Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [117]
Yet now, in the spring of 1968, the Texas oligarch and the Minnesota populist forged an alliance. None of Humphrey’s issues—certainly not nuclear disarmament—had ever before been moneymakers. Now, suddenly, he struck gold. Hughes was determined to stop the bombing at all costs, and the vice-president, who for a decade had labored unpaid to limit atomic tests, readily enlisted in the billionaire’s lucrative antibomb campaign.
Beyond the bomb they had no common bond. Except that Hughes wanted a president who would be reliably indebted and Humphrey desperately needed money to reach the White House.
Poor Hubert. Relentless in his pursuit of the presidency since 1952, he entered the race in 1968 short of cash and haunted by memories of past defeats, none more vivid than that of the night he sat helpless in a stalled rented bus, flat-broke, shedding tears of anger and frustration as he heard the private Kennedy jet roar overhead, carrying his well-heeled opponent to victory in the West Virginia primary, to the 1960 nomination, to the White House.
This time it would be different. This time Humphrey was determined to go first-class. He would accept illegal corporate contributions from the milk lobby, he would take a questionable loan from a Minnesota grain merchant, and he would make a deal with Howard Hughes.
Still, he would be outspent four-to-one by Richard Nixon, would not have enough money to buy a single national television spot until the final weeks of his campaign, and would lose the election for want of a few thousand votes that may well have been his for a few million dollars.
The day after “Humphries” announced his candidacy, Hughes pounced. “I read an article in the paper saying H.H.H. is sore-pressed for solvency at the moment,” he wrote. “Are we marching through this obvious opening? I mean in a really big and definite way?”
Within two weeks Maheu met privately with the vice-president. The deal was struck. Before the campaign was over, Hubert Humphrey would receive $100,000—half of it in secret cash—from Howard Hughes.
Humphrey was not the only candidate to receive Hughes’s support that year, and it was not only the bombing that troubled Hughes. As the 1968 election approached, he was faced with a number of serious, unresolved problems.
His drive to buy up Las Vegas had been stalled by the threatened antitrust action. His once aborted but still cherished plan to acquire the ABC television network needed FCC approval. His move back into the airlines business, through the illegal Air West takeover, would require both CAB and White House clearance. His helicopter deal was ending in disaster, and any chance of salvaging it depended on a new government contract. His TWA legal battle, with $137 million at stake, would come before a Supreme Court reshaped by the new president. A major overhaul of the nation’s tax laws loomed, imperiling the exempt status of his medical foundation. And there was always the Hughes Aircraft Company to consider, a billion-dollar-a-year business almost entirely dependent on defense, CIA, and space-agency contracts.
A man whose affairs were so intimately entwined with those of the federal government simply could not leave the selection of a new chief of state to chance.
“I think we should decide which Presidential candidate we are going to support, and then, I think we should go all the way!” wrote Hughes, completely nonpartisan, determined only to ride with a winner, even if it meant backing every man in the race.
“I feel that if we climb aboard in the all-out manner I have in mind, then either our candidate or the organization of his party will be able and willing to give us some important assistance.…
“For example, if we choose Kennedy or Humphries, then the Dem. party chairman and his associates should help us plenty thru the White House.”
Among the Democrats, Humphrey was