Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [134]
But O’Brien never stopped his job negotiations with Hughes. He met with Maheu for a second round of talks in Washington at the end of July, just two days after Maheu delivered $50,000 to Humphrey in the backseat of a limousine. It was a busy weekend for the bagman. Now, in their meeting at the Madison Hotel, he gave O’Brien the $25,000 Hughes had promised Bobby Kennedy just before the assassination. O’Brien passed on the cash-filled manila envelope to Kennedy’s brother-in-law Steve Smith, who gratefully accepted Hughes’s unusual expression of condolences.
And at that same Washington meeting, Maheu and O’Brien came to terms. Howard Hughes would become a client of the newly formed O’Brien Associates, and its proprietor, Larry O’Brien, would get $15,000 a month, $500 a day, for at least two years, a $360,000 secret contract.
Hughes had done it. He had captured the leader of the Kennedy gang, hired its top gun.
Now the man who had managed the 1960 Kennedy campaign, the 1964 Johnson campaign, and Bobby’s aborted 1968 race, the man who had just taken command of Humphrey’s presidential drive, would also handle campaigns for Howard Hughes. Now the man who had lobbied Congress for the White House—for the New Frontier and the Great Society—would instead lobby Washington for the penthouse. Now the country’s premier political operative would handle politics for a madman secretly determined to buy America.
Only the details remained to be worked out.
Right after the November election, O’Brien returned to Las Vegas to strike the final deal. By now he was also chairman of the Democratic National Committee. But that was no problem. He would simply serve simultaneously as unpaid leader of the Democratic party and as Hughes’s very well paid Washington representative.
O’Brien was not scheduled to start work for Hughes until New Year’s Day, but in fact he jumped right in. Even while he managed Humphrey’s campaign, he was already secretly doing odd jobs for his new boss.
When Hughes announced his bid to take over Air West, plotting to swindle its stockholders—“This plan necessitates that the stock edge downward, and then that we come along with a spectacular offer”—Maheu conferred with O’Brien.
“I don’t believe there is a living person who knows more about handling campaigns than Larry,” he reported. “Although our present situation is not in the political arena, I look forward to receiving invaluable guidance from him in the motivation of stockholders to come our way.”
When Hughes got hit with a judgment of $137 million on TWA, Maheu plotted with O’Brien to strike back at the bankers with a congressional investigation.
“The Establishment unfortunately does exist and, in fact, would make the Mafia look like a Sunday school picnic,” he wrote his boss. “We happen to be victims of this group, and I sincerely believe we should not take all this lying down. In 30 days O’Brien will be available. I have discussed this entire situation with him and he can’t wait to get going. We still have time to create a situation whereby these bums will come to us on bloody knees.”
And when Hughes sent Maheu to offer Lyndon Johnson a million-dollar bribe to end the bomb tests, it was O’Brien who set up the big meeting at the LBJ Ranch. Although he succeeded, he was not the best go-between. Despite Maheu’s assurances, Johnson was still bitter about O’Brien’s defection to Bobby Kennedy.
“Poor Larry,” the president told his appointments secretary Jim Jones. “First he jumps to Bobby, now to Hughes. He’s making a big mistake. Hughes will just chew him up, then spit him out.”
O’Brien had not even officially joined Hughes, however, when a threatened new bomb test set the stage for his first big mission.