My point is that if you know this – and I began to realize it when the investigations got under way – you know that it can be up to you whether you’re going to be the lion or the donkey. And you can bet your last chip that if you don’t choose your part first, then the other guy is going to choose his, and if he’s got any brains or experience, or even peasant cunning, he’ll choose to be the lion.
So you can’t give him that opportunity. You can feel around a bit because maybe before you go roaring in you have a moment to see if he’s a natural donkey, or if he thinks you’re a natural lion, in which case he’ll start out as the donkey without your having to do anything, and you can just be a kind of, well…
A friendly lion.
That’s a nice idea.
Are you saying that you were the lion in the Senate investigations?
I’ll tell the story and you be the judge.
This whole thing goes back a long way in time, and it’s involved with politics and big money. The man who was out to pillory me was Owen Brewster, commonly known as the Senator from Pan American Airways. He was a Republican from Maine and he’d been lobbying for Pan American down in Washington for years. He was a close friend of Juan Trippe, president of Pan Am, and Sam Pryor, vice president of Pan Am. Trippe tried to keep his hands clean on this, as much as he could – Sam Pryor did his dirty work and was Brewster’s contact.
The other chief honcho on the investigative committee was Senator Homer Ferguson from Michigan. Ferguson wasn’t as bad as Brewster, but he was bad enough, and he was a longwinded son of a bitch. What he enjoyed most was strutting before the cameras. And there was Senator Joe McCarthy of later fame, although he kept his mouth shut most of the time during these hearings. He was learning his trade. Harry Truman had been the head of that committee and then they gave it to Brewster. There were a few Democrats on the committee, including Claude Pepper from Florida. Pepper was a gentleman. I don’t remember the others’ names, but their faces are etched into my mind in indelible ink.
It all started when Juan Trippe got the bright idea to wipe out the competition. Pan Am was going to be the only airline flying from the United States to Europe and other foreign points. This was going to be a great measure of economy and efficiency, and all it required was for TWA and the other airlines to step down and get merged. It was called then the Community Airline Bill, sponsored by Senator Brewster.
Juan Trippe and Brewster came to tell me this personally, in Palm Springs, California, just before the war. It had been in the wind for several years and was being discussed between the various owners of the major airlines, of which I was one. Trippe came out and put the proposition to me.
But of course my terms were that I’d be right up there on top with Mr. Trippe. That was not acceptable. Mr. Trippe and Senator Brewster didn’t like the idea of playboy Howard Hughes horning in on their monopoly.
So the negotiations fell through.
The other part of the background was that this was 1947 and the committee, which was meant to be investigating the national defense program, had been jogging along, raising a little ruckus here and a little rumpus there, but fundamentally just shooting at clay pigeons. During the war the two major political parties buried the hatchet, decided to fight the Japs and the Germans instead of each other, but after the war they went back to the old business of cutting each other’s throats. Elections were coming up. The best thing the Republican Party could think of to win that election was to discredit the late President of the United States, Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been my friend, by discrediting his son, Elliot Roosevelt, also my friend. Tar the father with the son’s brush.
Senator Brewster had political ambitions as well. Harry Truman had previously been chairman of this committee. He jumped from there to Vice President of the United States, and from there to the presidency. I think Owen Brewster saw himself climbing the same ladder. In fact it came out later that he had been promised the vice-presidential nomination of the Republican Party by none other than Juan Trippe. Trippe was a shrewd man, with influence, and Senator Brewster would have profited very handsomely. He could have given the old one-two punch to Roosevelt Sr. and Roosevelt Jr., and if he could have decked me at the same time, that really would have put a feather in his cap.
We knew all this beforehand. The committee sent an investigator out to California, a man named Francis Flanagan, to look over our records.
Flanagan was indiscreet. He said to Noah, without batting an eyelash, ‘Don’t kid yourself, the purpose of this committee is to get Elliot Roosevelt.’
‘Mr. Flanagan,’ Noah said, ‘I don’t care whether you get Elliot Roosevelt or not’ – Noah was a Republican – ‘but if Howard Hughes is your whipping boy, then you’re going to be doing an injustice to a man who doesn’t deserve it.’
Flanagan paid no attention, because he had his orders from the top. And pretty soon came the famous incident at the Mayflower Hotel.
Brewster had been thumping the drums for days, weeks, about how he was going to drag me before the committee and prove that not only hadn’t I delivered any planes during the war, but that I’d profited illegally. And also that I’d curried favor with Elliot Roosevelt, who was in the photo reconnaissance division, and that Johnny Meyer, a public-relations man for me, had bribed Colonel Roosevelt and various other important officials with sex and nylon stockings.
His intentions were public knowledge. I knew it, the newspapers knew it, the world knew it. The pressure was on me – because no matter how much I tried to keep in touch with what was going on in my company, I couldn’t know whether the office boys were selling black-market stockings or what the hell was going on in every sphere. And if you dig deep enough in every man’s life, you’ll come up with dirt. Frankly, I felt a little uncomfortable about going before that committee.
That’s when our friend Mr. Brewster came to me at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. I was staying there with Noah Dietrich and my Washington lawyer, Tom Slack.
We had lunch in my suite, and Brewster said, ‘Mr. Hughes, if you’ll go along with Mr. Trippe and the Community Airline Bill’ – in other words, if you’ll bend down in public and kiss Pan Am’s ass, and agree for TWA to suck hind tit – ‘we’ll call off the investigation.’
Don’t think that deals and demands in Washington are subtle things. Maybe that’s the way you’d write about them in a novel, but in real life there’s no beating around the bush. The man comes up and says, ‘I want you to do this, and this is what I’ll give you in return, and you’ve got forty-eight hours to decide.’
It didn’t take me forty-eight hours. I told Brewster to go to hell. Right then and there I made up my mind that I was going to face this committee, that I was going to clear myself, my company, Elliot Roosevelt, and everyone who was associated with me, and that I was going to wipe away the mud that man was flinging at us with both hands.
The first point of truth is that there had been no war profiteering on our part. I had lost a small fortune on my war contracts. I think I’ve mentioned that by 1947, out of my own pocket, I’d laid out $7 million for the construction of the Hercules. That was only the beginning. By 1951 I’d spent another ten million, and the fact is that the government had never put up the whole eighteen million they’d promised me. I had to sue the RFC for the difference. Not that I expected to get it, it was more a point of honor, and to set the record straight.