Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [133]
“I’ve never met him myself,” explained Maheu as the job negotiations got under way at his home next door to the hotel. Since that was hardly reassuring, Maheu reached into his desk and pulled out a memo handwritten on yellow legal-pad paper. “I don’t want you to have any doubts that everything I’m saying comes directly from Hughes himself,” he said, presenting his boss’s sacred scrawl to O’Brien.
Incredibly, the proof Maheu offered was almost certainly Hughes’s “thorn in my guts” diatribe. O’Brien’s own account makes that clear. Except that instead of expressing hatred of the Kennedys, the memo—as O’Brien read it in his eagerness to take the job—was a heartfelt eulogy in which Hughes poured out his sorrow over Bobby’s death and the continuing tragedy of the Kennedy family.
Maheu said nothing to disillusion his guest. Instead, he presented the job offer in a code both men understood. He told O’Brien that Hughes had a problem—he didn’t think that his “good works” were sufficiently appreciated by the American people! O’Brien, one-upping his host, said he understood exactly what Maheu meant. Both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had felt the same way.
It was a perfect meeting of the minds. Over the next two days Maheu mentioned some of the good works in which Hughes was now engaged. They were manifold. First, there was his stalled Monopoly game in Las Vegas. Then, his legal battle over TWA. And that very weekend, Hughes had extended his benevolence to a television network in financial distress and a struggling new airline. He hatched his plot to take over Air West and launched his sudden raid to seize control of ABC. That particular act of munificence required immediate attention.
As it happened, O’Brien was simultaneously dickering with the three television networks. They too felt unappreciated and wanted O’Brien to help improve their public image. In fact, it was James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s former press secretary and now vice-president of ABC, who had proposed the deal. Since both Hughes and Hagerty were concerned only with good works, O’Brien apparently felt no conflict of interest.
And, according to Maheu, he was quite encouraging about the ABC raid. “He feels that we have no insoluble conditions before the FCC and/or the Dept. of Justice,” Maheu reported to Hughes. “Whether or not we work out a deal with Larry O’Brien, I surely believe we should tap his brain before making ‘the big move’ in Washington.”
Hughes was eager to put O’Brien right to work. Indeed, he wanted to send him right into the Oval Office. “It seems to me, Bob, there is a comparatively easy way to get an immediate answer to the network decision,” he wrote. “I think such an answer should be obtainable by Mr. O’Brien marching in and collaring Johnson and saying: ‘Look, my friend, my client Mr. Hughes has initiated the machinery to acquire control of ABC.’
“It seems to me that such a meeting would certainly give us an indication of which way the wind blows across the White House lawn.”
Maheu had his doubts about collaring LBJ, but he was very high on O’Brien. “I don’t know of one person to whom the President is more indebted and who could unravel this whole mess as quickly as he,” replied Maheu. “I just happen to know that when O’Brien left the administration to become involved in the Kennedy campaign, he did so with the full blessing of the President. Furthermore, I know that the President and Humphrey are most anxious to get him involved in the Humphrey campaign.”
In fact, when O’Brien returned to Washington he discovered that Humphrey had called while he was meeting with Maheu in Las Vegas. The vice-president