I don’t say that they’re not useful. My companies use them in all our operations, but we don’t use them to make decisions. Many of the finest businessmen I know had no more than high-school educations, and in many fields they were totally ignorant. They rose to the top of the business world because they were intelligent gamblers, able to act intuitively and swiftly, far more intelligently than any computer.
Do you think if you hadn’t inherited Toolco, you’d still be the billionaire that you are today?
Of course not. But I still would have become a pilot, and I would have turned my energies at some point toward aircraft design. I would have made a lot of money at it. That was built into my genetic makeup. I don’t know if I would have become a major figure – what I am now, in an odd sense – but I sure as hell would have created something of value.
I’m a creator, and I’m proud of it. I consider myself a man much maligned, a human being who has made a lot of big splashes but has missed the mark. My own fault. Life is a struggle, and the tools we’ve got are our muscles, our brains, our imaginations, our will to achieve something, and our ability to sniff out danger – that last is a sixth sense which we share with animals. If you don’t use those tools wisely, and you fail, you have no one else to blame. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ I know that quote well. And not only underlings, but overlings who have missed the mark. In the darker moments, that’s how I see myself. If this book has any value, I hope it will have the value of showing such a man. You can’t live your life over again, so you might as well learn from it and make an example of it for the people who come after you.
25
I’VE MENTIONED RICHARD NIXON’S name several times to you, and this is as good a time as any to tell the story of my involvement with him.
I want to say at the outset that I have nothing against the man personally, and in no sense is it my intention to cut him out of the pack of politicians as a particular target. This just happens to be something that happened in my life, and therefore I feel the obligation to tell the tale.
I’ve often believed that every man has the family he deserves, and Dick Nixon is no exception. He’s got the biggest jerk for a brother that you can imagine. Early in the 1950s Donald Nixon was running a glorified hamburger stand in the Nixons’ home town, Whittier, California. The restaurant featured the Nixonburger. That was nothing more than a hamburger, and not a very good one at that.
Don Nixon would have done better running a soup kitchen for the Salvation Army, or any other nonprofit organization, because, Nixonburger and all, he was up over his ears in debt. His food suppliers were dunning him and he couldn’t even pay his light bills. In 1957, soon after Dick had been elected Vice-President under Eisenhower, Don, with this white elephant of a hamburger joint on his hands, needed $205,000 to bail himself out. And no bank or legitimate loan institution in its right mind was going to lend two hundred and five thousand United States dollars on a corner candy store operation like that.
Dick Nixon would have given his brother the money, I’m sure, but he didn’t have a plugged nickel at that time. Politicians make money after they get elected, not before.
It’s important to understand that I didn’t get wind of his brother being in trouble and make an offer to Nixon. I didn’t know who the hell his brother was, and I cared even less. Nixon specifically asked me for the money. Clark Clifford, my lawyer, the man who had worked for Truman when he was president, called from Washington on a secure phone and spelled out the situation. Dick Nixon needed money to save his brother’s neck and he wanted it from me.
There was no shilly-shallying about this, nothing cute. It was a direct request for a loan, and it was also pretty clearly an indirect request that the loan be a permanent one.
Why did he come to you?
We had met before and he had me on his list for an emergency. This was the emergency. I had a number of things pending before government agencies at the time – I’ll get to those in a minute – and I figured $205,000 worth of juice ought to grease the skids. I agreed to provide the money.
The only security the Nixon family had for the loan was a vacant lot owned by their mother in Whittier, California. They wanted to build a filling station there. As a matter of fact, I own that filling station right now. I had to take it over, much to my annoyance, because it’s a pain in the ass. A filling station has no place in the Hughes Empire. But at least I could gas up my car whenever I went to Whittier, and it didn’t cost me a nickel.
I had to get this money to Donald Nixon sub rosa, because it wouldn’t do, naturally, for the papers to associate a Howard Hughes loan with Dick Nixon’s brother. They might think I was looking for favors from the government, especially since Dick was being widely called ‘Tricky Dick’ and had just barely saved his political skin when he was campaigning with Eisenhower in 1952. You way remember the famous Checkers speech that he made, when he had to explain why these big businessmen in California had him on their payroll at the same time he was a U.S. senator. That’s when he cried on television. I always thought he had an onion in his handkerchief.
Anyhow, Noah Dietrich tried to kill the whole idea of the loan. Noah was a rockribbed Republican but he sensed that Nixon might be a little careless about covering up, and this thing could come out as easily as the campaign-contribution thing and we all would have a hard time explaining it the second time around.
Noah was so firm about it that he convinced me it was a mistake.
I said, ‘All right, but you’d better go talk to Nixon personally. Explain our position. I don’t need him as an enemy.’
Noah went to Washington and saw Nixon. The appointment was in Nixon’s office, the vice-presidential suite. He and Noah had lunch together. Noah began to express his fears, but Nixon said that if any of it came out, well, tough titty, he could handle it. He’d been accused of worse things in his life. He said to Noah, ‘Don needs the money. I put my family ahead of my career.’
He also dropped a little bombshell on me, via Noah. He said he wanted an additional $200,000, so that his brother could go into another business.
Noah asked him what that business might be, and Nixon said, ‘I’ll work that out.’
When Noah told him that he didn’t believe that Mr. Hughes would want to put up any more money than the sum originally agreed on, if even that, Nixon said, ‘Tell Mr. Hughes I’m going to be in U.S. politics for a long time, and there are a great many favors I can do for him over a great many years.’
Noah reported this to me and said, ‘Don’t do it, Howard. He’s slippery.’
‘Yes, and loyal to his idiot brother, and thoroughly dishonest. I can use a man like that. We’ll give him the money.’
We worked it out and eventually resorted to various methods to get the money to Don Nixon. The full four hundred thousand. In for a penny, in for a pound, as the Brits say.
What did Nixon do for you?
The most important thing was a problem with the CAB, the Civil Aeronautics Board. They wouldn’t let TWA deal directly with Toolco, because I owned them both. That squabble had been going on for twelve years and caused me no end of aggravation. A couple of weeks after the loan was made, the CAB lifted that restriction.