I personally didn’t have the right to cross-examine, but the system worked – that is, with Ferguson asking questions for me. It worked not so much because of the advice I’d been given, but because of the method I adopted. Each night, as soon as the committee adjourned, I prepared a list of questions for the next session. I never flared up during those hearings. I kept absolutely in control of myself, but Brewster nearly went over the edge. He was yelling and pounding the table.
I went back to the hotel each night and I asked everybody to leave except Tom Slack, my lawyer, and he had to keep quiet unless I specifically asked him something. I worked all night preparing the questions. The point of it was that I didn’t know what Brewster’s answers were going to be. I couldn’t really cross-examine as a courtroom lawyer would. But I could make a pretty educated guess what he might answer. So I geared the next question to what I figured he would answer to the last one, and the results were amazing.
I’ll try to give you a small example. It was a little trap I set, and Brewster walked into it like a tame skunk on a string. In order to fathom the logic of the questioning, you need to know that Brewster was the one who pressed for the hearings to get started early, because he’d set up a timetable with Juan Trippe. There was even some doubt that the hearings would take place at all, but Brewster had his orders. He was pushing, and he bypassed Homer Ferguson when he announced it to the press. So first I asked Brewster a question: ‘Isn’t it true, Senator, that you yourself actually made the decision to start this hearing on July 28, the day it was begun?’
I knew that Brewster was going to deny it, pass the buck to Ferguson, and he was a long-winded son of a bitch and he was bound to get himself all tangled up in the denial. Which is exactly what he did. So then Ferguson read the next question. It was: ‘Then, Senator, if you yourself didn’t make the decision to hold this hearing, and if you left the decision up to Senator Ferguson, how do you explain the fact that Senator Ferguson was totally unaware that the decision to hold this hearing had actually been made until the day following the time when you announced the hearing to the press on July 24?’
Silence in the senate chamber. Brewster looks pale. Then he turns red. Then he looks down, then right, then left – then up – but God wasn’t there to help him and neither was Juan Trippe.
All Brewster could think of to say was, ‘I don’t know.’ He looked like a fool and he looked worse as it went on. A lot of the questions, since I couldn’t cross-examine him, were stuff like, ‘Do you still beat your wife?’ But that’s what they’d been trying to pull on me, and I figured two could play at that game.
The upshot of it was, when I finished with him he dragged his crippled ass out of Washington and whined to the newspapers that he’d been shot full of poison arrows, and Howard Hughes didn’t play fair like a red-blooded American boy should. What he really meant was that he hadn’t seen the color of my blood, which he wanted to spill into buckets and use to paint his campaign posters for the Republican vice presidential nomination, and this sort of irked him – he saw his political star sinking down the drain. He didn’t know the half of it.
After that he made a speech telling what a great upstanding senator he was, and I made a speech and said he had the reputation for being one of the greatest trick-shot artists in Washington. And then I blew my own horn a little because it had pretty much come down to a question that one of us was telling the truth and one of us was lying about the lunch in the Mayflower. I said I was from Texas, where a man’s word is his bond.
The upshot was that once Brewster got caught wetting his pants in this remote control cross-examination, he didn’t have the whip hand anymore. The galleries cheered every time I told him off, told him how much money I’d lost on those contracts and how hard I’d worked.
There was a point where they wanted Johnny Meyer to take the stand again, but or course he couldn’t be found. He was in St. Tropez. They asked me if I would make an effort to get him back to Washington.
I ducked it at first, and they kept badgering me, and when they asked me the last time I was fed up, and I said, ‘No, I don’t think I will.’ I knew it would make them see red, but I didn’t care. The United States Senate wasn’t going to make me jump through the hoop and I wanted them to goddamn well know it.
When I finally got out of Washington, Brewster told the newspapers that he’d only just begun to fight.
I waited a long time before I got in my licks. I couldn’t do anything about it right then, because Brewster had been reelected to the Senate in 1946, just a year before these hearings took place, and it was a six-year term. He didn’t come up for reelection again until 1952. But I gave him warning that I’d get him before he got me. I sent him a letter offering him a job as an actor at double the regular starting salary. I said that was because he’d very clearly demonstrated his acting ability in the Senate. It was a private letter, but it got to the press. The important part of it was my suggestion that he’d be wise to take the offer seriously and not turn down the job, because one of these days, when the people of Maine got wise to him, he was going to be out of work. That was a pretty clear warning, I figured.
I waited. I didn’t forget about him. I kept in touch. I sent him a telegram now and then to remind him that I existed, and I even sent him a birthday cake once from Texas, a fruit cake, to let him know that I hadn’t forgotten him.
And when the time came in 1952, I did what I considered was a patriotic duty. I felt that the man was a disgrace to the state of Maine and to everything that the United States of America stood for, or was supposed to stand for.
I had an agency working for me, the Carl Byoir Agency. They handled my public relations. I got together with them and told them what I wanted. What I wanted, specifically, was the defeat of Senator Brewster in the Maine primary election.
There was a man up in Maine named Frederick Payne, a publisher, and he was one of the two other candidates running against Brewster in the Republican primary. I decided that Payne was the only man who stood a chance against Brewster. Brewster was the favorite, but a favorite can only win when he’s got the right jockey riding him. I decided to ride Frederick Payne, and at the same time trample Owen Brewster into the ground. It was fairly simple. Noah Dietrich helped me a little, and the Byoir agency helped me, but what it took was just plain old cash.
I contributed sufficient sums to Mr. Payne’s campaign, and certain men were hired in Maine to do what had to be done. Mr. Brewster’s record in Congress was put before the general public, including his attempt to boil me in oil in 1947 and his offer to bribe me, and his association with Pan American. I don’t remember how much it cost, but it was under two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I would have spent a million if that’s what was required. However, Maine is not a very populous state, and $250,000 goes a long way.
When you’re dealing with a man like Owen Brewster you just tell the truth. Naturally it looks to the world like a smear campaign. We hired enough men and women to canvas door to door. We had the Girl Scouts out there campaigning against him – paid them off in cookies. No, that’s a joke, we didn’t pay off the Girl Scouts. They were happy to work for us. They knew Brewster for the cur he was.
And Brewster didn’t have a clue until the brick fell on his head. I enjoyed it thoroughly – in silence. An Italian friend of mine once said to me, ‘Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.’