Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [115]
If the president was none too subtle in linking the library donation to the Stardust deal, he quickly made it clear that he was not willing to sell Hughes the bomb.
Before Maheu could even mention the nuclear tests, Johnson staged a preemptive strike. He recalled the billionaire’s letter and deftly discouraged further discussion by saying “this was one document he would not place in the Johnson library, because it would prove embarrassing to Mr. Hughes if he did.” Despite the put-down, however, Johnson did not entirely foreclose even that issue. Indeed, according to Maheu, he promised to “do everything in his power to stop future big blasts in Nevada.”
Their business concluded, the president invited Maheu into his private office. There was no mention of the helicopter debacle. Despite his staggering losses, Hughes had merely instructed Maheu to find out when the war in Vietnam might end. Johnson would probably have paid a million himself for the answer, and the best he could now offer Maheu was a peek at some top-secret documents. While Maheu sat there trying to find light at the end of the tunnel, the president handled other matters of state. Ironically, among the papers he signed was an executive order allowing the displaced people of Bikini to return to their Pacific atoll. It was finally thought safe— twenty-two years after the natives had been evicted to make way for America’s first major atomic tests. (In fact, the island was later found to be dangerously radioactive, and is still uninhabited.)
After meeting privately with Hughes’s ambassador for almost three hours, Johnson invited him to lunch with the First Family—a lunch also attended by Arthur Krim, finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee—and then personally drove Maheu back to his plane.
“I was at the ranch for a total of five hours and I could not have been treated more graciously and hospitably throughout the entire time,” Maheu wrote Hughes, concluding his report. “Upon departure he asked me again to convey to you his highest respect and warmest regards.”
It certainly seemed a friendly visit. Not long after Maheu flew off, however, Johnson told one aide quite a different story. Hughes’s emissary, he confided with apparent dismay, had dared offer him money!
“I told him to stick it up his ass,” the president declared, thrusting his arm upward with a vicious twist. Over the next few days word spread through the White House staff that Hughes had offered a big donation to the LBJ Library, and that Johnson had indignantly refused the offer, shocked that Maheu would even suggest such a thing.
Yet at their lunch with Maheu, the president had told his trusted fund-raiser Krim to follow up and get the Hughes money, and in fact later sent Krim to Las Vegas to press Maheu for the contribution.
The cover-up was unnecessary. Hughes had no interest in such side deals. Told that donations to the LBJ Library were limited to $25,000, he reportedly snapped, “Hell, I couldn’t control that son of a bitch with $25,000,” and never contributed a cent.
Johnson also failed to deliver. He never did bring the bombing to a halt, and if he intervened as promised on the Stardust deal, it had no effect on either the attorney general or his deputy, that “jerk” Zimmerman. Both the antitrust blockade and the dreaded blasts continued.
Circling each other like two wounded lions, neither sure of the other’s true strength or intentions, Hughes and Johnson never came to terms. Soon the president would retire permanently to his ranch and himself become a virtual hermit, his failed encounter with Hughes a small part of his bitter memories.
For Hughes, however, it was a turning point. His failure first to persuade, then to buy, Johnson only left him more than ever determined to own the next president. In LBJ, Hughes saw a man he had once bought