Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [111]
“Further, the AEC, with his complete support, is going right ahead full-steam to conduct their major high-yield explosions at Pahute Mesa in the N.T.S. [Nevada Test Site].
“Why would the President have gone out of his way to rub it in?” wondered Hughes, nearly as shaken by Johnson’s reply as he had been by the blast. “I did not expect anything with a hint of future assistance. I realize this would have been too much to expect, but Jesus! he did not have to spend two full pages of deliberately hostile provocation.”
In fact, the president’s response, while formal and a bit distant, was hardly hostile. “I personally considered your letter and discussed it with my advisers, before coming to a final decision,” it read in part. “I approved execution of this test only after considering its importance to our national security—and only after receiving the Atomic Energy Commission’s assurances that extensive safety checks had clearly demonstrated that there was no cause for concern.”
The entire tone was respectful and reassuring. And if Johnson also let Hughes know who was president, still he had gone to extraordinary lengths to deal with the billionaire’s protest. Certainly few other private citizens, if any, could have caused the commander in chief to withhold until the last minute approval of a nuclear test deemed vital to national defense.
To Hughes, however, the president’s letter was a deliberate slap in the face. Not only had Johnson failed to stop “Boxcar,” not only had he refused to move all future blasts elsewhere, but he had kept Hughes waiting two weeks for a reply.
Perplexed and indignant, Hughes studied Johnson’s response, reading and rereading it to find hidden meanings, his outrage mounting. By the next day he was certain his original interpretation had been correct.
“There was nothing in the President’s letter to suggest any decision beyond the one taken when they went ahead with the last explosion,” pronounced the frustrated exegete. “I read the letter with microscopic care. I looked minutely for some in-between-the-lines meaning. I could find none at all. Everything he said seemed to be an elaborate, over emphatic defense of his position.…
“Now, Bob, this entire affair is becoming more puzzling every day.…
“When I say ‘puzzling’ I mean this:
“He did not answer my letter until 2 weeks after he received it.
“This, above, coupled with the strange tone of his letter, suggests two things to me—Either (a.) that he waited the two weeks for me to contact him and work out a straight-forward ‘deal’ on this problem, and then became angry when I failed to respond and let me have the hostile letter, or (B.) that during the two week period he was negotiating with representatives of R.E.E.Co. or E. G. & G. [the test site’s two private contractors] and finally made a deal with them.…”
Of course. It was all so obvious. How could he have missed it? The president had been expecting a bribe, and when the billionaire failed to come through, turned instead to the opposition for his graft.
Hughes’s memo was a diatribe of lost innocence.
He had taken the high road in his letter to Johnson, offered a reasoned and restrained case pleading the dangers and uncertainties of unchecked nuclear testing. And the president had ignored his plea, dismissed him as a fool or a skinflint, and pocketed a payoff.
Well, no one would ever catch Howard Hughes napping again. No more romantic illusions for him. He had seen the light.
“You see, Bob, some people feel I have unlimited power and absolutely no scrupples,” he explained to his veteran bagman and fixer. “You and I know this is not true, but they dont know it.…”
So be it. From now on, Hughes would do what was expected of him, and he would bring the bombing to an end.
“I urge what I have urged from the beginning: Down to earth, brass tacks, bargaining with the A.E.C. and the White House—in Washington,…” he wrote.
“I urge we get down off the soap box and quit trying to make over the morals of the world and focus on a bought and