Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [113]
Fuming and boiling over the Stardust, in terror of the bomb, Hughes could not wait until Johnson had been replaced by a more pliable president.
And there was one other thing the billionaire wanted. He had already mentioned it in his letter to Johnson, although only as an example of one of the many urgent matters he had been too altruistic to call to the president’s attention.
“The last of these,” Hughes had told Johnson, “was when I undertook the manufacture of a small helicopter for use in Viet Nam. I lost in excess of 1/5 of everything I possess in the world on this one project, purely because the price was miscalculated.
“The loss was far greater than I have ever suffered in my lifetime. The price we collected for these machines was less than the bill of material alone.”
It was true. The billionaire had taken a bath. The loss was not quite so great as he claimed, but it was close to $90 million. There was, however, one aspect of the debacle Hughes failed to mention. The price was not “miscalculated.”
Hughes had intentionally submitted a ridiculously low bid in a plot to corner the market on helicopters vital to the war. But his scheme had backfired when he tried to triple the price and got caught in a messy congressional probe. Now he was stuck with the bill.
Like the war in Vietnam itself, the copter deal, born in deceit, was ending in disaster. Johnson should certainly sympathize.
Still, it was neither his staggering helicopter losses nor the antitrust blockade that really obsessed Hughes. It was the bomb. And having failed to persuade the president, Hughes was now determined to buy him.
Within two weeks of his failed White House mission, Maheu was on his way to the LBJ Ranch, flying there in a private Hughes jet, the full magnitude of his mission still a secret known only to his taciturn boss. “I’m not ready to tell you yet,” said Hughes, sending Maheu off with no further explanation.
Johnson was completely in the dark. So great was the cachet of the name Hughes that the president had agreed to receive his emissary without even being told the purpose of his visit. In the previous two days Johnson had played host to Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, and now, having seen his two potential successors, the president prepared to meet the representative of a third major power.
“Who is this Maheu, why does he get to see you, Mr. President?” asked White House Appointments Secretary Jim Jones.
“He’s Howard Hughes’s man,” replied Johnson, as if that alone answered the question.
Maheu arrived in Texas the night before his scheduled rendezvous at the LBJ Ranch, checked into a motel, and called the penthouse. “I have an appointment with the President of the United States tomorrow morning,” he reminded Hughes. “I wish you would tell me what you want me to discuss with him.” Hughes again refused. “Call me in the morning just before you leave,” he replied, “and in the meantime, just sleep comfortably.”
If Maheu found that difficult, under the circumstances, so probably did the president. Johnson had met Maheu before, but not in the months since the president had bombed Hughes, and not in the year since he had finally learned the dirty secret that Hughes, Maheu, and the Central Intelligence Agency had long shared—the still hidden Castro assassination plot.
Maheu, of course, had played a pivotal part in that CIA-Mafia murder conspiracy. Hughes had been let in on the secret almost immediately and without a second thought. But the president had to learn about it six years later from Washington newspaper columnist Drew Pearson.
His belated discovery of the murder plot had sent Johnson into a rage. Convinced that the attempts on Castro’s life had somehow caused John F. Kennedy’s death, in fact certain that the CIA had a hand in