two prime movers remained offstage.
Rebozo instinctively backed away from Morgan. The more he reflected on their encounter and the more he recalled the impact of the earlier Hughes loan scandal, the more concerned he became about Morgan’s ties to Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, the very men who had exposed that transaction and kept Nixon out of the White House in 1960. No, Rebozo would not deal with Morgan, and he was having some second thoughts about Hughes.
Morgan, meanwhile, had also decided he wanted no part of this deal. Willing to play the bagman, he was not about to be left holding the bag. All through their meeting, he kept pressing Rebozo for some formal acknowledgment of the transaction. Rebozo instead kept assuring Morgan that he was extremely close to Nixon. An operator whose clients had a tendency to turn up dead in oil drums or disappear into trash compactors must have a sharp instinct for self-preservation. That instinct told Morgan it would be unwise to pass a wad of cash from a man like Hughes to a man like Nixon without getting a receipt. It was the kind of deal that could go sour.