I had also taken a hell of a loss on the F-11. Both these contracts, which technically speaking I hadn’t delivered on – that is to say, the planes were not finished by the end of the war, and therefore of no immediate combat use to the military – involved a total outlay on the government’s part of about forty to fifty million dollars, which they considered money down the drain.
It wasn’t down the drain, for all the reasons I’ve given you, but that’s how they considered it, and even if they didn’t really believe it that’s what they were saying, loud and clear. Now that so-called forty- or fifty-million-dollar loss represented less than one percent of the entire amount the government lost during the war in unfulfilled military contracts. Less than one percent! And that total included manufacturers like Boeing and Republic and Lockheed, companies that had a Priority One for material. I had a Priority Five, which was the lowest you could get.
The total government loss came to over $6 billion. But there was more fuss made about my supposed fifty million than all the others put together, because they’d singled me out as the scapegoat and also, as I said, this investigation was political in origin, a way to crush Elliott Roosevelt and the Democratic administration.
Republic, for example, was supposed to make a recon ship called the XF-12. I brought this up at the hearings, but of course they didn’t want to hear about it. They just brushed it off, because Pan American had worked with Republic on the XF-12 and Pan American was too delicate to touch. The XF-12 plane cost the government about $30 million and it was never delivered. There was never even a static model. The first test model nosed over and cracked up a minute after it got off the runway. But nobody cared about that because Howard Hughes hadn’t built it. I can’t remember the figures on how much money was put into aircraft that never flew, but you can bet that it came to well over $600 million.
As far as my employee Johnny Meyer was concerned, Johnny had been doing, on a small scale, what representatives of every single company in the United States had been doing throughout the course of the war, and on a much larger scale than Hughes Aircraft and Toolco – which is, specifically, lavishly entertain Army officers and government officials.
These men came out to meet you for an afternoon of business discussion. You couldn’t just throw them out of your office at 5 P.M. and say, ‘See you tomorrow morning, boys. Have a good evening.’ You took them out, you provided for them. It was simple hospitality. The hypocrisy of these senators, who called each other ‘gentlemen’ – ‘will the gentleman from Missouri yield for a minute to the gentleman from Montana?’ – really, that’s exactly how these pompous asses talked to each other when they were mouthing off in the senate chamber – the hypocrisy of these men who were living off lobbyists and accepting favors right and left, money, women, free travel, free vacations, gifts, every week of the year, was beyond belief.
What about Judy Cook?
Judy Cook was a girl who worked for Johnny Meyer. She swam around in a pool. I always think of her as the girl I saw a hundred times. This pool had reflectors, so that it looked like there were a hundred Judy Cooks swimming through the pool.
She was an Olympic swimmer and an actress, and the whole Judy Cook incident was completely innocent. Johnny found her and brought her down to Palm Springs for a couple of parties. What Judy did on her own time was her own business.
Let’s get back to the senate committee. That was the important thing, not what happened or didn’t happen with Judy Cook in Palm Springs.
Before I testified they had a parade of witnesses. By the time I got to the hearings they’d raked everyone over the coals, including Henry Kaiser and Johnny Meyer. They were digging into the entire story of the HK-1 and the F-11. A full transcript of the hearings runs close to 300,000 typed pages. Reading it is enough to make a man want to overthrow the United States government. The verbal inanity of those senators is beyond belief, and the American taxpayer has to foot the bill to have all that garbage put into print in the Congressional Record. The vanity of these boring little men almost passes human understanding.
This committee wanted to know everything – they had nothing better to do. They hauled people away from important jobs, and from their families and their children.
Then Johnny Meyer got on the stand. Johnny was a publicity man: flashy, accommodating, and not very bright. He had a hell of a way with girls, but that’s about as far as his talents went.
I dreaded Johnny’s testifying, because they’d asked to see all of Johnny’s expense account records, and as Johnny admitted to me before he went to Washington, he had a habit of making them up quite a while after the actual event and skimming a few dollars on the side. I didn’t mind that. He had to live.
But what mattered was that these records were not entirely accurate, and Johnny knew it, and I knew it. I’ve always had a kind of soft spot in my heart for Johnny. He was a congenial dope. I heard that at his birthday dinner a few years ago in Los Angeles his three ex-wives came to the party and toasted him. I don’t mean over a slow fire, I mean with champagne. That’s an eloquent tribute.
Before he went to Washington to face the committee I told Johnny, ‘There’s only one thing you can do that’ll work. Go up before those senators and tell them the truth. Tell them that you made up the records long after the actual dinner at the Mocambo, or at ‘21.’ You’re human. They won’t send you to prison for it.’
He tried, but they didn’t let him get a word in edgewise. They flattened him. He was like a jackrabbit on the road, in front of the lights of a truck – he kept running and dodging, but he didn’t have sense enough to get off the road, and they just ran him down like a goddamn dumb jackrabbit.
He testified for days. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it, and I winced when I read reports of the testimony. Every word that came out of that man’s mouth put me further behind the eight ball. He wasn’t just Johnny Meyer sitting up there getting slaughtered, he was Howard Hughes’ right-hand man, the man who was taking Howard Hughes’ stooge, Elliott Roosevelt, out to dinner, and giving Elliot’s wife black market-nylon stockings as a present from Howard Hughes.
The more he babbled, the blacker it looked. They got on to other people, but they told him to stay in town, they wanted him back on the witness stand at a later date.
Johnny called me and said, ‘Howard, what am I going to do? I’m making a mess of this.’
‘You sure are. You’ve got to get out of town, Johnny.’
‘Where can I go?’
‘I’ll take care of that,’ I said.
I got hold of a TWA plane and I put Johnny on it, sent him off to Europe and said, ‘Go to the French Riviera and rent a diving helmet. Go to the bottom of the Mediterranean and stay there until I call you.’
That’s not something I’m ashamed of. It would have been totally unfair for Johnny to have reappeared on the stand until I’d had my say. They were making hamburger out of him. They were chopping him up, without benefit of onion, and cooking him to a fare-thee-well. And it wasn’t getting us any closer to the truth, because the truth lay back there in the Mayflower Hotel in the words of that viper, Senator Brewster.
When we got to Washington the second time, for the hearings, I stayed in the Carlton Hotel with Noah and my lawyers. Noah walked into my room the first day and started to talk to me about what was going on. I said, ‘Noah, shut up. I haven’t even searched the room yet. You can bet your sweet ass they’ve got it bugged.’