Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [146]
The “Hughes Loan Scandal” hit the headlines in the final weeks of the closely contested 1960 election. Maheu took time off from plotting to kill Castro and tried instead to kill the story. Nixon, however, panicked. He put out a preemptive report that never even mentioned Hughes, and promptly got caught in his lies.
“I was successful, during the presidential campaign, in killing a story which was about to break in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and later in the New York Times,” Maheu told Hughes, recalling the failed cover-up. “It was only the complexities involved originally in setting up the loan which caused the Nixon forces to panic days before the election because some small-time accountant, who never should have been cut in, was terribly hungry and playing with the Kennedy forces.
“If a simple loan had been made to brother Don with the Whittier property as collateral, the very simple loan may not have become as complicated,” continued Maheu. “Two weeks before he died, Drew Pearson told me for perhaps the tenth time, that he never would have broken the story if he had not been suspicious of the incredible steps which were taken in the origin to conceal the fact that the loan had been made.”
Although only a hint of his full relationship with Hughes, the revelation ruined Nixon. He lied, denying that either he or Hughes had been involved in the transaction. Confronted with contrary evidence, he lied again, claiming that his widowed mother had “satisfied” the $205,000 loan by turning over “half her life savings,” namely the thirteen-thousand-dollar vacant lot. Nixon never stopped lying, but there was no escape.
At a rally in San Francisco’s Chinatown, he posed with children carrying a huge banner, its message inscrutable but seemingly supportive. Translated, it read: “WHAT ABOUT THE HUGHES LOAN?” Later, at a post-rally luncheon, every fortune cookie contained the same suggestion: “Ask him about the Hughes loan.” The scandal dogged Nixon down to the wire.
He was certain it cost him the presidency, blaming his “poor damn dumb brother” rather than himself or Hughes for his narrow loss to Kennedy.
The “all-out support” Hughes gave Nixon in 1960—a still unknown number of hundred-dollar bills secretly passed through the same bagman who handled the loan transaction—never became public. But the loan scandal would not die. It resurfaced full force when Nixon ran for governor of California two years later, and once more he was sure it caused his humiliating defeat. “I must have answered questions about the Hughes loan at least a hundred times,” he complained. “The media loved the story and played it up big—because it was so damaging to me.”
Hughes had become a haunting symbol of Nixon’s greed and corruption, apparently driving him out of politics forever. Yet neither could now break off the fatal attraction both had done their best to conceal.
Now, in 1968, Richard Nixon was staging a startling comeback. And both he and Hughes were ready to deal again.
“I want you to go see Nixon as my special confidential emissary,” Hughes instructed Maheu just two days after the presidential race opened with the primary in New Hampshire. While the rest of the nation focused on McCarthy’s upset of Johnson, Hughes immediately recognized that the real victor was Nixon, not only back from oblivion but also facing a badly split Democratic party.
“I feel there is a really valid possibility