Brewster lost the primary, but not by much, which should show you that if I hadn’t pumped all that money in there, he would have won. He lost by under 2,000 votes.
That ended the career of Senator Owen Brewster. I’m proud to say, after all these years, that I was the man responsible for his exit from public life.
16
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE first round of the Senate investigations, I decided to test-fly the Hercules. It happened on a Sunday, I remember very clearly, because someone asked me if I’d gone to church to pray.
Nobody thought the flying boat would fly. I had said I’d leave the country if it didn’t.
We trucked the Hercules down from its various hangars to San Pedro, part by part on the highway. I had a dozen trucks moving the fuselage, the wings and the tail assembly. Took a day or two to get it down there – they had to disconnect the overhead power lines all along the route so she could pass under them. That cost me a pretty penny, but most of the mayors of those Southern California cities were already on my payroll, so it didn’t break me.
Huge crowds lined the highway: Barnum and Bailey had come to town. And when we got her down to Long Beach and tucked her away in the hangar; we still had a lot of work to do.
This was final assembly, and suddenly I realized the controls wouldn’t work. They were manual controls, and they weren’t powerful enough. This was an engineering oversight on my part. I’d considered the problem and I thought I’d licked it, but I was wrong. So I invented what was probably the first power-steering device, and installed it in the Hercules. That’s what I mean, you see, when I say her value as a laboratory was incalculable. I made no secret about how I’d done it, and that information was snapped up by all the aircraft and automobile manufacturers, and the car you’re driving today uses the same principle.
Eventually I was ready to test the ship on the water. She was winched from the graving dock, checked for leaks, and she was ready. Some newspaperman had the nerve to ask me if I was taking it down there to load it on a barge and dump it beyond the three-mile-limit. That’s a guy I almost hit. There was a big crowd there when I finally decided to have that test run. There was a Navy cruiser, excursion boats, hundreds of other boats and even some aircraft which I told to get out of the way.
I hadn’t planned to fly it. They wanted me to fly it. They wanted a show. ‘FLY IT, HOWARD HUGHES, OR LEAVE THE COUNTRY,’ one newspaper said in a headline.
I decided to take a few taxi runs on the water. I checked the engines. Dave Grant, one of my engineers, was with me, and a government observer, George Haldeman, and some reporter whose name I can’t remember. Matter of fact he was the only newspaperman who stayed with me on the ship.
I took her across San Pedro Bay and opened up all eight throttles – we were probably doing close to a hundred knots by then. There’s a certain feeling you have when you’re at the controls of an airplane, and that was no ordinary airplane. That was like being at the controls of the Queen Elizabeth, except she was skimming across the bay at a hundred knots. There was a feeling of power and accomplishment, because all this was happening, you realize, after I’d gotten back from Washington and had been through the fires of hell. A lot of people said I was testing the Hercules in order to get good publicity for myself, make myself a national hero before the second congressional session took place. But I’d cracked eggs over Brewster’s head the first time and I knew I could do it again. I knew he’d wind up smelling like a henhouse.
But you did get publicity, didn’t you? Wasn’t there a Hughes for President Club at that time?
A lot of them, all over the country. You don’t think I paid any attention to that, do you? Imagine me as President of the United States. The country would grow rich, we wouldn’t have any more national debt, the Dow would jump to the moon, the government would actually make a profit. How would politicians thrive? Someone would have to assassinate me.
But there were more serious offers – serious and ridiculous. Both the state chairman of the Republican Party and the state chairman of the Democratic Party in California came to me and asked me to run on their ticket for governor. I’ll bet I was the only man in history beside Eisenhower who was asked by both parties to run for the same office. I told them I had more serious things to do than be governor of California. That’s for guys like that overcooked ham, Reagan.
All right, let me go on – I want to tell you how I felt when I was at the controls of the Hercules. I did a couple of taxi runs, and then a third. And then I hadn’t planned it, but I said to myself, ‘She’s ready, she’s aching to go, and they’re all here for a show. I’ll pander to the vulgar curiosity of the mob this one time, and that’s the end.’
I eased back on the throttle. She never hesitated. She took off. We didn’t gain very much altitude, because the ship wasn’t ready for that yet. And I didn’t fly her very far, maybe a mile at the most, before I set her down. I wasn’t proving to myself that the ship could fly. I knew she would fly if I wanted her to. I was proving to myself that I didn’t care one way or the other what people felt. They wanted a show – I gave them one. I felt great. I felt a moment of exhilaration that comes only a few times in a lifetime.
And it meant I didn’t have to leave the country.
Of course I wanted to fly the plane again, in private, but not until we had ironed out a few kinks and I had run tests on her. Then the second round of the Senate investigations interfered and the whole goddamn thing was put off.
Then came the first of several incidents which I have never cleared up, in my mind, to my own satisfaction. I’m not accusing anyone specifically here, because I never could find a clue. I will tell you this. Sometime in 1948 or 1949 various executives of some of the top metal producing companies in this country – I mean Alcoa, Reynolds, and Kaiser – approached me. They wanted to see the Hercules. It had flown and they were full of praise for what a wonderful job I’d done, and they said they’d like to look at it. I took them at their word. You understand, the boat’s made of wood – of duramold – and I thought, they’ve seen the light.
They came, and I personally took them through the hangar, which by then I had leased from the City of Long Beach. They were impressed. And then they left.
We had excellent security on the HK-1 but nothing compared to the security that existed afterward or that exists now, because on the next inspection of that boat, we discovered broken ribs, smashed ribs, all throughout the after section and inside the tail assembly. A broken rib in a man is set by a doctor and that’s all there is to it, but any airplane of that size – remember the tail assembly alone was ten stories high – is another story. But once we found the broken ribs and the tail assembly, naturally we checked her from stem to stern. We found bent propellers as well, and a bent propeller is not something you can see unless you have a practiced eye. If I hadn’t spotted them and if I had flown the plane again, it would have been the end of Howard Hughes.
I don’t want you to infer from this that I suspected a plot against me personally. In this instance, no. In my view this was a plan to destroy the Hercules, and whereas I say my suspicions have never been confirmed, I strongly suspect these metals people who came to look her over, because the success of your wooden flying boat would have wiped out the metal industries’ role in airplane construction. But I couldn’t prove it, then or now, though I hired half a dozen ex-OSS guys to go through the files of Reynolds and those other companies.