Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [109]
But who? Suddenly, from the depths of his desperation, came the answer. Hughes knew just the man for the job. He could certainly get into the White House, he would have no trouble shaking things up, and he was no stranger to Hughes.
“I just thought of something,” he wrote excitedly. “Clark Clifford!!
“He was under retainer to me for 25 years and did practically nothing. And he needed the money.”
Hughes had in fact been one of Clifford’s first clients, having personally called him just a day or two after he had gone into private practice. Now Clifford was Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, and his Washington law firm still represented Hughes. It was the perfect setup.
Just a month earlier, Clifford had persuaded the president to pull back from Vietnam, explaining that the war was bad for business. Obviously he could block a mere bomb test.
“Maybe we ought to have Long* see Clifford or Sawyer see him,” suggested Hughes, “and point out that here is an ideal situation where he could be of assistance to me and have my truly undying devotion and gratitude, and where it will not cost the Defense Dept. one solitary cent.
“If our representative in Washington could make it clear to Clifford,” he continued, “that although there is no monetary gain involved, this explosion is a matter of absolutely top importance to me, and that if Clifford will intervene in this affair, I will give him my most solemn pledge never, so long as he may be in office, to call upon him for assistance of any kind, if I make this kind of a promise, I think Clifford might take this on.
“It would only take one phone call for Clifford to pull the plug on the AEC’s claim that this explosion is necessary for national defense.”
Yes, Clark Clifford could do the job. How could he refuse so reasonable a request? Why, in the old days, Hughes had often spoken to him directly, sometimes calling at three or four A.M.
Over the years, Clifford had come through time and again. As Washington’s premier lobbyist, a man with unique access to every national administration—indeed every president—since Truman, Clifford had once pushed through a Hughes land grab in Nevada vigorously opposed by the Interior Department. His firm had succeeded in blocking a 1966 congressional probe of the billionaire’s Pentagon influence-buying. And, of course, it was Clifford’s law partner, Finney, who had hand-carried Hughes’s bomb plea to the president.
But neither their past telephone relationship nor their continuing business relationship now carried any weight.
Abandoned by his natural allies, Hughes now counted the dwindling hours, his last hope the letter he had sent to Lyndon Johnson. The yellow pages of his handwritten first draft lay beside him on the sweat-soaked bed.
Meanwhile, in the predawn blackness of the Nevada desert, a calmer countdown continued. Bad weather had briefly threatened a postponement, but by three A.M. the weather had cleared, and now test-site workers—ignorant of the Hughes-Johnson drama—made final preparations to explode the hydrogen bomb at sunrise. “Boxcar” was in the hole, stemmed, and ready to go.
At first light, a two-man team entered the red shack on ground zero, arming the thermonuclear device buried 3,800 feet below in a steel-lined, cement-filled shaft.
Alone in his bedroom, Hughes scrawled a final fevered memo in a desperate bid to reach the president and escape the impending holocaust.
“It is vital that somehow you prevail upon Mr. Johnson that this is an emergency and persuade him to read my letter,” he begged. “There is about 20 minutes left.”
Johnson, of course, had seen the letter almost as soon as it arrived at the White House, and was right now in his own bedroom, weighing the needs of national security against the words of Howard Hughes. Still undecided, he received a final bomb report from his top science adviser, Donald Hornig.
“There is still time