Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [143]
O’Brien was not merely a figurehead party chairman but the real leader of the opposition. With Johnson in exile, Humphrey in defeat, and Teddy Kennedy in disgrace, he was perhaps the most prominent Democrat in the country, the point man for his party in the 1970 congressional elections. With the financial freedom afforded him by the huge retainer he received from his hidden boss, Howard Hughes, O’Brien toured the country attacking Nixon.
Hughes and O’Brien! The leader of the Democratic party a secret Hughes lobbyist, getting $500 a day from the billionaire, $15,000 every month, $180,000 per year while he served two masters—and getting away with it! O’Brien, the leader of the Kennedy gang, getting away with it, just like the Kennedys always got away with everything. Nixon was determined to nail O’Brien, to get proof of his Hughes connection, to find out just what he was doing for all that secret money.
The president would have been surprised had he known. Certainly he never even guessed at O’Brien’s role in the big “Bold Ones” mission.
It began one night when Hughes was watching television. What he saw was so shocking that he wanted O’Brien put right on the job, even though it came up at the very height of the great tax-bill battle.
“Message to be given to Bob when he first wakes up,” Hughes dictated to one of his Mormons while he sat in the bathroom darkly brooding.
“Sun. night on television was a program entitled ‘The Bold Ones’ which portrayed an almost identical sequence of events as the Apollo 12 flight,” the aide scribbled down as his boss grunted in the background. “This one had one colored man and two white men in it, however HRH is not objecting because of the colored man.
“HRH thinks this type of show is detrimental to the welfare of the U.S. by showing scenes that would indicate that some things happened which could have been prevented, etc. In the program it showed the colored man getting sick and later one of the other men got sick and passed out and the problem had to be diagnosed by a doctor on the ground at Houston with the colored man’s wife sitting beside the control center.
“HRH thinks you, through your connections in Washington, should register a violent protest about such a program being permitted to run. HRH thinks it is unpatriotic and puts the US space program in a bad light.
“HRH thinks perhaps Larry O’Brien might handle such an assignment. However, HRH does not want this protest to be traced back to us.”
There were other top-secret Hughes-O’Brien missions, some of them directly involving Nixon himself. Oblivious to the president’s obsession, completely unaware of Nixon’s fear and hatred of O’Brien, Hughes regularly suggested sending O’Brien right into the White House.
“Suppose you have our top contact with Nixon (maybe O’Brien) go to the administration and offer to assist them in satisfying the southern Nevada public with an alternative water system which would be privately financed and require no government funding,” Hughes suggested, ready to pay any price to assure the purity of fluids.
And when he feared that the president was getting in bed with the bombers, Hughes again proposed that O’Brien make contact: “The very most urgent matter right now is, by all odds, the Nixon-AEC alliance, which I think is absolutely terrible, and must be untied somehow. Can’t you put O’Brien on this and pull out all the stops?”
Indeed, Maheu and O’Brien hatched a plot to help Nixon get Senate approval of a Supreme Court nomination in return for a bombing halt.
“I have been in touch with O’Brien and some of his people,” reported Maheu, “and they are going to make an attempt over the weekend to swap votes for Carswell in exchange for a postponement of the blast. You may rest assured that we are handling this one with extreme caution. But O’Brien thinks it’s at least worth a try.”
Nixon, however, never learned of any of these missions. And the president