Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [147]
Nixon was indeed eager to renew their ill-fated relationship. Even before Maheu could get to Nixon, Nixon reached out to Hughes.
Of course, Nixon could not reach Hughes directly. Nobody could. In fact, despite their long relationship, the two men had never actually met. Their dealings had always been through intermediaries, and this time Nixon wanted as much insulation as possible.
At one of a series of meetings in Washington and Florida in the spring of 1968, Nixon huddled with his closest friend, Bebe Rebozo, and the man who had introduced them to each other twenty years earlier, Richard Danner. Nixon and Rebozo ran through an apparently well-rehearsed script, designed to maneuver their old pal Danner into handling the dangerous contact with Hughes.
“The discussion was generally did I know or did I have any contacts that I could use to raise money,” Danner would later testify. “And the people I knew, of course, they knew equally well or better. The question arose as to what would be the best way of contacting Mr. Hughes.… And at that time Mr. Nixon and Mr. Rebozo asked me to attempt to contact someone in the Hughes organization relative to a contribution.”
Nixon was as clear in his instructions to Danner as Hughes had been in his orders to Maheu: “The question was, ‘Would he contribute, and if so, how much?’ ”
Yet the connection quickly became a tangled affair. Unable to resist each other but unwilling to meet, Hughes and Nixon groped toward each other through a profusion of go-betweens. Even the middlemen required middlemen. The clear purpose of the principals was lost. Only their paranoia remained. And the middlemen finally came together months later in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion.
The scene was Duke Zeibert’s, gathering spot for Washington power brokers. Three men were seated around a table in the front room reserved for the real movers and shakers—Bebe Rebozo, Richard Danner, and Edward Morgan. They were there to exchange money for power on behalf of two men who were not there—Richard Nixon and Howard Hughes.
Rebozo was there as Nixon’s surrogate. The Cuban had long been his closest confidant, the perfect companion for a self-absorbed loner like Nixon, willing to sit in silence for hours and listen to his monologues or to sit for hours in mutual silence and just brood with him. Nixon spent more time alone with Rebozo than he did with his wife, and some White House aides would later make suggestive jokes about their strange intimacy. But the real key to their relationship was money. A millionaire bank president who had helped make Nixon himself a millionaire, Rebozo was now putting together a secret slush fund for the president that would eventually total at least several hundred thousand dollars. He was at Duke Zeibert’s to collect a bundle of cash from Hughes.
Danner was at the table because Nixon had personally asked him to find out if the Hughes money was available. A tall, thin former FBI agent from Miami who was now a Washington lawyer, Danner had known both Nixon and Rebozo longer than they had known each other. In fact, they first met when Nixon came down to Florida to recuperate from his first Senate race, and Danner took him fishing on Bebe’s boat. Danner had no connection to Hughes, but he was trusted, and he did know the third man at the table, Ed Morgan.
Morgan had the Hughes connection. Another former G-man now practicing law, he was an intimate of Robert Maheu’s, and had parlayed their friendship into a lucrative position as prime go-between for Hughes and the likes of Moe Dalitz, collecting six-figure “finder’s fees” from the billionaire’s Las Vegas acquisitions. A classic Washington operator who specialized in handling sensitive deals for people who could not afford to deal openly with