Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [108]
Rostow, who had gained the president’s confidence, now reassured Johnson that the planned bomb test was also entirely safe and under control.
“I see nothing in Hughes’s letter that raises questions which the AEC has not confronted with as much responsibility as could be expected,” Rostow declared. Hard-nosed as ever, he even dismissed the dead sheep. “Hughes raises the example of the Utah sheep,” he noted. “If anything happened to the sheep, it arose not from AEC experiments, but from experiments for biological weapons in Utah.”
Seaborg also called Hughes’s fears unfounded, and warned that “without underground testing much of the dynamic nature of our weapons program would be lost and our strategic deterrent would erode.”
Strong words. But when press aide Tom Johnson stopped upstairs to say goodnight, the president cast aside the Seaborg and Rostow reports and once more displayed the letter he had received from Hughes. It still intrigued him.
Of all the hundreds of papers that came across his desk that day—daily CIA briefings, daily National Security Council reports, daily body counts, war dispatches from Saigon and peace-talk news from Laos, an urgent memo on Chinese troop movements, FBI reports on the planned antiwar march, a message from Egypt’s Nasser and another from the Shah of Iran—the one document that seized the president’s attention and even now, well past midnight, still transfixed him, was the letter from Hughes.
Johnson showed the letter to his aide without mentioning the impending blast. It was not that Hughes was seeking a private test-ban treaty, it was not that Hughes might be right and his own advisers wrong, it was simply the name at the bottom—Howard Hughes.
And despite his experts’ strong advice, Johnson went to sleep early Friday morning without making a final decision. The bomb test remained on hold.
Hughes, who had not slept in three nights, continued his vigil. Desperately awaiting word from the White House, he scribbled a note to his Mormons: “Please watch me carefully and dont let me go to sleep at all.” Then, acutely conscious of the approaching megaton blast, he added a final plea: “But try not to startle me.”
Finally, the recluse could no longer stand the tension and humiliation of waiting like a condemned man for an eleventh-hour presidential reprieve.
“I am sick of this continuous ass-kissing and subservient begging,” he exploded. “Why dont we seek an injunction but immediately? We cannot wait to hear back from Johnson.”
Hughes had toyed with the idea of court action earlier in his battle against the bomb and confidently concluded: “it is just a problem of finding the right judge.” Before deciding on a personal appeal to the president, he was even ready to take his case to the Supreme Court: “They have some awfully left-wing characters on that court, and if we could just catch them when those men are attendant and not the others, it might slide through in about 20 minutes.”
“Why are we hesitant?” the billionaire demanded. “The U.S. Supreme Court has issued injunctions many times on a thinner case than we have. I am sure the Supreme Court is out now because of the late hour, but lower courts have issued injunctive relief in the middle of the night many times.”
Trying to calm his commander’s rage, Maheu counseled that going to night court could not block a major atomic weapons test and cautioned that the attempt “would place the President in a position of having to fight us.”
More resigned than convinced, Hughes reluctantly agreed to forgo a midnight legal maneuver. “If you dont want to seek an injunction until the President gives an answer, OK,” he replied. “Since we have the 3 hour time spread, there is just a very microscopic chance the President might be persuaded to intervene.
“One thing is sure, we have nothing—but nothing to lose—so we dont have to pussy-foot around anymore,” he added, with the reckless abandon of a man down to his final hours. “You know