Proof is only proof when you’re in the mood to believe it’s proof. I think the newspapers didn’t want to be accused of a last-minute smear campaign against poor Dick Nixon, who had been knocked from pillar to post already by Jack Kennedy. Maybe they figured it wasn’t dignified. The only guy who would touch it was Drew Pearson, and even he said, ‘Not until after the election.’
I watched from afar. Although Pearson and the newspapers wouldn’t touch the story, they did make a few inquiries to the Nixon people, and Nixon panicked. He must have convinced himself that he’d better scotch the snake before it bites. After all, he was paranoid, and he didn’t know the newspapers didn’t have proof or were reluctant to print it. He knew it was true and he couldn’t be sure the newspapers didn’t know it was true.
Robert Finch, his campaign manager, came roaring out and made a statement to the press that there had been a personal loan to Donald Nixon by his old friend Frank Waters, Arditto’s partner, and Howard Hughes and Toolco had nothing to do with it, and Dick Nixon hadn’t known anything about it, he was pure as the driven snow. They called it a last-minute smear attempt on the part of the Democrats.
Drew Pearson blew his top at this hypocrisy and decided not to wait until after the election, and he broke the story with all the details – in fact, quite a few more details than the accountant and McInerney had supplied him with.
That came about because I had come to the conclusion over the years that Nixon was not very bright. Cunning and wildly ambitious, but not intelligent. Not eccentric. Common. Vulgar. I’d watched him on television and he always looked to me like a vacuum-cleaner salesman who just knocked on your door and is trying to sell you an out-of-date model. I had decided that Jack Kennedy was the better man. I was fond of the Kennedys, especially Bobby, and I thought the country needed a president who didn’t have a brother who made Nixonburgers. So the rest of the details leaked to Drew Pearson. Not all, not everything I’ve told you, but more than the file showed. Someone whispered in Mr. Pearson’s ear where to look. Mr. Pearson looked, and Mr. Pearson found.
Finch tried to deny Pearson’s accusation, but he had to admit, finally, that the money had come from Toolco. However, Richard Nixon hadn’t known anything about it and no favors had been done in return for it, which any human being with even a quarter of a brain could see was a blatant lie.
There was a hell of a fuss. This was a week or two before the election – a touch and go situation, if you recall. Nixon was already in trouble because he hadn’t done well in the TV debates against Kennedy – too much five-o’clock-shadow, they said.
Some people say that loan cost Dick Nixon the presidential election. I never saw myself as a power behind the scenes in Washington, but I did my bit. Every businessman need friends in high places. I did my bit, and I saw to it that Jack Kennedy knew that I did it.
Did you tell Pearson about the second Cayman Island loan?
No one has ever known about that until now.
Can you give me some more details?
I’ve probably told you too much already. If that ever came out, Nixon would probably be impeached. I’m pretty sure that taking a bribe, even though he was only Vice President when he took it, fits the founding fathers’ definition of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’
But it’s going to come out in your autobiography.
Let the chips fall where they may.
26
I’VE ALREADY TOLD you about the beginning of my involvement with TWA. But it was a three-act drama, and now I’m going to tell you Act Two. I had dozens of lawyers and advisers on this case who were milking me dry, telling me: ‘Don’t do this, Howard,’ or, ‘If you do that, Howard, the jig is up.’ Night and day they nagged at me. I felt like one of those experimental rats that keeps getting new charges of electricity shoved up his ass no matter which part of the cage he moves to: ‘Let’s see how long he can stand it, before he goes nuts.’
This all started in 1954, although the real crisis came later and lasted six years, from 1957 to 1963. If I hadn’t loved that airline so much, I would have walked out and said, ‘Let it go down the drain.’ It took ten years off my life. What it did to my marriage and my personal effort to get my head clear, can’t be measured in years or any other form of measurement. Of course in the end I have no one else but myself to blame for allowing it to happen, but you never see that when you’re in the thick of battle.
The man I got to replace Jack Frye was Ralph Damon, who at that time ran American Airlines. He’d done good things with American, but they weren’t going anyplace then and TWA was. So I made it known to him that I was interested in his meeting with me, with a view to his becoming president of TWA. This has to be done carefully, because it’s not considered good form to go around propositioning the president of one airline to take over the presidency of another. Damon had to sneak away from his offices, and I had to take extreme security precautions at the time. As a result, Damon sat in a hotel room for four days in Beverly Hills waiting for me. I didn’t know where he was and I didn’t know when he was supposed to arrive, and he knew even less about my whereabouts. When I didn’t show up he got annoyed. I don’t remember who he was in touch with then, but he told them he never wanted to hear from me again.
Of course that wasn’t true. We arranged another meeting, this time in Houston. I checked into the Rice Hotel under another name. But I forgot to tell Ralph Damon the details. So he checked into another hotel in Houston and we spent two days without either of us knowing the other was there or how to get in touch.
I was there in my room catching up on my sleep. You know, I can go up to forty-eight hours without sleep, but then every now and then I need a long stretch in bed, a good hard bed with a board. I can sleep for twenty-four hours. It doesn’t happen often, but it happened then, and while it was happening Ralph Damon was running all over Houston like a chicken with its head cut off, and finally he left.
He said a second time, ‘I never want to see that fucking Howard Hughes again.’
The point, of course, was that he had never seen me.
I never did get to meet him. Eventually I got Noah to arrange things, because Noah operated in a more conventional manner. Noah offered him the job and we signed him up for five years.
Ralph Damon was a fine president. He was able to act on my decisions as few other men have. TWA was the first airline to come up with the idea of the two-class service. That was my idea. I got hold of Ralph on the phone and I said, ‘People are snobbish. If we divide that plane into two sections, quite a few passengers are going to pay a lot more money just to ride forward in the first class section separated from the cattle in the back, and the people in the back are going to feel they’ve got a bargain. It’s a win-win situation. Sales will go up.’
Ralph grasped the concept, and did it. That put TWA on the map again as a pioneer. And that’s become the standard system for airline passenger traffic.
But I tried to stay away from Damon because he was an excitable man. I heard once, and I have no reason to doubt it, that after a telephone conversation we’d had, he cried himself to sleep. I felt terrible about that, because I don’t think I said anything to hurt his feelings. Maybe he had difficulty that time in interpreting my suggestions.