Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [106]
After an eighty-seven-vote victory in his second try for the Senate in 1948, however, “Landslide Lyndon” seemed a better investment. His triumph—marred by charges of ballot stuffing—happened to coincide with Hughes’s first big plunge into buying national power, and Johnson soon joined numerous other politicians already on the Hughes payroll.
“Lyndon was taken care of annually,” recalled Dietrich. “On the basis of contributing to the former campaign, the present campaign, and the anticipated campaign, why we could legally give him $5,000 a year.”
Johnson was then a newly elected senator with no campaigns to run for another six years, but as his longtime aide Bobby Baker later noted, “he was always on the look-out for an odd nickel or dime.” Hardly yet a national figure, as a member of the powerful Armed Services Committee he nonetheless soon became known for his uncanny ability to land military contracts for his defense-industry backers.
Hughes, although only three years older than Johnson, was already a national legend, but he was just then emerging as a major defense contractor. Tainted by the “Spruce Goose” hearings a year earlier, and in need of well-placed friends, he sent Johnson $5,000 a year for at least four years, at a time when a senator’s salary was only $12,500.
The money came from a Canadian subsidiary of the Hughes Tool Company especially set up to bypass a ban on political contributions from domestic corporations.
Through the years there would be further contributions, and eventually Hughes would offer Johnson a million-dollar bribe. For the moment, however, he was confident his masterful bomb letter would carry the day. That, and the “solid memories.”
The president clearly shared those memories, and apparently looked forward to future rewards. Certainly he must have savored the fact that Hughes was now the supplicant, that the man from whom he had once begged billboards was now begging him—the Leader of the Free World—to halt a nuclear blast.
In any event, he treated his erstwhile benefactor with unusual deference. Even before Hughes’s letter arrived at the White House, Johnson had met privately with a Hughes emissary, Grant Sawyer, a former governor of Nevada now on Hughes’s payroll. The meeting was arranged by Vice-President Humphrey, who had already tapped Sawyer for a key position in his still unannounced presidential campaign. Sawyer would later deliver $50,000 in Hughes money to Humphrey’s drive.
And a day earlier, another Hughes representative had called White House Chief of Staff Marvin Watson with an astounding offer: “Mr. Hughes has agreed to completely finance the pending campaign of Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey to any extent necessary to match the funds expended by Senator Robert Kennedy.” But only if Johnson delayed the scheduled nuclear test.
Watson later insisted he never even mentioned the call to either Humphrey or Johnson—perhaps because he was soon warned that “Drew Pearson has learned of Hughes’s offer of money to HHH if the blast is held off”—and there is no evidence that Hughes himself authorized the payoff, although he would later order Maheu to make a similar deal directly with the vice-president.
Whatever Hughes, Johnson, and Humphrey knew, and when they knew it, Sawyer’s Oval Office parley went quite well.
“Grant Sawyer has just left the President who sends his warmest personal regards,” Maheu reported to the penthouse. “He told Grant that he had the highest respect for you and your ability and also was very grateful for many favors of the past. I am sure you know that in addition to what you may have done personally many years ago, we have been good supporters. You will recall that when he was Vice President you asked me to set up something with him whereby he could call upon us any