Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [104]
A nice touch. Now for a strong finish.
“If the A.E.C. technicians did not consider the nuclear explosions at the Las Vegas Test site to be of marginal safety, then why did they make a firm agreement with me, 11 months ago, to move the large explosions … to some more remote place?” Hughes demanded, reminding Johnson of the nonexistent broken treaty, assuming the stance of an outraged sovereign.
“I think Nevada has become a fully accredited state now and should no longer be treated like a barren wasteland that is only useful as a dumping place for poisonous, contaminated nuclear waste material, such as normally is carefully sealed up and dumped in the deepest part of the ocean.
“The A.E.C. technicians assure that there will be no harmful consequences, but I wonder where those technicians will be 10 or 20 years from now.
“There are some sheep lying dead in nearby Utah.”
Ah, the martyred flock. It was the perfect clincher.
The four-page letter had taken Hughes all night and half the day to write and rewrite, and now, with the dreaded blast less than twenty-four hours away, there was no time to send it to the White House.
Instead, one of the Mormons dictated it over the telephone to Washington attorney Thomas Finney—law partner of Johnson’s newly appointed Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford—who hand-delivered Hughes’s impassioned plea to the president’s office.
Lyndon Johnson had problems of his own. Less than a month earlier he had been forced to abdicate, solemnly telling a startled nation: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
The withdrawal had brought him no real peace. It was not merely that Eugene McCarthy continued to sweep the primaries, or even that the hated Bobby Kennedy had announced his long-dreaded decision to claim his brother’s throne. Everything, at home and abroad, seemed to be in disarray. The war in Vietnam had been shattered by the Tet offensive, the Great Society had been undermined by the cost of the war, the American economy was in danger, the world gold market was in collapse, the nation was torn by protest marches, campus upheavals, and race riots of unprecedented violence. The cowboy president, caught in a stampede, had been trampled.
Still, the outer Johnson remained intact. He did not remove all his clothes, let his hair, beard, and fingernails grow long, take to bed, and tape dark blinds over the Oval Office windows. But the inner man had crumbled. And the siege atmosphere in the White House now resembled the siege atmosphere in the penthouse.
By day the president would harangue his staff—now purged of all but loyal Texans—with shouted accusations of treason and whispered tales of conspiracy. Communists controlled the television networks. New York Times Washington correspondent James Reston was consorting with the Russian ambassador. Most of the press was in on it, and so were the professors. All were in league with the Kennedys, and together they had plotted his downfall.
By night Johnson would dream that he was paralyzed from the neck down, a helpless cripple unable even to protest as his most trusted aides fought to divide the remnants of his power. The nightmares were a secret, but the raging paranoia and wild suspicions, often punctuated by obscene outbursts and misplaced laughter, frightened his advisers and convinced several that the president had become dangerously unhinged.
So, if Hughes’s letter was in one sense sovereign to sovereign, it was also bunker to bunker.
Johnson, keeping up appearances, had just returned from getting a haircut and was about to change into tails for a state dinner honoring the King of Norway, when the letter finally reached him early that evening. The president was in a foul mood. His day had been a disaster. Arthur Goldberg had suddenly quit as U.N. ambassador in a bitter confrontation over Johnson’s war policy, no one else wanted the job, and George Ball had