Noah said, ‘Then let’s go into the bathroom and talk.’
We went into the bathroom and I sat down on the toilet seat. I looked around and there was a ventilator in the bathroom. I jumped up and said, ‘We can’t talk here, Noah. They’ve probably put a mike in the ventilator shaft.’
Noah probably thought, Howard’s going round the bend again. We took the elevator downstairs. He started to talk in the hotel lobby right by a potted palm. I said, ‘For pete’s sake, Noah, the easiest place in the world to put a microphone is in a potted palm!’
He thought that was all in the movies. I had to explain it happened in real life and every day. So we talked on the streets, which were safer.
Well, this was one of many occasions when Noah had to admit I was right. Because it came out later that the ventilator shaft in the bathroom had been bugged, and there was a microphone hidden in it. Years later some police officer in Washington admitted that he tapped my telephone and installed bugs all over the hotel suite, including the bathroom ventilator shaft, for a thousand bucks, at the instigation of none other than our upstanding senator from Maine, Owen Brewster.
All my life, ever since the telephones were tapped at Romaine street in 1931, I’ve been conscious of people eavesdropping, and since the advent of revolutionary sophisticated electronic devices there isn’t a place in the world that’s completely safe. There’s a type of microphone called a shotgun mike – people can stand a hundred yards away from you and point that microphone at you and hear every word you’re saying. Do you know that they have a microphone that can be fired from a gun? It’s in the shape of a dart. A man can stand 500 yards away, aim his rifle at the side of your house, fire that dart into the wall of your house, and that microphone sits there and picks up everything that’s being said inside. You think you’re talking privately, but they’re broadcasting it in the Hollywood Bowl. Do you know what people would give to listen in to some of my conversation? If they could invent a dart to shoot into my brain and find out what I was thinking, they’d do it, no matter what the damage.
After the incident at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, when I said a place was bugged, Noah believed it was bugged. I can smell a bug in any room, and I’m not talking about cockroaches. Not about cucarachas. You know that song? La Cucaracha. That’s one of my favorite songs.
15
THE SENATE INVESTIGATION of me was the biggest post-war circus of its kind. All they wanted to do was make page one of every newspaper in the country, day after day, and they succeeded. Even before the circus started in Washington there were a lot of statements being made to the newspapers, mainly by me, because I figured once they got me in the witness chair, where I didn’t have the right to question the cross-examiners, I’d be not just behind the eight ball, I’d be jammed right into the side pocket and they’d be ramming their senatorial cue sticks up my ass every chance they got. I’d be the donkey, not the lion.
What I was saying, principally, was what everyone who opened his eyes could see that Brewster and Trippe were in partnership and the whole thing was a smear campaign to ruin my reputation and take routes away from TWA, and put the pressure on me to merge with Pan American as the junior partner. And I got in my licks, because I let the world know that while Brewster was screaming about Johnny Meyer and my people entertaining Air Force people during the war, he, Brewster, was freeloading on my TWA planes. That took the wind out of his sails for a little while, but guys like Brewster, any politicians, have an answer for everything: a fountain of doubletalk.
I had to prepare this carefully, because I knew pretty well what was going to happen. I telephoned Homer Ferguson and told him I wasn’t going to jump through the hoop like a trained seal and fly to Washington on twenty-four hours’ notice. I also wrote an article for the papers in which I asked how come an earlier investigation of Pan American – they’d built some airports and socked the government hard for the costs – had been dropped by the committee, and why Brewster lied in public about the committee having no authority to investigate Pan Am because the airports were built outside the United States.
I still boil when I think about all this, and it was over twenty years ago. But my reputation, my personal and professional reputation, was on the line. This committee was like something out of the Spanish Inquisition. Every time you’d try to give them a straight answer, they’d interrupt you. Every time you were giving them answers they didn’t like, they’d call a recess. And every time one of them lied, or got the facts balled up, and I tried to challenge them for playing dirty pool, they’d yell, ‘You’re demeaning the dignity of this committee, Mr. Hughes! You stay at the back of the bus where you belong.’
At first they wouldn’t let me ask a single question. So the only thing to do was turn the tables on them. I decided to treat it like a military operation. Right away, before we got anywhere near the meat of the thing, I demanded the right to cross-examine the senators.
I kept hammering away at that until they were sick of hearing me say it. At the very beginning, before they could get their teeth into me the way they’d done to Johnny Meyer, I told them the story of Brewster propositioning me at the Mayflower. That hit the headlines. Then I said that, considering what had happened, Brewster should disqualify himself as chairman.
They didn’t like all that, and we wound up with a compromise, something I hadn’t foreseen. They agreed to let me submit a list of written questions to Brewster, which he would answer one by one, in the order they were submitted, and Ferguson would take the chair while this was going on.
Now, Claude Pepper, who I mentioned before, was a gentleman, and a Democrat, and he was on the committee. We had two private talks, once before the hearings began and once after the first day of my testimony. We met by the Lincoln Monument in a parked car. I remember some kids were playing softball on the grass there. One of the kids hit a foul ball and the ball rolled under my car. The kid came running over to get the ball, and Senator Pepper ducked his head and tried to hide under the dashboard. He was in such a hurry he hit his head and cut himself. He was afraid of being recognized.
I said, ‘Claude, don’t worry, these kids wouldn’t know a United States senator from the Washington dogcatcher.’
He hadn’t wanted to meet me there in the first place, but I said, ‘A public place is the safest. Nobody thinks of looking for two people like us in front of the Lincoln Monument.’
He gave me all the information he had about Owen Brewster: where Brewster was vulnerable. And when it came time for me to submit my list of questions to Brewster, Pepper told me in advance what sort of questions might put Brewster on the spot, and I told him what I was planning to do, and he said, ‘Yes, that’s good,’ or ‘No, he can slide out of that for such and such a reason.’ This senator, you understand, wasn’t on my payroll, he wasn’t someone I’d helped politically. This was being done out of his sense of fair play.
I was also filled in on some of the favors that Brewster had gotten from Bill McEvoy, who was a vice-president of Pan American and had taken Brewster to football games. I worked that into my questions too. I asked Brewster – Ferguson was asking the questions for me, but they were my questions – about McEvoy and the football games. He muttered around for a while, but he couldn’t very well deny it since he knew that two of the senators on the committee knew, and he wound up saying, ‘Yes, but I bought my own peanuts.’ This was a United States senator telling the world: ‘I bought my own peanuts.’