Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [144]
All in a desperate effort to get to the bottom of the Hughes-O’Brien connection.
“I thought it would be a pleasant—and newsworthy—irony,” Nixon later explained in his memoirs, “that after all the years in which Howard Hughes had been portrayed as my financial angel, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee was in fact the one profiting from a lucrative position on Hughes’s payroll.”
But there was another factor in Nixon’s obsession, one he did not mention in his memoirs.
The president was also on the pad.
*So much more that when Fortune magazine sized up the wealthy in 1968, the whole of the Kennedys’ net worth—at most $300 million—was less than the margin of error in appraising Hughes.
*Hughes was mistaken about the days—it was actually Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
*Humphrey received $100,000 from Hughes. It is unclear if the billionaire had forgotten the full amount or was counting only the $50,000 in secret cash handed directly to the vice-president when he now equated “20 times Humphries” with his proposed million-dollar bribe.
10 Nixon: The Payoff
The blood dripped slowly from a suspended pint bag, trickling red down a clear plastic tube, flowing through a hypodermic needle into the emaciated arm of the cadaverous old man.
Howard Hughes, near death, was coming back to life.
He had been losing blood for months, apparently from his ruptured hemorrhoids, a now critical anemia compounded by chronic malnutrition. His hemoglobin count had dropped below four grams, a 75-percent blood loss that left him as leeched as a week-old corpse.
Unwilling to be hospitalized—he would not leave his lair, he dared not face the daylight—Hughes instead sent his henchmen in search of uncontaminated blood. It was no simple mission. Hughes insisted on knowing the precise origin of each pint, requiring a thorough investigation of every potential donor, rejecting some for their dietary habits, others for their sexual activity, and all who had ever given blood in the past, before he finally selected several clean-living Salt Lake City Mormons to be bled for him alone.
And now, after getting his first taste of pure Mormon blood—blood the billionaire came to like so much that he would later demand transfusions he did not need—Hughes watched television and waited for news that would satisfy an older craving.
It was Tuesday, November 5, 1968. Election night.
“… and it’s a very tight election indeed,” boomed the absurdly amplified voice of Walter Cronkite. “A seesaw race right across the country. Nothing like the presidential countdown that had been anticipated.…”
The same report echoed, at a considerably lower volume, in another grim hotel room three thousand miles away. There, men as yet unknown but soon to be notorious monitored the returns for Richard Nixon.
Nixon himself, secluded in a separate room on the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf Towers in New York, would not allow even a TV to share his solitude. Hour after hour he sat alone, hunched over his yellow legal pads, analyzing the vote pattern, shut off from his family down the hall, withdrawn from his closest aides in the adjacent suite.
Nixon had been losing ground to Humphrey for weeks, had seen his once overwhelming lead shrivel day by day, and now, alone in the gloom of his secret room, knew that his political survival was in serious doubt. “You could almost feel the mood changing as the darkness came over the land,” his aide Leonard Garment later recalled. “We knew there was this