Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [119]
Still, Hughes continued to find missions for his man, often speaking of the vice-president as if he were just another employee. “I feel we must start a negotiation with the AEC, just as if we were negotiating a business deal,” he wrote. “I think we can go thru Humphries.…”
“Please advise Humphries that the AEC shot off a 200 kilo test yesterday and did not even extend the courtesy of telling us about it,” he complained on another occasion. “Under these circumstances I wish Humphries would try to get a statement from the AEC as to their future plans.…”
And when Hughes finally decided to contact Johnson directly, he considered using the vice-president as his messenger boy: “You know I am perfectly willing to write a short personal message to Johnson, which we could ask Humphries to deliver—hand deliver—to Johnson.”
When LBJ rejected his bomb plea, the billionaire seemed to hold the hapless vice-president at least partly responsible.
“He should have more influence on the present administration than anyone else,” wrote Hughes, still chafing over Johnson’s two-week delay in replying to his letter. “But if he is doing anything at all for us, why should the President have gone out of his way to rub it in? This certainly does not sound as if Humphries or anybody has put in even a kind word.”
Johnson’s maddening intransigence, however, only intensified the billionaire’s determination to replace him with a more pliable president.
Barely a week after Humphrey launched his campaign, Maheu launched the Hughes campaign. Soon the two drives would merge.
“The pros feel that the natural person to champion our cause is the Vice President, because of his present position and, more particularly, his candidacy,” Maheu reported to the penthouse. “We feel it is important that he come to this conclusion ‘on his own.’ We, therefore, have the machinery in motion which we hope will cause him to invite me to Washington to plan the strategy.
“In the next 24–48 hours there will be suggestions made to the Vice President. If he reacts as I am hoping and takes the affirmative to work with us on this program, I really believe we will have come a long way.”
It did not take Humphrey long to come to the right decision “on his own.” The very next day he sent word that he was ready, indeed eager to join forces with Hughes. The news came through a member of his family who was already on board.
Robert Andrew Humphrey, one of the vice-president’s three sons, had been hired by Maheu two years earlier as the “mid-western distributor” for Radiarc, Inc., an electronics firm Maheu had purchased as a private investment. The company was not part of the Hughes empire, but its most valuable asset, the junior Humphrey, most definitely seemed to be. He regularly acted as go-between in his father’s dealings with Maheu.
“Bob Humphrey is his dad’s favorite and a very competent young man,” wrote Maheu in a memo on “political assistance” he sent to Hughes. “Any assignment given Bob Humphrey will automatically include the full support and effort of his father, as it has in the past.”
Now the vice-president himself seemed ready to join the team. “Bob contacted me today to advise that his father was very anxious to meet with me concerning the future plans of the AEC,” Maheu reported, adding a few days later that the Humphrey alliance would be cemented in Denver, Colorado.
“Today the Vice President sent word to me that he will be in Denver on this Thursday and would like to meet with me to discuss his strategy to delay and eventually preclude the necessity of the big blasts in Nevada.”
On May 10, 1968, just two weeks after he entered the race, Hubert Humphrey mortgaged his campaign to Howard Hughes. In a late-night meeting in the vice-president’s suite at the Denver Hilton, Maheu would later testify, Humphrey agreed to battle the bomb in return for a promised one-hundred-thousand-dollar