“When Nixon ran for President I told you I wanted to go just as far as necessary to have some voice in the new administration,” he concluded in bleak despair, “but I just have no assurance at all as to what the future holds.”
The new president was turning out to be something of a disappointment. And the real shock was yet to come.
Hughes, in fact, had grown quite disillusioned with Nixon long before most of the nation. Not over Cambodia or Kent State, not over Vietnam or the Christmas bombing, certainly not because he knew that Nixon was, of course, a crook. No, Howard Hughes was appalled by Nixon’s first major act of statesmanship.
In March 1969, less than two months after the inauguration, Hughes expressed his pained disappointment in the new president.
“The news just reported that Nixon will go ahead with the ABM,” he wrote Maheu, full of dismay. “Bob, this is an awful mistake. It would perhaps be to my best interest selfishly to do nothing and let the system proceed, but it is a ghastly mistake for the country and for Nixon, whom I want to grow in stature.”
Hughes voiced his sad disillusion in the high moral tones of a James Reston or a Walter Lippmann, without mentioning his true objection to the antiballistic missile system.
Building the ABM meant big money for Hughes the defense contractor, but it also meant more big bomb blasts in Nevada, the nuclear nightmare Hughes thought had ended with the election of a man who “knows the facts of life.”
One month later, Hughes’s disappointment turned to shocked outrage when White House communications director Herb Klein made a speech in Las Vegas backing the nuclear tests.
“Who is this bastard Klein?” Hughes demanded. “I am really seriously worried about the Nixon administration’s apparent intention of turning loose all the expensive forces of the government publicity machine to bring public opinion into an attitude favoring the test program.
“This is shocking, Bob,” he continued. “I always have assumed that you had the Nixon administration committed to our side. It is urgent that something be done to bring this Nixon Nuclear Test Campaign to your well known screeching halt.”
Hughes, in fact, was so shocked that he could hardly believe Nixon’s ingratitude:
“Sometimes I wonder if Nixon is aware of the donation, which I hope was made, or did somebody possibly forget to make it?”
No one had forgotten. Even as Hughes wrote his pained memo, Bebe Rebozo and Richard Danner were finally arranging the long-delayed $100,000 donation to Nixon’s private slush fund.
Danner was now working for Hughes, hired on shortly after the inauguration to be his Nixon connection. Danner was in regular contact with Rebozo, who was now quite comfortably handling his role as the president’s Hughes connection. Several times a month, Danner visited his old friend in Key Biscayne or Washington, and Rebozo often flew into Las Vegas, sometimes on a private Hughes jet.
“On several occasions we transported Rebozo when the White House did not want a record of his movements,” Maheu reported, making clear Nixon’s continued fears of being publicly linked to Hughes.
But if fear had overcome greed before the election, greed overcame all as Nixon settled in at the Oval Office. By the spring of 1969, Rebozo was needling Danner about Hughes’s apparent favoritism toward the Democrats. Somehow the president had learned of the $100,000 Hughes had given Hubert Humphrey, and Rebozo wondered why there had been no contribution to Nixon.
Maheu sent a reminder of the $50,000 donated to Nixon campaign committees, but Rebozo dismissed that money, and said it was “not comparable” to what Hughes had done for Humphrey.
Maheu, who had delivered $50,000 in cash to Humphrey in the backseat of a limousine, understood. He immediately offered Rebozo the $50,000 that had been similarly earmarked for Nixon but never actually passed. Rebozo turned it down.
But he kept right on needling Danner about the Humphrey money, softening him up before finally asking for the Hughes cash he had twice spurned. Not the $50,000 originally discussed, but twice that amount, $100,000.
Everyone called it a “campaign contribution,” but there was no campaign, and Rebozo made it clear that the contribution should be delivered directly to him—in cash—rather than to any campaign committee.
The request for $100,000 came to Hughes as he was battling Nixon over the ABM, fighting the president for votes in a closely divided Senate. It was the first major congressional battle of the new administration, and one that pitted Nixon against his hated foe Teddy Kennedy, who was leading the opposition.
So Nixon coupled his request for the money with a plea that Hughes back off from the ABM fight. “The President sent an emissary to ask me if we could relent some of the pressures on the ABM program,” Maheu informed his boss, shortly after Rebozo visited Las Vegas late in May.
Hughes replied in kind. He readily approved the payoff, sending word of his benevolence along with a twelve-page meticulously drafted and closely reasoned appeal to Nixon that he drop his support of the ABM. The memo would help the president to recognize his “ghastly mistake,” but if Nixon failed to “grow in stature,” surely he was still a man who knew “the facts of life.”
“Bob,” wrote Hughes, “you asked me recently if I had any thought as to what reply might be given to Mr. Nixon on the ABM question.
“Bob, I want you to tell Pres. Nixon this: I am aware of the many, many conflicting viewpoints that have been pressed through to him from right and from left. However, there is one very important difference between a message from me on this subject and the many persuasive inputs which I am sure he is receiving constantly from others.
“This is the difference:
“1. My technical information is absolutely accurate.
“2. My personal monetary selfish interest would be benefited in every way by an immediate, definite, final ABM go-ahead, with no further after-thoughts.”
Having established his credentials and his altruism, Hughes presented his arguments—very similar to views Nixon had already secretly received from former President Eisenhower.
“I do not argue in any slightest degree the wisdom or imprudence of spending X billion dollars for an increased defense capability,” wrote Hughes. “I argue only that the proposed ABM is not the way to obtain the maximum defense for the X billion.
“It is logical to assume that if the U.S. builds an ABM, then the enemy will do likewise…. Any ICBM’s saved from destruction by the ABM would not be completely effective, since they would have to run the gauntlet of enemy ABM’s before they could reach their targets.
“Now, on the other hand, if the same X billion dollars were expended for an increased fleet of Polaris Submarines, it would be an expenditure for a known and proven product, instead of an experimental, unproven, completely unpredictable weapon system of fantastic complexity.
“The U.S. will never know, really, whether the ABM will work until a real, true enemy missile is actually launched and in flight on its deadly course through the upper regions of space headed for its target in the U.S.
“No matter how it is tested, it will never really be known whether or not it is going to work.”
Hughes concluded his ABM memo without mentioning the $100,000, but he had Danner deliver it to Rebozo with word that $50,000 was available immediately and that a like bundle of cash would soon follow.
“Danner is meeting with his friend Rebozo on the ABM situation in Washington, D.C. on Monday,” Maheu reported late in June. “Depending on the results of that meeting, we may decide, subject to your approval, to have a personal meeting with the President.”