Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [128]
“Howard, you and I both know that this is the overture to financial help for their campaign—and I would like some guidance from you as to how we play the music.
“If our only concern were of a ‘political’ nature, I would be tempted to forget about Kennedy—because I truly believe ‘Hubert’ has enough ‘due bills’ from the political pros to assure him the Democratic nomination. However, we have other things at stake for the present and it might be wise to buy some ‘insurance.’ ”
Hughes was not surprised by the approach. He had been expecting it. The overture might be from Camelot, but to him it was an old familiar tune.
“I dont know what it is that Sallinger and Kennedy want, but I have a pretty good idea what they will want before too long,” replied Hughes, with the satisfaction of a cynic watching the last idol fall.
“I am not in favor, at the moment, of contributing any $$ unless he can and will make some kind of a half-assed promise to help us postpone or abort the bombing. Now, if he gets the nomination, then I think we are forced to contribute no matter what he does about the bomb.
“So, to summarize, until either some promise re: the bomb, or his nomination, I recommend a stalling operation inlaid with beautiful dialogue and all sorts of encouragement for the future, but involving no hard spending money.
“But, I repeat, I would try not to make an enemy of him.”
Pierre Salinger came to Las Vegas early in May, just after Kennedy’s first primary victory. He reminded Maheu that Bobby had called for an end to all nuclear tests in his maiden Senate speech three years earlier, assured him that Kennedy would now help Hughes battle the bomb, and asked for a contribution. Maheu stalled but promised to run it by his boss.
It was all quite friendly. Maheu and Salinger had known each other for years, and Maheu had even served as cochairman of Salinger’s own 1964 Senate campaign in California.
Bobby Kennedy also knew of Maheu. From the Castro assassination plot. He had learned of that CIA-Mafia murder conspiracy in May 1962, when he was attorney general and his brother was president. The Agency had to tell him. There was no other way to block Maheu’s prosecution for wiretapping comedian Dan Rowan, rival for the affections of singer Phyllis McGuire, girlfriend of Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana. Kennedy was shocked. Not about the failed attempt to kill Castro, which he and his brother almost certainly approved in advance, but about the CIA’s choice of hit men. Especially Giancana. Kennedy had to tell J. Edgar Hoover, knowing all the while that Hoover knew that brother Jack had only recently ended a White House affair with another of Giancana’s mistresses, Judith Campbell.
And Maheu had been right in the middle of it all. Now Kennedy had to assume that Maheu—and therefore Hughes—knew the darkest secrets of Camelot, and had to wonder if Maheu knew something darker still: who killed his brother.
The possible connections between the Castro plot and Dallas had long anguished Kennedy. And just a year earlier the entire ugly story had started to surface with a column by Drew Pearson that virtually branded him with the mark of Cain.
“President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb,” it began, “an unconfirmed report that Sen. Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother.” It was Bobby’s worst nightmare, the fear he confided to a few close friends that Castro or the Mafia or the CIA itself had ordered his brother’s murder.
Lurking in the background of this tangled nightmare was Maheu’s boss—the mysterious billionaire with a burning hatred of the entire Kennedy family.
Bobby could not have known the full extent of Hughes’s hate, but he knew quite well the dangers of taking Hughes’s money. He himself had singled out a scandal over funds Nixon received from