Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [123]
It was time to make the promised payoff.
On July 29, 1968, Robert Maheu checked into the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, carrying with him a manila envelope stuffed with $25,000 in hundred-dollar bills. He took a suite of rooms on the seventeenth floor and waited there for a courier to arrive from Las Vegas with an additional $25,000 in a black briefcase. Then he went downstairs to meet the candidate.
Humphrey had come to town a few days earlier and was winding up his campaign swing with a five-thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner for thirty select contributors in a conference room at the same hotel. Maheu greeted the vice-president at a cocktail reception, and toward the end of the evening arranged a private meeting through their mutual friend Lloyd Hand, former U.S. chief of protocol. Invited to accompany the candidate on a drive to the airport, Maheu left the dinner, went up to his suite, and returned with the black briefcase.
Humphrey’s limousine was waiting. Satchel in hand, Maheu joined the vice-president in the rear compartment. They sat facing each other, Maheu on a jump seat, and chatted a few minutes about Hughes and the bomb tests. Then Maheu placed the cash-laden briefcase, now stuffed with the entire $50,000, at Humphrey’s feet. The motorcade came to an unscheduled halt after traveling just five hundred yards, and Maheu, mission completed, stepped out.
“I had an excellent meeting,” he wrote, reporting his conquest later that night, “and this man wants me to assure you that he will break his back in an effort to accomplish our needs.”
Hubert Humphrey had lost his virginity in the classic American way—with a furtive quickie in the backseat of a car. It was a fittingly sad consummation of the Hughes-Humphrey relationship, the corruption of a candidate more to be pitied than scorned. He had simply surrendered to the sordid realities of politics in America.
Humphrey, who had opened his campaign proclaiming the “politics of joy,” arrived in Chicago August 25 morose, with no one to greet him except a handful of paid party workers. There were no crowds lining the route from the airport to the hotel, no cheering supporters to welcome the candidate to his convention headquarters. Humphrey was relieved simply to get into his suite unmolested.
Chicago was in turmoil. Earlier that Sunday police had swept through Lincoln Park, clubbing antiwar demonstrators, beating youths blinded by tear gas. The mayhem mounted every day. Humphrey was nervous.
So was Maheu. The backseat payoff was his biggest bag job. Although he had handled Hughes’s political money for years, he had never before passed $50,000 in secret cash to a vice-president of the United States.
“I know you think I may be overly cautious about having messages transmitted over the telephone which pertain to Humphrey and the convention,” he wrote Hughes as the Democrats prepared to choose a presidential candidate.
“Personally, I would put nothing past the AEC and their attempt to curtail our efforts. If—they ever were in a position to show the extent to which we are helping this man—they would clobber us.
“I don’t mind taking a calculated risk on Air West, L. A. Airways and many other projects in which we are involved—but—the Humphrey situation is one we should play real close to the vest.”
And that’s how they played it, all through the convention.
Closeted in their hotel command posts in Las Vegas and Chicago, both Hughes and Humphrey were feeling besieged. Neither really focused on the open warfare in the streets of Chicago but instead on hidden threats from rival powers.
First there was the president, Lyndon Johnson. For weeks he had been publicly ridiculing and privately tormenting his presumed heir, and now Humphrey feared something far worse. A coup. There were rumors that LBJ was about to board Air Force One, fly into Chicago, appear at the convention on his sixtieth birthday, and dramatically